In December 2004, the Student Government president invited me to a student roundtable to meet a man named Sean O’Keefe, who just days later would be hired as LSU’s seventh chancellor. A junior, I had just been elected editor of this newspaper. The student panel with the visiting O’Keefe was the first official event or press conference I would attend after being selected.
His hiring was the biggest story I had covered at that point and would become an integral part of the mother of all journalistic endeavors – covering the hurricanes.
O’Keefe sat with the panel of student leaders and answered our questions diligently. He had an impressive first interview.  Laid back, yet secure in his words. Confident. He wasn’t too versed on the Flagship Agenda but was all for it – who couldn’t be, right?
One of my questions included what newspapers he would want on his desk every morning. He said The New York Times was his favorite, but also expected to read the local press as well. He (notably) didn’t mention The Daily Reveille.
Overall, students were impressed and some even star-struck. After all, out of nowhere, Sean O’Keefe had descended, and many of us knew that the hastily-put-together student panel was simply a formality: O’Keefe’s hiring was inevitable.
On the way out of the meeting, I passed the speaker of the Student Senate giving his vote of approval to an interviewing TV camera and heard an starry-eyed, unnamed student leader exclaim: “I’ve never been that close to presidential cufflinks before.”
O’Keefe swooped in and jump-started a four-mouth search that had appeared just days before to be without end. With a smile, he took the job, a great white-mustached hope for fundraising and enhancing our national image.
His connections brought graduation speakers and big dollars, no doubt, but O’Keefe will always be remembered for how he handled Hurricane Katrina. He was accessible, determined and downright confident about his role in the process. He gave me his personal cell phone number and later chided me for giving it to a deadline-ducking reporter. Hindsight is 20/20, but all things considered, he handled the situation more than admirably.
Ironically, O’Keefe resigned the same way he was brought in. It came out of nowhere for most of us, and on this end of the process, the LSU Board of Supervisors was relatively silent until the last. Whispers he would be dismissed caused uproar – in the form of a full-page newspaper ad even as the writing was on the wall – from the same groups that celebrated his hiring. 
It’s too bad we can’t re-hire O’Keefe as LSU’s fundraiser-in-chief.
But the University needs someone of former Chancellor Mark Emmert’s stature, someone who can hobnob with the politicos and command the respect of the academic purists. And someone else, like O’Keefe, to be the face of the capital campaign.
Let’s hope LSU has learned not to hire its next chancellor the same way – with the students absent and much of the interview process thrown into overdrive or simply to the birds.
For those whirlwind days between O’Keefe’s candidacy and coronation, my photographing comrade (who still works at The Daily Reveille) and I chased him all over campus, to his verbal give-and-take with professors at a forum to his eventual selection by the Board. When he was confirmed, I remember a University official giving me 50/50 odds of O’Keefe lasting until the end of the Bush administration.
For better or worse, he was right.
—-Scott Sternberg is the former editor-in-chief of The Daily Reveille.
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