BusinessReport.com

From his appointment to the LSU Board of Supervisors in 1991 by then-Gov. Buddy Roemer to his removal July 1 by Gov. Bobby Jindal, Alexandria attorney Charlie Weems earned a reputation as a friend to LSU athletics and an experienced hand in system affairs.

Weems was the longest-serving member of the current board, spending the majority of it inside the executive committee either as chairman-elect, chairman or immediate past chairman. He was instrumental in the hiring of Mark Emmert, the LSU chancellor who hired Nick Saban as the Tigers’ football coach in December 1999.

Business Report asked Weems how it feels to be officially on the outside after 17 years on the LSU board and what his hopes and dreams are for the system he helped lead for so many years.

Question: How does it feel to be a former LSU board member?

I’d say at the moment it’s mostly disappointment. I’ve been on the board a long time. I certainly didn’t need to be on the board forever and I didn’t want that, and I probably would have been ready to step down in a couple of years. I guess my disappointment is that I feel that we worked so hard to bring the system and particularly the flagship campus to the position that they are today, that I hate to be stepping down at a time when we’ve got such a massive change in leadership across the whole LSU group.

Q: LSU has a relatively new system president, a new provost, a new athletic director and a new chancellor.

It’s a fragile time. That doesn’t mean that my being there would necessarily make it better, but at least they would have had the benefit of my experience and participation in going forward.

Q: Jindal’s pick to replace you on the board is Black Chatelain, a bank president from Alexandria, while Hal Hinchliffe [appointed by then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco] is being replaced by Monroe oilman James Moore. How’s it going to be for them?

The new guys will find this out—it’s a job that just has an enormous learning curve. If you’re going to be an effective board member, you can’t just show up and study the issues that come up at meetings. You have to understand what’s going on in the system with each institution—and of course our health care responsibility, what’s going in that segment as well.

Q: It sounds like a lot to wrap one’s mind around.

It’s a very daunting task. It takes a board member two or three years before they have any kind of grip on what’s going on, who the players are and how to effectively participate in trying to shape policy for those various segments.

Q: It sounds like you were very hands-on.

My personal philosophy is a little different than some. I definitely believe in the importance of effective citizen oversight for our primarily public institutions. I don’t think the job of a board member is to just sit and nod and be guided by staff.

Q: You got your bachelor’s degree from LSU in 1965 and graduated from the law school in 1970. Moore graduated from Northeast Louisiana University [now Louisiana-Monroe]. Should LSU board members be LSU alumni?

You can get a pretty good debate going with folks around the state. I know there are many who believe if you’re going to be on that board, you should have some investment in LSU. People who have that connection bring something to the board that others do not, but it doesn’t mean they can’t be a good and effective board member. I just don’t think they do their jobs with the same passion and involvement than someone who does have that connection.

Q: What big changes have you seen at LSU during your tenure?

There has been a significant evolution in the institution itself, from a more parochial focus to a broader and sustained commitment to excellence that has evolved over the years. We were able to step on the gas about 10 years ago when Bill Jenkins moved into the presidency. We hired Mark Emmert. I was chairman then and was fortunate enough to be involved in those things and with Emmert, who is the best higher education administrator I have ever seen or expect to see. We just really were able to put things in gear and shoot for another level. Even if those of us on the board didn’t know exactly what that meant, we were trying. With Emmert, we were able to flesh it out and give it wings.

Q: And Emmert hired Nick Saban, who brought LSU its first football national championship in 45 years.

At the time, [hiring Saban] was a very bold step for LSU, which had always been very close and parsimonious with its money and fighting to maintain things the old way. I thought, ‘The heck with the old way. Let’s step out and see what the institution can do.’ We found out we could be just as good as we wanted to be. The academic and athletic evolution has just been phenomenal. Lots of people have contributed to that. It’s been fun for me to be there when it happened.

Q: What about when Saban left LSU for the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, and later for Alabama?

Nick made us do some things we had to do and proved what we always knew: If you did it right, you could compete with everybody. And I hope our fans will always recognize that. There’s a lot of revisionist history about what Nick did or didn’t do, but you can’t downplay the significance of what Nick did—not only to football but the whole outlook and attitude of the university. Les Miles is carrying that forward more than we could have expected him to. It’s hard to follow anybody that had the kind of rock-star status Nick had in this state. It’s really just mind-blowing to think that in just three years, Les Miles has pretty much erased that giant shadow. All he had to do was win his own national championship to do it.

Q: Besides athletics, what were your biggest priorities?

As chairman, I set up the precursor organization to the flagship agenda with an LSU 2000 committee that was designed to have us study the whole flagship institution and really focus on what we wanted to be and how we could get there. That evolved into the flagship agenda. I was the first chairman of the flagship committee of the board. The whole flagship agenda concept raised the horizon for what we expected and wanted for LSU. We had great support in that from the board of regents and a great mover in Mark Emmert.

Q: You also worked hard to make LSU-Alexandria a four-year institution.

You had this huge black hole with higher education in the middle of the state, with kids within 50 miles of Alexandria who just couldn’t get to a four-year institution, and we had like 400,000 people in that black hole. Certainly from a local standpoint that would be the high point. It was a hard crawl, but we got there. In the long run for central Louisiana, that may be the most important thing we could have done.

Q: What big issues will the board have to grapple with in the near future?

The health care issue is a big one, I guess. The popular thought is that LSU is standing in the way of health care reform. That’s a thought that’s been put forward by any number of groups that are well intentioned. I don’t believe that’s the case. I believe LSU is very much poised and ready to be part of health care reform. But we have to know where we’re going. We can’t just jump off the cliff without knowing what’s at the bottom.