LSU President F. King Alexander continued his campaign this afternoon to thwart threatened state budget cuts to higher education, telling members of the Press Club of Baton Rouge that LSU is willing to work with lawmakers on any plan they come up with to mitigate cuts but that, in the meantime, the university is preparing for a worst-case scenario.
“Everybody thinks it will be taken care of by the Legislature,” Alexander said. “But we aren’t seeing a lot of potentially viable solutions, so what can you do but plan for the worst?”
Though the Jindal administration’s proposed budget for next fiscal year would reduce higher education’s $717 million budget by more than $200 million—and would cut LSU’s budget for the flagship Baton Rouge campus from $115 million to about $80 million—those figures assume lawmakers will roll back certain tax incentives, including the inventory tax credit favored by business.
Alexander said if that doesn’t happen, LSU’s budget will be pared down to just $21 million, a reduction of about 82%. The Jindal administration is trying to plug a $1.6 billion shortfall in next year’s state budget.
Alexander also said today that after the February meeting of the LSU Board of Supervisors he and five members of the board met with the governor personally to plead their case.
“We sat down with him and said we can’t cut 2,000 classes, we can’t stop 125 faculty searches,” Alexander said. “We gave him a timeline and we were hoping to get a special session out of that, but that didn’t happen.”
Over the past week, Alexander has launched his own campaign to raise public awareness about the severity of the situation. During an address to the Acadiana Press Club in Lafayette last week, he called the possible cuts “almost cartoon-like,” adding the university does have “room to move” on its tuition costs.
Over the weekend, he spoke at a student rally on campus. On Tuesday, he’s slated to speak to the Press Club of New Orleans, followed by a speech to the Rotary Club of Baton Rouge on Wednesday.
“I want the citizens to know these cuts are about them,” Alexander said this afternoon, explaining what he hopes to accomplish as he makes the rounds. “It’s about their students, their future economies. This isn’t just another round of budget reductions.”
Urging the public to lobby against the cuts is not an affront to the Jindal administration, Alexander said. On the contrary, he believes everyone is “on the same page.”
“We’re going to need the governor to help us with these remedies,” he said. “So you don’t burn any bridges. What we want to do is work with the governor and legislative leaders and try to tackle these things together.”
—Stephanie Riegel
