With the start of the new year, a search for the next president of LSU is expected to get under way soon and already names are flying for a possible successor to replace F. King Alexander, who announced in mid-December he will be taking over as president of Oregon State University later this year.
As he looks back on his six-year tenure, Alexander, who was the first to serve as joint president and chancellor, says whoever is tapped for the position will take over a system that is in better shape, both financially and in terms of its outcomes and performance, than the one he inherited in 2014.
As just one example, Alexander points to the efficiencies created by merging the chancellor and president’s offices, which has saved LSU some $14 million a year.
“We basically doubled up,” he says. “I took two jobs. Dan (Lazyell, CFO), took two jobs. The provost took two jobs, and we saved administrative money and went from being about two percent below our peers in overhead spending to being nearly twenty percent below our peers in overhead.”
Still, he predicts it won’t be easy for the new president. Funding challenges at the state level continue to hamper LSU’s ability to compete with peer institutions.
Though the state has stopped cutting higher education funding, as it had been for nearly a decade under Gov. Bobby Jindal when Alexander took over, it has not increased funding under Gov. John Bel Edwards. Instead, it has merely held steady.
As a result, LSU, which in 2008 ranked seventh among the 13 SEC public institutions in average state spending per student is now ranked 11th.
“The state has got to start funding higher education,” Alexander says. “You can only set records for so long until your bottom drops out. Just being glad that you weren’t cut is not a good strategy.”
The average spending per student in the SEC is $21,000, while at LSU it’s around $14,000, Alexander says.
The lack of state funding has also made it difficult to recruit back top faculty, who were lost in the mid-2000s during the years of the Jindal budget cuts. Though LSU has done a much better job over the past couple of years retaining existing faculty, “we haven’t gotten to the point yet where we could steal back the ones we lost because we’re still not funded well,” he says, noting that LSU’s SEC peers have gotten an average increase in state funding of 4% a year.
“We’ve gotten no increase,” he says. “So we’re back to losing ground.”
Alexander believes LSU and Louisiana’s other state colleges and universities need more autonomy over their institutions, particularly when it comes to setting tuition and fees. The kind of oversight state lawmakers exert in this state is unlike the way most other states do it.
So is the lack of state support for higher education.
“The kind of cuts we have had is unheard of elsewhere,” he says. “Very few places have had a higher ed drought like we have.”
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