At Wednesday’s Louisiana Board of Regents meeting, state Sen. Sharon Hewitt said she will introduce a bill to combine the state’s four higher education management boards and the policy-making Board of Regents into a single entity in order to increase efficiency and cooperation among the state’s four higher ed systems.
But if recent history is any indication, Hewitt will have a tough time getting traction for her idea. Three governors in as many decades, including Buddy Roemer, Mike Foster and Bobby Jindal, explored the single board concept in earnest but never could make it happen.
“None of the systems wants to get rid of themselves,” says Council for a Better Louisiana President Barry Irwin, who served on a Jindal-appointed task force that studied the issue nearly decade ago. “The Board of Regents don’t either. They don’t want to give themselves up.”
At least one member of the Board of Regents is open to the idea, however. Richard Lipsey, who served as board chairman in 2016 and 2017, helped spearhead a year-long planning process based on a 2016 law sponsored by Hewitt that looked at the state’s higher ed systems as a whole. Among the key elements of the report was a call for greater cooperation among the different systems.
Staffers in the Board of Regents office spent hundreds of hours working on the report, Lipsey says, and leaders of the state’s four higher ed systems—LSU, Southern University, University of Louisiana, and Louisiana Community and Technical Colleges—all agreed to help implement some of the suggestions.
But one year later nothing has happened. Like Hewitt, Lipsey is frustrated and believes merging the system boards might be the best way to achieve cooperation.
“We really need the four systems to come closer together and work together and in my six years on the board that has not happened,” he says. “We get together and talk a good game … and we have given them, we think, very good direction and then they go off and do what is in the best interest of their system without consideration of the whole. Sometimes you have to keep your eye on the donut, not the hole.”
On Wednesday, Hewitt said that within a few hours of her comments she’d already heard from system leaders who said they wanted to meet with her to share ideas about ways they could work together. None was interested in talking about it to Daily Report today, however.
LSU President King Alexander’s office declined to comment. University of Louisiana System President Jim Henderson could not be reached for comment. Southern University President Ray Belton and LCTCS President Monty Sullivan did not return calls in time for publication.
Lipsey says something has to give.
“Right now, we’ve got to find a way to get the four systems to work together,” he says. “If not, one board is the answer.”
