As he reflects on his presidency at LSU, which officially ended Dec. 31, F. King Alexander lists what he considers to be his major accomplishments: record enrollment and graduation numbers, an increasingly diverse student body, and the consolidation of system-wide offices and operations that resulted in a savings of more than $14 million year.
But Alexander, who has been named president of Oregon State University, also acknowledges a couple of areas where he struggled during his more than six years as LSU’s first combined president and chancellor.
One of the most significant, he says, was getting a handle on the hazing culture of LSU’s Greek system. Following the 2017 death of fraternity pledge Max Gruver in a hazing incident, Alexander led an effort to implement changes intended to curb excessive alcohol consumption among fraternity and sorority members and to ban hazing. Some say it was too little too late, while others say it went too far.
Alexander, in an extensive exit interview with Daily Report, says he doesn’t blame the Greek system, which he says is “very valuable in cultivating student leadership.” But he says hazing is a cultural issue that exists in many institutions and needs to change.
“There is a culture of hazing that took a long time to get it into the culture and it’s going to continue to take a long time to get it out of the culture,” he says. “But we have to weed it out.
… It’s not a Greek issue but a hazing issue … that has got to get weeded out.”
Another area where Alexander wishes he could have been more effective was convincing the leadership of other SEC institutions to join him in a pact that would have required 25% of revenues generated by the SEC Network, which premiered in 2014, to go to academics.
Alexander says he and the president of the University of Georgia were pushing the idea during negotiations with the upstart network six years ago. But smaller schools were unwilling to go along, not wanting to be told how they should allocate the revenues they receive.
As a result, the $42 million a year per university the network generates goes to athletics.
“If that vote had gone our way we would have gotten nearly $11 million or so every year for academics,” he says. “That would have been a significant amount of money.”
Alexander’s handling of athletic controversies often angered his critics. Still, he defends his 2019 decision—which was widely unpopular at the time—to suspend LSU Tigers head basketball coach Will Wade, after Wade’s name surfaced on an FBI wiretap in a recruitment scandal.
“It was a hard decision but if I had to do it over again, I would do it exactly the way we did it,” Alexander says. “The thing I didn’t like was that people came out of the woodwork saying, ‘Everybody does this; why don’t you turn a blind eye to it?’ But you can’t turn a blind eye when someone turns up on an FBI wiretap.”
Wade was later reinstated, after meeting with LSU officials and denying any involvement in recruitment irregularities, which prompted criticism from others who felt Wade should have been fired.
Alexander also took heat from detractors for his involvement in national higher education policy circles, where he has advocated for making public colleges and universities more accessible and affordable. Some say he cared more about his national profile than LSU and was angling for a position in Hillary Clinton’s cabinet, had she been elected president in 2016.
Alexander says he was proud to advise the Clinton campaign on higher education policy but was never promised a job. He also acknowledges he got “push back” from some in Louisiana, and says he remains puzzled that elevating LSU’s profile in national higher ed policy circles and increasing access to LSU is seen by some as negative.
“I never thought we would have a problem expanding access to the state’s best public university,” he says. “We got some pushback for it but it’s by far the right thing to do and if you’re a damned good public university you should be looking to open your doors to as many people as possible.”
Alexander will remain at LSU through March, doing research and helping Interim President Thomas Galligan with a transition. He says overall he is leaving LSU in a stronger position than when he joined and believes there is “no better time to be a student at LSU.”
