LSU plagued with funding worries

Low morale. Troubled funding. Persistent uncertainty. Lack of stability. Concerns about political meddling.

Those are among the assessments that higher education consultants catalogued as they interviewed dozens of university leaders, faculty, staff and students across the LSU System.

Those are the hurdles a new system president will have to overcome when walking into a job that remains undefined.

And those are the types of concerns that should fold into conversations for the LSU Board of Supervisors, which is deciding what to do with the system’s governance and who to hire to lead the $3.5 billion higher education enterprise.

The three consultants with the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, or AGB, delivered their assessment of the LSU System’s problems and potential at a recent retreat with the system’s governing board, the Board of Supervisors.

Board members, who appear to be taking a more hands-on approach with their leadership roles than their predecessors, are weighing whether to restructure the university system and whether to merge the system president’s job with the chancellor’s position at the flagship campus in Baton Rouge.

Both jobs are vacant. John Lombardi was fired as system president in April, after he clashed with Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration over higher education policy and criticism about his leadership style. Mike Martin left the chancellor’s job this summer to lead the Colorado State University System.

The AGB consultants repeatedly talked of the promise and attractiveness that LSU offers to candidates for the vacant leadership positions. They applauded significant improvements in quality and performance across the system, which includes four university campuses, a law school, medical schools in New Orleans and Shreveport and a network of public hospitals and clinics.

But the consultants’ meetings with leaders, students and employees of the campuses – more than 70 of whom were interviewed as part of AGB’s system-wide review – highlight what four years of repeated state budget cuts and a decade of leadership upheaval in the system has wrought.

The picture isn’t pretty.

Among the findings, according to the consultants’ report:

_The system’s strategic plan doesn’t contain a comprehensive vision that considers state needs and priorities. “In conversations in and around the system, no sense of direction, destination or progress emerges. Even in the face of good new work within the system, an eternal present, tinged with worry and even depression, surrounds it.’’

_Individual campuses complain of funding decisions “issued from on high, without appropriate institutional input or understanding of their roles within the system. Transparency and process are missing. Considerable ill will prevails.’’

_Educational programs are disconnected and duplicative, and campuses remain in silos with no identity for the unified system.

_University officials remain suspicious of the state’s top higher education board, the Board of Regents, which devises the funding formula that divvies up much of the state spending on public colleges and spearheads public higher education policy.

_Concerns were raised about the influence of the Jindal administration. All but one of the members of the Board of Supervisors was appointed by Jindal. Some interviewees talked about the high quality of the governor’s appointments, while others worried about a “board overly deferential to the governor and lacking in dissenting voices.’’

The comments were anonymous so people could speak freely, though a list of who was interviewed was included with the report.

Few of the findings should be surprising. The power struggles and morale concerns have been amplified as years of budget cuts created deeper tensions over funding.

Jindal and lawmakers have stripped $427 million in state financing from public colleges since 2008. While tuition increases have covered some of the gap, they’ve benefited campuses at different levels.

Those financial struggles have spilled over into budget hearings, where disputes between university systems and the Board of Regents and disputes among campuses within individual systems have played out publicly.

However, the litany of concerns documented over pages by outside reviewers should be disquieting to the Board of Supervisors as it decides the future of the LSU System, and the list could give board members their goals for improvement.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Melinda Deslatte covers Louisiana politics for The Associated Press.