An LSU search committee will be choosing between two African Americans, two generals, two Louisiana public officials, one woman and a former advisor to President Donald Trump to be the next leader of the state’s flagship university and its system.
Two graduated from UNO, two from LSU. Most claim some connection to Louisiana.
The LSU Presidential Search Committee plans to interview all eight candidates on Monday and Tuesday, then meet on April 30, next Friday, to decide which finalists to recommend to the LSU Board of Supervisors. The 16 supervisors have final say on who will be president of the LSU system and chancellor of the flagship Baton Rouge campus.
A Baton Rouge native and LSU alum, Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne is probably the best known of the eight candidates chosen to be interviewed next week.
He was elected twice lieutenant governor, twice as secretary of state, served 15 years in the state Senate, and three years on the Baton Rouge Metro Council. As the state’s chief administrative officer, Dardenne is in charge of overseeing the state’s $40 billion budget and 1,600 employees. He doesn’t, however, have much in the way academic credentials.
Initially, Dardenne expressed interest in being the LSU System president, mostly an administrative job, when the Supervisors were talking about splitting the president from the chancellor post, mostly an academic job, at LSU A&M’s Baton Rouge campus. “There have been some public comments that the board may consider two positions. Accordingly, I am applying for the single position and plan to urge that, if selected, an alternative structure be considered,” Dardenne wrote Monday in his application letter.
The system has about 45,000 students and along with the Baton Rouge flagship includes the LSU AgCenter, medical schools in New Orleans and Shreveport, a law school, regional universities in Alexandria and Shreveport, a two-year institution in Eunice, and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center.
A Shreveport native, Jim Henderson is in charge of the nine state colleges in the University of Louisiana System. The UL colleges – which include the University of New Orleans and the University of Louisiana Lafayette – have about 91,000 students, roughly double the number at LSU System institutions, and $1.3 billion operating budget. “In my current role, the challenge has been bringing disparate units with often conflicting interests together in systemic work for the betterment of our state,” Henderson wrote on his March 14 application.
A former Times-Picayune and Houma Courier reporter, Laurence Alexander has been chancellor of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, an historically Black college and university, since 2013. Alexander grew up in New Orleans 9th Ward, graduated from the University of New Orleans and juris doctorate from Tulane University Law School.
“Over the last 34 years, I have acquired the leadership acumen that I would need to return to my home state and advance the LSU System and the Flagship Campus by working collaboratively with the LSU Board of Supervisors and all of the constituents and stakeholders,” Alexander wrote in his application.
An Army brat who graduated Leesville High School in 1984, Major General Ron Clark graduated in the same U.S. Military Academy at West Point class as Gov. John Bel Edwards. Clark is chief of staff, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command at Camp H.M. Smith, Hawai‘i. At West Point he taught prevention of sexual assault and was responsible for training the athletic department on how to handle sexual harassment claims.
“I will help to shape the course of the of the LSU System to address the contemporary challenges of race, gender and income inequality, social injustice, political polarization, and the complications of COVID-19,” he wrote.
Kelvin Droegemeier was the director for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for part of President Donald Trump’s term. He came to the job after serving two terms – under President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama – on the National Science Board. “I coordinated planning, prioritization, and policymaking for more than two dozen Federal agencies which conduct or support research and development with combined budgets of more than $130 billion,” he wrote.
Droegemeier sees a university as “a place where all scholarly disciplines of a comprehensive research university – those which garner large external funding and those which do not – are valued, resourced, and used to improve and enrich the human condition here at home and around the world.”
A West Virginia native and horse surgeon, Ruston Moore was on the faculty of the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine from 1994 to 2006 before returning to The Ohio State University where he is dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine.
In the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Moore helped organized a rescue and recovery operation of nearly 500 horses. During his career, Moore said he also dealt with academic misconduct, a student’s suicide, and “situations of research misconduct, gross incompetence, grave misconduct, and other inappropriate behaviors and actions of faculty, staff and students.”
Mary Ann Ranking was provost, head academic administrator, for eight years at the University of Maryland until January. Maryland is a public university ranked as 58th best in the nation in the 2021 U.S. News & World Report. LSU comes in at 153.
She graduated from the University of New Orleans in 1966 and married a chemical engineer from Shreveport. But most of Rankin’s career was teaching marine biology at the University of Texas, where she was dean of the College of Natural Sciences of 17 years. Rankin also spent a short stint as chief executive officer for the National Institute for Marth and Science.
“To build trust and a community of shared values, I try to communicate often and clearly with university leaders and stakeholders, as well as the whole university community, and to create mutually rewarding team relationships,” she wrote.
Jeffrey W. Talley is a retired 3-star general with advanced degrees from the University of Oxford, Carnegie-Mellon University, and Johns Hopkins University. But he started his academic career at LSU, graduating in 1981 with a degree in forestry and natural resources. As an Army general, Talley served in Korea, Kuwait, and Iraq. After leaving the military, Talley went into private business and in 2020 founded the P3i Group LLC in Scottsdale, Arizona. The Public Private Partnership Initiatives (P3i) Group is a management advisory and consulting firm.
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