CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

The Times Picayune By Coleman Warner BATON ROUGE -- Morale bruises from a gridiron loss to the University of Florida were healing nicely in late October as the Louisiana State University football team rolled over South Carolina and Auburn and prepared to dominate Louisiana Tech. It was then, on Oct. 31, that LSU delivered a finely crafted message in a national publication: We will be a contender. But the pitch wasn't about sports. From Our AdvertiserEmploying slogans such as "Focused and Moving Forward Fast," LSU took the unusual step of publishing a full-page ad in the Chronicle of Higher Education touting its "Flagship Agenda," a sweeping effort to strengthen academics and raise the profile of Louisiana's largest university. The ad was timed to cause a stir at a convention of state universities in New Orleans. But that promotional opportunity paled in comparison to one the Flagship Agenda now enjoys. LSU's place in the Sugar Bowl's BCS championship game today brings with it an extraordinary chance to draw attention to work on the 31,000-student university's core academic mission. Since ending an open-door policy in 1988, LSU has gradually raised admissions standards, a move credited with attracting students with higher ACT scores and producing better graduation rates. Moreover, as the caliber of incoming freshmen has risen, so has the size of the class, two trends that sometimes move in opposite directions. Faculty pay levels are rising. LSU has a new supercomputer that is faster than virtually anything else in academia. It is adding tenure-track faculty in math, English, physics and other fields. It opened a computer-filled academic support center for athletes. And it is hustling to land more federal grants, a key source of prestige and income. The Flagship Agenda looks to continue that trajectory by improving the university's research programs, particularly at the doctoral and post-doctoral level, and also by improving undergraduate courses and by boosting the overall quality of campus life. Of course, all that comes with a price, and some academics around Louisiana, well aware of the state's limited money for colleges, are leery of heaping more attention on the strongest state university. Chancellor Mark Emmert insists the state won't end up robbing other state schools to foot the entire bill of improving LSU. But some commitment will be necessary if LSU is to compete with best schools in the country, which now outpace LSU in spending on students and faculty salaries. On the same day the ad ran, Emmert told the LSU system's Board of Supervisors that the Baton Rouge campus, spared the sorts of recent budget cuts faced by many state universities across America, is becoming more aggressive in luring talented, restless professors. "If we don't have great world-class faculty who compete day in and day out on a national level, we don't have a great university," Emmert said. Raising its sights In many ways, LSU is trying to emulate top research institutions, and it wants the nation to know it. For now, academic officials don't mind riding the promotional coattails of a history-making football team. "We're trying to capture that moment now that we've got everybody looking at us," Emmert said. "I wish we were in a society where winning a Nobel Prize got a university as much attention as planning for a national championship in football, but we're not." Many LSU professors say the Flagship Agenda is overdue, said Carruth McGehee, a math professor and Faculty Senate president. "We are delighted to have a period in which the university can build up, raise its sights, aim at better national standing, and perhaps most importantly, serve the changing student body that LSU has been attracting in recent years," he said. "We're getting much better-qualified students, with a higher standardized test score profile, and they seem to have rising ambitions with respect to the job market." As they talk of boosting research and adding about 50 new faculty members in the next two years, mostly in English and math, LSU officials see a parallel to the 1930s, when the university, still new to its present site, found itself relatively well off, due in large part to the state's then-abundant oil riches. As the Depression brought spending cuts in other states, Huey Long and his political allies dedicated an increasing share of the state's tax income to education. And the growing state college was a special interest of Long, who relished directing the band personally or joining football players on the sideline. With scarce opportunities elsewhere, talented young professors, including writer Robert Penn Warren, found a new home at LSU. The Southern Review literary journal and LSU Press were founded, chemistry and French language programs flourished, and professors with master's degrees were urged to go away and earn doctorates. Though a financial scandal later would force his resignation, LSU President James Monroe Smith pushed academic programs forward during that time. It was at that time that LSU "was able to hire good people, many of them with Ph.Ds, who were productive," history professor Paul Hoffman said. "Huey probably didn't understand anything but football and the band, but he was willing to listen to Smith, who did understand." Those halcyon days didn't last. Tier rankings Some professors drawn to the Louisiana institution during hard times, Warren included, left as other states revived higher education spending. New regional four-year schools in Louisiana siphoned off money that could have gone to the flagship. Later, a doomed fight against racial integration sapped LSU's resources and tainted its national image. In the past few decades, LSU has simply been part of a crowded nationwide field of respectable but undistinguished state schools. It may demonstrate brilliance in sports or rate high as a party school, but LSU has landed in the third tier of the U.S. News and World Report's ranking of academic institutions, far behind its perennial in-state rival, Tulane University. U.S. News provides a numerical ranking of what it judges to be the top 50 doctorate-granting universities, then lumps hundreds of others, without assigning a number, into lesser categories, ranging from tier two to tier four. No Louisiana school is in the second tier, but Tulane and the University of California at Davis tied for 43rd place in last year's critique, which takes into account a wide range of financial and student performance gauges. Since 1958, Tulane has held membership in the Association of American Universities, a by-invitation-only alliance of top research schools that now has 62 members. For LSU, joining that elite group is a distant goal. Emmert chafes at LSU's lackluster rankings. He says LSU would easily crack U.S. News' second tier, joining institutions such as Texas A&M and the University of Georgia, if it weren't for its still-lagging per-student budget support from the state and tepid marks given LSU in a national "peer assessment." The latter, he argues, reflects a bias against Southern schools and a lack of knowledge about LSU programs. But signs of a turnaround have been proliferating in recent years. LSU, as is true of Louisiana higher education in general, has seen its state financing protected, at times boosted, under Gov. Foster. The outgoing governor also oversaw the implementation of the state-financed Tuition Opportunity Program for Students, which pays full tuition for qualified Louisiana high school students to go to any state university. Because LSU's admissions standards are higher than what's needed to get a TOPS scholarship, virtually all in-state students automatically admitted to LSU can go tuition-free, furthering the state's long-term goal of keeping the brightest students in Louisiana. Also, to raise its national profile, LSU installed SuperMike, a computer with a capacity for 2.2 trillion operations a second, and recruited Ed Seidel, an astrophysicist with a rising-star image. Emmert said that sharpening LSU's edge also requires challenging many in-state supporters who define "flagship" in parochial terms. "If we asked our football coach to always have the best football team in Louisiana, people would laugh and say that's a silly goal. We want them to compete with the best schools and the best football teams in America," he said. "But we've historically not said the same thing about our math department or our chemical engineering program or our physics department." Indeed, educators and legislators in Louisiana frequently compare indicators such as faculty pay or per-student spending to regional averages, not national benchmarks. Louisiana's talented high school graduates and its business leaders must be convinced that teaching and research at LSU are competitive with the best available in the nation, Emmert said. "Our competitors aren't in the state," he said. "Our competitors are in California and Michigan and Georgia." To measure the Flagship Agenda's effects, LSU has selected for comparison 18 universities from the Southern region, along with five highly ranked research schools in other regions. Each year through 2010, LSU's 150th anniversary of its opening, officials will track statistics for the schools to see how each does in raising money, attracting top students, conducting research, improving student-faculty ratios and in other performance gauges. Statistics show that LSU has lots of catching up to do with its peers. Gaps are clear, for example, between LSU and the University of Georgia, a school LSU Provost Risa Palm sees as a natural competitive target because of similarities between the schools. With student populations of roughly the same size, both are state-run institutions with populist traditions. But Georgia, which lost to the Tigers in the Southeastern Conference title football game, draws 46 percent of its first-year students from the highest 10 percent of their high school class, compared to 26 percent at LSU, according to the latest available comparisons. Graduate students make up 20 percent of Georgia's enrollment; they make up 14 percent at LSU. Georgia's undergraduate-faculty ratio is 13-to-1; LSU's is 21-to-1. Georgia faculty members earn an average of $12,000 more than their LSU counterparts. Legislative spending, on a per-student basis, at LSU is 47 percent of that at Georgia. And research spending at LSU is 68 percent of Georgia's. "With the large amount of investment in the university (Georgia), and with a self-conscious program to improve, they have improved dramatically, and they're competing now on the national scene," Palm said. "This is what we want to be our trajectory." Spreading the cash around LSU must be selective in how it tries to compete, choosing programs especially relevant to Louisiana, or that already exhibit unusual strength, officials say. In addition to English, math and physics, such programs include biological sciences, chemical engineering, chemistry, French studies, anthropology, information systems, mass communication and music. Any rebuilding effort in higher education tends to carry a large price tag, and LSU's is no exception. Emmert has set a long-term goal of increasing the Baton Rouge campus' spending, beyond the effects of inflation, by $86.5 million annually. No specific year has been targeted for reaching the mark. That spending level would let LSU add a total of 250 faculty positions, roughly a 20 percent increase, and pour millions more into faculty pay, research staff, scholarships, library holdings and technology. Emmert is pushing the message that the state gets an excellent return on its investment and that as LSU becomes more competitive, other in-state schools will have more incentive to improve. And, he said, LSU won't simply ask the state for more money; of $48 million that the Baton Rouge campus wants to add to its funding base by 2010, it expects to raise half from tuition, fees, contracts and other nonstate sources. It doesn't have to be a "zero-sum game" in which "somebody's gaining and somebody's losing," said Emmert, who has had tentative conversations with Gov.-elect Kathleen Blanco about LSU's needs. Finding support Not everyone is waving pom-poms for the effort, however. During Emmert's flagship message on Oct. 31, one LSU system board member, Rod West of New Orleans, cautioned, "We don't have buy-in from important segments of the LSU community." West said later that he is often questioned about the Baton Rouge campus' agenda and that there is anxiety at other cash-starved schools about its meaning. Alan Artibise, a Canadian-born academic who is dean of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of New Orleans -- a school that's part of the LSU system -- is uneasy with the entire flagship idea. State leaders should prod each institution to polish its finest programs, he said, without applying a broad flagship label to one campus that can translate into "second-class status" for other schools. "A flagship -- what does that mean? It only has meaning as you look at particular programs and which ones the institutions are going to excel at. It's far too blunt an instrument in my view to use as a planning tool," Artibise said. "It's better to say that there will be a series of centers of excellence." His view clearly doesn't prevail. The Flagship Agenda, as LSU defines it, has support from many quarters. The LSU system's board formed a committee to support the agenda. Sally Clausen, president of the University of Louisiana system, which includes schools with lofty research ambitions, such as UL-Lafayette and Louisiana Tech, sees general benefit in the LSU strategy. And Commissioner of Higher Education Joseph Savoie said LSU is carrying out the Board of Regents' wishes in trying to pull closer to top research universities. In April, the Public Affairs Research Council published a "White Paper on Higher Education" that served Emmert's purposes nicely. It said LSU's pursuit of status as a research institution is basic to keeping bright students at home, attracting venture capital and to creation of technology-based companies. Among its recommendations: Increase state and tuition support for LSU, on a per-student basis, to a level comparable with the nation's leading public research schools within 15 years. Building up the flagship may not require cutting state money to other schools, but it could mean the others will receive far less new support, said Richard Omdal, a PAR research analyst. "You have to concentrate on one, and LSU's the logical choice," he said. "They all want to be top-line research universities. That's been the problem all along. Nobody wants to be the baby." Coleman Warner covers higher education and can be reached at cwarner@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3311.