LSU faculty, staff lack confidence in university leadership, survey finds

LSU’s Memorial Tower displays the time on Monday, March 20, 2023, on Tower Drive in Baton Rouge. (Matthew Perschall for Louisiana Illuminator)

Only 40% of faculty at Louisiana’s flagship university reported feeling confident in their senior leadership to make the right decisions for the institution, a survey of LSU employees showed.

The 2023 Employee Engagement Survey , which was administered by LSU last September and October and had more than 5,000 respondents, is the first campus-wide employee study and details how faculty and staff feel about the university. The survey also found just 48% of staff have confidence in university leadership.

The survey results come after recent tumultuous years for the university.

Shortly after former President F. King Alexander left the university in 2019, LSU became embroiled in a high-profile scandal after a USA Today report revealed the university mishandled sexual misconduct complaints against top student-athletes.

After the search for a new president was conducted in the scandal’s aftermath and during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the university hired last-minute candidate William Tate, an epidemiologist and critical race theory scholar who came to campus with big goals to prioritize enforcement of Title IX laws and revamp diversity.

Tate formed LSU’s first Office of Civil Rights, Title IX and Inclusion, hiring a seasoned diversity, equity and inclusion practitioner with no higher education experience to run it. But less than two years later, days before an arch-conservative governor was to be inaugurated, Tate and LSU switched gears, renaming the office and stripping DEI language from the university’s website.

Tate also caught flack for disbanding a renaming committee interim President Thomas Galligan created to address buildings named after problematic figures. Its list included the John M. Parker Agricultural Coliseum, named after the former Louisiana governor who participated in a 1891 New Orleans mass lynching, the largest in American history.

According to the survey report, “senior leadership” refers to “the most senior team who make decisions about LSU.” Examples listed are the provost, deans, department heads and executives in charge of technology, administration and human resources.

College and departmental leadership at LSU have also seen frequent changes, with six new deans being named since the spring 2023 semester.

The survey also found 43% percent of LSU employees believe senior leadership responds to feedback from employees. Just 40% believe there is open and honest communication at LSU, compared with 51% of employees at peer institutions.

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LSU Faculty Senate President Dan Tirone attributed the lack of faith in administration to the defunding of higher education during former Gov. Bobby Jindal’s tenure.

“Faculty evaluate leadership’s performance in part based on their pocketbooks, and the massive reductions in state funding under Jindal and lack of tuition authority have resulted in structural issues with salaries and benefits which are difficult to fix but negatively impact employee perceptions,” Tirone said in a statement to the Illuminator.

The  administration could regain faculty’s trust by continuing cooperate with faculty  on governance and compensation issues, Tirone said.

In a statement to the Illuminator, LSU spokesperson Abbi Laymoun said university employees’ trust in leadership is in line with global averages regarding employee perception of senior leadership. She pointed to a study of 1,500 private businesses that found“46% of [surveyed employees] report that they fully trust their direct manager to do what’s right.”

The campus employee survey also found less than half of faculty believe everyone can succeed at LSU, regardless of their background.

Bob Mann, a former LSU mass communication professor, said that even before LSU began its shift away from DEI language , many felt the campus was not diverse enough. Mann  resigned from his position, in part, due to his lack of confidence in the administration. Gov. Jeff Landry, when he was attorney general, called on university leaders to discipline Mann over a social media post.

“I think the numbers of minority faculty and staff around campus tell the tale,” Mann said. “This is still a school that has a relatively small number of tenured Black faculty, especially in the full professor ranks. This is still a very white faculty and a very white student body.”

Tirone added that the lack of higher education funding has caused infrastructure issues that have resulted in a campus that is not fully compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, further hampering the school’s ability to be inclusive.

“The recent legislative session took steps to begin addressing some of these issues but more needs to be done, and any future reductions would have a tremendously harmful impact on our system, further depressing faculty and staff morale,” Tirone said.

Laymoun said that to address the survey, LSU’s Office of Human Resource Management will meet with deans and department heads to create a campus-wide informational onboarding guide. The school also plans to implement further surveys to monitor campus opinion and have its Office of Communications and University Relations improve internal communication on campus.

The survey wasn’t all bad news for the university. In fact, much of it painted LSU as a place people like to work.

It revealed 73% of respondents said they would recommend working at LSU, compared with 60% of employees at peer institutions, and 81% reported a sense of personal accomplishment about their work, compared with 76% elsewhere.

But the survey also showed few employees believed the results would lead to any changes. Just 34% of staff and 22% of faculty reported believing the survey would result in positive developments at LSU.

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