Louisiana Voice

In case there’s still someone on the planet who may be surprised or disappointed at the manner in which LSU handled the allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of school football players or its former head coach, I’ve got a hot investment tip on some dandy Studebaker Motors stock for you.

LSU spent “up to $100,000” to get the law firm Husch Blackwell to conduct its an investigation and issue a 260-something-page report that could’ve been much more concise and considerably less expensive – and far more informative – had LSU officials simply turned inward to examine the school’s history of crisis management.

It’s long been a fact of life that academic infrastructure has been allowed to deteriorate shamefully while more opulent and costly athletic facilities continue to sprout on the other side of the campus.

And yes, we’ve seen the reports that boast of the $66 million in subsidies the athletic department has provided academics since 2012 but most of us were unaware that athletic director Scott Woodard terminated that largesse, according to a recent STORY in the Baton Rouge Advocate, observing that it was a “poor way to run a university” and that the athletic department could put the money to better use.

Part of that “better use” was the athletic department’s decision to sink $28 million into the renovation of its football operations building, thanks to the generosity of the Tiger Athletic Foundation (TAF) which paid for the work with donations to the foundation.

Included was a new “nutrition center” for student-athletes, a bone of contention between Michael Martin, LSU’s chancellor from 2008-2012, and then-head coach Les Miles. Martin said he felt that jocks “ought to eat with other students.”

That same Advocate story noted that the LSU athletic department is often held up as an example of a program that is rare in college sports in that it generates its own money and has no need for student fees or taxpayer subsidies to subsist, that in fact, the athletic department turned an overall profit of nearly $5 million from $160 million in revenue in 2019.

What that story did not say, however, is what the athletic program’s financial picture would look like without the TAF. Take head coach Ed Orgeron’s salary alone. He gets a compensation package worth $7 million a year but if you examine the budget for LSU, you will find that only $500,000 is allocated for his salary.

Where do you suppose the rest of that $7 million comes from?

But I’m getting off-subject.  We’re supposed to be discussing how LSU dropped the ball in its investigation of sexual harassment complaints. (And by “dropped the ball,” of course, I mean how LSU attempted to sweep it all under the rug the way it always does when problems arise).

Former 23^rd JDC District Attorney Tony Falterman, a non-nonsense type of guy who was appointed to the LSU Board of Supervisors by former Gov. Kathleen Blanco but not reappointed in 2012 by her successor, Bobby Jindal, raised the legitimate question of whether or not Jindal was aware of the charges against Les Miles.

After all, Falterman observed, three of Jindal’s appointees – Hank Danos, Robert “Bobby” Yarborough and Stanley Jacobs – were informed and probably should have made the governor aware. Those three and their family members combined to contribute $120,000 to Jindal campaigns, campaign finance records show.

“Was he aware of it?” Falterman said of Jindal. “I’m wondering if he was aware of what was going on and if not, why didn’t they make him aware?”

It remains curious as to why LSU’s law firm, Taylor Porter, only delivered its Miles investigation report to those three members of the Board of Supervisors. It’s a 16-member board and other than those select three members, the only ones to see the report were then-athletic director Joe Alleva, former LSU general counsel and Taylor Porter attorney Shelby McKenzie and LSU senior associate athletic director Miriam Segar.

Segar, the low person in that circle’s pecking order, was subsequently suspended without pay for 21 days. Also suspended was executive deputy athletic director Verge Ausberry, who was banished for 30 days. Both are required to attend training on sexual misconduct, domestic violence and more.

And that’s the way it always happens: the most expendable, those lower in the food chain, are always the sacrificial lambs at the outset. Take any crisis, any scandal, and you’ll see the pyramid eroding from the bottom as those at the top scramble for damage control and begin to employ CYA maneuvers. It happened with Watergate, it happened at Baylor, it happened at Penn State, it happens every single time, without exception, and it’s happening right now at LSU.

Of course, as the scandal, like a metastatic cancer grows, so does its damage. Miles and his boss, the University of Kansas athletic director, are gone (though Miles did walk away with a $2 million separation package) and F. King Alexander, who tried to finesse his way through the LSU minefield, is likewise history at Oregon State University. Others will also fall victim to their own attempts to skate through this.

If, as they say, what’s past is prologue (William Shakespeare’s actual meaning notwithstanding), perhaps it would be fitting to revisit some other embarrassing moments in recent LSU history:

• Coastal scientist IVOR van HEERDEN who claimed that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had not driven pilings deep enough which allowed levees to fail during Hurricane Katrina, was fired – mainly because LSU feared the loss of grant money from the corps. It turned out that van Heerden was 100 percent correct in his assessment of the Corps and it wound up costing LSU $435,000 to settle with is former coastal researcher – after spending another $1 million defending his lawsuit.
• Remember STEVEN HATFIELD? He was hired by LSU’s National Center for Biomedical Research and Training in July 2002 and put on administrative leave less than a month later. Why? Because U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI head Robert Mueller considered him a “person of interest” in the mailing of a series of anthrax-laced letters. He was innocent but that matter little to LSU chancellor Mark Emmert who fired the scientist. Making matters worse, LSU then fired Hatfield’s supervisor, the head of the research center where he worked. This time it was the JUSTICE DEPARTMENT that settled the lawsuit – for $2.825 million in cash and an annuity that pays Hatfield $150,000 a year for 20 years.
• A story that LouisianaVoice broke was that of the epic failure of the dental implants developed at the LSU School of Dentistry. Undaunted by revelations of the faulty design of the implants, the dentistry school promptly fired whistleblower DR. RANDALL SCHAFFER who warned of the implants’ “100 percent failure rate.” Those failures, which were leading to suicides in some cases, eventually involved 675 patients combined as a class for discovery purposes, leaving the state exposed to about $1 billion in liability. For his diligence, LSU rewarded him by having his license revoked and his career ruined.
• And who can forget the manner in which DRS. ROXANNE TOWNSEND AND FRED CERISE were sent packing? The Bobby Jindal administration just couldn’t stand a bit of candor from professionals in the field of medicine when they decided to meddle into the affairs of the LSU Medical Center so the logical solution was to get rid of them in much the same say Donald Trump would dismiss experts in intelligence a few years later.
• The LSU Board of Supervisors saw no problem with allowing one of its MEMBERS, Dr. John F. George, Jr., to become President and CEO of Biomedical Research Foundation which would be taking over the operation of two LSU hospitals or that Biomedical Research Foundation leased research labs to the LSU System for millions of dollars. Of course, John F. George, Jr., MD, vice chairman of Biomedical Research Foundation was also a major contributor to Bobby Jindal.
• One of the main characters in this soap opera, F. KING ALEXANDER, was brought in as the new LSU president back in 2013 despite red flags raised by LOUISIANA VOICE.

Finally, in the irony of all ironies, after LSU football players were protected from charges of sexual assault, and after an LSU football coach was protected from being fired for sexual harassment, one obscure associate professor, DR. TERESA BUCHANAN, was given the axe in July 2015 for the sin of uttering a couple of four-letter words in her classroom.

But, don’t you see? That’s just the way it is at a school like LSU where football is king.

There are priorities, after all.