Louisiana Voice

The Presidential Search Committee, following a three-hour closed-door session on Tuesday, NARROWED THE SEARCH for a new president to try and sort out the mess that is LSU down to three candidates.

Two of the three finalists appear to be viable candidates for what will surely be one of the most difficult administrative jobs of any university in America, given the slew of charges, counter-charges, finger-pointing, lawyer-firing and lawsuits.

Those two are Jim Henderson, president of the University of Louisiana System, which oversees nine state universities with a combined enrollment of about 90,000 students, and William F. Tate, IV, provost at the University of South Carolina.

But a third has to raise eyebrows, given his immediate past employment.

Kelvin Droegemeier, a one-time University of Oklahoma vice president for research and a longtime faculty member, left that position in 2018 to become director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the administration of Donald Trump, the nation’s foremost science denier.

Now he wants to become the president of LSU, which finds itself embroiled in a spate of complicated, multi-front legal battles. Various lawsuits have been filed against the university, its New Orleans medical school, its board of supervisors, its athletic department, all outgrowths of separate sexual harassment claims. In addition, the head of the university’s Shreveport medical school has been placed on administrative leave for mishandling sexual harassment claims at that facility.

For a fleeting moment, I thought perhaps I was being too harsh on Droegemeier, that perhaps he was one of those who flew beneath the radar during the Trump years and who furtively did a job worthy of consideration for a university presidency.

Google is a wonderful tool, used properly. When I googled his name, up popped a story from Science Magazine, the 141-year-old peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science originally founded with financial support from Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell and considered one of the world’s foremost academic publications.

Competition to publish in Science is intense. Articles published in such a highly-regarded magazine can – and do – lead to career advancement for authors. That is precisely why fewer than 7 percent of articles submitted see the light of publication.

One article that did get PUBLISHED was an October 13, 2020, story that was part of a series that examined how federal research agencies fared under Trump. This particular story carried the headline “’Very disappointed.’ Trump’s science adviser has left U.S. researchers wanting more.”

Included in its profile of Droegemeier was a passage that said there was “scant evidence that Droegemeier, who also holds the unofficial title of the president’s science adviser, has tried to mitigate any of the administration’s most controversial policies relating to science and innovation. The list includes its chaotic approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, rolling back a slew of environmental regulations, restricting immigration, and proposing deep cuts in the budgets of most federal research agencies.”

Droegemeier declined to be interviewed by the magazine (remember, this is a magazine in which scientists would kill to be featured in an interview) or even to answer questions from Science about his tenure in the Trump administration.

He did, however, provide a brief email in which he boasted of the Trump administration’s accomplishments and insisted that “President Trump values research and the great work of scientists.”

That would be the same Trump who wanted to nuke hurricanes and who wanted us to drink bleach as an antidote for Covid-19 – the same Trump who, drawing on his vast scientific background, predicted the path of a hurricane with a Sharpie.

I understand former Trump administration officials are having trouble finding gainful employment, but I had no idea things were this bad for them.

Of course, I would ever expect the LSU Board of Supervisors, comprised to a great extent of political campaign contributors who bought their way onto the most prestigious board in state government, to ever pay heed to any of my observations.

On the other hand, I was the only one who cautioned against the hiring of former President F. King Alexander. Those warnings were based on his professional resume.