LSU BOARD VISIT - Last Friday the LSU Board of Supervisors paid a visit to Shreveport for a meeting but prior to that, they spent part of the morning touring the LSU Health Shreveport Center for Medical Education, currently under construction at a cost of $74 million. Later in the day, the Board Members held a regularly scheduled meeting this time at LSUS. Now during that meeting, members of the state legislature and local citizens spoke of the need for more funding for campuses in northwest Louisiana. This advocacy for more attention to LSUS and LSU-Health Shreveport was in response to a House floor speech made last week in Baton Rouge by Shreveport Representative Republican Thomas Pressly District 6, who basically said campuses in Northwest Louisiana don’t get their fair share of support from Baton Rouge.
"The LSU system has been great at building up some of its campuses. It has become clear that LSUS and the health science-based in Shreveport the third-largest city in the state are both not a priority for the LSU leadership of yesterday, today, and tomorrow,” Pressly said.
Pressly referred to LSU’s $1.5 billion-dollar campaign launched in 2019 of which $1.35 billion was earmarked for LSU’s Baton Rouge Campus and $27 million for the LSU Alumni association, leaving just $29 million to be split between LSU-Shreveport, LSU-Eunice, and LSU Alexandria campuses.
The LSU Board of Supervisors meeting closed with future plans for discussions on how LSU can better serve these campuses, and afterwards, Louisiana State University President William Tate told reporters:
“We need to get together, not just the legislature but folks here on the ground who live here along with LSU, and we need to lay out a real plan so that we know what to ask for so the investment actually returns the (best) bang for the buck,” Tate said.
The next scheduled meeting for the LSU Board of Supervisors is June 9th and 10th at the University Administration Building on the Campus in Baton Rouge.
