1012 Corridor

Former legislator Ron Gomez still remembers the hue and cry that erupted in the Legislature when he introduced a seemingly insignificant bill that would have changed a single line in the state budget to reflect the correct name of the state-run teaching hospital in his Lafayette district.

The institution was officially called University Medical Center, so named because it sat on property belonging to the University of Southwest Louisiana, and that’s what everyone in Lafayette knew it as.

But in Baton Rouge—and in the state budget—the hospital had a different name: Charity Hospital of Southwest Louisiana.

It was the mid-1980s, and having the word “charity” in the name was becoming politically incorrect. What’s more, as chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, Gomez wanted the books to accurately reflect the name of the institution. Baton Rouge area legislators would hear nothing of it.

“I moved for passage and some of the big LSU supporters came jumping out of their chairs,” Gomez recalls. “It was such an innocuous little thing but the paranoia was such back then that when they heard that a guy from Lafayette was going to change the name of anything they immediately assumed that USL was behind it and was trying to take over the hospital, and nothing was further from the truth.”

It’s a little story from long ago but it speaks volumes about the political tension that for years clouded the relationship between Louisiana State University and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, formerly USL. It’s a tension that some will tell you is still around.

“All the state universities have always gone after the same pot of money and so there’s always been competition there,” says political columnist John Maginnis. “ULL feels it most acutely because they’re in LSU’s shadow.”

But the rivalry—really a political and geographic rivalry more than an academic one—is not nearly as acute as it once was. Indeed, relations between the two schools have, arguably, never been better. Since the state restructured higher education in the late 1990s, establishing a multi-tiered system with LSU squarely at the top of the pecking order, there are no longer questions about where each school belongs in the hierarchy or how much public money each should get.

“A kind of intense rivalry was prevalent in the 1980s, when there were serious budget issues,” says UL Lafayette President Dr. Joseph Savoie. “But after the Board of Regents began to get more control and laid out the master plan for the state, and the Legislature began to fund the formula appropriately, that tension kind of went away.”

Savoie, if anyone, would know. Not only does he head UL Lafayette today, but he was the state’s commissioner of higher education from 1996 until 2008. He’s also been around state politics for decades. He remembers the animosity that existed between the two schools, particularly from the 1960s until the early 1990s.

Part of it was a natural regional rivalry that grew more intense as LSU’s enrollment mushroomed in the 1960s, increasing its size and political power. As the smaller of the two schools, USL was the one with the inferiority complex, and its supporters made no secret of the fact that they believed LSU’s friends at the Capitol were keeping their school down. The bad blood went so deep that back in the late 1960s, USL students picketed a Lafayette auto dealer after he sponsored the rebroadcast of a Tiger football game on Lafayette TV.

The tension really reached a crescendo in the 1980s, however, when oil prices fell through the floor and the state coffers started to dry up. Suddenly, money was scarce, and the schools—not just LSU and USL, but all the state’s many four-year colleges and universities—found themselves fighting for ever-smaller pieces of a budgetary pie.

“Back in those years the campuses that got the most money were the ones that had the longest-serving legislators on the most powerful committees,” says USL alumna and former Gov. Kathleen Blanco, who was a legislator at the time. “Some small colleges got disproportionate funding relative to their mission and some larger ones were left out.”

About that same time, USL tried to change its name. The university’s longtime president, R.J. Authement, who headed the institution for more than three decades, promoted the effort. He believed USL should position itself as the other Louisiana state school—the University of Louisiana. His timing couldn’t have been worse.

“Back when I was a freshman legislator he asked me to introduce a bill to change the name,” Gomez recalls. “I shopped it around and it was obvious it was going nowhere.”

Gomez advised against it. So did other veteran legislators. But Authement insisted, persuading Blanco to handle the legislation for him.

“The LSU people turned out in force to oppose it,” Gomez recalls. “It went nowhere but it created a lot of animosity,” which helps explain the hostility that ensued when he tried a couple of years later to change the name of the medical center.

Former State Rep. Carl Crane was also in the Legislature at the time, representing Baton Rouge, and a big supporter of LSU. As he explains it, the LSU contingent had very real concerns because USL was seen as a potential threat at a time when there was no clear delineation of each school’s role in the state’s higher education framework.

“It was a lot of bickering over status,” Crane says. “They were turf wars.”

The situation turned a corner in the 1990s during the administration of Mike Foster, who began a nearly decade-long process of restructuring higher education in Louisiana. First, he strengthened the Board of Regents, giving the state’s higher education governing board more oversight and control over budgetary issues than the advisory role it had played in the past.

Then, his administration set about creating a hierarchy among the many colleges and universities in the state. That involved taking the loose confederation of four-year colleges that had previously been lumped together under the Board of Trustees for State Colleges and Universities system, including USL, and creating the University of Louisiana system. USL became the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, or UL Lafayette, though diehard Cajun supporters prefer, simply, UL.

This time LSU supporters went along with the name change. That’s because another key element of the higher education reorganization was to officially establish LSU in Baton Rouge as the state’s flagship university. With its status codified on paper, LSU supporters could relax, and much of the hostility toward UL Lafayette went away.

Was UL Lafayette satisfied with its secondary status on the totem pole?

Not entirely, but there wasn’t much the school could do about it. The plan just made too much sense. LSU became the state’s flagship university: the only Southern Regional Education Board Four-Year Category 1 institution in Louisiana, a distinction that meant it awards at least 100 doctoral degrees that are distributed among at least 10 categories with no more than 50% in any one category. It’s also the only Carnegie Doctoral/Research Extensive University.

UL Lafayette moved to the tier below as one of three SREB Four-Year Category 2 universities, along with Louisiana Tech in Ruston and the University of New Orleans. Those schools award at least 30 doctoral degrees that are distributed among at least five categories.

The master plan also provided a blueprint for how each school should be funded. Under the 2001 plan, which is currently being revised, funding was determined by a formula based on enrollment and SREB level. As such, LSU got a lot more money than UL Lafayette, not only because it has twice as many students but because it offers more degrees in more categories.

The new funding formula, which likely will be adopted this year, is changing the matrix. Funding will be based on a variety of factors that emphasize a school’s performance—retention rates, graduation rates and research, to name a few. While the change may have some effect on how much money each college and university receives relative to what it got in the past, LSU will still get the lion’s share of the money—and UL Lafayette officials say that’s how it should be.

“LSU is the state’s flagship institution and it needs to do well,” Savoie says. “We have a different role and we want to do well in that role but not to LSU’s detriment.”

Not everyone feels that way. On sports blogs, UL Lafayette fans spew venom on the subject of Tiger athletics, a sentiment that is often reciprocated. Although the two schools are not competitive on the football field, they have had fierce match-ups in baseball and other sports.

State and university officials insist that such negative attitudes are seldom seen where it really counts—among faculty, administrators or local legislators.

“On the sports side people are always going to be competitive,” Savoie says. “LSU has world-class programs and we’re just happy to have the opportunity to compete.” What’s more important is that the two schools are now collaborating, though on a very limited basis. They’re involved in a handful of joint research projects and occasionally share grant money. They’re also connected through a research network.

But they could do much more. Given how far they have come over the past few years, it’s not unrealistic. But it will take time.

“We have different areas of focus,” Savoie says. “But we hope to be able to complement what LSU is already doing.”