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LSU System President Comments on PERC Final Report

BATON ROUGE – Feb. 5, 2010 – LSU System President Dr. John Lombardi today issued the following statement on the Postsecondary Education Review Commission’s Final Report:

The Louisiana State University System and its component institutions have observed and when requested participated in the discussions of the PERC throughout its work.  It has, at the request of the Board of Regents staff, provided much data and information on topics of interest to Commission members.  The commitment of time and effort by the Commission members has been remarkable, and everyone with an interest in higher education in Louisiana is grateful for the commissioners’ personal investment in reviewing our work and offering suggestions and recommendations for improving our future.

Given the intense and short time period available, and the large scope of the Commission’s assignment, it quickly became clear that the Commission’s advice would necessarily have to be expressed in terms of aspirations and expectations rather than in terms of actual effective policies.  This result stems from the Commission’s inability, given time and staff constraints, to actually test theoretical propositions for improvement against real data, national experience, and particular local circumstances that would indicate whether any particular recommendation had a basis in fact and a possibility of implementation within the Louisiana fiscal and political context.  Nonetheless, many of the goals expressed by the Commission, if not the measures suggested for their implementation, are widely shared within the academic communities of our state.

Everyone wants to improve the success of students who graduate from high school and choose to extend their education through technical, community college, or university level work.  Everyone wants to see the opportunity for higher education made available not only to the middle and upper class students but also first time college students, under represented populations, and older students.  Everyone agrees bureaucratic and administrative barriers to flexible and effective management of institutions should be reduced.  All of higher education recognizes that efficiency and effectiveness benchmarked against the best in the nation are critical for performance driven higher education. 

However, this agreement on principles rests on a commitment to understand fully the nature of the problems to be solved, the opportunities to be captured, and the efficiencies to be achieved.  The expression of goals without careful, fact-based analysis and without a careful consideration of unintended consequences of seemingly simple corrective measures, offers little support for improvement.  Additionally, the confusion of political goals related to the bureaucratic organizational domains of higher education with the achievement of academic and educational results debases the original intent to focus on improving results for students and for the educational attainment of the citizens of the state. 

Over the next several weeks, along with our colleagues in all parts of higher education in Louisiana and following the lead of the Board of Regents, we will review the final PERC report and offer some observations on the specific recommendations.  We will seek input from our campuses and institutions and attempt to place the admirable aspirations of the PERC into a context that offers the realistic possibility of achieving progress in improving higher education in Louisiana.  We will focus on teaching, research, service, and the success of our students. We will identify those actions we can take on our campuses and make recommendations to our legislators that will have a real impact on improvement.  These actions include a focus on national measures of performance, the relationship of investment to achievement, and the effective mechanisms of rewarding improvement.

John V. Lombardi
LSU System President

Contact:
Charles Zewe, LSU System Vice President for Communication, 225-578-3941, 504-251-5400 (czewe@lsu.edu)

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