Former LSU President F. King Alexander says the Monday night meeting in April 2019 at Juban’s restaurant, at which key members of the LSU Board of Supervisors informed him they had reached a deal to hire Scott Woodward as athletic director, was one of the most egregious violations of university policy he’s ever seen.
The meeting, which Alexander first detailed in late March toThe Chronicle of Higher Education, was convened by then-current board leaders who laid out the terms of the deal—writing Woodward’s new salary on the back of a cocktail napkin—and told Alexander he would have to fire existing Athletic Director Joe Alleva first thing Tuesday morning.
“I call it the Monday night massacre,” Alexander said in a wide-ranging interview this morning on the radio show Talk Louisiana with Jim Engster. “It violates university policy, accreditation standards, to have a small number of board members—without the others knowing—that they had worked out a deal and … were paying him substantially more than we were paying Alleva …. I had never experienced anything like it in 20 years as a public university president. To replace the athletic director without myself or anyone on my staff knowing about it is quite an extraordinary intrusion into university governance and shared governance.”
In the nearly hourlong interview, Alexander defended his six-year tenure at LSU, which has come under intense scrutiny since details of the way the university handled Title IX reports of sexual misconduct and violence surfaced, first in the national media and, in early March, in a report prepared by the Husch Blackwell law firm.
That report cost Alexander, who left LSU at the end of 2019, his most recent position as president of Oregon State University.
Alexander says he is proud of the tough decisions he made at LSU to investigate Title IX complaints and noted that he established the Title IX office. He also defended the actions he took against the university’s Greek system, which he has said caused pushback from prominent LSU alumni.
“There was a combination of misbehavior that the fraternity system felt immune to understanding … so we had to shut down all social activities in the Greek system … to reeducate the Greek system and Greek leaders that we’re taking these issues seriously,” he says. “We didn’t have an anti-Greek approach to this. We had an anti-sexual assault, anti-drug abuse, anti-hazing approach to this.”
Alexander also suggested the outcry against one of his most significant and controversial actions—to allow a holistic admissions process that would remove barriers to access for low-income, mostly Black and Hispanic, students—was rooted in a racist culture.
“This is a racist issue,” Alexander says. “I was surprised we would have such resistance from the Board of Regents and others but it was because we were leveling the playing field for disadvantaged students, who needed LSU more than other students. … This was a battle between old LSU and the new LSU ….”
You can hear the full interview here.
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