BATON ROUGE, La. – By pushing out a 14-year-member of the Board of Regents to make room for a minority appointee, Gov. Bobby Jindal is acknowledging it doesn’t look good to pack the state’s top higher education board with White members.
It might have been better if the Republican governor had thought that as he was making appointments the first time — before he ignited a racially charged debate over merging the historically Black Southern University at New Orleans with the largely White University of New Orleans, and before he got slapped with a lawsuit for the Board’s lack of diversity.
The state’s Constitution, after all, says the Regents “should be representative of the state’s population by race and gender to ensure diversity,” a provision enacted in 1998.
Last week, the Jindal administration edged out Roland Toups, who had served on the Board since 1997. Toups’ exit came about a week before the study of a possible SUNO/UNO merger is due to the board.
Toups was then replaced with Albert Sam II, a Black surgeon from Baton Rouge.
The announcement that Toups was leaving included statements from Board Chairman Bob Levy and Jindal praising Toups’ service, but offered no explanation of why he was resigning.
Toups made up for that lack of explanation in his resignation letter to Levy.
