Friday, Dec. 16, is slated to be a pivotal day for Southern University Baton Rouge. The Southern System’s Board of Supervisors, which recently declared financial exigency for the institution, is scheduled to vote on a controversial reorganization plan that is expected to include termination of some tenured faculty.
SUBR Chancellor James Llorens also will merge some colleges and schools within the university, as outlined in drafts circulated last week.
“We have balanced the budget for this year through staff layoffs, furloughs, freezing vacant positions and all but critical expenditures,” Llorens told Diverse. “We now have to make sure we’re operating at level consistent with projected revenues for 2012-13 academic year.”
But the prospect of dismissing tenured faculty has engendered further strife between faculty and administration amid ongoing struggles at the Baton Rouge campus.
“I believe the reorganization committee is a total farce in order to gut the tenured faculty. No votes were taken, no motions made,” said faculty senate president Dr. Sudhir Trivedi, who participated in the committee and is known for his colorful candor. “I call it the chancellor’s feel-good committee.”
Trivedi has maintained that financial exigency was unnecessary and could have been avoided. “Financial exigency is a direct result of incompetent and imprudent financial and administrative decisions consistently made by the administration and the board,” Trivedi wrote in one of his recent memos to faculty. “We must oppose and fight it at all costs.”
Trivedi told Diverse those board-approved decisions include hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to former administrators after they left their positions, recent hiring of a board member’s son as assistant vice chancellor of student affairs, and increasing subsidies to the athletics department from $1.2 million to $2.4 million.
