Re: A Tale of Two Universities
PS (I'm in a chatty mood today.)Originally Posted by LaCajunsFan
1) I talk about Ray the most because his is the administration I know the most about.
2) Personally, however, I have known T-Joe the longest... we went to HS together. I believe that, now that Gail passed, I may have known him longer than anyone in Lafayette. The argument that T-Joe is the best president could be made.
You might not recognize that, however, and I have come to believe that that is by design. T-Joe was UL's lobbyist for some years, and our VP of University Advancement; and then he was head of the Board of Regents for 12 years. He understands higher ed politics better than anyone in the state. And our VP Finances is Jerry Luke LeBlanc, who only a few old-timers remember, was Chairman of the House Finance Committee, and after that, Chief Administrative Officer. He was one of the two or three most powerful people in state government for awhile, and he understands the overall scope of Louisiana politics as well as anyone.
It's important to understand that. We have a BioInnovation Lab, and a Level III testing lab, both going up in New Iberia; we have a new engineering building going up; Madison is undergoing a second renovation; we acquired the Lourdes property; and there are other significant things going on.
Riddle me this, Batman: Where did all the money come from? Riddle me this #2, Batman: Why isn't anyone asking that question?
Like I said, it's by design. T-Joe & Jerry Luke understand this game very, very well. A few years back, UL received unprecedented funding from the state. Unprecedented. When I heard about it, I asked the administrator what we were going to do with the information. He fixed me with a cold stare and said, "Not a damned thing."
Even though T-Joe and I have known each other a long time, we are not best buds, and I do not share in his secrets. But I have watched him long enough to know that he likes to keep a low, and very affable, profile. If you've heard him talk, he is very informal, even cracking a lot of jokes. I have come to think of that as a bit of a 'Columbo' routine.
Things are happening at UL, and happening fast, but we don't scream it from the rooftops. And so it just keeps happening, we keep growing, and we don't give our enemies traction to fight us. At the same time, those schools that get nasty with us often seem to later end up in deep doo-doo... but I have no information that T-Joe is behind any of that. It might just be an odd coincidence.
So T-Joe is also a very strong president.
If you had switched him to any of the other presidencies, he might not have been so strong; and if you took any of the previous presidents, and put them in T-Joe's place, they would almost definitely not have been as strong.
3) People here keep bashing Ray, or T-Joe. It's a shame that I'm the only person here who's married or has kids (IT'S A JOKE, 'RUNNER), because if any of you had a family, you'd know that you don't get a perfect spouse, nor perfect kids. But when you step back, if you're fortunate as so many of us have been, and you look around at other families, you think, "I guess I didn't do so bad."
Sports fans sometimes tend to the ridiculous. Some of them should have been computers, because they think in 0s and 1s: a coach, an administrator, a president, is completely perfect, or perfectly awful. There is no grey. If we don't win every game, every sport, every year, it's unsatisfactory.* If our stadium isn't the best, if our parking isn't the best, if our tailgating isn't the biggest, if our attendance isn't the best, if our enrollment isn't the largest, if our bathrooms aren't the best...
...the whole program is a failure.
Puh-leeze. I ask you to stop.
There ain't no perfection. We have to look at it like we look at our families, and think about how we are faring over all. Which was one of the intentions of the opening post in this thread: Tech used to be a rival. So were McNeese, ULM, UNO, and the rest of them.
We left them all behind, and in some areas we're now passing LSU & Tulane.
But if a president didn't make every decision the way some of the geniuses here think they should have, they were horrible, terrible, anathema.
Meanwhile, we keep growing and expanding, while our rivals recede.
For those of you who look at the big picture, make posts about that. Remind people that, right now in the state and the conference, we're in the catbird seat.
(And here's to hoping the bird eats the cat... )
*Actually, even that isn't good enough. Lou Holtz went undefeated one year and won the NC at Notre Dame, and was still getting complaints. He realized that many of the fans, the wealthy fans, the ostensibly intelligent fans, expected to not only win, but to drub every opponent.
Don't be like Notre Dame.
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