re: Can you LSU baws educate me on why everyone hates F King Alexander?

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Re: the ridiculous BBT comparison LSU will never be CalTech.

We’ll never have the liberal arts programs like other state schools. Don’t have the funding or population necessary.

Academically LSUs bread and butter is the school of engineering and some of the business/marketing stuff. A few random undergrad and postgrad majors.

Kill a half dozen or so other universities and that could change.

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This is a good post and a good take on the situation at LSU. Regrettably, state higher education funding is spread far too thinly for LSU to have excellence across the board. We throw too little money at too many colleges and universities to spend higher education dollars wisely or efficiently. LSU prioritizes engineering and the natural sciences, which makes sense, but any other units that have done well have done so on their own and without resources that are comparable to those provided at other universities. This is why excellence cannot be sustained over time in most departments. A given department can hire some good faculty and do a great job for a short while, but eventually the good faculty get picked off by better funded universities--LSU invests very little in retaining high-quality faculty--and the quality of the department returns to mediocrity. I have seen this pattern in my own department and in many other departments across campus. There are a lot of faculty working heroically to make their departments as good as they can be, but it is an impossible dream with the resources available to LSU.