Battles over university and university system governance in Louisiana really boil down to the fact that Louisiana’s higher education provision is overbuilt.

Culminating a years-long effort that has developed in bits and pieces, the Louisiana State University System has moved to reorganize. It has abandoned the combination of the Baton Rouge campus with the system within leadership by its new recent hires, and rightly so.

Back when system and LSU leadership was combined, the plan for the system was to merge campus governance and implementation as much as possible. On the business sides, campuses were to find economies of scale, and in that aspect the strategy succeeded in creating a central back-office operation, among other ways to save.

But the centralization tactic replaced the combination tactic on the academic side as well. Originally, the idea was to take the relative strengths of specific campuses and then export those to others. Naturally, LSU has the greatest program exportation capacity, but other campuses in Shreveport, Alexandria, and the medical schools in New Orleans and Shreveport (through combination undergraduate degrees programs with other institutions) would have some areas of excellence in instruction that LSU could import. Instead, LSU did little in the way to invite in programs from elsewhere and rather emphasized foisting programs onto the other campuses. Not surprisingly, the cross-fertilization effort collapsed in short order.

As unharmonious as that may have been, that approach represented an attempt to solve the problem that has plagued the state’s higher education system almost from its inception: too many institutions placed too haphazardly, particularly at the senior level. Extended to its extreme, it sought to turn back the clock in putting all of these campuses into the posture that basically Louisiana State University Eunice is in: branch junior college campuses, which all of LSUS, LSUA, and the reintroduced University of New Orleans (decades ago, LSUNO) began as, specifically designed to feed into LSU.

That kind of centralization – if not driven directly by accreditation concerns, then at least in spirit – could help alleviate the problem of overbuilding to some extent. However, it also risks worsening the situation by starving non-flagship campuses of resources, perhaps not intentionally, but as a natural consequence of the tendency to feather the flagship’s nest first.

The most effective way to address the problem of too many senior institutions chasing too few students would be to downgrade several campuses located near major metropolitan areas to community college status – prime candidates being Nicholls State University and Southeastern Louisiana, and perhaps also McNeese State, Northwestern State, and LSUA – and to consolidate others. The most obvious consolidation would involve the three campuses within 30 miles of one another: Grambling, Louisiana Tech, and the University of Louisiana Monroe, as well as Southern with LSU, and the once-attempted merger of Southern University New Orleans with UNO.

Of course, the political will to pursue any of this remains disappointingly absent.

With that option off the table, the latest reorganization appears to address the overbuilding problem from the opposite direction. Rather than significantly reducing costs, the focus seems to be on generating additional revenue by boosting research prestige and the funding that accompanies it. That goal would be pursued by consolidating governance of previously separate graduate education and research entities – LSU Health Sciences Center Shreveport, LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, the LSU Agricultural Center, and the LSU Pennington Biomedical Research Center – under LSU itself rather than at the system level. In doing so, the move satisfies the bean counting used to rank research output, potentially strengthening LSU’s case for membership in the Association of American Universities, a group comprising the nation’s most prestigious research-focused institutions.

There is some administrative logic and gain to this. The two centers are research institutions whose missions easily could be folded into LSU and wouldn’t be given short shrift if LSU is so hopped up on a larger research presence. Folding in the medical schools is trickier.

On the one hand, medical education is education, and other graduate-only degree programs, such as law, already exist under the campus umbrella. But on the other hand, medical education in state university systems is often done through standalone institutions, driven by the separate and very specialized accreditation in medical education.

It doesn’t appear that any single governance model – whether an institution operates under a university system, has its own separate board, or is housed within a university – inherently creates better outcomes than another. Thus, while policymakers’ objections to the LSU Board of Supervisors moving governance of the four entities under LSU, rather than the system board, may prove valid if those institutions fail to receive adequate attention, it is the policymakers themselves who can prevent that outcome by, for example, crafting budgets that provide the monies they believe is necessary.

At the same time, the new approach does nothing to resolve the underlying problem of overcapacity. Just as legislators can ensure campuses receive adequate attention, they also have the power to address the larger issue created by too many institutions dividing an increasingly small pie. However, they appear far more inclined to do the former than to confront the latter.