Picking up the paper (metaphorically speaking) and seeing Dr. Jim Henderson is retiring from and leaving Louisiana Tech brought back bad memories for me. It felt like a middle ground between finding out that Leon Barmore was retiring and then finding out Kim Mulkey wasn’t going to be his successor as the women’s basketball coach in Ruston. Leon was a legend and a Hall of Famer. He’d been in Ruston a long time and had won 3 national titles. Kim was Leon’s heir-apparent, but someone made a bad decision and didn’t hire her. We knew what we were losing with the legend, and we thought we knew what we were losing with his appointed successor not getting the job. It didn’t turn out well for Tech. Ego often gets in the way of success, but I won’t re-plow that ground.

Losing Jim Hendeson gives me flash backs to those “oh dang” moments when an organization loses someone who is really good. He’s been successful in Ruston and around the state. His time at Louisiana Tech has been short but his impact has been world-class and paradigm-changing. If he could have stayed 5 or 10 more years, there’s no telling what he might have done. But he’s leaving after accomplishing a great many things in a short amount of time. He’s leaving higher education in Louisiana, but NOT without accomplishing a LOT over the course of several decades.

As a legislator, I’ve gotten to know Jim on a professional basis. When I was elected in 2019, he was the University of Louisiana system president. I got to know him quickly as I soon learned he was one of the few people in government and especially in higher education who were not afraid of facing tough moments. I grew to trust him and especially admire his courage.

He showed up with common sense in COVID and did not skulk away like others. He showed up at tough Education Committee hearings when other system and university presidents seemed to cower. When we confronted tough issues like free speech and tenure, Dr. Henderson came to our committee and offered up unsolicited testimony. Most of his peers weren’t even in the building in these hard moments. When I passed legislation on campus speech rights for students, he showed up and testified then hosted a campus speech symposium, attended by most universities in the state to discuss the importance of free speech for all—even students. I brought a very controversial academic freedom bill last year that Jim told me was needed. It wasn’t his idea, but he told me he was worried about the stifling of speech of faculty—as well as our students.

When Jim was hired at Tech, I was thrilled. As an “ever loyal” alum, I was fired up about him following Les Guice as our President. Jim inherited a pretty well-running machine and has made it better. I’ll go so far as to say he made it MUCH better, which is hard to do when things are already working well.

Louisiana Tech is a bit of an enigma in Louisiana. It’s not a directional school. It has never changed its name. It has never tried to be anything other than what it is—a higher ed institution that strives for excellence. It’s an engineering, research and scientific powerhouse. It just is. We do plenty of other things, but the sciences and research are what Tech is known for and what it has focused on. I’ll also say Louisiana Tech has never tried to be anyone else. There’s no need to try to compete with LSU—they have different missions.

But what Jim has done in his brief time in Ruston merits review. Returning to a campus was, by his own account, the joy of Henderson’s career, and in three years Louisiana Tech put up results that are hard to dismiss as luck. Though not a Tech alum, he has a deep family connection. His dad was in Ruston but got called away for World War II. After surviving the war, his dad came back and played football for Tech legend Joe Aillet and picked up a degree. Jim grew up hearing about the greatness of the institution.

Here’s the report card: The university posted three consecutive years of revenue-generating enrollment growth, including record freshman classes, while recording the highest retention rate in the University of Louisiana System.

Tech leads the system in graduation rate and time-to-degree—the three student-success measures that tell whether a campus is finishing what it starts. It did that work while receiving the lowest per-student state funding in the UL System, a gap Henderson quantified at roughly $13 million a year below the system average. Tech outperformed its peers on the metrics that matter and did it on the thinnest state appropriation per pupil. I never heard him or anyone in the institution whine. And I was listening.

The university earned a ten-year reaccreditation and, in 2026, a Niche ranking as the No. 1 public university in Louisiana. Henderson pushed research that solves problems rather than research for a bumper sticker, and federal partners answered. In 2026 more than $38 million in federal appropriations flowed to Tech and its partners for work in biomedical engineering, micromanufacturing, cyber engineering, and forest products—world-class engineering research tied to defense and industry, not to vanity metrics alone.

The Roy O. Martin Forest Products Innovation Center, backed by $15 million in state funding, anchors that applied-research agenda in a Louisiana industry that undergirds the State economy. By partnering with Roy O. Martin, Tech will be part of revitalizing a critical but staggering part of the economy. Alongside the City of Ruston and the state, he advanced a utilities overhaul that will replace failing steam infrastructure and is projected to save about $1.6 million a year.

The Radiance Technologies microchip project, through a foundation subsidiary, is expected to bring some 150 jobs to Ruston by 2032.

There are LOTS MORE things that could be discussed, but hopefully the reader will get the picture. Jim Henderson has done very good things in Ruston.

The fact he’s leaving higher education altogether also is a loss for Louisiana. While there will be plenty of time for commemoration in the coming months, I’m going to go ahead and relay to any who will listen what Jim Henderson has gotten done while serving as an Education Leader.

As the longest-serving president of the University of Louisiana System, he built Compete LA to pull hundreds of thousands of adults with leftover credits back across the finish line, and he stood up the Reginald F. Lewis Scholars program as a leadership pipeline, not a press release. He also did the unglamorous work—COVID, thin state budgets, and showing up in committee when free speech and academic freedom were on the table—while other system leaders found reasons to stay home.

As the senior vice president for workforce and career-technical education, he helped sell and launch capital programs that finally gave Louisiana’s community and technical colleges modern shops instead of leftover buildings. After Katrina and Rita he helped drive certified construction training for thousands of Louisianians when the state needed welders and builders. He helped align programs to employers, fund the labs, and measure the work in credentials and jobs.

As President of Northwestern State University, he pushed enrollment to the highest mark in NSU’s 135-year history. He added programs the region actually hires for—nursing, oil and gas, construction management, industrial technology, and engineering—instead of collecting majors for the catalog. It was brief, but it was the same Henderson pattern: student life plus labor-market programs, then move to the next hard job.

As Chancellor of Bossier Parish Community College, he put the college on a national list—five straight years among America’s five fastest-growing two-year schools—while enrollment roughly doubled past 8,500 and completions rose with it. He tied BPCC to industry with a $22 million training facility for Benteler, an NSA two-year cyber designation, and a first nursing class that passed certification at 100 percent. He also built a real off-ramp to work for students with cognitive disabilities and autism, which is the part of a growth story most presidents never get around to.

So, yes, I am saddened that our State is losing this level of achievement and losing an educator’s educator. I wish him well, and I am personally grateful for all he has done for our Louisiana.

Finally, I know my beloved Louisiana Tech will thrive, as it has now for well over 130 years. The institution has never been about any ONE person, but many people have seen to creating the place of excellence that sits quietly up in Lincoln Parish. Thank you, Dr. Henderson, for the record.

Chuck Owen is a second-term State Legislator and hails from Vernon Parish. He holds two degrees from Louisiana Tech, was commissioned in the Air Force through Tech’s ROTC program, was a scrub walk-on for the track team, and is a proud Bulldog. Both his daughters hold degrees from Tech, as well.