The folks in the know have suggested this was likely to happen as long ago as last summer, as LSU President Bill Tate wasn’t a great fit for a red-state flagship university run by an activist conservative governor. Jeff Landry is pushing to eliminate woke ideology at LSU, and there was an enormous amount of it left over by Landry’s predecessor John Bel Edwards, on whose watch Tate was hired.

So this morning, when the news broke that Tate is departing Baton Rouge for Piscataway, New Jersey, to take over a similar position at Rutgers, it wasn’t shocking.

Dr. William Tate is leaving his position as president of Louisiana State University at the end of June, the university confirmed Monday.

Tate, 60, was hired Monday as the new president of Rutgers University in New Jersey and will begin the new position on July 1, 2025.”This was a distinctly difficult decision, and one I did not take lightly,” Tate said in a written statement.  “LSU, its students, faculty, staff, and supporters are all incredible and inspirational. You will forever stay in my heart. This is a very special place, and I am honored to have been a part of it for four incredible years,” said President Tate. “There’s no other place like it in the world, and I will forever cherish the memories we created together.”

Outgoing Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway announced last year that he would step down after serving five years in the role.

Rutgers is the eighth-oldest college in the country, consisting of three campuses in New Jersey with nearly 70,000 students and a $5.6 billion annual budget.

The Louisiana Illuminator reported last month that Tate had moved his LSU campus office to the same building that once held the chancellor’s office.  They came amid talks of possibly splitting LSU’s top leadership role into two positions, the online publication reported at the time.  The president and chancellor roles were merged into one position in 2012.

Tate was hired into the position at LSU in 2021, becoming the first African American president of the university.

He came to LSU from the University of South Carolina, where he oversaw the 13 schools and colleges there along with the university’s School of Medicine locations in Columbia and Greenville.

What we can say about Bill Tate is that we were never fans. Tate moved up in academia pushing scholarly papers and articles based on critical race theory, and specifically, essentially, that math is racist. Under his tenure LSU continued moving in the direction of becoming a woke indoctrination factory just like so many other major universities have.

That said, he did exceed our expectations.

Particularly once Landry was elected governor, and the momentum shifted toward ended woke tomfoolery like DEI and related items, Tate happily got on board with the new project. He led an effort to eliminate DEI from the university’s websites and governance, whether his heart was in it or not, rather than fighting for woke indoctrination like his predecessor F. King Alexander did.

You got the impression that Bill Tate was more of a weathervane, pointing in the direction the wind was blowing.

And honestly, among most college administrators that’s probably the best you can hope for.

But it was never going to last long. Tate managed to avoid direct personal controversy for the most part, which was something Alexander was completely incapable of doing, LSU hasn’t fallen apart on his watch though the university’s national rankings aren’t particularly advancing, and there’s a lot of research money rolling into the university – or at least there was; federal research grants have peaked everywhere and probably aren’t going to be a growth area for LSU going forward no matter who’s running the show.

In other words, you could say that Tate has done an OK job at LSU. And given his personal charisma and diversity background, he’d certainly be a hot name when he decided to put himself on the market. Along comes Rutgers, a flagship school in a more populous state where the ideological impetus is more in line with his background, and it’s a nice fit for him. And his taking that job means there’s no acrimony over a change that Landry and the more conservative LSU Board of Supervisors were hoping for.

So where does LSU go from here?

You’ll hear a bunch of names. Two that we’ve heard were most interesting.

One is Julia Letlow, the congresswoman from Louisiana’s 5th District which now includes parts of Baton Rouge.  Letlow comes from an education/academic background, and there had been talk before her husband Luke passed away, in late 2020 just after winning the congressional seat she now holds, that Julia was in line to take over as president of UL-Monroe.

Landry is known to be backing the idea of Letlow running against Bill Cassidy for the Senate, but she hasn’t joined that race yet. She’d be a political hire as LSU’s president, but on the other hand there is something of a track record of universities being successfully led by politicians – the University of Florida’s outgoing president Ben Sasse was a Republican senator from Nebraska who had been a professor and academic executive before getting into politics, and Sasse has done very well in Gainesville.

A more conventional name which has surfaced is Eric Monday, who is currently the Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration at the University of Kentucky. Monday has been the money guy at UK for about a dozen years now; before that he spent several years at LSU in a number of roles, finishing as Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administrative Services and Chief Financial Officer. Monday is an LSU graduate with a BA in Accounting, a Masters in Public Administration and a PhD in Philosophy, so he’s got the triple-threat degree profile as well as an intricate knowledge of how the LSU system works.

But maybe what LSU needs is a total outsider who’s more about business and the private sector in order to turn the place into a more innovative, 21st century institution better suited for the realities of the market.

We’ll see. It’s far too early to tell at this point. What we do know is the Bill Tate era is over and something new is coming at LSU.