The Louisiana State University System, and chiefly the flagship campus in Baton Rouge, is having its revenge on the University of New Orleans, echoing events from more than a dozen years ago, when UNO left the system and the Shreveport campus might have been snatched away.

Last year, the Louisiana Legislature passed a bill returning UNO back to the LSU System. UNO has had financial difficulties (although some of them were of its own making and entirely avoidable) since the hurricane disasters of 2005, which caused a steep enrollment plunge. The switch out came as UNO had chafed under the dominance that LSU exercised within the system since the 1958 establishment of LSUNO, which didn’t throw off the shackles of being considered a property of LSU (for its first years, it was considered an extension of LSU) until its name change about 15 years later.

Now, it’s back to the future. Starting next academic year, not only are the school’s decades-long silver and blue colors being junked to adopt LSU’s purple and gold, but the name is reverting back to LSUNO. This follows the same strategy employed when the system underwent governance changes at the same time UNO left, in response to a move in the Legislature to merge LSUS and Louisiana Tech.

That never was a good idea, especially given that backers of that wanted to pour LSUS into Tech when the only workable solution, given LSUS’ position in a large urban area and Tech being located in the hinterlands, was the opposite. The rationale behind that direction was that Tech was the larger institution and growing whereas LSUS was smaller and stagnant – although LSUS navigated choppy waters precisely because the LSU system never cared that much about the goings-on at LSUS until it was about to be torn from it.

When the merger idea faded away, LSU made some governance changes. That led to the combining of the system and campus leadership roles, a structure now undone in time for UNO’s return, and the promise that both campuses would deliver courses and even degrees to each other. Naturally, that arrangement melted away after a couple of years as the eagerness to receive and deliver cooled quickly for LSU, but not the branding change that chunked LSUS’s colors, also silver and blue, in favor of the purple and gold.

The branding change was sold as a way to spark interest in LSUS by connecting it to LSU, with the same reasoning currently articulated for UNO. This obviously ignores the fact that LSUS is a regional campus (then) without a doctoral program, and not considered a research institution widely known outside of Louisiana, while UNO is a research university one notch below LSU, located in a larger metropolitan area and possessing some national recognition. As a result, this becomes more an issue of confusion, created by bludgeoning UNO with an LSU identity, because UNO was designed to draw mainly from the New Orleans area with some national reach where hardly any recruitment advantage would come by changing the name and colors.

If there was any disadvantage to its current branding, it was because for so long LSU had fought UNO over the latter having a separate identity, such as the system slow-walking for years the establishment of on-campus housing (also true in the case of LSUS).

Regardless, in its time in the University of Louisiana System UNO’s enrollment dropped by nearly half, although the undergraduate population only fell by only about half that amount. But actually, it was not alone. Among all senior institutions (this excludes professional schools, although those will join with LSU starting next academic year) in the state, from that time until now, all lost student populations except for the three LSU schools and Southern University, Tech, and the University of Louisiana Monroe, with the two ULS barely gaining total students.

Enrollments at LSUS and Louisiana State University Alexandria merit further investigation. LSUA has tripled in size because of an emphasis in distance education for undergraduates (now, it has no graduate programs) while LSUS has doubled because of an emphasis in distance education for graduate students – creating a rueful situation in Baton Rouge where LSUS serves more graduate students than does LSU.

And keep in mind that the LSUS surge (not replicated in undergraduate enrollment, where numbers are about a third lower) had nothing to do with the promised but brief LSU assistance. Building a graduate-focused online portfolio was a decision independently made at LSUS, one that ended up so overshadowing LSU’s online programs that eventually LSUS online programs were forced into LSU’s – which LSU also plans to do with UNO’s online presence.

In short, banking on the experience of closer integration of LSUS with LSU – which had a better fit to begin with – suggests that trying to do the same with UNO will not, by itself, do much to increase enrollment at UNO. Now, there will be cost savings by that same lesson, as LSUS merged a number of back-office functions into the system, and that will help UNO budgetarily, but there’s no real evidence that partially subsuming UNO’s identity in LSU’s will do anything to put more warm bodies on the Lakefront or even hooked in through the web.

So, bringing UNO to heel will have a more lasting impact on its separateness as an institution than in enlarging the student body. That latter task is really incumbent on UNO itself and the LSU system being helpful in ancillary ways, such as in finding cost savings, as it already has done. In practical impact, it’s more about recapturing a wayward institution.