LSU picks William F. Tate IV as president, first Black man to lead the school system
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In addition to being the first Black president of LSU, he will be the first Black president in the SEC.
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Tate was selected after a unanimous vote by the Board of Supervisors. He will be the head of the LSU system and the chancellor of the flagship campus.
In addition to being the first Black president of LSU, he will be the first Black president of any Southeastern Conference colleges.
Tate is the provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of South Carolina.
“What I’m really most excited about is I met students here who really are amazing, and for me, this position is all about what we can do to help students and give people access and opportunity in higher education,” Tate said at a press conference. “That’s really in my DNA, how do we help people regardless of their background – we find the money, get you here and give you the opportunity to live your dream. I think there is no better place in the United States to come find your dream and to make it happen than right here at LSU.”
LSU Board Chair Robert Dampf said that the school found a “great leader” in Tate. “This is a very pivotal time at our university, from economic, environmental, social challenges, but we are doing great things at this place. From our academic achievements, our enrollment, our diversity, I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished,” he said.
William F. Tate IV will be the first Black person to head LSU — the first to lead any Southeastern Conference college, for that matter — after a unanimous vote by the Board of Supervisors on Thursday.
The board spent much of the day interviewing the three finalists before debating for more than 90 minutes behind closed doors, then voting to offer Tate the job of LSU system president and chancellor of the flagship — a job that one supervisor described as being a combatant in a political knife fight.
Dr. William Tate is the provost and executive vice president of academic affairs at the University of South Carolina. He holds the USC Education Foundation Distinguished Professorship with appointments in Sociology and Family and Preventive Medicine (secondary appointment). Prior to that, he served as dean and vice provost for graduate education at Washington University in St. Louis. Before working at Washington University in St. Louis, Tate served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He completed a second post-doctoral training program in the Department of Psychiatry—Epidemiology and Prevention Group at the Washington University School of Medicine, where he earned a master’s degree in psychiatric epidemiology.
He had served as dean of the Graduate School & Vice Provost for Graduate Education at the elite Washington University in St. Louis from 2002 to 2020. Tate also taught mathematics at Texas Christian University and University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He said his target start date at LSU is July 2, but the details of his contract need to be worked out first.
The other two finalists were Kelvin Droegemeier, who was President Donald Trump’s science adviser, and Jim Henderson, who is president of the University of Louisiana system’s nine public colleges. All three were questioned for more than an hour each.
Tate grew up on the southside of Chicago, “which means I’m really from Mississippi,” he said. His grandparents were part of the Great Migration between the two world wars when more than 100,000 Black Mississippians moved north for work and a chance to live in a less repressive environment.
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Tate said he learned of the LSU job at a dinner outside the Governor’s Mansion prior to attending the Oct. 24 football game between South Carolina and LSU. He was with University of South Carolina President Bob Caslen.
He sat next to LSU board Chair Robert Dampf. At the time, Tate said the discussion about the LSU presidential search was just entertaining small talk. A lifelong friend of Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne, who also applied for the job, Dampf said he told James Williams, the head of the LSU Presidential Search Committee, what a good candidate Tate would be for LSU’s top post. Later, Tate was contacted by the Atlanta firm contracted to search for candidates.
As LSU chancellor, Tate will be responsible for the flagship campus’s academic, fiscal and administrative matters. As LSU president, he will be the chief executive officer of the colleges and universities associated with the system, which includes two four-year universities, one two-year institution, two medical schools, a law school, an agricultural center, research facilities and the Baton Rouge flagship, educating about 50,000 students.
Tate will take ownership of an ongoing scandal at LSU in which administrators are accused of covering up sexual misconduct allegations reported by female students over a period of years. Interim President Tom Galligan hired the Husch Blackwell law firm to investigate just how widespread and how deep the harassment claims went. The findings were so severe that the Louisiana Legislature launched hearings and is pursuing laws that would circumscribe many of the powers now held by LSU administrators.
Two current employees were suspended, two others were forced to change jobs, the university’s law firm for the past 80 years was fired, and a new system of rules and protocols was put in place that details the responsibilities of faculty and administrators who hear of sexual misconduct complaints.
The chancellor of the medical school in Shreveport was suspended over allegations that he retaliated against professors and staffers who made sexual harassment complaints against two top administrators, both of whom were forced into retirement.
Tate said the University of South Carolina is battling a sexual harassment scandal similar to LSU’s, and he walked into the middle of it a year ago. Tate has been criticized by students on the South Carolina campus for not dealing with the accused harsh enough.
Tate said a lawsuit has been filed, which muddies the situation.
He added that he remained silent during the face of protests, blog rants and Twitter posts to avoid further traumatizing the victims. He said if he were forced to comment in those circumstances, “I’ll walk away from any job in America.”
“You have to deal with the perpetrator or he will continue to act,” replied Board of Supervisors member Jay Blossman, of Mandeville.
Tate said he removed an accused professor from campus and fired him from his administrative duties the day after being made aware of the allegations. “I want everyone to know that I am fully committed to remove whether you have tenure or not — gone, end of story,” Tate said.
Because of the legal nature of Title IX, the federal law that mandates how to handle sexual harassment claims, Tate said, those processes must proceed. But he would take a trauma-focused approach, meaning the first step would be to assume the victim is telling the truth and to deal with healing, rather than making the initial step requiring the student to fulfill evidentiary necessities.
“He has expressed a desire to ensure that more students have the opportunity for higher education at the schools in LSU’s system, including more minority students, those from rural areas and those who face financial challenges,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said in statement congratulating Tate. “He will also be charged with attracting first-class researchers and research funding to our state as we seek to continue and expand LSU’s role as a national leader in innovation and discovery.”
The university also has been wrestling with its racist past. A special committee is trying to figure out what to do about the dozens of buildings and roads named after Confederates and segregationists scattered across campus.
LSU didn’t admit a Black student until 1953 — and then only one. It took a federal lawsuit before LSU allowed more than a few Black students into the university.
That has changed recently.
For the fall 2020 semester, 14.75% of the 35,453 students enrolled at the flagship were Black, according to the Louisiana Board of Regents, which oversees all public higher education institutions in Louisiana. That’s less than half of Louisiana’s Black population. But enrollment of Black students increased almost 6% over the past decade.
The previous search for president-chancellor, which led to the hiring of F. King Alexander in 2013, was held secretly, with LSU going to court to avoid naming who was considered. This time around, the Presidential Search Committee released the paperwork on all 23 who applied. The eight semifinalists were chosen in public, and their interviews were held on public livestream to give the out-of-state candidates the same situation as the Baton Rouge-based candidates.
Supervisor Lee Mallet, of Lake Charles, warned the three finalists that taking the top job at LSU was a political minefield.
“It’s serious politics,” he said. “They’ll knife you here. It’s a tough game here.”
Mallet said he wanted whomever the board chose to stay for a long time and not to quit in frustration after a few years.
Behind the scenes, supporters for each of the candidates served up negative information about the other candidates.
For Henderson, it was his receiving a doctorate in management, rather than a Ph.D., from the University of Maryland’s college that offers graduate degrees with an online component and limited in-person classes to nontraditional students.
Henderson made no apologies and pointed out that if he was being hired to run one of LSU’s research arms, then having an academic degree would be more important.
“You’re hiring someone to run this university, to raise up this university,” Henderson said. “The role of president is to build relationships.”
As Trump’s science adviser, Droegemeier was widely criticized for not mitigating the former president’s anti-science bent. But Droegemeier noted that he wasn’t appointed until after Trump withdrew the United States from the environmental Paris Accords.
He also said despite repeated reports, and contrary to Trump’s oft-repeated opinions, he believes climate change is real and that humans played a role. He had criticized Republicans in Congress for stripping funding from research of climate change.
“The White House helped a heck of a lot for having a thick skin,” Droegemeier said. “It was tough people who asked a lot of tough questions.”
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MORE ON DR. TATE
DR. William F. Tate IV
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Member Since: 2016
William F. Tate IV is an African-American social scientist and leader in higher education. In May 2021, he was selected as president of the Louisiana State University system, and chancellor of the flagship school in Baton Rouge. He is the first Black person to hold the position(s), and the first to head any school in the Southeastern athletics conference.
William F. Tate IV is the former provost and executive vice president of academic affairs at the University of South Carolina. He holds the USC Education Foundation Distinguished Professorship with appointments in Sociology and Family and Preventive Medicine (secondary appointment). Prior to joining the University of South Carolina faculty, he served as dean and vice provost for graduate education at Washington University in St. Louis, where he held the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professorship in Arts & Sciences. Before serving at Washington University in St. Louis, he held the William and Betty Adams Chair at TCU and served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Tate’s research program has focused on the social determinants of mathematics performance. He served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he was a senior researcher at the NSF-funded National Institute for Science Education working in the area of systemic reform and policy studies. He later served as project director of the Urban Systemic Program, an NSF-funded project in the Dallas Independent School District, where he was charged with district-wide responsibility in mathematics, science, and engineering education for over 161,000 students and 10,500 teachers. He served as a member of Mathematical Sciences Education Board at the National Research Council. His co-edited book project titled, Research and Practice Pathways in Mathematics Education: Disrupting Tradition captures his interest in connecting researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to improve opportunity to learn in mathematics education.
Tate has a particular interest in STEM attainment. Ongoing research projects include understanding the distal and social factors that predict STEM doctoral degree attainment defined broadly to include highly quantitative social sciences disciplines (e.g., economics). His co-edited book titled, Beyond Stock Stories and Folktales: African Americans’ Paths to STEM Fields captures the direction of this research program.
For over a decade, his research has focused on the development of epidemiological and geospatial models to explain the social determinants of educational attainment as well as health and developmental outcomes. He served as a member of For the Sake of All research team, a multi-disciplinary group that is studying the health, development, and well-being of African Americans in the St. Louis region. His book project titled, Research on Schools, Neighborhoods, and Communities: Toward Civic Responsibility reflects his interest in the geography of opportunity in metropolitan America.
Professor Tate is a past president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Among his research fellowships, he has been an Anna Julia Cooper Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Patricia Roberts Harris Fellow at the University of Maryland at College Park, a Ford Foundation Fellow at the University of Ghana, and the recipient of an Early Career Award (AERA). In 2010, he received a Presidential Citation from AERA for “his expansive vision of conceptual and methodological tools that can be recruited to address inequities in opportunities to learn.” In 2011, he was awarded fellow status in the Association. In 2015, he received the Distinguished Contributions to Social Contexts in Education Research-Lifetime Achievement Award (AERA-Division G). In 2017, Insight Into Diversity Magazine presented him with its Inspiring Leader in STEM Award.
Tate earned his Ph.D. in mathematics education with a cognate in human development at the University of Maryland, College Park. He completed the post-doctoral training program in the Department of Psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine, where he earned a master’s degree in psychiatric epidemiology.