LSU President William Tate IV has led the university since July 2021. He sat down recently with Deputy Editor Arnessa Garrett and columnist Faimon Roberts to discuss his tenure so far and what’s next for the state’s flagship university. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
GARRETT: Under your leadership, we've seen LSU enrollment grow with some of the largest graduating classes that the university has ever seen. Why do you think more students are choosing LSU?
TATE: LSU offers what I would call a very traditional approach to education, and I think people are clamoring for that. By that, I mean we offer an excellent education related to our A&M brand. We have a full-fledged student Greek life. We have Saturday nights in Tiger Stadium. And we have a faculty that deeply invests in students, and so that reputation grows. When people visit, they feel it, they understand it, and it puts us in a really good position to recruit excellent students.
We are able to keep really talented students from Louisiana, but we also are able to secure students from other states. And we're a very sticky place: 8 out of 10 students who come to LSU end up staying in Louisiana after 10 years. Now I know a lot of times we talk about the Baton Rouge campus only, but the realities are we've broken enrollment records in Shreveport, in Eunice and in Alexandria.
GARRETT: You talk about a “scholarship first” agenda. Explain a little bit about what that looks like.
TATE: The “scholarship first” agenda is really a pentagon. In a sense, it's the ABCDEs.
World-class universities are always coupled with whatever industries are drivers in their state.
Agriculture is foundational for an A&M school. You want to be elite in agricultural science. For us, that's genetics, precision ag and AI.
LSU president Bill Tate poses for a picture at his office on Tuesday, October 8, 2024.
Biomedical is the second part of the pentagon. If you look at the disparities in the state with respect to cancer and many other forms of disease, it becomes transparent that you have to invest in your biomedical infrastructure.
The coast: Coastal science is extremely important. It's a place where we partner, in many cases, with government agencies.
And then defense: LSU started as a military school. For us, the way we began to articulate that, and this is probably one of the areas that has matured the fastest, is a combination of investing in our ROTC tradition but also in cyber.
And finally, energy is extremely important. We tightly work with our industry partners to answer research questions related to energy.
GARRETT: Anything that you're especially proud of on the academic side?
TATE: Our cyber group has proven themselves. That's the fastest-growing undergraduate major. People are running to work with talent.
In our energy work, we have the FUEL grant, which is the $160 million grant from the National Science Foundation. I don't think people really understand it. We were not supposed to get that money here.
Look, when you're in D.C., they're not looking to say we're going to give $160 million of energy funding to LSU. They're saying, “We're going up to Texas. We're going to give it to Texas, to Texas A&M or Rice. If we're going to be in the Gulf region, that's where we're going.” We took that from them. We got into a competition head-to-head, and we beat them, and we beat other schools out East who wanted that particular grant. It didn't just fall into our laps.
GARRETT: To compete with all these other places, there are a lot of upgrades needed to facilities. Can you update us on where you are with physical plant improvements?
LSU president Bill Tate speaks during an interview at his office on Tuesday, October 8, 2024.
TATE: A winning university is one that has massive construction all the time. So where are we right now? We have a new science building going up. I'm also raising money for a construction management and advanced manufacturing building that will be contiguous to Patrick Taylor Hall. We have to be raising money [for] a library, which would allow us to do a couple things. One, once we're able to tear down the current library, we go back to our original quad, which was viewed as one of the prettiest in the United States. When we do that, we're going to tear down an electrical engineering building, and that's where the new library will be. Electrical engineering will go to Coates Hall, which is being retrofitted for them to upgrade so they have world-class facilities. Construction management will move out of Patrick Taylor into their own facility.
What you're seeing right now is [that] the area around Tiger Stadium is almost going to be a new entryway.
ROBERTS: There has been some news about a proposed new arena. How does that fit into that whole plan of having an entryway around Tiger Stadium, and how do you work with the Tiger Athletic Foundation on a possible private developer getting those projects?
TATE: We’re looking at whether private development can make that happen. Should that unfold, I don't think it would be limited to sports. I think we would then develop the area to be part of this broader STEM corridor of activity. If you could imagine an environment that would have a world-class venue for athletics and other activities and then the continuation of the STEM corridor in that environment, now scaled out with all these other amenities, that would more than change the face of LSU.
GARRETT: Do you think the focus on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has changed since we're in a new political environment?
TATE: The focus for me has never changed. I told the team when I first arrived, “Find the best students in the state of Louisiana and find the best students outside the state of Louisiana and bring them here.” And I will never deviate from that. Whoever you are, if you're really good, you're welcome. Too many people are focused on the wrong thing. You have to focus on good to great talent.
ROBERTS: How do you identify talent from across all walks of life in all parts of the state given the disparities in opportunities?
TATE: What you're looking for is a student who took advantage of whatever opportunity they had in the context of their K-12 setting.
What we've discovered is there are a set of schools, for example, in Baton Rouge, who were not sending students to LSU. They simply weren't applying. The kids said, “I didn't think it was attainable for me because I didn't have the money.” What we put into place is the Future Scholars program, and we literally went to five Baton Rouge high schools who weren't sending folks to us and looked at their feeder pattern. Last year, we brought in 83 high school seniors and put them through a rigorous program throughout the academic year and helped them with their test prep.
And 78 of the 83 ultimately were admissible, and the other five we’re tracking. We put together a scholarship program for them to meet the total cost of attendance. And we're going to have a class every year as long as I can raise money, because it's all philanthropy.
GARRETT: We’ve got to shift to sports, because we can't talk to the LSU president without talking about sports. You were instrumental in recruiting head football coach Brian Kelly to come to LSU. How do you think he's doing?
LSU president Bill Tate speaks during an interview at his office on Tuesday, October 8, 2024.
TATE: He has a tough job. And we judge him week to week, but what he inherited wasn't a healthy situation. I think he has brought a system of expectations and recruiting that has us on the right trajectory. Obviously, he's working in a very competitive environment. But I would say with two 10-win seasons, he's done a good job.
GARRETT: I know you're a big fan of the women's basketball team, and your wife was the chaplain during their run to the national championship [in 2023]. Talk about what their success has meant for the university.
TATE: I have great respect for Coach [Kim] Mulkey and her staff. It’s just crazy how talented a coaching staff she has put together. I think they've done a really great job. The run-up to the championship was special. I think it speaks to what happens when you have a super-talented leader who can help bring together big personalities in the context of season because it was just unprecedented.
GARRETT: How do you think NIL has changed college sports?
TATE: The actual NIL, where you have a job — like Olivia Dunne, Angel Reese, Flau’jae [Johnson] — those are legitimate examples of athletes who are taking on the marketing of their image as real employment. And I have tremendous respect for those young people who are able to navigate almost full-time jobs while maintaining their academic endeavor and performing like All-Americans.
GARRETT: To be clear, you think the idea of boosters raising money to give to players is not what NIL was intended to do?
TATE: We're in a shifting landscape, and so what I think won't even matter.
ROBERTS: The Legislature is considering going back and doing a tax session completely reforming the tax code. What do you want them to keep at the forefront of their mind as it relates to LSU?
LSU president Bill Tate poses for an portrait along the bookshelves at his office on Tuesday, October 8, 2024.
TATE: If you look at it, they give us about $180 million, and you get a $6 billion return. In a state where we don't have a lot of in-migration, we are the biggest entity in support of in-migration of talent from other states. It strikes me that you would want to have whatever policies that are necessary to support that.
GARRETT: You're an example of in-migration. You grew up on the southside of Chicago. Does Louisiana start to feel like home to you?
TATE: The southside of Chicago is African Americans probably from Mississippi, Louisiana or Arkansas. My family was from Mississippi, so I would go there every year. I have Southern roots, and I feel comfortable here.
It’s special [because] I get to meet people who are geniuses. When I recruit a student-athlete, I ask them a question, “Are you a genius?” If you’re a four- or five-star athlete in the United States, that makes you in the 99th percentile of the very best people [in your sport]. So the job of LSU is to help you find your second genius.
When we talk about being a top university, we're talking about setting the conditions for students who may not have that first genius, like athletics. They've got to find their first genius, and we want to set the context for them to find it in something that's really Louisiana-specific. It's going to add value right away, and they're going to be employable, and they're going to be able to start businesses, and they're going to be to take care of their families. Our job is to help you find your first genius. And if we do that, we become successful, too.
