BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - Louisiana State University’s presidential search committee has whittled down the field of contenders to three finalists and excluded the governor’s chief budget adviser from that list.
The committee Tuesday night narrowed its list of candidates for the president’s job to Kelvin Droegemeier, Jim Henderson and William Tate IV.
Droegemeier is the former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under former President Donald Trump’s administration. Henderson is the president of the University of Louisiana System, overseeing a system with nine colleges and 90,000 students. And Tate is provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of South Carolina.
The list of finalists came after two days of interviews of eight semi-finalists, including Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne, the top financial adviser to Gov. John Bel Edwards. Dardenne was interviewed Monday, but was not named a finalist.
The finalists will visit LSU’s main campus to meet with groups of faculty, staff, students and administrators from various LSU campuses, along with alumni and donors.
The university system is searching for a new leader in the midst of scandal. A scathing independent report detailed years of LSU’s widespread mishandling of claims of sexual harassment, domestic violence and rape.
The job became open when F. King Alexander announced in December 2019 that he was leaving for a similar post leading Oregon State University. Alexander recently resigned from Oregon State because of his role in the mishandling of sexual misconduct cases at LSU.
Tom Galligan, then-dean of the LSU law school, has served as interim president since January 2020.
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