Political reshuffle in favor of the court, maybe NSU

The political elections that could begin in the near future with the selection of a new president for Northwestern State University could, if approved by voters, produce a good bench of judges on the state’s Supreme Court — but at the cost of rekindling a questionable trend in the governance of Louisiana’s institutions of higher learning.

In late May, NSU President Marcus Jones announced he had accepted an offer to move up the ranks of the University of Louisiana System. The ULS quickly appointed former Grambling State University President Rick Gallot as system president just before last fall’s state election, but then put the brakes on Republican Gov. Jeff Landry requesting a meeting with Gallot before making a final contract offer.

Landry has no say in the hiring decision. He does have control over ULS Board appointments, nearly half of which come at the end of the year, and most of them before Landry’s term ends (and all of them if he replaces someone else). While some won’t be back due to political leanings, many have a good chance of being reappointed, and the lack of consensus would suggest that.

Gallot may not have had to worry about Landry’s opinion, since he actually led the effort while he was in the state legislature to preserve a more favorable congressional map for Landry when the future governor found himself on the losing end of the reapportionment race in 2011, leading to his defeat the following year. Regardless, Gallot received an offer and accepted the job earlier this year.

Now that Jones has become Gallot’s assistant and opened up the top job at NSU, one candidate for the job is Republican Supreme Court Justice Jimmy Genovese. Although he is a GOP member, he is probably the most likely member of his party’s court to rule in favor of more traditional Democratic interests, since he has been a favorite of trial lawyers and is typically less enthusiastic about the more stringent criminal justice measures favored by Landry and his party.

Importantly for the job, he has no experience beyond working in a law firm and, for nearly three decades, serving as a judge. But that doesn’t mean he’s in any way disqualified in the Louisiana higher education universe: The state has a regrettable history of moving lawyer-politicians into positions of higher education leadership, and Gallot is the latest to move from the legislature to head his alma mater.

It is not necessarily a bad thing that non-academics are becoming CEOs in academia; this space has argued for decades that the growing isolation of academia, which is not in itself a bad thing, insofar as it does not necessarily replicate the “real world” because if one wants to, one can skip academic pursuits and stay in the “real world,” has gone too far to deviate from its true purpose of encouraging critical thinking and assessment of the human condition, taking on the posture of a bully virus that tells people how to think according to an inferior worldview that is crippled precisely because it is not built on the impartial and dispassionate analysis that informs critical thinking. This desirable need to avoid isolation extends to involving politicians in the management of universities or systems when appropriate.

The best recent example is former GOP Senator Ben Sasse, who was brought in to run the University of Florida. It should be noted, however, that Sasse already had a lot of experience in academia, including administration, and therefore should have a good understanding of how an institution or system works. In stark contrast, Gallot and Genovese had no such experience, or even any in a senior leadership position, such as former Louisiana State University System President Sean O’Keefe (who also had experience as a university faculty member). Limiting one’s experience to the practice of law and politics creates a very narrow knowledge base when it comes to university governance.

While that certainly gives you the ability to navigate the political aspects of the job, the problem, of course, is that if it turns out to be such a valuable part of the job that politicians with no academic connections beyond being a local alumni (Genovese’s undergrad is from NSU) are entering those positions, then that suggests the job is too politicized to even begin with.

Suffice it to say that if Landry wants Genovese to take the presidency in Natchitoches, the ducks will line up and he will. If so, that doesn’t mean that given his past, Genovese couldn’t do a good job, but it does suggest that he’s less likely to have the skills to pull it off.

And if his takeover actually succeeds, there could be a chain reaction of seat shuffling, contingent on another Landry initiative earlier this year: his urging the majority-Republican Legislature to change the Supreme Court’s boundaries, which will likely cost his party a seat. Landry has advocated for years as part of a two-pronged strategy to smooth out the lopsidedness of the Supreme Court, although legally that condition has no bearing on the court mapping. One would help the state get out of a consent decree on the court, and the other would expand the court to nine members, but that would require a constitutional amendment that would fall short of the supermajority needed to send it to voters, which, if approved, would somewhat reduce the impact of flipping the seat to Democrats.

Landry’s consolation prize, however, is a plan that allows his allies, whose pasts suggest high-profile judicial programs, to potentially gain two seats on the court. Genovese’s departure opens up a seat a few years early, in a redrawn district that allows Cade Cole, a lawyer and administrative law judge in Lake Charles, to run for the seat.

Cole has an ally in Landry, GOP Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill, but getting him into office would be a boost. Incumbents almost never lose such races, so when the seats open up — often taking a decade or two — ambitious candidates see it as their only chance in their careers to get to the court. Appellate court judges are particularly well-positioned, having run and won in the next-largest jurisdictions before and having built networks of supporters in the legal community who wield disproportionate influence on candidate campaigns (a judicial candidate technically can’t campaign, so his surrogates do). Cole doesn’t have that comparable base, so it would take allies like Murrill to get him across the finish line, either by clearing the field to some extent or by actually canvassing if he attracts worthy opponents.

Another seat could also change Landry and his allies’ preferences. The new lines would allow Landry’s confidante and former top aide when he was attorney general, Bill Styles, to run for a seat that is set to open up in 2028 due to term limits. It would give Styles, now an appellate court judge, plenty of time to build a base of support from which to launch a campaign.

The NSU job could be decided before the end of the month. This outcome could be part of a demonstration of long-term political play by Landry that could yield higher jurisprudence for the Court but uncertain administrative capacity for the NSU.