LSU'S Biweekly Newsletter for Faculty & Staff
September 10, 2004 |
VOL. 21, NO.2 |
LSU System President and Interim Chancellor William L. Jenkins has selected 21 LSU faculty, staff, students and stakeholders to serve on the search committee that will help select the university’s next chancellor.
Alumni Professor Joel Tohline of the Department of Physics & Astronomy will serve as search committee chair.
“I am pleased to name this extraordinary group of dedicated and enthusiastic people to the search committee,” Jenkins said. “They represent a wide array of LSU supporters, from our Student Government President to community leaders from around the state. I am confident that, under Joel Tohline’s leadership, the committee will help identify a chancellor who will move LSU forward and advance the university’s Flagship Agenda.”
The committee will convene for the first time on Thursday, Sept. 9, at 1 p.m. in the Provost’s Conference Room – Room 135F – of Thomas Boyd Hall on the LSU campus. Media are invited to attend.
During that first meeting, the committee will discuss what characteristics and credentials the next chancellor should have and will help create the advertisement that will run in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The committee will also hear from President Jenkins, Board of Supervisors Chairman Stewart Slack, and Ellen Brown of Heidrick & Struggles, the search firm that will assist LSU in identifying possible candidates for the position. The meeting will be led by Tohline.
“In order to be successful in this endeavor, we will need to draw upon the knowledge and enthusiasm of our extensive community of LSU supporters,” Tohline said. “Toward this end, we will aggressively seek nominations of exceptional candidates from all of LSU’s constituencies and will keep the selection process as open as possible.”
To keep members of the LSU community updated as the search progresses, LSU is working to set up a Web site about the search process, which will soon be available at http://www.lsu.edu/chancellor/search/. Anyone who would like to send nominations, comments or relevant information that will be circulated to the search committee may do so via a special e-mail address, chansearch@lsu.edu.
Members of the search committee, listed alphabetically, are: Claire Advokat, psychology professor and Faculty Senate president; Scott Anderson, LSU Alumni Association Board chairman and vice president of Mid South Extrusion; Skip Bertman, athletics director; Meredith Blackwell, Boyd Professor of biological sciences; John Davies, president and CEO of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation; Brad Golson, Student Government president; Eugene Kennedy, professor and chairman of the Department of Educational Leadership; Bob Kuhn, associate vice chancellor for Finance and Administrative Services in the Office of Budget and Planning; Gary L. Laborde, LSU Foundation Board member and president and CEO of Marine Lifts Inc.; Jimmy Maurin, chairman of the board of Stirling Properties; Nell McAnelly, associate director of the LSU Cain Center for Scientific, Technological, Engineering & Mathematical Literacy and mathematics instructor; Joanne McMullen, Staff Senate president and assistant dean of Continuing Education and director of the Evening School; Risa Palm, LSU executive vice chancellor and provost; Lisa Podlaha, associate professor of chemical engineering; Karl Roider, Alumni Professor of history and former dean of the College of Arts & Sciences; Stewart Slack, LSU Board of Supervisors chairman; William S. Slaughter, president of SSA Consultants; Robert Sumichrast, dean of the E.J. Ourso College of Business Administration; Tohline; Jacqui Vines, Tiger Athletic Foundation Board member and chair of the board of Cox Communications; and Isiah Warner, Boyd Professor of chemistry and vice chancellor of strategic initiatives.
During the Friday, Aug. 20, meeting of the LSU Board of Supervisors, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and head LSU football Coach Nick Saban expressed sentiments to the board, and board members approved a 15 percent pay raise for LSU System President William Jenkins as he takes on added responsibilities as interim chancellor of LSU.
On her way to a meeting at the Lod Cook Conference Center, Gov. Blanco made a surprise appearance in front of the board members, praising their work and telling them that she wants to partner with them to better Louisiana’s national reputation by using education to grow the state’s economy.
“Education is the key to economic development,” Blanco said. “Education is economic development.”
Minutes later, Coach Saban thanked the board for its past support of the football team. Saban said it is because of board-supported programs, like the the Cox Communications Academic Center for Student Athletes, that 45 percent of the team achieved grade-point averages of at least 3.0 last spring.
To compensate President Jenkins for the additional workload that comes with being the interim LSU chancellor, the board approved an additional $50,000 per year for him until a new chancellor is selected. The pay raise means Jenkins’ salary will rise to $373,943 a year from $323,943. LSU Foundation funds are providing the raise.
In other news, the board approved a $345 million operating budget for the LSU campus. The figure reflects a 4 percent increase from the $331 million last year. Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Risa Palm told the board’s budget and finance committee that 70 percent of the increase is due to self-generated sources and the remaining 30 percent comes from state funding.
She said new state funds were dedicated to cover a portion of mandatory merit increases and higher health insurance and retirement costs. Palm also said the majority of the funds will go to advancing LSU’s Flagship Agenda. One major aspect of that agenda includes the gradual hiring of 300 new Ph.D. tenure-track faculty. Palm said the university plans to hire 30 faculty members and 30 new graduate teaching assistants this academic year. She said more faculty means the student/faculty ratio could be lowered from 27 to 1 to 21 to 1. Palm said the 21 to 1 ratio is common among schools that LSU is trying to rival.
In addition, board member Louis Lambert of Prairieville swore in Stewart Slack of Shreveport as the new chairman of the board and Bernard E. Boudreaux of Baton Rouge as vice-chairman of the board for the academic year of 2004-2005. Slack served as the vice-chairman for 2003-2004 and has been a member of the board since August of 2000. Boudreaux served on the board in 1998 and then was reappointed in March of 2003 for a term that ends in June of 2008.
Also, officials from LSU’s Athletic Department presented to the board the plan for Tiger fans to gain safe access to Tiger Stadium while the West side of the structure undergoes construction.
Tiger fans should arrive early to campus on football game days and consult LSU’s fan guide parking map ahead of time, representatives of the Athletic Department told the LSU Board of Supervisors at its Aug. 20 meeting. The suggestions are part of a plan the athletic department has devised to ensure safe access into Tiger Stadium while construction continues on the structure’s West upper deck.
David “Bo” Bahnsen, associate athletic director of internal relations, discussed the planned changes to fan accessibility of the stadium’s West side and parking that became effective for LSU’s first home game against Oregon State on Sept. 4.
Because there is a construction fence around the stadium’s West parking lot, Lot A, pedestrian access routes and parking on the West side have been reduced, requiring LSU officials to develop substitute entry and exit portals and alternative parking spots for the 610 vehicles that are being displaced.
For the remainder of the season, ticket holders with tickets marked for Gate 5 should enter through Portal A, located on North Stadium Drive between Tiger Stadium and the Athletic Administration Building. Ticket holders with tickets marked for Gates 1 through 4 should enter through Portal B, located on South Stadium Drive on the Southwest corner of the stadium. Ticket holders for Gates 15 through 17 may enter through either Portal A or Portal B. It is at these portals that tickets will be collected. Visit http://www.LSUsports.net/westside for diagrams of these entrances.
Once inside the portals, signs will direct ticket holders to their respective seats either in the lower bowl or in the upper deck of the stadium. Upper deck ticket holders have the choice to either walk up the ramps or take a series of temporary elevators that will shuttle 20 people at a time to the upper deck in 50 seconds. Escalators on the West side of the stadium were removed to accommodate the construction.
Student-section ticket holders will continue to enter through Gates 6 and 7, located at the Northwest section of the stadium. All Tiger fans are asked to arrive early to campus to park, tailgate and find their seats in the stadium. To encourage early attendance, all stadium entrance gates will open two hours and 30 minutes prior to kick-off and the Tiger Band will arrive at the stadium earlier than usual – about an hour and 45 minutes prior to kick-off.
Bahnsen said tailgaters who park around the stadium can expect the following lot assignment changes this fall.
• Lot A tailgaters will be moved to Lot C/A located on South Stadium Drive.
• Handicapped parking will remain next to the LSU Campus Safety Building.
• Due to the displacement of Lot A tailgaters, Lot C parking will be extended back into Lot C and into a new lot that was created on the former LSU Golf Course’s Old Front Nine.
• Charter buses that normally park in Lot C will return to the lot adjacent to the Special Olympic Pool building on Skip Bertman Drive.
• Additional free parking will also be available on the LSU Golf Course’s first four holes, fairway and beyond the fairway extending toward River Road. This area has been cleared, lighted and made pedestrian-friendly.
On a partly-cloudy February morning in 1996, an airplane carrying 82 passengers landed “wheels up,” or without its landing gear deployed, at Houston Intercontinental Airport. The plane slid violently down the runway for almost 7,000 feet, before coming to rest in a grassy area. The craft’s lower fuselage was severely damaged and smoke filled portions of the cabin.
In the end, only minor injuries were suffered by those on board, and the National Transportation Safety Board laid most of the blame for the accident on human error. The board’s final report stated that the plane’s flight control system was functioning properly, but it noted that the generic “pull-up” warning provided by the cockpit system may not have offered the pilots the detailed information they needed.
Such problems may soon be a thing of the past.
Thanks to the work of LSU Professor Jorge Aravena and a team of electrical and computer engineers, airplanes of the future may be able to detect problems sooner, provide pilots more specific information on how to respond, or, if need be, take appropriate actions on their own.
The project is part of the Aviation Safety and Security Program, a joint research venture through NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, and it includes researchers from the University of New Orleans and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The team recently wrapped up a round of work on the development of flight control systems that was supported by a three-year, $1.6 million NASA and Louisiana Board of Regents grant. This month, the researchers began to finalize the results of the initial research and found out that NASA had approved a two-year extension of funding for their work. With this approval, more than $1 million in additional funding will be provided to the researchers.
Aravena explained that each university group has certain areas of responsibility. At LSU, he and Kemin Zhou, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, lead a group responsible for the development of “fault tolerance strategies” that are capable of preserving the integrity of the plane even when problems have occurred. The ULL and UNO groups are developing different approaches to fault detection in aircrafts.
“Control systems are normally calibrated for certain operating situations,” explained Aravena. “If things vary too much, the system might not work, or may give ‘bad advice.’ Pilots may err as well.”
Simply put, Aravena said that the university teams are looking for “new ways of detecting faults and dealing with them.”
Currently, most commercial aircraft are fully automated during normal flight conditions. Pilots monitor the automated functions of the flight-control computer from the cockpit. If there is a malfunction, the pilots call on their knowledge and training in order to take action to correct the malfunction. The goal of the LSU team and other researchers is to develop a better aircraft self-diagnostic in which the plane’s computer system detects a problem earlier, recommends the best course of action or, if necessary, takes control of the flight. This “automatic safe recovery” is implemented through novel techniques first proposed by Zhou.
To help with their mission, the LSU researchers are using software developed by NASA, including a mathematical model of an entire Boeing 747. Using the Boeing model, Aravena and Zhou are able to simulate how the plane may react in specific situations. They and the other team members brainstorm different situations in which the plane may be jeopardized and can test the automatic safe recovery strategies.
“Theory can only take you so far,” Aravena said. “And the model of the B747 is the closest thing we have to a laboratory.”
Aravena described himself, Zhou and the various graduate and undergraduate students who are working on the project as “control people,” not aerospace experts. Therefore, he said, they had to spend a good deal of time learning about planes and their special instruments and requirements. He said that one possible result of their work is that other “control people,” such as instrument manufacturers, could glean valuable information and improve their technology or develop entirely new instruments.
In addition, he said that the tools or systems that they develop could be applied to other processes. For instance, industry could adapt the fault detection/control technology for use in plant safety.
Aravena said that the teams submitted progress reports to NASA in March, citing numerous positive results. This report was a major factor in nailing down the two-year extension, he said. The teams will continue to build on their discoveries and, eventually, the researchers from all three universities will integrate their results into a computerized “test bed” simulation – a test as close to real-life as possible. Then, the results will be provided to NASA, which will thoroughly test them in its own sophisticated laboratories. Assuming all goes well, the third stage will be to install the new equipment on an experimental plane to see if it works.
Finally, Aravena said, the “toughest” step will come when they must prove to the Federal Aviation Administration that the devices they have created cannot possibly cause an accident.
“It’s a long road, but, in 10 years or so, it could lead to the next generation of revolutionary planes,” said Aravena.
External awards of grants and contracts to LSU in fiscal year 2003-2004 reached $134.8 million, an increase of more than 10 percent over fiscal year 2002-2003.
According to LSU’s Office of Research and Graduate Studies, the exact funding total for the fiscal year was $134,806,809.
Three areas saw substantial growth. The School of Veterinary Medicine brought in $5.2 million in 2003-2004, up from $3.9 million in 2002-2003. The College of Engineering brought in $15.7 million, up from $14.8 million last fiscal year, and the College of Education brought in $3.4 million, compared to $1.9 million in 2002-2003. The largest contributors to LSU’s fiscal year total continue to be the National Center for Security Research and Training, which received $44.7 million, and the College of Basic Sciences, which received $25.3 million.
LSU’s external funding has grown by a total of 54 percent since the 1999-2000 fiscal year. The average annual percent of funding growth over the last five fiscal years is 11.6 percent.
The federal government was the top source for funding, providing $83.5 million, or 62 percent, while the state provided $39.9 million, or 30 percent. Industry and other private sources provided $11.6 million, or 8 percent. The federal funding represents a large investment from the outside in the state’s economic base.
LSU System President and Interim Chancellor William L. Jenkins has announced that the university’s athletic department has been re-certified by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
The NCAA introduced a certification process in 1993, and LSU completed its first certification in 1994. Re-certification is required every 10 years.
The year-long, campus-wide re-certification process included a self-study by LSU, a written report to the NCAA Certification Committee and an on-site evaluation and report by an NCAA peer-review team composed of officials from other universities and athletic conference offices.
“I’m proud that our athletics program has met all of the certification requirements as set forth by the NCAA,” said LSU athletics director Skip Bertman. “It reflects well on our university and the role that athletics plays in the ultimate mission of LSU. There are a lot of people from across the LSU campus who put a lot of work into the certification process, and I thank them for their service.”
The goal of the NCAA’s certification process is to help ensure integrity within athletic department operations, while also opening up athletic department policies and procedures to the rest of the campus community and to the public.
LSU’s re-certification process was led by a Certification Steering Committee that was appointed by former Chancellor Mark Emmert in December 2002. The committee was chaired by Neil Mathews, vice chancellor for student life and academic services, and included three subcommittees made up of 19 LSU faculty, 22 LSU administrators and staff members, 13 students and four alumni. The subcommittees were: Governance and Commitment to Rules Compliance; Academic Integrity; and Equity, Welfare and Sportsmanship.
“I am extremely pleased with the work of the Certification Steering Committee,” Jenkins said. “The committee members have put a great deal of time into this process and in making sure they provided all of the necessary information to the NCAA. Their efforts are very much appreciated, and I couldn’t be happier with the result – full re-certification of the athletic department.”
LSU sent its self-study report to the NCAA in April. The NCAA peer-review team visited the campus in June, and LSU responded to the team’s report in July. The NCAA’s announcement of LSU’s re-accreditation was made Aug. 26.
The NCAA is a membership organization of colleges and universities that participate in intercollegiate athletics. The association’s primary purpose is to maintain intercollegiate athletics as an integral part of the educational program and the athlete as an integral part of the student body. The NCAA formulates rules of play for NCAA sports, conducts national championships, adopts and enforces standards of eligibility and studies all phases of intercollegiate athletics.