BATON ROUGE — The LSU Board of Supervisors may have violated Louisiana’s open meetings law when it recently increased its power without giving the public sufficient notice. 

The board’s executive committee quietly met Thursday and voted to change its bylaws to allow its chairman to make appointees to any search committee in the LSU System. The updated rules apply to faculty, administrative and athletic department searches. Taken to its extreme, the new rule could allow the chair, who the governor has the power to directly appoint, to stack any search committee and steer it to a preferred outcome. 

The executive committee’s notice for Thursday’s meeting said the group would discuss “bylaw review” but did not specify which bylaws or whether members would be voting on them. The executive committee meeting was not live streamed, and the proposed changes were not provided to anybody in advance but only those in attendance at the meeting. 

A reporter with the Illuminator was the only member of the public in the meeting, which was held in a small conference room in the LSU administration building that, to anyone without specific knowledge, appears closed to the public. 

Louisiana’s open meetings law is intended to protect the public’s right to know what government bodies are doing. 

“There were people who walked out [of the board meeting] not even knowing this happened,” LSU Faculty Senate President Dan Tirone said in an interview. “I’m not sure if it’s a technical violation, but it sure seems like a spiritual violation.” 

The vague notice could violate Louisiana’s open meetings law, said attorney Scott Sternberg, who’s an expert in First Amendment issues and the open meetings law. 

“(The committee meeting notice) does not provide reasonable specificity in my opinion. How would [the public] know what bylaw they were going to change?,” Sternberg said. “If they were going to change a bylaw that affected faculty, they should have provided more specificity as to what they were going to be doing.” 

Louisiana’s open meetings law contains specific requirements for advance meeting notices: “Each item on the agenda shall be listed separately and described with reasonable specificity.  Before the public body may take any action on an item, the presiding officer or his designee shall read aloud the description of the item except as otherwise provided in Subitem (dd) of this Item.” 

In a statement, LSU spokesman Todd Woodward defended the notice by arguing that the notice of the bylaw changes was given in September, when the board discussed them in a public meeting. 

At that meeting, the notice also said “Bylaw Review.” 

“The executive committee said by law [sic] review, which I think is specific but I am not a lawyer,” Woodward said. “This was all reviewed in September.” 

Tirone said nobody gave the faculty a heads up that the board might be making these changes. LSU President William Tate did not mention it in a meeting with Faculty Senate leaders last week, Tirone said. LSU Board of Supervisors chairman Jimmie Woods did not meet with the Council of Faculty Advisors as usual before the board meeting Thursday, according to Tirone. 

Shortly after the executive committee recommended the changes, the full board adopted their recommendations at its public meeting Thursday. 

The agenda for the full board meeting listed “Approval of Committee Recommendations,” but again did not list which committees or which recommendations it would be approving. During the meeting, which was live streamed, the board did not discuss the executive committee’s recommendations. 

Because the executive committee recommended the changes less than 30 minutes before the full board met, the deadline to register for public comment had passed. LSU’s website states the public can register to comment up to one hour before the meeting starts. 

“The LSU’s Board of Supervisors clearly did not provide enough information for meaningful public comment,” said Steven Procopio, president of the good government group Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana. “At best, this was a thoughtless oversight.  At worst, it was a deliberate attempt to hide a controversial change from the citizens in general and faculty in specific.” 

“The whole concept behind the open meeting law is choice,” Sternberg said. “If you don’t provide that reasonable specificity, you’re not allowing the public to make that choice (to comment).” 

Any action taken in a meeting in which the open meetings law is violated can be thrown out by a judge, according to the law. Members of public bodies who participate in meetings a judge determines to be in violation of the law may be penalized up to $100 per violation.

In addition to the right to file a civil lawsuit, any member of the public may lodge a complaint with the state attorney general or the district attorney who represents the parish where the meeting occurred. 

Procopio and Tirone have called on board members to reconsider their action and to include the public and faculty. 

Giving the board chair — a political appointee — direct input on faculty hiring is unusual and raises concerns about possible politicization of hiring. The new bylaws do not put any limit on the number of appointees the chair can put on a hiring committee or require them to have any particular qualifications. 

“If I understand this Bylaws change accurately, the new authority, coupled with legislation passed in the spring, makes faculty search committees potentially two degrees removed from the Governor’s office, introducing the possibility that merit will be discounted relative to politics in the hiring process,” Tirone said in a statement.