BusinessReport.com

What better way for LSU to dim the glow from a BCS championship than a major administrative shakeup eight days later?

Yes, Sean O’Keefe resigned, though few seem to believe he went willingly.

What did LSU’s chancellor do—or not do—to merit such a precipitous departure? The answer to that question has proved elusive, though many people on and off the record insist O’Keefe had become unpopular with some members of the LSU Board of Supervisors long before LSU System President John Lombardi showed up. The board’s executive leadership says allegations of a conspiracy against O’Keefe are total fantasy.

Somewhere in the middle a picture has emerged of a board of supervisors with a zeal for micromanagement, a chancellor resistant to such treatment and a take-charge system president [Lombardi] confronted with a take-charge underling [O’Keefe] who probably wouldn’t submit to being pushed around too much.

Paul Pastorek, state superintendent of education and O’Keefe’s attorney, thinks the board created the problem by first hiring O’Keefe to take charge of the flagship agenda, then later hiring Lombardi to do much the same thing with a more aggressive role than his predecessor, William Jenkins.

“Sean is not one to be micromanaged,” Pastorek says. “I think when Lombardi came in, he saw that Sean wasn’t going to be micromanaged.”

Lombardi, the man who did the firing, won’t talk about O’Keefe’s job performance, citing privacy concerns. Jenkins, who was named acting chancellor, is equally tight-lipped, and so is the Board of Supervisors’ top leadership. Other board members, while offering no more clues to what led to O’Keefe’s resignation, have expressed disgust over how O’Keefe was treated and how the entire process was handled.

Multiple well-placed sources maintain O’Keefe’s troubles had less to do with his job performance than with issues of autonomy and control: O’Keefe, the former head of NASA and Secretary of the Navy, chafed at being made to wear a short leash, which in turn didn’t sit well with certain board members.

Without solid answers, people have come up with theories of their own. According to the mass e-mail from Alexandria businessman Jonathan Martin that forced the whole affair into the light, O’Keefe had lost the support of the “business community,” a statement attributed in the e-mail to Lombardi, true or not.

O’Keefe receives high marks from wealthy LSU donors for his fundraising acumen, including heavyweights like Emmet Stephenson, class of 1967, who last year pledged $25 million to LSU and suggested it never would have happened if not for O’Keefe’s accommodating influence. Stephenson is among several business leaders and donors expressing surprise and dismay that O’Keefe was apparently forced out.

Not everyone in the business community was as impressed by O’Keefe, judging from an e-mail, obtained by Business Report, in which Baton Rouge Area Foundation Executive Vice President John Spain expresses “concerns” that he, BRAF President John Davies and other “Baton Rouge business leaders” have about O’Keefe’s performance. Spain and Davies won’t comment, though BRAF spokesman Mukul Verma says the e-mail expresses Spain’s views, not those of BRAF, which Verma says has no official position on O’Keefe’s performance or the circumstances surrounding his resignation.

After first seeming to attempt to pin O’Keefe’s firing on Lombardi, LSU board officials acknowledged that evaluations had begun much earlier. Several sources point to a 2006 evaluation conducted by then-president Jenkins that is rumored to be critical of O’Keefe’s performance. On the other hand, Hank Gowen, an LSU board member who says he’s “ashamed of the entire situation,” doesn’t recall any serious problems that warranted evacuating the chancellor’s office.

“Sean had an evaluation like everybody else did,” Gowen says. “I’ve read it, and it’s not that bad.”

While there’s speculation that last year’s dispute between O’Keefe and the board over auditing authority might have damaged O’Keefe politically, such speculation is misplaced, says Gowen, chairman of the board’s audit committee. A compromise was reached and a measure was passed by the board.

“That didn’t have a damn thing to do with anything,” he says.

Then there was the 2006 controversy over Athletic Director Skip Bertman’s sale of a baseball camp to former baseball coach Smoke Laval. O’Keefe reportedly was ready to impose harsh sanctions on Bertman, a man much beloved for leading the Tigers to five College World Series championships from 1991-2000. Bertman kept his job, but will retire this year.

The baseball camp fiasco turned Bertman against O’Keefe, Gowen says, though he’s not sure how much it might have hurt O’Keefe politically. Other sources say the Bertman debacle soured Jenkins’ attitude toward O’Keefe and helped guarantee the chancellor’s days at LSU were numbered.

Gowen thinks that more than any one issue that offended one group, it was a series of issues that offended multiple constituencies that finally resulted in O’Keefe’s exodus—and there were issues. One matter that never should have gone before the board in Gowen’s opinion was O’Keefe’s plan for compulsory on-campus residency for freshmen.

“If there was ever an issue that was Sean’s, it was that issue,” Gowen says. “But one of those three people thought it was significant enough to come before the board.”

Though he wouldn’t name names, Gowen is referring to the board’s executive leadership: Chairman Jerry Shea, Chairman-Elect James Roy and immediate past chairman Rod West. Roy, particularly, took in interest in the residency issue. He and the others, along with board counsel Raymond Lamonica, formed an anti-O’Keefe contingent long before Lombardi was hired, according to several sources. In October the board passed the freshmen residency requirement, which the LSU Faculty Senate had recommended as a simple thing LSU could do toward bettering academic achievement and raising its national rankings.

Roy denies being out for O’Keefe’s blood early on, though he says he did support the 2006 evaluation initiated by Jenkins, which was followed by Lombardi’s own evaluation. Roy says he unequivocally supports Lombardi’s decision on O’Keefe—a decision backed by a “clear super majority” of the board.

“Those looking for a conspiracy story here are looking in vain,” Roy says. “There is none.”

West, who was chairman until August, says the idea of an anti-O’Keefe cabal within the board is preposterous.

“To suggest the three of us were orchestrating the demise of Sean flies in face of everything we’ve gone through in the last three years,” West says. “The sad part is I don’t have the luxury of getting into the nuances and details. I have to take it on the chin. I’ll take it on the chin if folks want to tee off on me.”

But another source close to the organization insists just as emphatically that there was indeed a “hit list” of people Roy, Lamonica and former board chairman Bernie Boudreaux wanted to get rid of—and O’Keefe’s name was on it.

“The fact of the matter is O’Keefe has been a target for some time,” according to the source. “I can’t help but think they were threatened.”

O’Keefe’s occasional absence from LSU board meetings to attend corporate board meetings fueled ire within the faction, according to the source, even though O’Keefe’s corporate and political ties were originally touted as major selling points that would bring prestige to LSU.

Another issue that may have gotten O’Keefe in trouble had to do with a post-Katrina addition to LSU bylaws routing more transactional campus business—certain facility repair, hiring, etc.—through the board. O’Keefe and UNO Chancellor Tim Ryan, especially, along with other LSU chancellors, opposed the new rules, which have since been rolled back.

“That was probably one of the nail’s in Sean’s coffin,” the source said. “He fought those bylaws.”

Pastorek says the tighter controls were an example of “micromanagement at the extreme” on the part of the board.

Whatever doomed O’Keefe in the end, this really did happen: a conversation between the chancellor and then-chairman West in summer 2007. O’Keefe had received a lucrative job offer from an aerospace firm and, hearing rumblings that his board support might be eroding, asked West if it would be a good time to take the job and resign as chancellor.

West says he acknowledged to O’Keefe that he had detractors, but didn’t think a majority of the board would move against him. West told O’Keefe he should “hang in there” because a new president might have a better disposition toward the chancellor, who had fallen out of favor with Jenkins, his biggest cheerleader when O’Keefe was hired in December 2004.

“If I wanted to fire him, I certainly would have encouraged him to leave then or supported others who wanted him gone,” West says. “To the contrary, I backed him.”

O’Keefe requested “certain concessions” from the board as a show of confidence. West says he told O’Keefe he would share the request with the rest of the board. Since one of the concessions O’Keefe had asked for involved “system-level organizational moves,” West says the new president—not the board—would make the ultimate call.

The new president, in turn, was to be guided by a report from the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges that, among other things, called for tighter presidential control over the system and integration of LSU’s Baton Rouge campuses.

The report, commissioned by the LSU board and released in August 2006, also criticizes the board for micromanagement—specifically the stricter bylaws O’Keefe fought—and concentrating too much power at the executive level to the exclusion of other board members.

If the question of autonomy was part of what caused the falling out between members of the LSU board and O’Keefe, and his fate at the hands of Lombardi, it would be ironic, since Lombardi himself was ousted as chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Amherst after a fight with UMass system officials over the issue of campus autonomy.

West says board support for O’Keefe eroded further after Martin’s e-mail and public calls to save the chancellor’s job. Gowen says you don’t kick someone of O’Keefe’s abilities to the curb over differences of opinion—especially when the market for good chancellors is so tight. Some think the O’Keefe episode will make it that much harder to attract a quality successor.

Pastorek thinks the board supported O’Keefe for a long time—and as recently as the chancellor’s summer 2007 conversation with West—but found itself in a tough spot and essentially had to chose between O’Keefe and Lombardi.

“Everybody was put in box when Lombardi came in and said I’m going to run show and you’re not,” Pastorek says.

Whatever the case, he adds, one thing that did not figure into O’Keefe’s resignation was his job performance. On that score, O’Keefe “hit all the marks,” Pastorek says.

“In spite of what people may say, I don’t think there was any fundamental flaw in his performance,” he says. “People will always have criticism in leaders. But in all of the conversations I have heard that business leaders had with Lombardi and board members, there was never any real issue around management and leadership.”

Now that the dust has settled to some extent, a lot of people are waiting to see the impact of O’Keefe’s departure on LSU fundraising, beloved as the chancellor by Stephenson and other donors. More than one is reported to be rethinking planned gifts to the Forever LSU capital campaign. Opinions vary on how fundraising will fare.

“I think it’s very disappointing,” former board member Stewart Slack says. “I think it’s going to slow the momentum of the flagship agenda and the capital campaign. I hate to see that. It’s a poor reward for great work.”

Dr. John George, a current board member who characterizes O’Keefe as an “outstanding class act” who took the high road and left LSU’s integrity intact, says things will work out eventually.

“The institution is bigger than any one person,” George says. “We’re going to get through this. But I think this indicates that the processes need to work better. Hopefully with a strong presence like Lombardi the processes will work better in the future.”