In a Back Room, LSU’s Board Pushed for a Sports Shake-Up

On a Monday night at Juban’s, a creole restaurant in Baton Rouge, La., the particulars were written on a cocktail napkin and handed to F. King Alexander, who was then president of Louisiana State University, he recalls.

Alexander had been summoned to the restaurant by members of the university’s Board of Supervisors, who laid out their instructions: Fire Joe Alleva as athletics director and replace him with Scott Woodward, a Baton Rouge native and LSU alum who was, at the time, athletics director at Texas A&M University. One of the board members wrote Woodward’s starting salary on a cocktail napkin, Alexander said.

Alexander told the story of the meeting, which has not previously been reported, in a series of interviews with The Chronicle this week. Related events were corroborated by another source with knowledge of them, who asked not to be identified for fear of professional repercussions. Two members of Alexander’s family — his wife and his father — confirmed that Alexander had told them of the meeting in the restaurant at the time.

James M. Williams, who was chairman of the board at the time and attended the dinner, acknowledged that the board suggested that night that LSU replace Alleva with Woodward. But Williams strongly disputed the idea that Alexander had been given an ultimatum.

“King Alexander was never told, ‘You must do this or else; do this or you’re fired; do this or it’s not going to be good for you,’” Williams said in an interview on Thursday.

The meeting between Alexander and the board members happened in April 2019, during a particularly tense period for LSU athletics. Alleva had recently suspended Will Wade, the Tigers’ head men’s basketball coach, who had been caught on a wiretap connected to an FBI investigation of corruption in college athletics recruitment. The suspension, which had kept Wade out of postseason games, prompted a backlash from LSU fans, and the board members appeared to seize on Alleva’s political vulnerability as an opportunity to install their own pick atop LSU’s vast athletics enterprise.

(Wade has not been charged with a crime. His program is reportedly under NCAA investigation related to his comments on the wiretap).

The LSU board’s direct interference in the firing and hiring of an athletics director, as Alexander describes it, could run afoul of accreditation standards that demand presidents retain control of such decisions, an area that is already the subject of investigation for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, LSU’s regional accrediting agency. (Regional accreditation is necessary for colleges to receive federal financial aid).

New details about the athletics-director change at LSU come as Alexander, who was forced out this week as president of Oregon State University, fights to salvage his reputation and to dispute allegations that he was an active player in a culture of cover-ups tied to sexual misconduct at LSU. Recent revelations, contained in now-public investigative reports, have described how, during Alexander’s tenure, LSU mishandled claims of sexual misconduct and long retained Les Miles, the former head football coach, despite charges that he had behaved inappropriately with a student. (Miles has denied that he kissed a student, as has been alleged).

The decision to retain Miles was made by the board, before Alexander arrived as president, in 2013, he has said. In hindsight, it was an early signal of the board’s deep involvement in high-profile sports.

Details about LSU’s mishandling of sexual assault came to light recently, when Alexander had been at Oregon State for only about nine months, and he quickly lost the trust of the board, the faculty, and the state’s Democratic governor. In what proved to be a futile fight to keep his job, Alexander described himself in a public meeting as having been powerless at LSU to challenge an athletics-obsessed board that controlled decisions that should have rested with the president. The Alleva firing adds new specificity to those broad charges.

The Dinner

When Alexander arrived at Juban’s that evening, he recalls, four board members were seated at a roundish table in a private room. He recalls specifically that Williams, then the chairman, and Mary Leach Werner, another member, were present. (Alexander said he is less certain now whom the two other board members were, and Williams said he isn’t entirely sure, either).

The board members told Alexander that they had already hired Woodward, who was then at Texas A&M, Alexander said.

“They had already hired a guy I had never interviewed — a guy I had never met,” Alexander said. “They had already negotiated a salary.”

“He wrote down the numbers on a cocktail napkin,” Alexander said of Williams, who was sitting next to him, “and said ‘This is what we’re paying our new athletic director.’”

Alexander says he thought to himself, “Does Dan know about this?” referencing LSU’s then-executive vice president forfinance, Dan Layzell. “I was shell shocked. This money is like monopoly money to them.”

(Woodward, who did not respond on Thursday to a request for comment, signed a six-year, $7.95 million contract with LSU, The Advocate reported at the time).
The board members, Alexander said, directed him to fire Alleva the next day, refusing to allow the AD to serve through the end of his contract, in June, as Alexander suggested.

“They said ‘No, you have to fire him tomorrow,” Alexander said.

Williams offered a less inflammatory characterization of the meeting. There was great fan unrest about Alleva, who had not, during his tenure, overseen a national-championship football team, and had suspended a basketball coach at a critical moment in the season. Board members were frustrated, Williams said, that Alexander seemed to lack “situational awareness” about the need to change athletic directors. The meeting was designed to give Alexander an “opportunity” to change things, Williams said.

“We had several discussions with King about where things were heading, and he just didn’t seem situationally aware,” Williams said. “Nero was on the fiddle, and Rome was burning.

“Board members,” Williams said, “had had discussions about: Hey, this is something that is perhaps not going as it should be, and this is within your purview. Do you have this under control?”

The former board chair acknowledged that, before the dinner, he had personally discussed with Woodward his potential interest in the athletic-director job, and that other board members had as well. But Williams said he was “fuzzy” on whether, at that point, he and Woodward had met in person.

Williams said he had not negotiated a salary with the board’s suggested candidate, and he did not specifically remember writing a figure on a cocktail napkin.

“Could there have been a discussion,” Williams asked rhetorically, “about what it would take to bring Scott Woodward to LSU — what I think a range would be that he would probably have to offer to get it done? I can’t say that that would have been impossible. But I don’t know about sliding some number on a table on a napkin, saying, ‘Here it is.’ That bills this dramatic meeting that didn’t exist.”

During the meeting, Williams said, the board members had merely cast Woodward as a target of opportunity. In so doing, Williams said, he did not think the board had undermined the president’s authority over athletics in violation of accreditation standards.

“I can’t see how SACS would say trustees at a university have to keep their eyes closed and not be on the lookout for talent,” said Williams, who is a lawyer. “The key to me is: Is anybody forcing or directing or mandating — and that’s just not accurate.”

Werner, the other board member Alexander recalls being at Juban’s, could not be immediately reached for comment.

‘Take Care of Verge’

Whatever took place at the restaurant, Alexander was sufficiently disturbed by it that he called his father, Kern Alexander. Over the course of a long career in academic administration, Kern Alexander has served as president of Western Kentucky University and Murray State University, in Kentucky, where King Alexander succeeded him as president.

“It was one of the worst things I’ve seen in higher-education administration,” Kern Alexander, recalling the incident, said in an interview on Thursday. “I’ve taught education and been in educational administration for a long time, but I had not seen the kind of blatant control that they exercised.

“It just weighed on him,” Kern Alexander, who is now a professor of education policy, organization, and leadershipat the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said of his son. “He talked to me about it several times. He frankly didn’t know what to do. Of course he didn’t have another job, and it was mandated by them that he had to do it. He didn’t have any choice, is what it amounted to.”

By firing Alleva and hiring Woodward, rather than quitting or sounding an alarm, Alexander opened himself up to criticism that he lacked the courage and conviction the moment demanded. For him, though, the athletic-director debacle was the last straw.

“That’s when I knew I needed to get out of there,” Alexander says. “That’s when I started looking. The board wanted to run everything.”

Around this same time period of the dinner meeting, King Alexander said, the board made another decision: Promote Verge Ausberry, a longtime athletics administrator, and double his salary.

“I was told they would take care of Verge,” Alexander said.

Effective May 6, 2019, less than three weeks after Woodward was named athletic director, Ausberry’s salary increased to $500,000 from $250,000, records provided by the university show. He was promoted in July of that year to executive deputy director of athletics and executive director of external relations, according to his online biography.

Ausberry did not respond to an email on Thursday detailing the allegations, although it is unclear whether he is receiving email at his university address.

LSU recently suspended Ausberry without pay for 30 days, following a report by Husch Blackwell, a law firm that investigated LSU’s handling of sexual-misconduct and domestic-violence cases. The investigation found that Ausberry had mishandled a domestic-violence accusation involving a football player.

Asked about Ausberry’s pay increase, Williams, the former board chairman, said that it happened in the context of a larger discussion about pay equity across race and gender at LSU. (Ausberry, who is Black, worked his way up from an internship in the compliance office over about two decades.)

“That wasn’t a board directive,” Williams said of Ausberry’s raise. “The board does not get involved in directing people to be paid a particular salary.”

‘Monday-Night Massacre’

The day after the meeting at Juban’s, Alexander met with Alleva, the athletics director, at a lounge at the University Club, where the Tigers’ golf teams have their practice facility, to deliver the news. Thomas V. Skinner, who was then general counsel, accompanied Alexander. (Skinner declined to discuss the meeting.)

“I said, ‘Joe, I’m so sorry,’” Alexander recalls, “‘But the board leadership has hired a new athletics director, and I’ve got to fire you.’ It was the three of us in a room. He said, ‘It’s not your fault.’ He said, ‘I know these guys have been after me.’

“It was kind of a Monday-night massacre. I said, ‘We’ve hired a new AD, and it’s a good ol’ boy from Baton Rouge.’”

Efforts to reach Alleva through multiple listed phone numbers were unsuccessful.

Alexander’s allegations will surely turn up the heat in a simmering feud between him and his former employer LSU. His vague public criticisms of the university, now even more detailed, had already spawned a backlash. On Sunday, The Advocate published an editorial headlined, “F. King Alexander blames Louisiana hicks for his failures in LSU scandals.”

The next day, Robert S. Dampf, chairman of LSU’s board, wrote a letter to his Oregon State counterpart, blasting Alexander for his “arrogant and condescending comments about Louisiana’s culture, our state, and our university.”

Alexander said he was worried about telling his story publicly, fearing it could come off as petty and prompt a protracted back-and-forth with a university he has left behind. But the story is the truth, he said, and it has serious implications for public higher education in Louisiana and beyond.

“I want to help presidents who are dealing with this type of intrusion,” Alexander said. “I’m in this business to help students — not to promote football. If this story helps presidents tell board members where they’re overreaching, that’s why I’m talking.”

Not long before he was fired as athletics director, Alleva had lifted Wade’s suspension as head men’s basketball coach. But the controversy had taken a toll on Alleva, who was already crosswise with the Tiger faithful. During his 11-year tenure, Alleva, who came to LSU from Duke University and had no ties to Louisiana, LSU did not win a football national championship — the measure by which directors at top programs in the Southeastern Conference are often judged.

Alexander expressed no public compunction about Woodward’s hiring when he was president of LSU. In a press release, announcing Woodward’s hiring, Alexander said, “We are happy to welcome a fellow Tiger back home.”

Eight months later, Alexander was named Oregon State’s next president. As it turns out, his troubles were just beginning.