Some more background info on LSU's new chancellor, Dr. James Dalton

Dr. James Dalton will take over leadership of the LSU's Baton Rouge campus, the Ag Center, the two Health Science centers, and the Pennington Biomedical Reseach Center. Since 2020, he has served as Executive Vice President and Provost at The University of Alabama. Prior to joining Alabama, Dr. Dalton served as Dean of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Michigan. Full Bio

I spoke to someone that has worked with Dalton at Alabama...this is what they had to say:

Overall Thoughts:
Overall I’ll say that this is a loss for UA and a gain for LSU because Dalton has been a good administrator and has left a positive mark here. He’s a nice guy, friendly, has a sense of humor and, from what I’ve seen, good to work for. Of course, there are some faculty who don’t like him, but that’s going to be the case with anyone and most of those faculty have never been in a meeting with him or even spoken to him.

On Leadership Style:
From what I’ve seen, he’s not a micromanager and mostly trusts people to do their jobs. He is very approachable. Overall, I think he’s an effective leader because people like working with him and I’ve never seen or heard of any sort of toxic behavior. In fact, he has been instrumental in several ineffective or toxic Deans stepping down during his tenure.

On Holistic Admissions:
He would prefer to make standardized test scores optional, but he has set higher GPA standards since he’s been here, mostly for out-of-state students since UA is about 60% out-of-state students. He’s good about staying fairly neutral on controversial issues like DEI. He speaks about things in a matter-of-fact way without getting emotional or on any kind of soapbox. I honestly have no idea about his true feelings on DEI because he just doesn’t bring that into the conversations we’ve had in meetings.

Just a couple of notes for those worried about grade inflation: he checks for that in his research. When he is looking at GPA data, he can run the numbers for certain high schools and get a likelihood of retention based on the school.

On Faculty Salaries:
He has done a good job of getting our faculty salaries up to be more competitive with peer institutions. There was a surplus after merit raises were given this year, but it was used to bring all faculty who weren’t at a certain salary level up to that level.

On LSU’s Athletics and Louisiana’s Political Environment
He doesn’t really connect much with athletics here. For the most part, Saban had final say over everything so Dalton had to submit to whatever he wanted. That being said, he is not anti-athletics and I think his time here has been a good learning experience for him on the importance of athletics in the SEC.

He may struggle some with the politics, especially if there is a lot interference and meddling by the state/governor. I don’t think he would do well if he is being micromanaged. I do hope that he is given the freedom to do his job because he will do well. If he is getting a lot of interference from the state, he won’t likely stay around very long.

Note: it has been announced that President Rousse will oversee LSU Athletics, not Dalton.

On Campus Life:
I’ve read in articles that he mentioned class sizes and retention rates and that is very on brand. He’s worked on us getting our class sizes down with some success. He does deep research into recruiting and accepting students not just on their academic performance, but their likelihood of graduating. He also tries to have as many resources as possible for at risk students, like first generation kids.

On Academic Excellence and Research Priorities:
Research and scholarship is a top priority for him, especially with his background. Last year, we implemented new titles and promotion paths for RC Faculty (Renewable Contract) with PhDs. Dalton’s stipulation with this was that all RCF, even if they were strictly teaching faculty, had to have some sort of scholarly activity (publications, research, presentations, etc.). He has also put grant awards as a significant contributor to tenure and promotion.