re: LSU is alienating its alumni, state, and region.

I was there for Tdecline. It was caused by two factors:
1. School of music greed
2. School of music arrogance

See, the school of music has open and obvious contempt for the tiger band, even going so far as to schedule critical path required courses for music majors during Tiger Band rehearsals in order to strongarm music majors into quitting. They’re arrogant and see the Tiger Band as something for the uncultured swine, but the head of the Tiger Band was traditionally the head of all of the bands at the university. So, when Linda Moorhouse, a competent second in command (despite rumors that she slept her way into that position), demanded to be named the head of all the bands when her superior retired, the school of music rebuffed her, so she went elsewhere to a university that would allow her to run the marching band and concert bands. So, they turned to the third in command, Roy King, to run the tiger band because he was willing to accept that position without being given control of the concert bands other than his own, which was the lowest tiered concert band in the university. They then brought in someone more “like minded” to run the concert side of things. Roy was the last guy you’d want running a disciplined unit. He wasn’t completely incompetent, but quality noticeably declined noticeably under his reign.

The Tiger Band is a huge source for donations for the university because it publicly faces the customers. It’s one of its biggest symbols. The school of music made a fatal error when they split management of the Tiger Band off from the director of bands because the money donated to the Tiger Band stayed with the tiger band and didn’t trickle to the rest of the school of music. They wanted that money. In addition, Roy King had a pool of money from which to offer scholarships to potential tiger band musicians, but was requiring them to play in Roy Band (the third band) in order to maintain them. The school of music wanted to be able to siphon those donations and take back control of those scholarships so they created a false scandal (which was really unnecessary as Roy was a complete perv. They could have easily found evidence of sexual assault allegations to fire him for cause) based around money disappearing from a desk and fired Roy for cause triggering a lawsuit which he won. The school of music, however, promoted Roy’s #2 Llinas, but with the condition that the school of music had control of the money donated to Tiger Band. Llinas was a major improvement over Roy, but quickly left for greener pastures where the director of the athletic band was also the director of concert bands (sound familiar?). The current director is alright, but has so much less power and influence that it’s difficult to attract the best talent especially with the school of music siphoning resources and scholarships, attempting to take stipends away from the color guard and golden girls, and the athletic department’s indifference regarding funding pep band trips to away games.

The school of music vs the Tiger Band is just another example of how the university is run in a “penny wise pound foolish” manner while holding abject contempt for its traditions and donors to its own detriment.