F King continues to disparage LSU What does he hope to accomplish? His career is over

and it's only making him look more desperate


F. King Alexander is taking his media campaign against LSU to a global audience.

In a story published today in the London-based Times Higher Education, Alexander details his six-year struggle as president of LSU with a university culture that he says valued student athletics and white exceptionalism over academics and equal opportunity.

As he did in a story earlier this spring in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Alexander attributed his unpopularity in the later years of his tenure at LSU to his decision to implement holistic admissions standards on campus, which increased student diversity.


“What I ran into by doing that was that the old LSU—the old, white LSU—saw that their university was changing and looking more like the rest of the country, in Louisiana, and they went nuts,” Alexander told THE, which has an estimated 380,000 weekly readers worldwide. “(They) were OK having the diversity exceptions as long as they could play football and basketball and entertain them like the Roman Colosseum. But if you didn’t throw a football or dunk a basketball, then we really didn’t want you at the University.”

Alexander’s campaign to disparage LSU in higher education circles began in March, after he was forced to step down from his more recent position as president of Oregon State University due to fallout from LSU’s Title IX scandal.

The OSU community blamed Alexander for the way LSU mishandled complaints of sexual violence and misconduct against student athletes, detailed by USA Today and Husch Blackwell, even though Alexander, ironically, established LSU’s Title IX office shortly after his 2013 hiring.

He has since tried to salvage his reputation by arguing that he could only do so much while at LSU because of the ingrained culture and political meddling of the board.