NEW ORLEANS – Hurricane Katrina, the dismissal of a popular chancellor and a proposed merger with a neighboring institution are over with, but uncertainty remains at the University of New Orleans, which opened 52 years ago as an arm of Louisiana State University and is preparing to leave the fold.
Votes in the House and Senate on Monday moved the university closer to a transfer from the LSU System, where some feel it has operated in the shadow of the campus in Baton Rouge, to the University of Louisiana System. UL operates Louisiana Tech, Nicholls State and other regional universities.
The school’s administration says students won’t notice the difference. Students seem unconcerned except to say that they hope the school benefits. Some on the faculty express strong support for the idea while others would like more information.
Specifics on how the university might benefit are hard to come by but lawmakers sense a definite mood for change.
“I’ve heard the frustrations of the folks at UNO,” Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, said as she spoke in favor of the switch.
Steve Striffler, who joined the university’s anthropology department three years ago, said he believes that, the longer someone has been teaching at UNO, the more likely they are to be for the switch. “The folks that have been there longer are probably more tired of the LSU System than, say, someone like myself,” he said. “I don’t have a long history of being frustrated with the LSU System.”
Striffler isn’t opposed to the switch but is uncertain about what it will mean.
