Give me a break...The job was open for over a YEAR, man...365 calendar daysw, without him even sniffing it...He'd been home to visit friends and family in the area, and you're telling me he didn't know it was open and didn't even think about it for a year? Emmert himself will tell you that what drove him from LSU, and what made him make the first contact with U-Dub was when Blanco cut 30,000,000 from higher education that was ear-marked for tenure salaries, and spiraling yearly costs like insurance premiums and facility upgrades and maintainance...Amazing how almost 50% of that was aimed directly at LSU, while no other in-state school took anywhere close to that spending cut hit... The LSU law school was also cut in funding by-quite literally-millions of dollars. He was also told that the Master Plan that she had come out in support of during the election was going to be a "tough sell" in the Legislature. With Dardenne stripped of the Finance Committee Chair, Emmert knew that the handwriting was on the wall. The ONLY OTHER TIMES HE EVER TALKED OF LEAVING was when he interviewed for the much lower prestige USC (South Carolina) System Presidency, and-magically-it was right after the Legislature said they'd have to cut LSU's funding... Foster stepped in and made sure LSU got its funding...and, again-magically-Emmert stayed... Notice a pattern? He went to the single most well endowed and best funded institution of higher learning in America. I'm counting the Ivy Leagues there as well in this discussion. He has a mission of academic and institutional excellence, and having to convince a governor who loses more people in population than she gains each year that Education is the answer to almost every question (What do you know, Cleo had it right!) she poses or has posed is not something he had the stomach for. Foster got it...He may not have gotten much else, but he understood what he had with Emmert...Blanco's the old establishment...Lying to Bishop Ott in New Orleans and letting 1,500 kids rot in the public schools they were trying to pull out and get into private ones because she "Didn't recall" promising him the funding during an election conversation... Giving Johnny "Edwin Edwards-lite" Alario control of Committee Chairmanships without even so much as a public debate, or even a Committee vote, and then allowing him the audacity to speak publicly about it by responding to critics with, "That's the way we always used to do it." Give me a break...You're right...Let's leave politics out of it...Because Blanco got booed at the SuperDome for a reason last year during the Sugar Bowl...New Orleans and the idiots who traditionally vote Democrat because Daddy and Gramps always did put her there...Not us...and she's cost us every day since...especially LSU...
