Facing imminent budget cuts of up to 30 percent, state higher education officials are having some serious discussions about the future of the state’s university system. Talks about the current budget situation spilled over into a conversation on possibly consolidating state colleges at a Senate Finance Committee meeting yesterday. The Advocate reports that when lawmakers pressed State Commissioner of Higher Education Sally Clausen for specific examples of consolidation, she cited LSU-Alexandria being turned from a community college to a four-year university in 2001. Clausen plans to begin laying out a new master plan for the state’s universities at Monday’s Louisiana Board of Regents meeting. “It envisions change - a lot of change,” Clausen said.
Two Acadiana lawmakers are noted as advocates for consolidation. The Advocate article notes that Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Michot concurred with Clausen that turning LSU-A into a university was a mistake. The article also quotes State Sen. Nick Gautreaux. “The reasons these systems were created was for power – political power,” Gautreaux said. “People in this state are tired of the rhetoric from everybody.”
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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