Before the session began, Jindal gave a press conference at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette's LITE Center decrying Louisiana's constitutional mandate to balance the budget on the backs of public health and public higher education, and charging the state legislature with coming up with creative ways to offset these cuts, so that revenue generating centers like UL Lafayette's LITE Center, the world's only publicly accessible 3-D immersive technology facility, would continue to exist. By statute, all other areas of the state budget are protected from the types of budget cuts threatening to decimate higher ed. (Public health, of course, had already been decimated in the wake of Katrina, so there isn't as much there left to cut.). Higher education is the only remaining vulnerable cash cow.  And higher ed officials are barred by state law from lobbying state government so there aren't many things that they can do to protest this action, other than plan for as bad if not worse cuts than during the oil bust of the `80s that may bring several struggling institutions to the brink of closure or beyond, and severely damage the healthier ones, none of which typically operate with sufficient budgets even according to SREB standards. This in a state where higher education is historically undervalued and a significant percentage of even college-prepared students don't go to college.

While other states are also facing severe higher ed cuts, the independent blog site UL Today did a good job of putting these cuts in local perspective. They equal the entire operating budgets of several major state higher educational institutions. Close LSU? I'm sure the rest of the SEC is salivating over that one.

And since when was higher education's worth measured just by its ability to stimulate the economy? But I digress.

Both the House and the Senate have come up with their own plans to mitigate these cuts. A private company, The Shaw Group, announced it would return $13.5 million to the state in relocation incentives specifically to help offset higher ed cuts, warning that the cuts would be disastrous for Louisiana's economy. The Senate also proposed delaying a state income tax cut until 2012, which would restore roughly half the proposed cuts to higher education. Really bad considering $50 million was already cut mid-year from 2008's higher ed budget, but still significantly less debilitating. Jindal said he would veto the plan, saying that they only delay the inevitable need to cut state government and result in a tax increase (uh, since when is a tax cut that was never fully enacted a tax increase? I never saw it in my paycheck).

Supporters of Jindal's plan state that Louisiana has too many state-supported higher education institutions for its population, partially due to the continued existence of geographically proximal state-supported HBCUs. This is true. However, most other states have more higher education institutions after factoring in both publics and privates. There are very few privates in Louisiana, and outside of Tulane most are relatively small and regionally based. Some of the state's larger population centers, like Lafayette, don't have any private four-year educational institutions apart from the publics. Baton Rouge has one allied health school affiliated with a local hospital system.  (I'm sorry, but I don't count University of Phoenix in either Lafayette or Baton Rouge. Call me an elitist if you want.) The only major Louisiana city with a more typical mixture of publics and privates is New Orleans, but several of its institutions are still struggling to maintain enrollment post-Katrina.  Alexandria and Shreveport each have a private four-year college but their local state universities (LSU Alexandria and LSU Shreveport) are small and only recently converted from something more akin to junior colleges. State budget cuts would seriously curtail Shreveport's desire to turn LSUS into a true regional university. This lack of educational infrastructure is unheard of in most other major and mid-major metropolitan areas, including in other states facing similar serious higher education cutbacks. So if state institutions close or are forced to severely cut back on their offerings, there are few to no other options other than going out of state, which would completely negate the TOPS scholarships offered to educationally prepared students in order to keep them in state.

It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that Jindal plans to seize a once in a political lifetime opportunity to "close and consolidate" higher education institutions, and possibly "privatize and outsource" other offerings traditionally offered by state-supported higher ed.

As a former member of a cultic, dominionist church with close ties to Louisiana Family Forum and Jindal's political base, my first thought is that there must be a "Christian" dominionist basis to Jindal's position, one that he is not acknowledging now publicly and is not generating much discussion among those who are wondering why this former head of the University of Louisiana System seems so hell-bent (which is what his bizarro version of heaven on earth will be) on bleeding state higher ed to death.

Why?

Could it be because higher ed faculty, as a group, in Jindal's perspective, are a bunch of atheistic, anti-Christian postmodern ideologues who persecute Christians and are promoting the downfall of traditional society, as Talk2Action blogger Frank Cocozzelli discovered he wrote back in 1996?

The wave of political correctness, which has affected universities at every level, has also infected religious and philosophical thought. Whereas Western universities once existed to train clergymen and educate others in the fundamentals of the Christian faith, modern centers of higher learning are much more secular and skeptical toward anything remotely religious. Faith is a taboo subject among many of the educated elite; indeed, persons with strong religious convictions are often viewed with scorn and disapproval. Equating all religious beliefs with the seemingly intolerant attitude of Fundamentalists, the more ardent critics of religion are so bold as to equate faith with ignorance and disparage any attempt to support faith with reason as naive. (Atheism's Gods, par. 1)

Now thirteen years after he wrote these words, Jindal is in a political position to reshape Louisiana's institutions of higher learning in another direction, whether in the real world they truly are "skeptical toward anything remotely religious" or not. (I personally find my current institution, UL Lafayette, to be more tolerant of people with faith like me--and of diverse or no faith in general--than any other I have worked for so far in my career, public OR religious/private.) While state-supported higher education in Louisiana will still exist as a skeleton of its former self, the budget cuts as proposed will flush a significant percentage of the "educated elite" aka higher ed faculty and staff out of state, particularly those in the liberal arts and sciences who are more likely to be critical of the "America is a Christian Nation" myth and less likely to be seen as contributing to the state's bottom line without conversely intellectually challenging the Kingdom According to Bobby and His Dominionist Friends. The LITE Center can stay; philosophy majors and the LSU Press have to go.   I'm personally no big fan of postmodern thought (I'm working on my PhD in English so I know a little bit about Foucault, Derrida and the like) but setting higher education back several generations in in a misguided attempt to shrink LSU to the size and potentially the mission of a dominionist theme-park version of colonial-era Harvard merely demonstrates Jindal's intolerance of those who think and believe differently from him--not all of whom are atheists, and many of whom are professing Christians like me--not intolerance among the postmodern, "secular humanist" scholars he denounces.

One of the carrots held out to me to stay at my former church five years ago was that there would be a prominent position for me at their planned university.  Since my pastor's dreams and visions were the same as God's, well, this had to be God's plan for the church, and for me. Thanks, but no thanks. But I keep thinking of this as Jindal's cuts loom closer.  Would new or emerging dominionist church-based colleges and universities be part of Jindal's plan to "restore" higher education along his limited ideological lines? According to the Louisiana Federation of Teachers his budget also includes increased vouchers for religious schools so this is not an unreasonable question to ask.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, I know you're a born-again neo-Catholic, but given that you owe much of your political existence to the Louisiana Family Forum's neo-Puritans, I recommend that both you and your pseudo-Protestant friends read John Milton's Aeropagitica before you go further with your plans to implement all y'all's vision of the Shining City on the Levee south of I-20. You may have heard of Milton, you know, the guy who was Cromwell's brain (ah, if only Karl Rove had 1/10th his smarts). He basically said that in the marketplace of ideas truth will survive and conquer without the aid of state censorship. If your faith is so weak that it requires books to be tossed, curricula to be censored, and higher education faculty to be driven far out of state to survive, then how true is it? Is the object of your faith really Jesus Christ, or a religio-political entity that merely claims to act for Him by proxy?  We've been there, done this before in the English Civil War and early colonial times, and it failed on a grand transcontinental scale. That's why we have the constitution we have, the religious and academic freedoms that we have, and why America did not become a narrowly Puritan dominionist theocracy. Truth will survive and flourish without your help, Gov. Jindal.  God's a lot bigger than you. He's even bigger than LSU... before the budget cuts.