Last week, students, faculty, staff, and community members at McNeese State University in Lake Charles gathered for public interviews with the three finalists to lead their university. In anonymous surveys afterward, they praised two of the candidates: Dee Dee Anderson, who has worked in higher education for more than 30 years, and Wayne Brumfield, a higher education administrator with comparable experience. They gave the third candidate, Louisiana state Sen. Mike Reese, mixed reviews.

On Tuesday, the University of Louisiana System Board of Supervisors hired Reese.

Reese's qualifications for leading a university consist of a bachelor's degree and a year as student body president at UL Monroe in 1997 and 1998. He has no professional experience in higher education. He is a logistics and real estate business owner who has served in the Louisiana Senate since 2020.

He is not an outlier. He is a pattern.

Under Gov. Jeff Landry, politically connected figures have been installed at the top of Louisiana's public university system with striking consistency. LSU's president was hired with Landry's backing. So were the presidents of UL Lafayette and UL Monroe. Landry directed Northwestern State to hire a former state Supreme Court justice. Reese is the second state senator in less than a year to leave the legislature for a university presidency in Louisiana.

Public Service Commissioner Davante Lewis, a McNeese alumnus, put it plainly: "These presidencies should not be treated like lollipops for the governor's office."

Louisiana's public universities are funded by taxpayers. Their leadership should be selected through transparent, merit-based processes that prioritize academic and institutional expertise, not political loyalty. When a campus community's clear preference for qualified candidates is overridden by a unanimous board vote, something has gone deeply wrong.

We are calling on the University of Louisiana System Board of Supervisors to reconsider the Reese appointment and reopen the search with a genuine commitment to honoring community input, on the Louisiana Board of Regents to establish and enforce minimum professional qualifications for all public university presidential appointments, and on the Louisiana legislature to pass legislation limiting gubernatorial interference in university presidential searches and codifying the right of faculty and students to meaningful input in leadership selection.

Louisiana's students deserve universities led by people who have spent their careers in higher education. Sign this petition to demand that Louisiana's public universities be governed by merit, not by political favor.