Nunez reflects

In March, LSUE Chancellor William Nunez sat down for an interview in his office, but not really.
It wasn’t long before Nunez, who had announced his retirement in the fall, was up and pointing out photos on the wall to explain the physical progress on the campus.
“Mumphrey is the guy who made this thing happen,” he said of the college’s first chancellor, Anthony Mumphrey. “He deserves all the credit.”
Mumphrey, who served as chancellor from 1977 to 1988, built a Louisiana State University campus on the rice fields of Acadiana. Mumphrey, a vocational agriculture professor on the LSU Baton Rouge campus, began guiding the growth of LSUE in 1966, when he was appointed dean of LSUE.
“We are just blessed with Tony’s Johnny Appleseed approach because we have all of these mature trees now,” Nunez.
It is no surprise Nunez appreciates that natural setting because he is a scientist. He received his bachelor of science degree in zoology and chemistry and master of science degree in microbiology-biochemistry from LSU A&M. He earned a doctorate in immunology-microbiology with a minors in biochemistry and general biology from the University of North Texas.
In August 1966, Nunez became LSUE chancellor succeeding Michael Smith who followed Mumphrey in 1989.
Louisiana was emerging from a oilfield-driven economic bust.
In January 1996, Mike Foster became governor.
Nunez said Foster reversed education’s fortunes.
“I think Foster’s point of view was ‘If I take care of education and take care of Louisiana’s roads, that will be quite an accomplishment.’”
Kathleen Blanco followed Foster as governor and she supported higher education, Nunez said.
“Interestingly enough he was a Republican and here you had Blanco, a Democrat, two of your best governors as far as education is concerned...” he said.
The period was also a time when improvements were made to the LSUE campus.
“I think we just got under the wire,” Nunez said about capital outlay projects.
Nunez was at the helm when the Community Education and Health and Technology buildings came on line. The Acadian Center was expanded, Bengal Village student housing arrived, and athletic fields and facilities were developed.
Some of the progress would not have happened if not for one important improvement.
That was solving drainage issues.
“It used to be we would have a rain and this was a river,” he said pointing to the area leading to the Acadian Center.
There were other issues and they include money.
“When you are leader of an organization, usually your strategic plan is what should run your budget, but here you never know what your budget is going to be until sometimes the 12th or 13th hour, in which case the budget runs the plan. It is backwards,” he said.
“The plan should run the budget, but it has never been that way in Louisiana.”
Another challenge arose when the state began rethinking education.
Nunez said when the Louisiana Community and Technical College Sytem came into being “there was this growing mentality that everything is the same. It is cookie cutter like if you are two-year, you are all the same. If you are four year, you are all the same. They are not all the same at all.”
LSUE grew out providing students a transfer to four-year colleges.
“This is really another campus for the LSU system,” Nunez said. “Our strength was mostly for transfer students. Students would start with us and they would go to Baton Rouge or go to ULL or, at the time, USL.”
Some legislators saw LSUE as just another two-year campus like a vocational-technical school, he said.
“When legislators saw the students who transferred and their success rates, they could see we were quite different from the vocational-technical kind of campuses,” he said.
If LSUE had been cut out of the LSU system, “I can tell you right now we could not have hired the high-quality faculty that we have been able to accrue over this period of time.”
Nunez said successful LSUE students are ready for the next step in their education.
“I can tell you right now in Baton Rouge they get called the ‘Eunice kids.’ That’s not negative. That’s actually a very positive thing.”