• By GREG LANGLEY
• Books editor
• Published: Nov 22, 2009

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David Madden is packing up and driving off into retirement.

The LSU English professor emeritus is heading to the hills – North Carolina. He’s got a lot to look back on: he has written seven novels, two short story collections, numerous scholarly publications, plays, critiques and more. He’s mentored students, helped start successful writing careers and collaborated with other writers on projects. He has been at LSU since 1970s and while he was there he served stints as writer in residence and director of the creative writing program. He served as the chairman of Louisiana’s Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. And he is also the founder of the university’s U.S. Civil War Center.

It’s that last thing, the Civil War Center, that’s gives him the one regret as he looks back on his time in Baton Rouge. Madden founded the center in 1989 while doing research on his Civil War novel Sharpshooter. The center was housed in the Agnes Morris House, a small building on campus.

In 1999, Madden resigned as the center’s director to return to writing novels. The Civil War Center was moved under the control of the LSU Libraries shortly after that. It hasn’t flourished, Madden said.

First of all, the Civil War Center’s holdings and functions have been scattered, he said. “There’s no physical place. They’ve moved everything out of the building. We used to have the entire building. The T. Harry Williams Oral History Center was moved over there once it was under the purview of the library. That was a good combination, but they kept colonizing every room until now it’s only the Civil War Book Review.”

Book collections have been moved to the Libraries’ special collections, Madden said, and there is no individual identified as director of the center. That hurts fund-raising. “I checked with the LSU foundation when I started this campaign, which was six years ago, and $25 had been raised the last time that I looked,” Madden said. That’s a big dropoff from his time at the center, he said.

“When it comes right down to it, I didn’t raise a hell of a lot of money, but I raised enough to where we spent less than $30,000 in addition to the $25,000 for my assistant. We always had a surplus.”

But funding isn’t the problem.

“My successfully running it on little money proves that money is not the problem,” Madden said. “It may be the perception that you need money, but what you need is first of all, that person to whom people want to give money because people give money to the person. They give it to (Chancellor Mike) Martin, not to LSU.”

Madden would like to see the Civil War Center returned to its former prominence. Toward that end, he introduced a resolution before the LSU Faculty Senate earlier this year.

“A revitalized Civil War Center would restore its national reputation; it would be a perfect exemplification of the Flagship Agenda, especially of the interdisciplinary initiative; and certainly because of the pervasive interest in the Civil War, especially during the upcoming Civil War Sesquicentennial (150th anniversary), the Center would attract donors at a time when we need them sorely,” Madden wrote.

The Civil War Center needs a new home, Madden says, and a director to be the face of the enterprise. It won’t be Madden’s face anymore, but he hopes it can be someone with a deep interest and dedication to the project so that he can point back at an institution that he founded which is in as good a condition as it was when he left.