Savoie given ULL command

• By MARSHA SILLS
• Advocate Acadiana bureau
• Published: Oct 31, 2008 - Page: 1BA - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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While working in Baton Rouge, Joe Savoie encountered fiscal and political challenges to improve higher education in the state.

Those challenges still exist for the former higher education commissioner in his new role as the president of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. But he won’t cross the hurdles alone, University of Louisiana System President Randy Moffett told the few thousand people attending Savoie’s investiture ceremony Thursday.

“Leading a university is a great challenge and Dr. Savoie is up to the challenge. … He will need all of you in the good times and the difficult times,” Moffett said. 

The ceremony exhibited the pomp and circumstance of a commencement ceremony with a procession of higher education leaders, including Moffett, Sally Clausen, commissioner of higher education, UL System board members, state and city leaders, and university administrators and faculty members.

Family members of past presidents, as well as Savoie’s predecessor, Ray Authement, participated.

Savoie was presented with a medal engraved with the university’s seal and a lapel pin worn by Edwin L. Stephens, the university’s first president.

A wooden chair that belonged to  Stephens sat on the stage. Carved into it was the university’s first name — Southwestern Louisiana Industrial Institute.

As SLII, the university was little more than a high school. Savoie said it was the people of Lafayette who advocated for locating the school here rather than elsewhere in the Acadiana region, because they wanted to be part of impacting the area’s future. 

“And they did,” he said. “Now, it’s our turn. We are now the custodians of (the) promise that has been passed onto us.”

Each of the past five presidents shaped the university that today has a freshmen class with the highest ACT scores and GPA of any other, increased graduate school enrollment, a football team tied for the No. 1 spot in the Sun Belt Conference and faculty salaries above the Southern Regional Education Board.

“The foundation is firm. The future is bright,” Savoie told the crowd.

The future was the topic of keynote speaker Thomas Frey, a former IBM engineer and designer who is now executive director of a futurist think tank in Colorado, the DaVinci Institute.

Lafayette is the city of the future — today, Frey said.