Why This LSU Professor Quit His Job As Soon As He Heard the Election Results

The morning after Louisiana GOP gubernatorial candidate Jeff Landry claimed victory in a lopsided race where he avoided a runoff, tenured LSU professor Robert Mann knew he had to quit his job. He submitted his resignation to his dean and announced it on social media.

“My reasons are simple: The person who will be governor in January has already asked LSU to fire me,” Mann said Sunday in the four-post thread on X, formerly Twitter. “And I have no confidence the leadership of this university would protect the Manship School against a governor’s efforts to punish me and other faculty members.”

Mann, 65, holds an endowed chair in LSU’s journalism department and has worked at the school since 2006. But he’d been pondering a move for a while, since his 2021 dust-up with Landry over COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Then Louisiana’s attorney general, Landry had sent an aide to an LSU Faculty Senate meeting discussing vaccines, where she read a letter calling the mandates “problematic” because they violated people’s right to religious freedom. Mann followed up with a tweet, saying Landry had sent “some flunkie … to read a letter attacking covid vaccines.”

Landry responded immediately, announcing a day later that he’d contacted LSU president William F. Tate IV to personally request that Mann be punished. Landry tweeted: “This type of disrespect and dishonesty has no place in our society—especially at our flagship university by a professor. I hope LSU takes appropriate action soon.”

Tate later issued a statement that took no side in the dispute, saying instead that LSU was “committed to free and open scholarship and the freedom to debate ideas and principles without interference.” Mann escaped punishment, but he took note that no one from the administration offered their support, privately or publicly. He also understood that Landry was already then positioning himself for a run as governor.

“And so that’s when I began to think, If this guy gets elected governor, I need to start thinking about an exit plan,” he said.

Landry won handily, tallying 52 percent of the vote in a 15-candidate race that many observers had predicted would go to a November runoff. His victory flipped a seat that’s been held by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards for the past eight years and gave Republicans control of all branches of state government.

On Tuesday, I reached Mann by phone in Baton Rouge. We talked about the roots of his beef with the governor-elect, how Louisiana Democrats failed to put up a fight in the race, and what Louisianians should be concerned about now that Landry, a Trump-endorsed acolyte, and the GOP prepare to assume total control of the state government. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Joel Anderson: I found it interesting that your most recent book, Kingfish U, was about Gov. Huey Long and his hands-on relationship with LSU, even down to being so involved in university affairs that he personally attempted to silence his critics on campus.

Robert Mann: It’s primarily coincidental, I think, but it hasn’t escaped me that there were professors at the time who were punished and run off campus.

So, yeah, it didn’t inspire the book because I had started writing this before I had my first run-in with Jeff Landry. But I always felt like I shared a lot of commonalities with those people.

As you were writing about this, did you ever worry—even prior to Jeff Landry throwing his hat in the ring—that your criticism or even your commentary on politics might come back to hurt you and your position there at LSU?

Yes, I did. And maybe I was a little naïve about it in the beginning. But when I first started speaking out and writing, in which I was pretty harshly criticizing [former Louisiana Gov.] Bobby Jindal and other state officials, the thing that really brought me up short was my former boss, [former Louisiana Gov.] Kathleen Blanco, going to dinner one night with her and her husband—and this was after she had left the governor’s office—and her leaning across the table and asking me, “You do have tenure, don’t you?” And I said, “Yes, ma’am.” And she [said], “Be careful, because there’s a lot of ways the governor can hurt you that don’t involve taking away your tenure.” And I thought to myself, “Oh, well, if a former governor was concerned about me, who kind of knows the ins and outs in ways that I don’t, maybe I ought to be more worried than I am.” But I don’t think that really changed my behavior a whole lot.

Some people have questioned, “Why are you giving up? Why are you not standing up and fighting and waging a brave battle to keep your job?” And what I told somebody this morning was, “I’ve been fighting for 18 years. Am I expected to fight until I’m 95?” I mean, am I never allowed to stop this and go do something else with my life that I might enjoy a little more or maybe have a job with a little less drama?

Is it fair to say this starts in December 2021, when you called one of Landry’s aides a flunky?

Probably for him it goes back earlier. I mean, he had been a pretty aggressive purveyor of misinformation about vaccines and the basic COVID protections and all that. So I’d probably been critical of him before then. I think he took this personally because it was me criticizing him for sending his person before the Faculty Senate.

What happened after Jeff Landry made it clear that something needed to happen to you?

I just want to make it clear that the tweet wasn’t really about calling her a flunky. It was about saying that he sent a flunky to read us a letter full of lies and misinformation about vaccines and calling himself a pro-life politician.

I wasn’t trying to insult the person. I was trying to criticize him for, first of all, not having the courage to come in and tell the lies to us in person.

So I really wasn’t trying to insult this young woman. I think she obviously should have known better and should not have done that. But still, she was just a low-level person doing her job, which, by the way, is the dictionary definition of a flunky.

Right, right.

Instead of responding to the substantive criticism of him, he spun it into that: I was being disrespectful to this young woman who works on his staff.

And he used that to call the president and demand that I be punished or reprimanded. Then he followed it up with a letter in which he put it all into writing, saying that what I had done was inexcusable. And so, of course, then he released the letter to the press. So he wanted it to be known that he’d done this.

But for the first, I don’t know, 18 to 20 hours, LSU just refused to make any response. They finally put out a very general statement in support of academic freedom, which was fine. I’m glad they reaffirmed the university’s commitment to free speech and academic freedom. But, you know, I took note of the fact that unlike previous incidents, no one ever bothered to call me and to reassure me. Which, you know, I didn’t need that call. But I took note of the fact that it never happened.

I’m guessing it occurred to you then that you might need to make this move.

So when Jeff Landry called (former LSU president) Bill Tate in December of 2021, everybody in the state, including Bill Tate, knew that this was a guy who is probably the most likely leading Republican candidate for governor. He was clearly positioning himself to run for governor. So when they talked to him, he was talking to someone he knew was a potential next governor of Louisiana.

And so that’s when I began to think, Well, you know, if this guy gets elected governor, I need to start thinking about an exit plan. Because I don’t want to be around here making life hard on my colleagues and my students and my school just because this guy is going to be hellbent on trying to get rid of me.

My tenure still is pretty solid protection But I think if you want to hurt me, what you do is you take hostages.

What do you mean by that?

You cut their funding. You come after us in ways that aren’t directly related to me, that are much easier to do. You know, our budget doesn’t have tenure. There is crazy zero-based budgeting. So [the dean has] got to go to the provost every single year now and justify every dollar that she’s spending on everything other than tenured faculty. And so, they’ve got all kinds of ways to make her life miserable and without trying to take tenure away from anybody. These are people who are really creative about making people miserable. So I don’t think she realizes what a lot of favor I’m doing her.

Had you ever had a conversation with [Jeff Landry] before?

Never. Never met him.

Really?

Never been in a room with him that I know of.

Do you remember when he first appeared on your radar?

I guess when he ran for Congress [in 2010]. I don’t remember thinking maybe he had a future. I remember thinking it’s just another sort of radical Republican. There’s a lot of those.

You mentioned on Twitter that the head of the Louisiana Democratic Party should resign. What did the Louisiana Democrats do wrong in this election?

I don’t know that they could have done anything to prevent it from happening. But the one thing they could have done is try. And they didn’t try. They weren’t in the fight.

Just one example of how they wasted time and resources on silly useless fights was in District 91 in New Orleans. Rep. Mandie Landry[—no relation to Jeff—]is probably the most progressive, if not one of the most progressive, Democrats in the House who crossed swords with [Gov. John Bel] Edwards over reproductive rights and some other issues. You know, the governor, the party, Mary Landrieu, all endorsed her opponent, a quasi-Republican.* And they got everybody distracted and, you know, fighting amongst each other over Mandie Landry’s reelection. And she was never going to lose that race. She got 66 percent of the vote. And they spent more time trying to beat her than they spent trying to beat Jeff Landry. So from the governor on down, it was just a lot of useless, selfish actions that I think distracted everybody from the real mission, which was to beat Jeff Landry and get [Democratic candidate] Shawn Wilson into a runoff with him.

How much blame does Gov. Edwards deserve for this outcome?

He never really took an interest in taking the party over and making it into his organization, which he could have done. And it would have served Democrats across the state well. But he had no interest in that. He just had, for whatever reasons, no interest in doing party building. It was really all about, you know, his political organization and his people.

Beyond the governor and the candidates, did you think anything else doomed the Democrats in this particular election cycle?

One of the things that I think really hurt enthusiasm among Democrats in the state was that, you know, post-Dobbs, even in Louisiana, public opinion over reproductive rights has changed a lot.

Everywhere it’s been tested around the country, the Democrats have done well. People have gone out to vote for protecting their reproductive rights or regaining their reproductive rights. And yet again, we have a governor-elect who was very much on the other side of this issue and so radical that he’s trying to get information on people who leave the state for an abortion so they can be prosecuted. So this is a truly radical individual who is committed to taking away the reproductive rights, the bodily autonomy of half the population of the state.

And the problem was the Democratic governor was pretty much with him. The Democratic governor signed the bill, for crying out loud.

No one tried to make any effort to win over the part of the population that I think is really pissed off and discouraged and angry about having lost their bodily autonomy. And so where do they think the enthusiasm was going to come from? What issue did they think was going to motivate people to get out and vote, if not that?

For people that live in Louisiana that support Democratic policies, even if they’re not a Democrat, but maybe they would just like to have the option to get an abortion—what are the stakes for them now that the Republicans control all the levers of state government?

It’s pretty grim. If I had a student who came to see me and said, “I’m really concerned about this, what should I do?” I would tell them, “Get out of here as fast as possible, because this is life or death for you.” If you’ve got a difficult pregnancy, it’s one thing. If you need an abortion, you know it’ll be hard enough, but at least you might be able to leave the state and go get the care that you need. But if you’ve got an emergency, or some other kind of complication, basically you’re going to go to the emergency room and they’re going to say, “Well, go sit in your car until we determine that you’re almost dead and then we can do something about you to help you. But otherwise we can’t treat you because we’re afraid that the governor is going to put us in jail because that’s what the law says.”

These are dark days. And I think there’s probably no state whose residents are farther away from a state that does offer abortion services than Louisiana. It’s a long drive to a state that will provide those services for you.

One of the leaders of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Janai Nelson, who said—and you retweeted this—“As I’ve said before, the brain drain that the totalitarian laws against truth and the freedom to learn is precipitating in the South should deeply alarm every parent who hopes their child will develop critical thinking skills and not just be a vessel for indoctrination.” What do you think about that?

I think she said it as well as anything I’ve seen said about that. That, to me, sums it up, distills it just so well.

The people who run LSU, the current leadership, are gradually turning the school into a vocational institution. It’s not about learning to think. It’s about learning a skill. This is a university. This is not a trade school.

Trade schools have a very important role to play in our society, and I think we need to do more to support them. But this is a university. And a university is not about just getting a job, it’s about learning to think. It’s about learning to be a fully realized person. But learning to think and think critically, we’ve devalued that. And it’s not just society that’s devalued that, it’s the leadership of LSU.

You also said: Louisiana’s education system will increasingly resemble what’s happening in Florida and Texas. What does that mean?

That means if you wonder what Jeff Landry will do, I think you just need to ask what has [Florida Gov. and GOP presidential candidate] Ron DeSantis done.  Because I think that DeSantis is the role model for somebody like Landry and, to a certain extent, [Texas Gov. Greg] Abbott as well.

I see Landry as being a disciple of those two guys. I mean, he’s certainly a disciple of Donald Trump. So, I think if Landry has any national aspirations, which I suspect he does, he’s going to be performing for the Trumps and DeSantises of the world and trying to raise his profile. And you do that by fighting a culture war like DeSantis and Abbott have done.

Last question. What’s next?

I’ve got another book that I’m finishing up and another idea for the one after that. And so I’ll have more time to write. But I’m also open to, you know, going somewhere else and teaching for a few more years. I kinda joke that, “Wouldn’t it be nice to live and work somewhere where when something breaks, they fix it?”

I literally went out and bought a vacuum cleaner for my office because LSU doesn’t have the money to hire anybody to vacuum my office. In fact, I got an email from a faculty colleague today or yesterday saying, “Hey, when you leave, can I have your vacuum?”

So the idea of working at a university where the academic side is actually funded properly and where the roof doesn’t leak and all that, it’s kind of appealing. LSU is all I know, and it might be kind of fun to go somewhere else.

When you say somewhere else, that means you’d leave Louisiana.

Yeah, that means leaving Louisiana. I don’t think any other public school in Louisiana would really want me to bring my bull’s-eye and settle in on their campus.