Provost Dr. Stephen Doblin

‘I wanted to be a provost and so, I had applied to several places. When I got to Lamar and talked to Dr. Simmons, I knew that was the place I wanted to be. I spent 14 years at Lamar as Provost, and it was just wonderful. At that time in 2001, we had very few students, about 7,000 students. The relationship between faculty and staff/administration seemed to be very strained. Jimmy Simmons at that time was a relatively new president. Jimmy Simmons was a long-time music faculty member. He had something about him. Some people characterized his leadership style as leading by friendship. There was a lot to that. One of the things that impressed me most about Dr. Simmons and the whole administrative staff is that whenever we would get together to make a decision, the first question we would ask always was, what impact it would have on our students; next what impact it would have on our faculty; and what other unforeseen impacts it might have. We instituted a series of merit raises and increased the faculty salaries by a lot. That always makes people happy.’

 ‘Jimmy Simmons and I met with the faculty in the Faculty Senate. Initially, my feeling was that the relationship was very strained. Not necessarily, Dr. Simmons. But, it seemed to me that the faculty didn’t get along with the administration. Once they figured out that we were interested in improving their situation, increasing salaries, it changed. It was really a wonderful feeling. Dr. Simmons surrounded himself with really good people. We had a chief financial officer who told me that he was here to make sure that the academic enterprise is running well. I had never heard a financial officer say anything like that.’

‘One of the biggest challenges we had was Hurricane Rita in 2005…top of the library glasses blown out…we had never been through anything like this before. One of the smart things Jimmy Simmons did was he gave the Montagne parking lot as a staging area to the responders in the area. It was great for us too, because they were right here in the campus if we needed help. I had a wonderful time at Lamar, enjoyed every minute of it. Learned a lot. What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. People who have never been in a hurricane think after the hurricane leaves things get back to normal. It doesn’t. It takes years.

‘I was in one of the Louisiana cities. I get this phone call. One of the workers wanted to clean up. They asked me, what do you want us to do with these fetal pigs in the Biology Department? They were in the refrigerator for the students’ research and the generator had gone out. I was hundreds of miles away and so I said get rid of them. After that I wrote a handbook of what we went through during Rita and how we should have handled them.’