In 2021, Jeff Landry called the president of Louisiana State University to demand that Robert Mann, the chair of the journalism department, be punished for a critical tweet.
State University said Sunday that he was resigning in response to the outcome of the state’s recent gubernatorial election, explaining he would step down in an effort to avoid putting the school he loves in the crosshairs of the new governor-elect, a hard-line Republican who bayed for his blood in a skirmish over a critical tweet two years ago.
Landry, who flipped the seat held for the last eight years by his Democratic predecessor, said in a victory speech that his success showed “we the people in this state are going to expect more out of our government from here on out.” Landry, 52, has been a staunch champion of a number of controversial Louisiana laws in recent years, including its near-total abortion ban with no exceptions for rape and incest, and a bill banning gender-affirming health care for transgender minors. Along the campaign trail, he railed against the “woke agenda,” particularly on, and pushed to restrict access to “sexually explicit” books in schools, which critics have said could result in LGBTQ+ literature being banned.
In a statement issued shortly after, Tate neither condemned nor defended Mann, but instead noted that LSU was “committed to free and open scholarship and the freedom to debate ideas and principles without interference.” Now, should Landry choose to come after him again, or his department or the university, Mann said, he has “doubts” that he’d be met with much of a fight. “If Landry really wants to stick his fingers in the pie, I don’t expect that the people who run LSU or any other higher education institute in the state will have the courage—or even really the ability—to defy him for very long, if at all,” he said.
Mann told The Daily Beast that the 18 years he spent at LSU have been some of the best of his career. “I love my work. I love my students,” he said. “The school has supported my research, the books I’ve written since I’ve been here. I won’t have that anymore, and I’ll miss that.”“I can retire. I’m going to be fine,” he said. “I’m certainly not falling on my sword.” He added that he likely would have retired within the next few years regardless; the election just expedited those plans.
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