BATON ROUGE — A search committee on Wednesday interviewed five candidates for LSU's next president before narrowing them down to three finalists.

The finalists are former University of Arizona President Robert Robbins, University of Alabama Executive Vice President and Provost James T. Dalton and McNeese State University President Wade Rousse. The board also interviewed LSU Interim President Matt Lee and Dr. Giovanni Piedimonte of the Tulane School of Medicine, but they were ultimately not chosen.

Next, the three finalists will participate in faculty, students and staff forums. Robbins' will be on Thursday, Dalton's on Friday and Rousse's will be on Monday. The LSU Board of Supervisors will then choose the next president on Tuesday, Nov. 4.

Originally, only four candidates were set to be interviewed at Wednesday's meeting, but the committee added Dalton at the last minute.

"He's a provost of a major university. He has checked every box. He is very articulate, presented himself well with a lot of energy, so I think that he deserved the next level," LSU Board of Supervisors Chair Scott Ballard said.

In his interview, Dalton emphasized the importance of student success and his goal of boosting LSU's 86% second-year retention rate. The committee asked Dalton how he would retain top research faculty and graduate students.

"At the end of the day, we're hiring people, and we have to make sure that the people we're hiring are aligned with our values and aligned with that same very hard work ethic," he answered. "You only get that by sitting across the table from them and having a conversation, and I tend to hire people that I want to have dinner with again during that process."

When it was his turn, Rousse focused on five priorities that LSU should follow to break from the status quo.

"You cannot achieve student success without financial resources. You cannot build world-class research programs in crumbling buildings. You cannot hold yourself accountable without structure, and you cannot sustain any of it without a clear-eyed commitment to fiscal responsibility," Rousse said.

Rousse also said LSU's Baton Rouge campus should have its own chancellor, separate from the president. LSU combined the two positions in 2012. When he was later asked about potentially having Matt Lee serve as the school's chancellor, Scott Ballard said, "There is momentum to have a change in the system and how it looks. I have different ideas for that, and I think we have different ideas for that, but we're gonna talk about that later. I would not rule Matt Lee out for anything."

The committee asked Robbins, the third finalist, about "failures of campus safety" during his time as president of the University of Arizona, a role he stepped down from in 2024. Robbins alluded to the murder of University of Arizona professor Thomas Meixner by former grad student Murad Dervish in 2022. Dervish had previously been barred from campus for making threats.

"That was absolutely a failure on our part. I took full responsibility for that. I commissioned an outside entity that is to go and look at mass shootings and to determine the root causes and what you can do to improve the situation after that," Robbins said. "This individual was threatening four of our professors for over a year, and I think that it was handled about as well as it could have been handled, although I think that we probably could have done more."

Ballard was asked about the decision to move forward with Robbins, despite his previous tenure ending in controversy.

"I think he answered those, and I believed his answers and the people in references who are still there who are very well respected, backed up his sayings, so I believe him," Ballard said.

At the end of the meeting, each committee member was asked to name three candidates to move forward with. Dalton received the most votes with 19, while Rousse and Robbins got 14. Lee came in fourth with nine votes.