In a matter of days, now, the board of supervisors of Louisiana State university will open bids covering construction of a 23,000-seat addition to the LSU stadium at Baton Rouge.
That expansion, in the cynic's eye, will make it possible for LSU to average about 38,000 vacant seats per football game instead of the current 15,000 vacant seats, an average which has held for the past seven years.
Although the university has no need for additional capacity in its stadium, already one of the South's largest, it has an urgent need for a new library. Its present library is now 28 years old and smallest for any major college in the South. That smallness covers not only book capacity but seating capacity as well.
True, that when the Legislature authorized a $6 million bond issue in 1950 for educational institutions these were the projects listed in order of their precedence: LSU medical school expansion, enlargement of the LSU stadium, a gym for Northeastern Louisiana institute and a library for LSU. There is not enough money to go around and the unneeded stadium project is in a fair way of elbowing the vitally needed library out of the picture.
In the time remaining, the only action which could save Louisiana's taxpayers this imprudent stadium outlay, reckoned at $2 million, would be a decision by LSU's board of supervisors to reject all stadium bids and hold up the expenditure. While the board could not change the will.of the Legislature, it could at least see if a subsequent assembly might have a better perspective on LSU's real scholastic needs.
If the board of supervisors steadfastly pursues the football project to the exclusion of the book project, the public has the right to expect the board to justify fully its actidns. After all, it is the public's $2 million and the public's university.
