Faculty Senate questions Athletics over sports betting deal

BY OLIVER BUTCHER @OliverButcher73

A presentation Monday to the Faculty Senate by LSU Athletics on its partnership with sports betting site Caesar’s Sportsbook drew sharp criticism from the school’s faculty representatives, who said they were left out of the deal making process and questioned the ethics of a gambling company sponsoring a school in the first place.

The Caesar’s Sportsbook deal was signed in late 2021 in anticipation of sports betting being legalized in Louisiana in January 2022. The exact details of the deal are unclear, but it runs until 2026 and, according to reporting by the AP, is worth “multiple millions” of dollars.

Members of the Faculty Sen- ate raised concerns about what they felt was the secretive nature of the deal. Representatives said they weren’t notified of the deal’s existence until about a day before it became official and were given no opportunity to offer input.

“I didn’t hear about this until literally the last minute,” said Faculty Senate member Edward Shihadeh, a professor of sociology.

Officials said the deal was made by LSU Athletics and not LSU itself, meaning it didn’t need oversight from any administrative body without connections to the athletics department. The LSU Board of Supervisors, however, did get a say in the deal and approved it. A more impassioned round of questioning began when the topic of underage gambling was raised.

Multiple members of the Fac- ulty Senate expressed concern about the proximity of Caesar’s Sportsbook advertisements and promotional materials at sporting events such as football and basketball games to students under 21, the legal age to gamble in Louisiana, at the university and local schools.

One poster in particular drew the ire of the Faculty Senate. It was a responsibility poster featuring a man in traditional Roman attire pointing to the slogan: “Caesar’s know their limits.” “I do not feel that shows responsible gambling. It shows that if you gamble with Caesars, you are a good person because you know your limits, and it endorses engaging in a very addictive behavior,” said Faculty Senate member dians, 11 Ukrainians and other passengers from Sweden, Afghanistan and the United Kingdom, according to the Ukrainian government.

“And it just shows that it doesn’t matter if you are protesting against the regime or if you are [just] living your life… The regime doesn’t leave you alone. It’s just — it’s hunting its own people,” said a woman involved in the video who asked to remain anonymous. “And they lie about it.”

About 45 people were involved in the video, according to a woman who asked to be identified by Behi TVS in fear of retaliation for her family members in Iran. She designed the project alongside another woman, identified by her initials S.N., and worked with a videographer and editor, identified by his initials K.K.

“Most Iranians of the town actually showed up to light the candles and show that we are not alone in this and show them that we don’t forget all the people who were innocent and got killed by this regime,” the other woman said.

Protests for women’s rights sparked at the funeral of Amini, the 22-year-old arrested by Iran’s “morality police.” Women took off their hijabs in defiance of the government’s dress code, according to news reports.

A 2021 United Nations report says women are treated as “second-class citizens” in Iran and details some of what protesters are fighting to change now — strict dress codes enforced on women, lack of autonomy in marriage and other sectors of life and weak protections against domestic violence.

At least 516 protesters have

ETHICS, from page 3 TATE, from page 3

Tate’s academic accomplishments.

“His background as one of the world’s most brilliant education researchers and social scientists clearly informs his smart leadership of a complex institution that enrolls nearly 36,000 students,” it reads. “Tate highly values and courageously leads in response to evidence, which should be the case among all higher education CEOs in this era of intense political polarization. He takes seriously the University’s social responsibility.”

There are many predominantly white colleges and universities that have yet to have a Black president, according to the Forbes article. And only 8% of university presidents are Black, according to a 2017 report referenced by Forbes.

Since coming to LSU, Tate has been killed since the unrest began, including 70 children, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency. The group says almost 20,000 protesters are in prison. There have been widespread reports of torture against detained protesters, including beatings and sexual assaults.

The Iranian government shut down the internet, blocking apps like WhatsApp, Signal, Instagram and Skype, according to CNN. For Iranians abroad, this means little communication between their family and friends and fears that they’ve become the next victims of state violence.

“We barely can talk to even our parents for more than two minutes,” the woman involved in the video at LSU said.

Amid the protests and international attention, Iran was expelled from the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women.

“They are not the ones that you want in the Women’s Commission to actually make rules for all the women of the world,” the woman said. She said this was a step toward removing Iran’s credibility—credibility they don’t deserve, she says.

“It’s not Iranian people. Iranian people are actually wanting the world to look at these people,” she said. “And they notice that we are being governed by terrorists.”

Behi TVS, one of the designers, said they wanted to show that even in a small city like Baton Rouge, people in Iran have a community supporting them.

And the Baton Rouge participants were joined by over 100 cities around the world in showing solidarity with the victims of the flight crash and protesters in Iran, according to Middle East Matters, a youth advocacy organization. The video at LSU was

In the face of questions and frustrations from the faculty representatives, Keli Zinn, chief operating officer for LSU Athletics, and her co-presenter Clay Harris, deputy athletic director for launched the “Pentagon Plan,” which aims to address five key areas of concern for Louisiana: agriculture, coastal restoration, biomedical science, energy and defense.

“Perhaps more than any other institution in the nation, LSU has a vital role to play in securing our nation’s future through protecting our state,” Tate told Forbes.

What excites Tate most about the plan, he told Forbes, “is the role we will play in educating the next generation of leaders in each of these fields.”

Tate wasn’t the only Louisiana leader on the list. He was joined by Kim Hunter Reed, the state’s commissioner of higher education.

“There are other outstanding higher ed CEOs who are Black,” the Forbes article read, “but these 10 are indisputably among our nation’s best.” edited into a compilation of other demonstrations from corners of Germany, Turkey, Canada, Italy, South Korea, Iran and other countries. revenue generation, remained on message about their reasoning behind the contract.

“With a partnership like this, [Caesars] become one of our most high-level givers to LSU Athletics,

“We hold each other’s hands,” the other woman said, describing the video. “This is a human chain that we were doing in the U.S. to be united with all other so that’s a big part of this,” Harris said in favor of the contract. “They’re contributing a good bit of funds to this…and it’s a financial gain.”

The meeting adjourned a few people all over the world who are looking for freedom, looking for a just system, and looking for human rights and women rights.” questions later, but the tension remained, setting the stage for future clashes between the juggernaut of LSU Athletics and the more academically - focused Faculty Senate.