If Robert Mann were a right-wing blowhard, he'd be all over cable TV, celebrated as the latest and greatest example of a American hero willing to stand up the Stasi Thought Police.
In 2021, Louisiana's then Attorney General Jeff Landry demanded that Bob be "punished" for calling out Landry's anti-vax nonsense. And in 2023, Jeff Landry was elected governor.
Bob respectfully announced his retirement at the end of the school year, not wanting to put a target on the back on an institution he loves. He then spent his last year as the Manship Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University saying goodbye to the profession he loved.. And now he's moving on to write books and author his newsletter Something Like the Truth, where he can say whatever he wants about Jeff Landy.
But everyone in America should know the name Robert Mann. Not just because he's the author of several books, including Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU, but also because he's a particularly poignant example of how the thin-skin of wannabe dictators harms all of society with their intolerance for the truth.
The state of Louisiana has taken a bleak turn under Landry, who is following in the path of his fellow Southern demagogues Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott. But the new governor has a distinctive passion for putting people, especially certain people, in prison.
We spoke to Bob about his decision, why civility is a trap, and what the last dictator in America could teach us about the man currently running to be dictator.
And you should definitely check out Bob’s Last Lecture at LSU.
Catch up on all the episodes of “How are you feeling about democracy?” here.
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TRANSCRIPT
Jason Sattler: You stepped down from a job you loved the day after Jeff Landry was elected governor of Louisiana. Do you mind explaining what prompted that decision and how you're feeling about it right now?
Bob Mann: Yeah. This is my last day of teaching. So I announced my retirement. I didn't actually step down on that day, but began planning to do that.
The backstory is that about two and a half years ago Landry when he was attorney general of Louisiana was spreading a lot of lies and misinformation about the COVID vaccine and discouraging businesses and schools and others from imposing any kind of mandate or strengthening their COVID prevention protocols. This is in the midst of the pandemic still. And so I am and was then on the Faculty Senate pushing LSU, my institution to do more to just do more to protect students, faculty, and staff. And Landry sent an aide to read a letter that was just full of lies and misinformation about vaccines.
And so I called him out on it on Twitter. And he took offense and went to the president of the university, who's still the president, and asked for me to be punished or fired, reprimanded. I, I don't really know. They had a phone conversation, so I'm not entirely sure what he demanded they do to me or with me. This guy was clearly running for governor at the time, and I knew it was very likely that he would be governor. So I began at that time thinking if he becomes governor, I'm going to have to get out of here because I don't want my presence on the faculty to be a problem. I have tenure, but my school does not, my department does not, and there's just a lot here that I care about that I don't want to see hurt by Landry or by the government.
So the morning after he won I just sent an email to my dean and said, "I'm retiring at the end of the year." I just wanted to take myself out of the equation. I didn't want to be the bullseye on the back of our school. Not that I'm the only reason that or even the main reason why Jeff Landry and his allies in the legislature would want to hurt LSU. But I just couldn't live with myself thinking that I might be the reason that, that this, that the school that I worked for 18 years would be damaged in some way.
Jason Sattler: Or the excuse, because, all they're looking for is an excuse to, to damage LSU.
Bob Mann: Or the excuse, yeah exactly.
Jason Sattler: That's a beautiful thing you said. You said you have tenure, but your school and your department..
Bob Mann: Yeah, that's right.
We're in the middle of a legislative session where the governor and his allies are trying to get greater, they already have a lot of control over institutions of higher learning in Louisiana, like governors do in most states, if not every state. But Landry will soon appoint 7 of the 15 LSU Board of Supervisors members. So he still won't have a majority on that board. But there are lawmakers who are pushing bills that he supports right now that would give him the ability to appoint the LSU president, to name the chair of the LSU board, and to basically take over and run LSU and run every public institution of higher learning in the state as an extension of his political organization. It would be very much like making Huey Long governor again and giving him all the power and in some cases more power than long had over colleges and universities in the state.
Jason Sattler: We spoke to Carol Anderson and she talked about how bad ideas spread very quickly from state to state in the South. It's the history of reconstruction ending. What do you think that people need to know about what's going on broadly in Louisiana under Jeff Landry that could quickly spread elsewhere?
Bob Mann: I think he is he's learned a lot and he's learned all the wrong lessons. I think there's a lot to learn from DeSantis and and Greg Abbott.
Who I think are the two most pugnacious governors in the South. And I think he's learned a lot from them and he's, people would ask me during the campaign and since he became governor, what do you expect from him? And I say I think you probably should just look at Florida and Texas and you'll, it'll, you'll be pretty close to what he plans to do.
They've had a few years head start on him, but I I think he may be a little bit more like Abbott in the sense that I don't sense that Abbott has used his platform as a launching pad for a presidential campaign, as DeSantis did. I'm not convinced that Landry is looking to run for president. But he may be but I see him more, maybe more from the political calculation of it all to be just a garden variety Southern demagogue like Greg Abbott with, without grander aspirations.
Jason Sattler: DeSantis launched like a, one of those SpaceX rockets that people were supposed to be impressed that almost got out of the atmosphere. But that's a really good point is that, Abbott and DeSantis have really set the mold for how this is happening. There's one focus that Landry seemed to have that seems a little different to me . And this is his obsession with incarceration and law and order. One of the first things he did is they're sending kids back to adult prisons and they're just, the intention seems to be ballooning the prison system in Louisiana, which I believe is already so impacted that there's a court order about how they're supposed to deal with that.
What do you think is behind his obsession with incarceration?
Bob Mann: If he ran on anything when he was running for governor , it was crime. Obviously he had no political reason to do this, but instead of talking about it honestly, which this was a spike in crime that the criminologists will rightly , I think, say that was a result of events in and around COVID, the pandemic... It was a spike that happened everywhere, not just Louisiana. It happened across the country. And when I say spike, that the implication is that it was a shooting up and a dropping down, and it's falling everywhere just about. And it's falling in Louisiana, it's falling in New Orleans and other big cities.
But that's not a politically useful way to explain it. It was more politically useful to him to say that his, the incumbent governor then John Bel Edwards had passed a lot of sensible reforms that a lot of Republicans supported, by the way, a lot of conservative organizations were behind it. In fact, leading in one, one of them, the Pelican Institute, which is very close to Landry was helping lead the way. And plowing those savings by not keeping people who don't need to be in prison for the rest of their lives in prison for the rest of their lives, plowing those savings back into re entry programs and making sure that the people who do get out have the infrastructure and the support they need to survive and not become recidivists was working. But he blamed it. And there's no evidence, there's zero evidence that those reforms, those sensible reforms were the cause for our increase in crime because other states didn't do what we did. And they still had the same kind of spike in crime. But the public bought it.
And they bought it because the sheriffs and the district attorneys wanted Landry. He spoke their language. He had been attorney general. He had been close to them. And I know he promised them more parish prisons. More than half of the prisoners in the state reside in parish prisons. And the state pays sheriffs to house these prisoners because it's cheaper to house a prisoner in a parish jail than it is to build a new penitentiary for them. So it's big money for a lot of these sheriffs. And so I think they, they were happy to support Landry because he knew they were, he was going to send them a lot of new warm bodies and $25,000 to $30,000 a year per body.
It helps them employ a lot more people and build a lot more, infrastructure in their parishes and become a lot more powerful. We were once the incarceration capital of the world. We dropped a little bit in that category and now we're going right back up. The sad part about it is that it was done by quote unquote "fiscal conservatives" who were completely heedless of the cost of this thing. In fact, they said, it doesn't really matter. We don't even need to give you a. A fiscal note on this, we don't need to tell you what it would cost, because that doesn't matter. We just need to start putting all these people back in jail. So those bills just sailed through, and we're right back to where we were. In fact, we'll be worse off than where we were. Because he didn't just revert us back to the pre-John Bell Edwards situation. He made it worse. So there are going to be a lot more people, a lot higher percentage of people going to prison in the state than before those reforms.
Jason Sattler: Is there a dog whistle to this whole kind of law and order bent that Landry has ? Is this about dividing the populace racially?
Bob Mann: I think so. I think so. They're pretty careful and crafty about how they use it. But if you say violent criminals in this state , most white people think of a black person. It's just a fact. They get offended when you say that, but we all know what that means. That's a dog whistle.
And the reason I think we know that is because the criminal justice system in this state and just about every other state is really good at sending black people to prison. They're, they're a th they're a third. of the population in the state, but they're two thirds of prison population in the state. This is, you start saying you're going to send more people to prison by definition in this state, you're going to send two times as many black people to prison as you're going to send white people to prison.
Jason Sattler: That kind of speaks to your ability to get beyond civility, which I loved in your last lecture. You ranted against civility. Why do you think civility has this amazing reputation in political discourse that they were always supposed to appeal to it? And the worst thing you could be called is "uncivil".
Bob Mann: Yeah, it is. I think that The one, several things. And I think for purposes of, the way I teach it to my students is that the people who run this institution, and I think you could just say -- when I say institution, you could say any organization that you want to challenge to change, that you wanna protest against -- the leaders of that institution use civility as a weapon.
Apply this to what's going on at Columbia and UCLA and Tulane and my state and other places around the country, the leaders of these institutions, they want civility, meaning that they don't want anybody challenging them and they define incivility is as anything they don't like any behavior that makes them uncomfortable. It causes them the least inconvenience becomes incivility. And so I tell my students when they say they want you to behave in a civilized manner, they're wanting to civilize you. In other words, they want to control you. They want to control and dictate how you speak to them. And the way I put it, the way I tell my students is that's, being civil is perfectly fine in a church, at Thanksgiving dinner. I don't think you should shout with your crazy drunk uncle who loves Trump. I think civility has its place and it's the appropriate behavior for a lot of situations.
Jason Sattler: If you're watching Beetlejuice, you're in a musical, you're in the audience, you should be civil then.
Bob Mann: Exactly. Yeah, precisely. Strangely enough, I do not have to tell my students not to engage in sex acts in a...
Jason Sattler: Because they're not members of Congress, right?
Bob Mann: Yeah, exactly. But in politics, in activism , civility is a tactic, not a virtue. Don't let them make it a virtue because the minute they try to make it a virtue, then anything you do, any protest, no matter how civil it is, no matter how, how nonviolent it is it becomes a reason to punish you, to crush you, to silence you.
Don't protest through their paradigm and it's just, it just pervades our society right now. Because if you ask any, if you ask anybody on the street, just the random person, what's the worst thing that's going on in our politics right now, they're not going to say, "Oh, it's the way our legislature, our Congress crushes the poor. It's all the human rights violations that we support in the world. " They're going to say "We just, we need to be nicer to one another." And that's somehow the problem. And that was the problem in the Vietnam war. That was the problem in the civil rights movement. That was the problem that they had with John Brown.
In fact, you go back to the Founding Fathers, that was John Adams' big thing. Anybody disagreed with him as a mob. And it's just a way that leaders generally across the board try to control people who they don't want coming to their office and pointing out their mistakes. And so I just tell students that if behaving in a civil way, the way they define civility, gets you what you want, then do that. But if there's a more effective way to do it within the law, and if that includes a protest, a sit in or, a boycott or whatever it is, an angry speech with a bullhorn, then you do that.
Look I'm very conscious of advising my students not to break the law. I don't want them to go vandalize buildings. And if they do break the law, I do think that they need to be ready to face consequences for that. That's also a big aspect of our tradition in this country. A way I put it is that you, if you're going to break the law, you want to be arrested. You shouldn't protest being arrested. You should be strategic about it. I want to get arrested. I want to get hauled off.
The civil rights protesters in Birmingham, they didn't like being hosed down, but that was the reason they did it. They wanted to provoke Bull Connor into violence against them. And I think a lot of maybe young activists aren't fully aware of the history of creative nonviolence. And so when the authorities do what they want to do instead of, taking it because that's what they're supposed to do and that's what helps their cause, they didn't expect that. When that's what you should have expected. That's what you should have wanted. That should be the, that should be the reason for doing what you're doing.
Jason Sattler: And you practice what you preach in the sense that you had also in your speech, you talked about welcoming criticism as hard as that can be as a professor.
What did you learn from your student critics?
Bob Mann: I told the story in my last lecture about my first semester here teaching when the student came to me one day about, I don't know third of the way through the semester and said, can I yeah. Can I have some? Can I be honest with you? And I said, yeah.
And he said, you're losing this class. You're just, and he just raked me over the goals and told me everything that I was doing wrong. And I don't know. Maybe I already knew that I was messing up. I could just you can sense whether things are going well in a room if you're attentive.
And so maybe I just knew he was right. I didn't have a way, I didn't have words to put to what was wrong, but he was able to do that. So I took his advice and did most of what he suggested and adjusted the class and adjusted my way of teaching. And things went really well.
I just remember thinking, "Wow, I'm really glad that young man did that."
So I built it into every class. Maybe in some cases I wasn't as explicit as I was in others. But I always tried to tell my students, "Look, if I'm not giving you your money's worth, if you're not getting from me, if you're not getting out of this class what you think you deserve, if you have a problem with something I'm doing or the way this class is going or the way, you should come to me. I don't want to find out about this at the end of the semester when it's too late to do anything about it because I read an unfavorable course evaluation. Tell me now. You have a right to my best efforts and I'm not going to promise you that every time you come to me and tell me I ought to do this or that I'm going to do it. But I will listen to you. And I will take into account and be respectful of your criticism."
And I know most students didn't do that. They're just trying to get through. They're not trying to make trouble. But some of them did. Some of them did. And after a while, what I decided I was going to do was I wanted the course evaluations that most universities make students fill out at the end of the semester are worthless. So I made the final assignment in every class for the last I don't know, 10 years, 10, 12 years that they had to write me a four page memo telling me what I did wrong, basically. It wasn't the only part of the memo, but a lot of it was, "What could we have done better? What could I have done better? What would be a better experience for the next group of students who comes behind me?"
And I have used those memos to improve the course every semester. And it's been really valuable. I think in every walk, a lot of people ought to be looking for that kind of constructive criticism and inviting it because I just think it makes you a better person all around.
Jason Sattler: And it's something authoritarians just cannot stomach. If hierarchy is your only motivation in life, criticism is not something you can really invite , which is pretty telling given your situation.
Something I've never really thought about before is students owning the campus. They're more than consumers they're the people who actually have the highest stake in the campus. I'm supportive generally of people who are protesting for Human rights in Gaza because it's desperately needed at this time. But I hadn't actually thought about that those students actually have a huge stake in the campus they're on. Of course , they're gonna have to suffer the consequences because the law doesn't necessarily recognize that.
How does that inform your way of looking at these protests?
Bob Mann: I do think we have to distinguish between private universities and public institutions. So I probably wouldn't say to a Columbia student, "You own this campus" or to Fordham students, "You own this campus." But I still would say, "You have a much larger say, and you should have a much larger say in how things go here, than the people who run this place are willing to give you."
Not to get all religious on you or anything but it's very well established in almost every religion that that God favors the poor. Those are the people who are closest to him, and I would say that we ought to adopt that kind of attitude in higher education that God favors the student that the people who are the most important people here. They're the reason we're here.
Bob Mann: In my department and almost every place we value research more than teaching. Some departments value teaching more than others. I think mine does, thankfully. But research at an R1 university like mine is the gold standard. And I think that's really wrong.
I'm not saying it should be less than teaching, but we really ought to elevate teaching and serving students more than we do. We just don't. The way I put it in my last lecture is, "If you want to know what's really going on a campus, you want to know what's really wrong. You want to know who's getting screwed over. You want to know how things could be better, the average president or administrator his or her first idea is to go hire McKinsey or somebody like that and pay him half a million dollars to give him some report." And I guarantee you that you'd get a lot better information if you put a student committee together or went to students in a curriculum like mine, went to a professor like me and say, "Hey, could I, Could we have five or six of your students and work, work on this project this semester to make this thing better or to figure out what's wrong with this thing and how we could, what we need to be doing?"
It wouldn't cost them anything and they'd get better results. They get a much better information. But That's it's just it's a crime to me. That's not the first inclination when something goes wrong on a campus to go talk to the students. They just don't. They faculty talk to each other, administrators talk to each other and administrators talk to their wealthy friends and they talk to consultants. And that's just, it's just so messed up.
Jason Sattler: That says something about who the administrators of these campuses are. . We have this reputation of like our universities are these liberal hotbeds or left-wing hotbeds. I don't know that anyone who has that view, either is purposely spreading propaganda or has never actually come across people who work in administration.
What do people need to know about the administrators of public and private universities?
Bob Mann: A lot of them haven't spent much time at all in a classroom. Some of them have never been in a classroom. There are a lot of, we, we see more and more the sort of the corporate politic politician presidents who who were never, it didn't come up through academia at all. And so they've never taught in a classroom, never, never had to hold office hours, never had to grade papers, never had to deal with, with the kind of problems that an average faculty member has to deal with in a day. So they, they're just completely disconnected from what goes on outside the the oak panel walls of their offices. A lot of them don't really get out much.
The other thing is that there are a lot of people in administration who did come up that way, they're, they, that's, they became an associate dean and then a dean and then a vice provost or a provost and eventually a president or whatever. But many of them, they've been away from teaching for so long that they've, I think they've forgotten about what it's about.
And here's the other thing that I always tell my students and others about higher education that once you get above the tenured professor, associate and associate and full professor ranks, everybody above you is a coward. Everybody above you is a abject coward. Because everybody who's in is who's in any kind of administration from associate dean to vice provost to name the academic position, the administrative position, none of those jobs have, none of those jobs have tenure. They're all there to serve this one guy or this one woman that's sitting at the top of the hierarchy. They all are worried . They all wake up every day worried, is this going to be the week that I lose my job?
Is this going to be the week I fall out of favor? And they have no desire or even the ability to speak truth to power. And so that's the other thing is that, you're rarely going to get the truth from an administrator, a dean or anybody like that because they're not, they're just generally not suicidal people. They're climbers and they all see themselves as a provost or a president someday and they're not going to rock the boat. And so they just, they have no desire or no inclination to do that to do anything that makes anyone uncomfortable.
Maybe there are institutions and I'm sure there are where there's a much healthier environment where there's a much leaner upper administration that is closer to the student body. That's probably a smaller, liberal arts colleges, where people are having to maybe teach a course in addition to running whatever program they run. I think those are probably much healthier organizations. But the bigger the organization becomes, the less connected the upper administration is from the student body. And I think the worse the student experience is, probably.
Jason Sattler: To tie this a bit into the research since that's so important to the university, your new book is about Huey Long. Can you give us some background on what the average person should know about him? And is there anything we can learn from him about another guy who at least sometimes pretends to be a populist, who is currently the third time presidential nominee for the Republican Party?
Bob Mann: Yes. So Huey Long was governor of Louisiana in from 1928 to 32, and then was elected to the Senate and and served one term before he was assassinated in the halls of the Louisiana State Capitol in September of 1935 and was probably the I guess the last person in American politics, certainly on a state level, who you would call a dictator. If not a dictator an authoritarian, but I would say pretty close to being a dictator. He ran Louisiana with an iron fist, every aspect of it. Even when he became U. S. Senator, he continued to run Louisiana. He began to basically begin to, he basically continued to operate as the de facto governor and political boss of of Louisiana.
He ran every aspect of the state. And he did it all legally. They passed laws to give the governor vast powers, including naming appointing every school teacher, municipal officials in almost every corner of Louisiana. If you were seen as an opponent or you weren't willing to support publicly or financially the Long organization, you lost your job. And that's the bad side of the guy.
I wrote the book because he also fell in love with my institution of LSU and dragged it out of its mediocrity, dragged it out of obscurity, some of it on the back of a football team and a band. But he turned within a few years, he turned LSU, a middling second rate, third rate institution and a backwater town in South Louisiana, into an institution that was known around the country. And was respected enough within a few years, because he was pouring money, resources and building new buildings and all, that amazing scholars including Robert Penn Warren were willing to come here. And so my book was about that, how this authoritarian governor fell in love with the university, embraced it and and, pulled it out of pulled it out of obscurity and made it a national player.
Jason Sattler: Well, that does sound like it could be a template for, Donald Trump. The bad part, not the LSU part, which is fascinating. Didn't even know that. Great story. Making everything legal things seems especially relevant given given what we're seeing from Project 2025, et cetera.
I've been thinking of Putin as a template for Donald Trump. But it seems like Huey Long might be a better model for Trump's third term?
Bob Mann: Oh, absolutely.
Jason Sattler: Or second Trump term, sorry.
Bob Mann: He would say third. Yeah, maybe I can amend my remarks. Long didn't do everything legally. I think he stretched the law and probably broke the law in some cases. But he had a legislature that was willing to do whatever he wanted . So it was a lot easier to pass a law and do what you wanted, then to do what you wanted to get sued and spend the next two years in court. If you're gonna be a dictator, your life is a lot easier if you can just get your toadies in the in the Congress or the legislature just to give you legal authority to do whatever nefarious stuff you wanna do. As bad as it may be, if it's legal, it's probably gonna at least keep you outta the courts. And you'll be able to say I'm only doing what the elected representatives allowed me to do.
Jason Sattler: That could be good news for Palm Beach State College if Trump happens to fall in love with it and decides to make it into a world-class institution. It seems really bad for the rest of us.
Your plan, if I understood correctly, is to stay in Louisiana. I'm sure that's for the food. For people who live in these deep red states and recognize that their leadership is never going to really represent them, what do you advise as we face November and the years ahead that they could do to make their case for democracy?
Bob Mann: Yeah, I had a column for a long time in the Times Picayune, and I, lost that. I hadn't been writing a lot of political commentary. But when Landry got elected , I decided to start up a Substack mainly just to try to keep people in the game. For anybody who cared what I thought, that I would at least tell them that this is not the end of the fight, this is the beginning of the fight .Landry is never going to be more popular than he is right now.
He's not as smart and as strategic as people maybe thought he would be would be. He's already making mistakes. His power will wane. When it does, we need to be willing to, we need to be ready to take advantage of it. We need to be willing to drive a wedge where there's an opening. I think a lot of people's inclination, and including mine, briefly, was to just leave this place. Just get the hell out of here. This is no longer a free state. The vandals are in charge, and let's just get the hell out of here. Maybe there will come a day when I decide to do that too. But as long as I'm going to be here, I decided I just want to, I want to give people... And I'm not the only one doing it and I'm not the, I'm not the one doing it most effectively, I know. But I just felt like we need to fight, we need to challenge this guy. We need to point out when he's lying, when he's doing something wrong. And eventually I think the truth I think eventually decency will catch up with him.
It may not happen as quickly as we want it to, it may not happen as completely as we want it to. But I think eventually it will .And I think we've also got to be willing, and this goes, I'm talking to people who are thinking about their own state politics or national politics, is that you've got to be willing to settle for incremental success. And you can't demand it all or nothing from even your allies you've got to, you've got to give them some room to operate. If you've got a guy who you don't agree with on a lot of stuff, but he or she is willing to oppose Landry on a couple of things then build an alliance with that person, encourage them don't make them an enemy, give them some room to operate and and help them .
We have to be strategic and I haven't always been a strategic because I advise people to be, I admit. But I just think that the other side, and this is what I tell when anybody asks me to speak, I say the other side wants you to give up. They're hoping we will give up. Landry wanted to come into office, with this shock and awe, pass a bunch of bills that we all hated. And convince us that opposition was futile and we would just all leave and go away. And that's what he wants us to do. Don't do that. Keep fighting him and eventually we'll get some victories. And I think that's already starting to happen. It is already starting to happen. There is opposition building in the legislature to some of what he wants to do. He's making some mistakes and he will continue to make those mistakes.
And so we got to stay in the fight and I would say the same thing goes for even if Trump is elected, God forbid. My inclination is going to be to move to Ireland. I'm just telling you. I'm going to have a long conversation with myself about staying here and fighting, not just turning the whole country over to this guy.
Jason Sattler: Few people have made the kind of stand that you've made, and I think it's incredible story and it's an incredible career and I hate that you had to do it. But it's been a pleasure to talk to you and I'm glad I had this excuse to do it.
Bob Mann: Thank you, Jason. It's been great. I love following you on Twitter and I look forward to, to, to continuing to laugh along with you.
"Civility is a tactic, not a virtue" with Robert Mann