Yet, 35 years after leaving campus, I worry that football success has obscured L.S.U.'s escalating academic ambition and its struggle to maintain excellence over the past three years in the face of about $50 million in state appropriation cuts and the loss of a tenth of its faculty.
The Hall of Science will have its appropriation cut by $230,000, to $1.4 million -- a significant reduction but a marked improvement over the $580,000 decline required by the mayor's executive budget.
As for the Corp. for Public Broadcasting-public television-federal appropriations were cut back.
Last month, a House appropriations subcommittee cut back on the administration's 2004 budget request for the arms, citing organizational disarray among the nation's bomb makers and calling "pursuit of a broad range of new initiatives premature".
A few weeks ago, the Republican-controlled appropriations committee cut the Securities and Exchange Commission's fiscal 2012 budget request by $222.5 million, to $1.19 billion (the same as this year's), even though the S.E.C.'s responsibilities were vastly expanded under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
Last month, the House appropriations committee cut the agency's requested 2016 budget for census-related activities by $374 million.
Overall, the $45.2 billion bill (S. 3216) approved on 22 May by the Senate's Committee on Appropriations would cut DHS's total budget of $46.2 billion by about $1 billion over 2012 levels in the fiscal year that begins 1 October.
A bill approved by the House of Representative's committee on appropriations would cut funding for a number of cultural organizations, including the National Endowment for the Arts, whose budget would be slashed to $75 million for the 2014 fiscal year, a 49% decrease from the agency's funding for 2013 before the budget sequester.
In its draft report last week it recommended that the Smithsonian's federal appropriation be cut by $225 million, or roughly 30 percent, and that the institution make up the loss by charging a $7.50 admission fee.
When his appropriation was cut off in 1892, Powell sent a terse telegram to Marsh demanding his resignation, a personal slight as well as a financial one.
