By TODD HORNE, EXECUTIVE EDITOR
BATON ROUGE — The most revealing thing about Tuesday’s 9-3 committee vote on HB 608 was not that lawmakers advanced a secrecy bill. It was how many of them talked as if LSU, a public university, somehow stops being public once the money gets large, complicated, or embarrassing. That confusion is not a side issue. It is the whole problem.
It was listening to lawmakers talk as if LSU, a public university, somehow turns private the moment the money gets big enough, politically sensitive enough, or inconvenient enough to disclose.
That was the real spectacle in the room.
Not serious disagreement over where to draw a fair privacy line for student-athletes. Not a hard constitutional debate over competing public interests. Something stranger than that.
Too many lawmakers sounded as though they did not understand the most basic legal fact in front of them: LSU is a public university. Public. Not public when convenient and private when disclosure becomes uncomfortable. Public all the way through.
Yet several of them talked as though “public funds” only count when dollars arrive directly from the state treasury in a neat little appropriations box. If the money comes from tickets, television, sponsorships, donations, merchandise, or “self-generated revenue,” then maybe, in their telling, it somehow stops being the public’s business.
That is not serious legal reasoning.
That is civic ignorance.
A public university does not become private because it earns money. A public university does not become private because it has donors. A public university does not become private because its athletic department is rich, powerful, and politically protected.
LSU is a creature of the state. It operates on public authority, on public property, through public officials, under public law. When LSU receives money, controls money, allocates money, negotiates agreements, and creates records in the course of running its athletic programs, that is public business. Period.
What made the hearing so bizarre was watching lawmakers talk as if LSU Athletics is some kind of offshore private enterprise loosely parked next to campus.
It was absurd.
And that confusion poisoned the rest of the debate.
Because once lawmakers start from the warped premise that LSU can wall off records simply because the dollars are “self-generated,” then public accountability becomes optional. Then every public institution with enough revenue can start pretending it is functionally private. Then the public’s right to know becomes a loophole to be managed rather than a principle to be defended.
That is exactly why Wednesday’s hearing felt so unserious.
Too many lawmakers were not honestly wrestling with a hard public-records question. They were fumbling around with a broken premise, as if “public” only counts when money comes through the front door of the Capitol.
And that warped premise made it easier to hide what HB 608 actually does.
Supporters repeatedly sold the bill as a modest privacy measure for student-athletes. They talked about harassment. Stalking. Safety. Manipulation. They invoked the image of young athletes being exposed in ways that could place them at risk.
That is the political sales pitch.
It is not the full bill.
The engrossed version of HB 608 does not merely shield the amount paid to a specific athlete. It also shields “the total amount, and any percentage amount” of revenue-share funds allocated to “any specific intercollegiate sport or athletic program.” It further makes confidential any document related to the negotiation of those revenue-share agreements. The only thing the public gets to keep is the annual topline total the university spent through its revenue-sharing program.
In plain English, the bill lets the public know the size of the pie while hiding how the slices were cut.
That is not a narrow privacy bill.
That is institutional secrecy.
And the hearing exposed that clearly.
Opponents from the Louisiana Press Association and the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana warned the committee that HB 608 would block the public from learning how much goes to football, baseball, women’s basketball, gymnastics, golf, and every other sport. They argued, correctly, that the bill reaches well beyond the protection of individual athlete identities and instead hides how public universities allocate money across athletic programs.
That should have been the central issue.
Instead, supporters kept retreating into the safer, softer argument that critics just wanted to expose what individual kids make.
No. That was never the whole issue, and the text proves it. The bill is written to hide program-level allocations and negotiation documents too.
That is where the committee’s logic collapsed.
There is a serious difference between protecting personally identifying compensation details for athletes and shielding the institutional decision-making of a public university. Those are not the same thing. A legislature acting in good faith could have protected athlete names, private identifiers, and deal-specific personal details while still allowing disclosure of aggregate allocations by sport. HB 608 does not choose that narrower path. It chooses secrecy at both levels.
Why?
Because the real concern is not just privacy. The real concern is scrutiny.
LSU’s own testimony all but confirmed it.
Julie Cromer, LSU’s executive deputy athletics director, testified that LSU believes not only student-athlete information but also allocations across teams and programs should remain private. Asked directly about the section shielding revenue-share allocations by sport or program, Cromer defended keeping that information confidential as well.
That is the quiet part said out loud.
Once you admit that the university wants to hide team-by-team distributions too, the “privacy” label starts to fall apart. At that point, the bill is no longer just about protecting athletes from being harassed in class or online. It is about keeping the public from seeing LSU’s internal allocation strategy.
That may be useful to LSU.
It may be useful to coaches.
It may be useful in recruiting battles.
But it is not the same as a student-safety rationale, and lawmakers should have been honest enough to say so.
Instead, the hearing blurred categories every chance it got.
Supporters repeatedly mixed private NIL deals together with school-run revenue-sharing, as though they were all one thing. They talked about private companies, outside endorsement money, and deals made long before some athletes ever arrived on campus. But existing law already protects certain NIL contract documents. HB 608 is different. It adds new secrecy for records tied to an institution’s intercollegiate athletics revenue-sharing program. That is a separate legal question, and the hearing did not treat it with the precision it deserved.
Then came one of the most revealing evasions of the day: Title IX.
A lawmaker raised the obvious point. If the public cannot know what is being allocated by sport, how can anyone outside the institution meaningfully evaluate whether there may be inequities between men’s and women’s sports? Cromer’s answer was essentially that Title IX law is still evolving and the bill would not erase future obligations. That was not really an answer. The issue is not whether Title IX disappears. The issue is whether secrecy makes outside scrutiny harder. Obviously it does.
That is the pattern throughout HB 608.
It is overbroad in relation to its stated purpose.
If the purpose is athlete safety, why hide the percentage allocated to a sport? If the purpose is privacy, why hide negotiation documents? If disclosure itself is supposedly so dangerous, why leave the annual aggregate total public at all? The structure of the bill gives away the real game: the problem is not disclosure in general. The problem, for supporters, is disclosure of allocation choices.
That is why Wednesday’s hearing was so revealing.
Not just because lawmakers voted for secrecy.
Because too many of them seemed not to understand the basic nature of the institution they were protecting.
They spoke as if LSU were a private shell corporation wearing purple and gold. As if the public character of the university fades away once the revenue gets complicated or lucrative. As if “self-generated” means “none of your business.”
That is not how public universities work.
That is not how public accountability works.
And it should not be how Louisiana law works.
The committee could have demanded a narrower bill. It could have protected athlete identities without hiding sport-by-sport allocations. It could have insisted on a serious distinction between personal privacy and institutional secrecy. It could have recognized that a public university remains public even when the money comes through tickets, donors, or television contracts instead of a straight appropriation.
Instead, it bought the softer label and ignored the harder text.
So yes, HB 608 moved out of committee on a 9-3 vote.
But the most important thing that happened in that hearing was this:
A room full of lawmakers showed just how easily public accountability can be weakened when the people writing the law no longer seem to understand what “public” means.
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