BATON ROUGE - The Bluff, located in the back of Southern University, overlooks the Mississippi River and has been a staple at the university since 1914.

"So this area means a lot because this is the landmark and the footprint where Southern University started," Ken Dawson, the System Director over Facilities at the university, said.

At one time, it was said to be like a bayou beach.

"It was kind of a sand bayou, it was a sandy area students we go down there and have incredible times," he said.

Over time, due to coastal erosion, the landscape has changed.

"It's definitely erosion. I mean, when you have hydraulics and hydrology of just the Mississippi River, I mean, the Mississippi River continues to flow, then you have also a situation where you have flooding," he said.

"There are times during the year when it's high flooding, and the water is almost at the edge of the bluff now. But when that water recedes, of course, it begins to pull back the earth and just pull back the land," Dawson said.

Southern University Alumnus General Russel Honore says concerns about The Bluff's stability became more noticeable around a decade ago.

"Working with Corps of Engineers at that time, they took a project to get the boar samplings done. And now it's time to move to the next phase," he said.

He says it will take congressional funding to back the next projects.

"This has to be appropriated money by the Congress, federal money, because it's not built into the Corps engineers, Army Corps of Engineers, budget," Honore said.

Dawson says they have begun looking at some initial designs.

"There's some surveying being done to try to see what it's going to take to do it, but it's not a small task. You may be looking about a $80 million to $100 million project," he said.

But today, he says support for the project does not have to wait.

"You can reach out to the Southern University Foundation, contribute to that, encourage our state legislatures, and encourage our national delegation to support getting appropriations and funding to take care of this," he said.

"Because the main thing is that if we don't, when we start to get to a point that we start to affect our buildings, on the infrastructure, then it's too late to report on the blow," he said.