Backlash Mounts Against Michigan State Board

When Michigan State University president Kevin Guskiewicz announced last week that he was leaving East Lansing to take the top job at Clemson University, the blame game over his exit began immediately.

Guskiewicz cast the first stone in his resignation announcement.

In a scathing letter, he accused the Board of Trustees of spending “too much energy” on “revisiting past conflicts and internal disagreements rather than focusing collectively on the opportunities and aspirations ahead of us.” He also blamed trustees for “publicly undermining decisions and putting personal interests above the best interests” of the campus community. In addition, Guskiewicz wrote that they abused “their access to privileged and confidential information to mispresent [sic] facts, manipulate situations and selectively use and leak that information to promote personal agendas.”

The rare public rebuke by an outgoing president came less than two weeks after the board offered Guskiewicz a $1 million raise to stay. Instead, he spurned Michigan State and took a pay cut.

The board has since responded by blaming one another for the dysfunction at Michigan State, where Guskiewicz is the second president to resign since 2022. His predecessor, Samuel Stanley Jr., also chastised trustees on his way out.

Now, amid the finger-pointing, Michigan State is set to embark on another presidential search. As the trustees begin that effort, lawmakers across the state are calling for their removal and pushing for changes to overhaul a board that seems perpetually embroiled in controversy.

Trading Accusations

Board chair Brianna Scott directly blamed her fellow trustees for driving Guskiewicz away.

“The decision that he made is the direct result of an unsustainable environment created by the unfettered and disruptive behaviors of three of my colleagues on the board,” Scott told Michigan State’s student newspaper, The State News. “These individuals routinely use their positions of public trust, not to govern, but as weapons against our administrators and our presidents.”

She did not name those trustees or respond to requests for comment from Inside Higher Ed.

But it seems likely that two of the colleagues she was referring to were Rema Vassar and Dennis Denno, both of whom were found to have violated the board’s code of conduct in 2024. An external investigation that year found that Vassar and Denno interfered with university investigations and litigation and encouraged personal attacks on a faculty member, among other transgressions. Vassar was also found to have accepted private air travel and courtside tickets to basketball games from a donor. Both pushed back on the report’s findings.

(Inside Higher Ed reached out to all eight Michigan State board members. Only one responded and agreed to speak, but they did not reply to subsequent emails about setting up a time for an interview.)

Trustees have also clashed over a new policy that restricts the speech of individual board members who disagree with the consensus. The policy—approved on a 5-to-3 vote the same night the board awarded Guskiewicz a $1 million raise—calls on trustees to support decisions made by a board majority or face sanctions. Scott has denied the policy restricts speech and said it clarifies expectations around trustee conduct.

But two trustees who refused to sign the order—and were punished by the university, which barred them from attending a recent conference with policymakers—argued that the policy restricts their First Amendment rights and sets an alarming precedent for public university boards.

Vassar and Mike Balow, the two trustees who refused to sign, blasted the policy in a live-streamed press conference on the steps of the Michigan State Capitol Wednesday.

“If a public university can sanction an elected official for refusing to sign a loyalty pledge, the principle of free, democratic representation is at risk,” Vassar argued. “It’s un-American.”

Since Michigan State trustees are elected, they argued that the approved gag order is an extraordinary restriction on public officials and limits their ability to communicate with voters.

Free speech advocates have also taken a dim view of it.

Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, condemned the policy in a letter sent to the Michigan State board and shared with Inside Higher Ed.

“That trustees’ criticism might ‘undermine’ the administration or Board decisions—or even contribute to a president’s voluntary resignation—does not make it a legitimate target of censorship. Michigan deliberately chose a system in which the governing boards of its flagship public universities are elected directly by the people. Trustees cannot fulfill their oversight role without being free to openly express their views about university issues and leadership,” he wrote. “The Board has no legitimate interest, much less a compelling one, in limiting the ‘free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern,’ including speech by the public’s elected representatives. That exchange of ideas ‘is the essence of self-government.’”

State lawmakers have also expressed skepticism about the restrictions on trustee speech, which Republican Sen. Jim Runestad said amounted to “a censorship agreement” and would serve to “silence dissent” on the board.

Proposed Changes

The recent dysfunction has prompted statewide conversations about shifting Michigan from an elected to an appointed board model. A bipartisan push in the Legislature to do so ultimately failed Wednesday, despite the support of Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and business leaders.

The recent situation at Michigan State “underscores why we need stable, accountable, and consistent leadership at our public universities. The way we’ve selected board members needs to change,” Whitmer said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed. “The bipartisan proposal to appoint university board members would help ensure institutions have the leadership and expertise to get things back on track.”

Under the current system, candidates are nominated for university boards at political conventions. Voters then decide which candidates are seated for eight-year board terms. The University of Michigan and Wayne State University boards are constituted in the same manner as MSU, though the governor appoints board members at the state’s other public universities.

But changing the process to an appointed model at all public universities would require voter approval, because the state Constitution specifies that the boards of UM, Michigan State and Wayne State must be elected. The proposal that failed this week in the Michigan House—which sought both to remove current board members at those three institutions and to ask voters to decide on an elected or appointed model—needed a supermajority to pass but received only 52 votes in favor and 54 against.

(A similar effort also failed in 2023, though it did not receive a vote in the State Legislature.)

By Thursday a new plan emerged: Sam Singh, a Democratic senator who represents East Lansing, proposed changes to how board members are nominated. While his proposal keeps elected boards intact, it requires candidates to be selected via primary elections, rather than the current process, in which parties select nominees at their political conventions. The proposal is currently before the Senate’s Government Operations committee.

Elected vs. Appointed?

Isabel McMullen, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison studying higher education governance, is skeptical that a shift from an elected to appointed board model would bring the board changes that constituents want. Appointment processes lack transparency, she argued, and handpicked boards can still be rife with conflict or packed with ideologues.

She noted a lack of research to determine the efficacy of appointed versus elected boards.

But as Michigan lawmakers look to fix what many see as a broken Michigan State board, McMullen pointed out that more states are adding faculty and student trustees to governing bodies. She said, “It’s really important to have those positions, even if they’re nonvoting,” because such members often bring needed higher education expertise to boards.

Michigan State Faculty Senate chair John Aerni-Flessner said that’s the kind of change he would welcome. Aerni-Flessner is agnostic on appointed versus elected boards, noting that both can be problematic. But he argued that the current process for seating trustees yields “people who are very good at getting through the party-nominating process, who are good at winning a statewide election, but who don’t necessarily have a lot of experience with higher education.”

He believes the current dysfunction at Michigan State has little to do with whether members are appointed or elected. Rather, he thinks something fundamental broke during the 2018 Larry Nassar episode, when it was revealed that the Michigan State doctor had sexually abused more than 250 young women and teenagers. Instead of responding appropriately, he said, the board at the time betrayed institutional values, pivoted to a cover-up and failed to ask hard questions.

“The long reverberations of the Nassar scandal are still playing out here,” Aerni-Flessner said.

Faculty, he said, just want to focus on the basics of higher education: teaching and research. And as a presidential search gets underway, he hopes the board can focus more on the needs of finding stable leadership for the institution than scoring pugilistic points off one another.

“We need stability at the top. Maybe our next president needs to be a boring Midwestern dean or the equivalent,” Aerni-Flessner said. “Someone who wants to come in here and help us focus on our core mission, who isn’t going to get sidetracked by bigger debates and who’s going to lead us for a decent amount of time, so we don’t have to think about presidential transitions and board politics.”