By John Lindstrom
Publisher
Posted: February 16, 2018 1:28 PM

In the last few weeks this reporter was in a Lansing area restaurant when one of the Michigan State University trustees came in with a friend. They shared a glass of wine while sitting in a corner. While this reporter watched, no one came over to the trustee to criticize him, denounce him, demand he resign the university.

All this may be apropos of nothing, except that at least in the Lansing area right now the only person more hated than the MSU trustees is convicted sex offender Larry Nassar himself. The university’s stunning failure to stop Nassar from sexually abusing girls and young women led not only to his conviction and the resignation of former President Lou Anna Simon, it has led the university’s faculty governance to pass a vote of no-confidence in the trustees. Another group calling itself the concerned faculty of MSU has posted an online petition that among other things demanded the trustees hold public hearings so the public could tell the trustees what they thought of them and then resign or be impeached.

And there’s been a series of newspaper editorials, including one from The New York Times, demanding the board members resign. As of this writing they have not done so.

And of course politics is part of the furious response as well.

Constitutional provisions have been introduced – HJR DD which would require the elected governing boards of MSU, the University of Michigan and Wayne State University be appointed by the governor as are all the other university boards and HJR EE that would limit the elected governing boards to four-year terms instead of the current eight years – but their potential success is uncertain. Both Democrats and Republicans like being able to nominate and elect folks to those boards.

Out of the horror of the Nassar scandal one issue not been talked about much is the potential effect it could have on all Michigan’s public universities. When lawmakers talk about change, they are not focusing on one school but all 15 universities. To date, even with three elected boards, the universities have been able to steer largely clear of rocks and sandbars that state politics can hide.

In recent years, universities in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Mississippi – where lawmakers and governors have greater authority over the universities – have been subject to fights and confrontations. Go back even further in history where in states like Texas and Washington, the legislatures enacted huge increases in tuition costs, not one penny of which went to the universities. Instead, those increases went to the states’ general funds.

Michigan does have a constitutional provision guaranteeing university autonomy. And the universities have used it both to the approval and annoyance of the Legislature and the public.

But there are other ways to assert political control and one of those could be making it that all university boards are appointed by the governor. Supporters say the fact those appointments would be subject to the Senate’s advice and consent provisions which would head off the possibility that politics would enter into university operations. But would it really?

What would be the odds that given the power to select all university governing boards a gubernatorial candidate, from any party, would not promise to select persons who reflect certain beliefs and values? Given certain political moods at different times, how likely is it those boards accountable to a governor and not the people or the university itself could resist being used to accommodate those moods?

That the governor can now name the governing boards of 10 schools and they do not kowtow to political whims may actually be more a benefit of MSU, UM and WSU’s boards being elected. Because they are truly accountable to the electorate at large that helps provide some cover to the other university boards. Lawmakers know there is effectively little they can do to force universities to bend one way or another so long as the three major schools are free from them.

But the shock and disgust at MSU does show that change is needed, yet it is a change that can be enacted not by law but only by collective will. The trustees or regents or governors or whatever they are called need to take it upon themselves to behave as true oversight agents. They need to insist on open accountability, on a public review of budgets, procedures, practices, contract review, personnel policies, academic certifications, student issues and the like.

A university president once told this reporter that governing boards should not question the school’s administration but accept that the administration has thought out the best options and enact them. If nothing else, the Nassar debacle demonstrates that governing boards should make university administrations squirm a bit and stand up to tough questioning.

If governing boards did do that, the MSU trustee might still drink his wine in blissful anonymity, but also could tell anyone who might ask that more was being done to ensure the best governance of a university.