The kerfuffle inside the Michigan Democratic Party over who won a nomination for the Michigan State University Board of Trustees is being treated as a dispute about convention procedures and vote counting.
But the bigger issue is who will hold power over one of the state’s most influential public institutions — and whether university board members will provide meaningful oversight and move beyond their past function as ribbon cutters and rubber stampers.
Using unofficial convention results, the party declared incumbent trustee Kelly Tebay the winner over State Sen. Sylvia Santana, D-Detroit. Santana has appealed the convention count, citing widely reported irregularities. Her independent forensic review showed a different outcome.
This debate is about more than internal party politics. As taxpayers, we don’t need a cheerleading squad behind the board table, or board members who throw up their hands and smile when a university goes $100 million over budget in a $200 million project, as happened recently at MSU. We need people with a genuine vision who speak up when things aren’t going right at our institutions, ask the hard questions, demand accountability and provide real oversight.
Many voters still don’t realize how much power these boards hold — or how much their decisions cost the public when their oversight fails.
Michigan’s Big Three university boards — at Michigan State University, University of Michigan and Wayne State University — are not symbolic bodies. Under the Michigan Constitution, they are responsible for “general supervision” of the institution, as well as “control and direction of all expenditures.” Each has a third duty to “elect a president of the institution under its supervision.”
That authority is enormous. Financially, these universities have budgets of $3.7 billion at Michigan State, $14.9 billion at the University of Michigan and $1 billion at Wayne State University. The next elected board members have a say for the next eight years on how nearly $20 billion a year is spent in our state.
Boards approve tuition increases. They authorize construction projects. They approve executive compensation. They direct how universities respond to scandal, litigation and public accountability crises.
And, when their oversight fails, the public pays for it.
In the last decade alone, Michigan universities have paid staggering sums connected to failures of governance and institutional accountability:
These are just the most high-profile cases, and the sums don’t include the money paid to outside lawyers the universities hire for these cases, with some firms charging as much as $1,500 per hour.
That’s your tuition and your tax dollars. Families pay more each year as boards hike costs and approve larger budgets, projects, administrative paychecks and settlements. Yet meaningful public scrutiny of trustee candidates remains remarkably limited.
That needs to change.
The people serving on these boards influence the direction of this state for decades. Our universities shape Michigan’s future workforce, economy and leadership. Many graduates of MSU and Wayne State remain in Michigan, becoming teachers, physicians, business leaders, engineers and public officials.
That’s why this particular seat on this particular university board matters. Three board members at MSU have tried to set a tone of accountability and have been met with resistance. Santana, who will leave the Senate this term, made her mark on our state, offering transparency, economic opportunity and a background in finance. She has been accountable to voters, not bureaucrats.
The Democratic Party owes all of us a transparent audit and a credible resolution to the question of who really won the nomination for a board seat at Michigan State University.
Valerie von Frank is the executive director and founder of Parents of Sister Survivors Engage (POSSE), an advocacy group established in 2018 for parents of survivors sexually abused by Larry Nassar at Michigan State University (MSU).
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Why the Michigan State University trustee race matters | Opinion
Reporting by Valerie von Frank / The Detroit News
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