EAST LANSING – Why is Michigan State University embroiled in constantly self-created controversy?
It’s a question I’ve been asked many times over many years. By alumni, fans and even those in the highest positions of power. If it was a simple answer, it would have been fixed decades ago.
But you can’t spell “dysfunctional mess” without MSU.
That has been the case athletically for about 55 years, save for a 10-year period of Camelot in the 2010s. The prevailing years have been spent with infighting among university presidents and Board of Trustees and coaches and faculty. And that began long before anyone knew the name Larry Nassar.
So I asked the same question to Tom Izzo on Monday, June 15, in the wake of athletic director J Batt’s departure to Kentucky, the impending departure of President Kevin Guskiewicz and amid more turmoil that has plagued the land grant institution since John Hannah’s renaissance run as the school’s leader from 1941-69.
Why can’t MSU get out of its own way?
“Michigan hasn’t had it so easy, either. Neither has Wayne State,” said Izzo, the 71-year-old Basketball Hall of Famer who has worked almost his entire professional life at MSU since arriving in 1983 as a 28-year-old graduate assistant coach. “I think Michigan State people have to take ownership of their university. We have as many living alums as any university in the country probably. We got to speak up. We got to speak up, we got to band together. I think it’s really important that, in times of need, that you band together. That’s why I’ve always been such a proponent of either having our people or getting our kind of people. Same thing we do in recruiting.”
If only it was that easy.
Izzo is correct about issues at the other two state universities which have elected governing boards, both of which also have had significant controversies over the past decade. However, the proximity of MSU in East Lansing to the political sway from the state capital in Lansing − and the school’s history of internal conflict − has made it a seemingly perpetual flashpoint of friction ever after Hannah left and the 1970s began.
Since Hannah’s 28-year tenure ended, MSU has had 14 different full-time or interim presidents. Only two, M. Peter McPherson (1993-2004) and Lou Anna K. Simon (2005-18), have lasted more than a decade in the president position. Since Simon’s resignation amid the Nassar scandal in January 2018, there have been three interim presidents and one acting president. Neither of the full-time presidents (Samuel Stanley from 2019-22 and Guskiewicz since March 4, 2024) made it 40 months on the job. Guskiewicz, who accepted the president position at Clemson in late May, remains in position without a departure date.
The Board of Trustees is an eight-member elected body that always seems either at odds with each other or fighting with the leadership it hires. It was something that Guskiewicz sought assurances on before he took the job, and it ultimately provided the impetus for his impending exit.
In Guskiewicz, Izzo said he believed that MSU found the right fit.
“We’re raising more money than we ever thought to raise. He’s out more than anybody I’ve ever seen. He’s got a warm and fuzzy – people trust him. They trust him,” Izzo said of Guskiewicz. “He shakes your hand and looks you in the eye. He was a freakin’ [athletic] trainer and he became an Einstein president. Doesn’t that tell you it all? He’s still a beer-and-a-burger guy, if you’re allowed to be that as a president. He’s everything that is what I’ve always dreamed and hoped for for Michigan State – a blue-collar, regular guy that can do extraordinary things.”
But Guskiewicz’s brief and fractious tenure is nothing new along the banks of the Red Cedar.
Harvard-educated Clifton Wharton – who did not share the same embrace of athletics as his predecessor Hannah – took over MSU from 1970-77 and navigated the college campus protest era, along with conflicts with his Board of Trustees. Wharton oversaw the football program getting placed on major probation after an NCAA investigation, then broomed out almost all of the top athletic leadership in 1976 – football coach Denny Stolz, men’s basketball coach Gus Ganakas and athletic director Burt Smith all were fired.
After getting MSU football back to a Rose Bowl in 1987 for the first time since his mentor Duffy Daugherty in 1966, George Perles and then-President John DiBiaggio ran into conflict when Perles took over as athletic director in 1990. That lasted two years before DiBiaggio demanded Perles pick one job or the other. DiBiaggio hired Merrily Dean Baker as his replacement athletic director, then promptly left MSU himself for Tufts University.
Perles eventually was fired as football coach by DiBiaggio’s replacement, McPherson near the end of the 1994 season, and vacated wins and another probation followed (though Perles was cleared of wrongdoing by the NCAA). Perles sued MSU in 1995 for breach of contract and age discrimination but eventually dropped the lawsuit two months later. He eventually returned to MSU as an elected member of the Board of Trustees in 2006, serving from 2007 until November 2018. He resigned for health reasons at the end of a hectic year that included fallout from the Nassar conviction, the resignation of Simon and then-athletic director Mark Hollis, and scrutiny into sexual assault allegations surrounding the school’s football and basketball programs.
The athletic director position has been just as tumultuous as the presidential seat.
Since legendary football coach Clarence “Biggie” Munn held the position for 18 years from 1954-72, MSU has gone through 13 athletic directors and will be looking for a 14th with Batt’s departure after a little more than a year. Hollis (2007-18) and Doug Weaver (1980-90) are the only ones who held the position for more than five years.
Amid that constant turnover, Izzo, over the past 31 years as men’s basketball coach, emerged as the face of the university in many ways, from winning the 2000 national championship to embodying the same ethos he sees in Guskiewicz with his own journey from Iron Mountain and Northern Michigan University to MSU in 1983 as a graduate assistant.
“I’ve been without a lot of people [in higher leadership positions]. You know what? I’m still standing, still winning,” Izzo said. “I love my football coach [Pat Fitzgerald] and my hockey coach [Adam Nightingale]. They were the first two guys to call me last week. Their words were, ‘Let’s go.’ Those of us that have been through other stuff? Let’s go. It’s a rallying point right now, though, because we’ve been divided. And I don’t think it’s a 50-50 divide or a 60-40 or an 80-20. It’s a couple of people look at things one way and a lot of people look at them the other way.
“But it’ll be a cold day in hell before I don’t think this is still one of the great universities in the country.”
Izzo called Guskiewicz, a native of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, who was hired away from North Carolina by MSU in late 2023, “the perfect fit for here.”
“Doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have been the perfect fit somewhere else, it doesn’t mean somebody else wouldn’t be as perfect (at MSU). … I just think he is the right guy for this job,” Izzo said of Guskiewicz. “And it’s sad, and people better realize it’s sad. And don’t believe all the garbage out there. He’s not afraid of warm weather or cold weather. He loved it here. I know that. And it’s self-inflicted.”
Which takes it back to the question no one can answer.
“Why don’t we get out of our own way? I don’t know,” Izzo said. “The media’s got something to do with it. … We’ll see what the Michigan State people think. Because their basketball coach is frustrated. And don’t anyone in this room think and say, ‘Well, you’re powerful.’ If I was powerful, this wouldn’t be this way.
“Power is in the majority. Power is when everybody gets together. Power is when, to me, you don’t use the media.”
Of course, the media’s job is to ask the questions of the people in power – the elected Board of Trustees and the university presidents, administrators, faculty and coaches who are servants of the public at a state and federally funded institution. Their answers become more challenging as the tax dollars seem to diminish year over year, tuition continues to soar to ever-increasing highs and salaries of top employees at MSU and other schools continue to multiply amid academic cuts and budget deficits.
The Board’s responsibility is to those taxpayers first and foremost to ensure MSU is acting in a fiscally responsible manner. The trustees’ overarching mission is to provide the educational opportunities that land grant institutions represent within their communities and ultimately leave MSU a better place than when they arrived. Athletics, considered the front porch of the university, is an important part of that.
But nothing is secure if the whole house is ablaze. And right now, MSU is experiencing a raging inferno of instability.
Again.
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: With chaos at the top, Michigan State stuck in its own way again
Reporting by Chris Solari, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Chris Solari, Detroit Free Press | USA TODAY Network
