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President, Athletic Director Assess State of Michigan State

Bill Beekman, Russ White, John Engler

Michigan State University Interim President John Engler and Spartans Athletic Director Bill Beekman assess the state of Michigan State and future challenges and opportunities facing MSU in this MSU Today conversation with Russ White.

Russ White:I'm joined today by interim Michigan State University President John Engler, and Spartans Athletic Director Bill Beekman for a conversation and an assessment on all things Michigan State, the state of Michigan State, if you will. Gentlemen, great to have you both back on MSU Today.

Bill Beekman:Thanks, Russ.

John Engler:Thank you very much. Glad to be with you.

White:President Engler, could we start with you? What's the state of Michigan State right now? 

Engler:Well, it's actually quite good. We're back in session. School started the end of August, and so, almost a month on campus already, and kids are going to classes. We hope they're passing all those classes. They're in the residence halls. We've got a 35 percent increase in ridership on our buses around the campus, so they're clearly on the move.

Bill's programs over there at the athletic department are going well. Our researchers are researching. The donors are donating. It's a pretty good time actually at Michigan State.

The most important thing from the standpoint of Michelle and John Engler is that the search committee is searching. We've got them at work. They announced the search firm's name this week. A veteran firm, it's done presidential searches for other universities around the country. I think we're in good hands.

The Board of Trustees earlier selected the former University of Virginia President, Dr. Terry Sullivan, to be their advisor to the search process. Shortly, on the, I think it's the 10th and the 11th of October, the search committee itself will have the search firm on campus. They're going to do a couple of open forums. 
In the meantime, the search committee has been going out and meeting with faculty and students. Homecoming weekend, they're meeting with alumni. I think, Bill, they were with the athletic council.

Beekman:They were with the athletic council. They've met with our student athlete advisory council. They've been getting around campus and meeting with just about everybody. 

Engler:We did the impossible over at the Board of Trustees. We replaced Bill Beekman with Nakia Barr, a heroic effort on the part of Nakia to step into the vacancy that Bill left when he became the full-time athletic director, but, he's doing a great job. I'll tell you there's a lot of energy and momentum around campus.

Marti Heil, who was the director of advancement for Indiana University and Virginia Commonwealth University had a long career at Michigan State before then, is coming back. She'll be working with Bob Groves while Bob prepares the celebration of our Empower Extraordinary fundraising campaign, and Marti will be taking over as the head of University Advancement.

Everywhere I look, there's a bit of good news. There's construction in many parts of the campus. We're building the first brand-new undergraduate education building since really Wells Hall in the late '60s, early '70s was built.

That's going to be a stunning building which will incorporate and recycle the old power plant. A lot of people remember that power plant with those stacks, the MAC up on the stack, those are gone. The asbestos's been cleaned up. The building has been prepared now to be incorporated in this new design which will see new classroom buildings on either end of the power plant.

The power plant space itself becomes a lot of exhibition and meeting rooms. It will become a sought after space. I suspect there will be a lot of creative things figured out for those football weekends too when they're not in class. But that building sits right adjacent to the stadium so a wonderful new addition.

We're putting in a new water supply for the campus. I said we're going to make the white in the green and white a lot whiter. Some of that iron that's been in our water is perfectly safe, but not always the most flavorful. And, sometimes, it’s not the whitest when you wash your white things in that. We're going to be getting that online.

There will be a brand-new music building for one of the nation's premiere jazz programs among other spectacular programs that are in our music school. That college has actually been living in a building much of which was built during the WPA, so that's underway.

Bill's got a lot of things that he's doing in the athletic programs as well that are upgrading facilities. The campus is looking fresh and clean, and it's going to have some stunning new assets for our students and our alums.

White:Bill, let me ask you the same question. What is the state of Spartan athletics as you take over?

Beekman:Well, I think things are going great. As John mentioned, we've got a number of projects that are in process. The board happily approved our authorization to plan for some renovations to Munn Arena. We'll be building what I've described as a small, Berkowitz Center kind of addition, if you're familiar with that addition to the Breslin Center.

Onto the south side of Munn Arena, that will be new and improved space for our coaches' offices, a player lounge, a player weight room and training facilities, our athletic training area, all of that. That will be a great addition for our hockey team. We'll be making improvements to the other three entrances to that building.

Then the board also approved our first phase of planning for some renovations to the football building. The NCAA has authorized us to have two additional coaches. We need to build out some office space on the second floor for that.

But what the public will see are some exciting renovations to the first floor of the Skandalaris Center where we'll be making it a lot more video-friendly with much better displays that are similar to the Tom Izzo Hall of History that you see over at the Breslin Center. So that will be a really slick addition. It allows us to, if we've got recruits in, to put things on those video boards that are of interest to the recruiting classes and change them up for really any sort of reason.

Then, one other addition that is very exciting for our baseball and softball teams is that this winter we'll be installing lights at Old College Field. We've got lights for soccer, but we'll be adding lights for baseball and softball to allow them to play games in the evening. That will also allow us to host Big Ten tournaments and NCAA regional events.

Those have to be installed in January and February. You've got to get the ground good and frozen, so we can drive a truck over the playing surface without ruining it. Counter-intuitively, the best time to put those lights and poles in is in February. That will be happening, but the teams are very excited to have that amenity set at those fields for the spring.

Yeah, we've just got a lot going on. Happy to report that in addition to the success of the football team so far, our men's soccer team has eight wins, no losses and two ties to keep them a top five program in the country.

Our women's golf team is off to a good start. They finished second at the Mary Fossum Invitational here on campus the other weekend. Stacy Slobodnik Stoll has the women prepared to compete for another Big Ten championship and perhaps beyond.

Men’s basketball is up and running, too. We're in full swing.

White:President Engler, let me ask you what, with all you've accomplished since leading your alma mater, are some things you still hope to accomplish before you turn the reins over?

Engler:Getting back here, coming in at a time where we had a lot of issues that were on the front burner, we wanted to get through what I would say would be the worst part of the crisis in the sense that I came back, and the doctor had committed all these assaults on so many young women, young girls, and he’s already in prison. Settlement with the survivors that's done. Pretty much all but signed off on by the federal judge in Grand Rapids that's now a perfunctory thing. We have a couple of pieces of paper waiting for California.

We've changed the way we handle our clinical practice now. Patient safety I think is quite assured here. The changes are rather significant. You’ll notice changes the first time you come into a clinic I would think. But, if you were going to have a procedure, there’s consent for minor children involving chaperones, the role they play. And we’ve updated the billing procedures.

The new dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine has been a godsend. The clinical practice itself is now being reorganized.  MSU Health Care is the new name, a non-profit organization that the Board of Trustees approved.

This will bring the clinical practices of the College of Osteopathic Medicine, the College of Human Medicine, and the many contributions from the College of Nursing all together, unify the practice, simplify probably how we do everything from keep the records to reimburse the medical professionals there that are working. I think it's going to result in a lot better service for people who want to avail themselves of that, and it prepares us through the construction which we hope gets started this fall.

One of those things is to get the groundbreaking done for the new McLaren Hospital. It will be built right on the south edge of the campus. That's going to be a state-of-the-art facility and will add immeasurably to our ability both to care for patients and develop new ways to treat them. And we want to find ways to incorporate some of the cutting-edge research that's being done.

Michigan State University is without an actual medical hospital that we own. U of M and Ohio State have hospitals. We don't have one. Our total research now at the university is over $700 million per year. That's just stunning.

Today, we're doing a lot of things that are medically related, but these partnerships that we're building, and the new MSU health care organization will be able to enter into joint-ventures. It's going to be very exciting.

Bill and I were talking about how this was something that had been in the works; probably for a decade they've talked about this. Now, we've got it done, and they're launched. The leadership of the health professions at MSU, it's all been turned over in recent years here, the last couple of years, and it's very strong. It's really impressive.

Beekman:You just need to drive down Service Road to discover that we built a new research building to do some very important work on precision medicine. We're now in the process of building another building for biomedical research. That part of our campus and that critical work and the medical schools just keeps growing and growing.

We pulled a page out of the John Hannah playbook with that building. When Hannah was President and the GIs were coming back from Korea, they couldn't build residence halls fast enough. They took Wilson Hall and flipped it around and turned it into McDonel Hall. Then you see the Bryan Hall flipped as Rather Hall. Our research building in Grand Rapids that we just completed is virtually the same floor plan for this building we're building on campus. 

Our research enterprise is growing so fast that it's just getting challenging to house folks. We stole those blueprints from that project, and we're reusing them again on campus. That building's well under construction.

Engler:The new President's going to have a lot to do when they get here. But what we've tried to do is deal with some of the fundamentals to have the university well-organized. 

We're doing this with our technology. There's been an IT consolidation that's been underway. By the time, the Board of Trustees meets in October, I expect to have everything fully migrated over.

But among the successes, something like 1500 servers have been pulled out of closets tucked around the university and secured now in a data center. We're doing that centrally.

Seventy-plus email systems are now fewer than 20 and headed down to one. Twenty is ridiculous. We found things like the Astronomy Department had their own email system. I said, "Well, that was probably for their intergalactic communications." I don't know what the cause of that would be. A lot of these are just historical accidents. Somebody knew how to do something, and so they did it.

But, today, the premium is on security. We've removed literally tens of millions of social security numbers. Now, we'll say, "Well, how can there be tens of millions? There aren't tens of millions of people here." But there are that many social security numbers if every time you put somebody's name in a file somewhere, and the social security number's attached to it, you're making it vulnerable. We want to pull those back in and protect people's privacy. That's been part of it.

Everybody's now on, well, they will be on Office 365, which is our standard operating software for your desktop computer. We'll have everybody on the same license. We were buying licenses at the college and the department level and paying way too much for that. We can negotiate a better discount if we do that with one purchase, and then you can upgrade everybody at the same time. You don't have different generations of software and then have incompatibility or, in some cases, poor security.

We had software being used that the Defense Department had said, "No, you can't use that. It's not secure." But, the professor, said, "Well, I like it." Well, you know what? You might like it, but it's not secure. We value the research that we do. We want to have security, so that's underway.

One of the things that was completed, every room on campus, if you're a student living on our campus, there's Wi-Fi in your dorm room, in your residence hall. Expanded computing power in the computing centers around the campus.

Technology and computing power is essential. It's especially essential in a university where you've got researchers. You've got people pushing boundaries. We had to have that capacity, and so part of this is also freeing up capacity.

Where the real payoff comes is we want to have app development and innovation be what we spend our time on, not patching some problem.

It's interesting. We would have fewer email systems today except several of the people who operate them failed to document what they've actually got in those systems. You actually have to solve the puzzle first before you can migrate them over. Otherwise, people are going to wake up some morning and they won't have email because we didn't know they were even in the system.

We're doing a lot to get this administrative infrastructure in place. That to me frees up that next president to come in here then and focus on the real mission of a university of how do we prepare these 50,000 undergraduate and graduate students who are here for success in life. You want the content of the teaching and the research to be first rate.

One of the things that Bill's been very much involved in this, and I really came in toward the end, but we've had this Empower Extraordinary campaign, a fundraising campaign that's been underway for some period of time. It is probably going to raise when we're done over $1.7 billion.

That's going to do a lot, several hundred million for scholarships are in that amount of money. There's some new buildings. We had the largest ever gift in the history of the university. $30 million to name the business pavilion, the Edward Minskoff Business Pavilion. These are exciting.

But one of the things that people will benefit in untold ways from is they set out a very bold, audacious goal of having 100 new endowed chairs. Monday of this week, we're at 102. We exceeded the goal, and we're going to keep on climbing until we have that celebration the middle of October. Frankly, until we wrap this up at the end of the year.

Those are things that, again, will take some of my time and making a few calls and trying to do a little bit of shake the money tree. I'll tell you what's been rewarding is how passionate Michigan State alums are. They know we went through a tough period.

Nobody's ever going to forget that on this campus. We've apologized to the women who were harmed by a doctor who happened to be a member of the faculty and regrettably was known nationally and internationally as the Olympic doctor. This fellow had people coming to him from all over the country, all over the world indeed. We're never going to forget that here, and, frankly, we're going to pay the bills for quite some time too because of that.

But, at the same time, our donors and our supporters also want to know that there are thousands of kids who came here. We've got now two classes who came to school after this fellow had been fired. They're here, and they're going to try to get a great education. These donors want to invest in the programs and in the schools and the colleges to try to make that happen. They want to show some Spartan pride, and they're doing that. We're setting some pretty interesting records.

White:What do you see as the challenges you're facing ahead, not only for Spartan athletics and athletics beyond and higher education, sir, but then what also excites you about where you see us going?

Beekman:Well, I think from an athletics perspective, we're just always challenging ourselves to be better. I think if you think about, as I've talked to the media over the last number of months, I posted them up that they'll tend to judge us on wins and losses, and, really, wins and losses in the two sports that get the most ink in the newspaper, football and men's basketball. But, and happily, we've done quite well at those sports over the last number of years.

But, we have 25 sports on campus. Those are two of them. Part of our goal is to make sure that those two sports continue to thrive, but, also, to ensure that the other 23 sports have every opportunity to succeed. 
When I talk about it with our student athletes, it's success on the field of play, success academically in the classroom, and ensuring we set up those students to be successful in life. It's really all three steps of that process. We're not succeeding if we don't succeed in all three areas.

We've been paying a lot of attention to sports that are things other than football and basketball, not that we're not paying attention to those. But, in fact, President Engler has been a wonderful friend of our athletic department. I went to my first rowing regatta a number of months ago. The first person I saw there was President Engler. Then we just missed each other the other weekend at the women's golf tournament, and he's a regular at volleyball.

He's been an extraordinary friend to athletics. While he's a big fan of football and basketball, he's also a supporter of many of our other sports, and so, we're trying to take every opportunity to allow those sports to succeed. That's part of what we'll be focused on over the coming year.

Engler:One of the things I’m impressed about is what Bill just said about the students' success in the classroom and off the playing field or off the gridiron. One of the early events I had the privilege of going to was the academic awards banquet for the athletes. We had over 400, virtually half of our student athletes at Michigan State University with a 3.0 GPA or better. Several of the teams' GPAs were close to 4.0, but they were setting records in terms of the highest ever team GPA.

We have a number of athletes who just, first of all, we have a number that are themselves straight 4.0 athletes which is just amazing given how much time they commit to their sport. Depending on which one of those 25 sports you're talking about, the time that you have to practice, you have to commit to doing, you love doing it, but you don't compete at intercollegiate level without putting the time and the energy in. These young men and women are going to be very successful in life, because that work ethic is extraordinary.

I just couldn't have been more pleased to see that evening and to see those kids celebrating that success. Boy, they were all, they were all teammates regardless of what sport they were playing whether men's or women's sports. They were all in it together. You had to feel good about it.

What was interesting is, for the first time ever, one of the other things I had to do was sign a report to the NCAA, and the graduation rate for the student athletes was one point higher than the graduation rate for the main campus. Sometimes, some of these outlets get a little cynical about sports, and, again, maybe they focus on one or two sports. But the student athlete experience, when you look at what it takes and how they're graduating at a higher rate than the main campus, that's telling you these are some pretty talented future leaders for our country.

I think the big challenge for higher education is to be affordable. I think to also attract the first of the family, and there's still way too many families where we're waiting for the first in the family to be able to go to college and complete college.

I think it's very important, we admit students, because we know they can do the work here at Michigan State University. Not all of them graduate. One of the things that I think is most troubling if you look at a student who might come here, for whatever reason, they're here a couple of years, and then they drift away. They often leave with a lot of debt and no degree. That's the worst possible position to get in.

We've made a number of changes designed to make sure that students can get through Michigan State University in four years. That there's the financial support to help them do that. One of the things I'm very proud of is we've already set the tuition for the next school year, for the 2019/2020 school year it's set. The tuition rates have been frozen.

We've moved to a block tuition. If you want to take an extra class, you can do that without that costing you. It's a pretty dramatic set of changes that are already in place. The new president won't have to do that. They're spending the year getting ready for what these changes mean in terms of how students might schedule classes and what they might seek to do.

The other thing that was done, a project way before I got here, but it's been completed now. Faculty really rolled up their sleeves, and these student advisors we've got all over campus. They've mapped every course out, so, how do, no matter what you choose to be, if you want to study economics, you want to study philosophy, you want to be a music major, you want to be an engineer, how you can finish your curriculum and get your degree in four years. These are the classes you have to take, and there's a pathway to make sure that can happen.

We really are saying, "Go green," going forward. Let's get this done. 

I think working on continuing to develop the support. We have 50,000 of our 500,000 graduates who are overseas or out of the country, tremendous potential support there.

We're going to need to admit in the future more students from other nations. We're going to need to admit more students from other states. About 75 percent of our largest ever freshman class is from Michigan this year.

But we're going in the next 10 years see a 16 percent decline in the number of students graduating from the high schools in the state of Michigan. Well, we're not suggesting Michigan State's going to get 16 percent smaller. What we're going to do is look at other states and other countries and say, "Who wants to be a Spartan? Who's prepared to be a Spartan?"

We want to be able to attract, we want to be able to compete, because there are some people silly enough to think they should be a Wolverine. I go out and tell them that. I can't imagine, or even a Buckeye which is even nuttier. You want to be able to go attract these kids and say, "Hey, come to Michigan State."

The quality of our teaching matters. The quality of our research matters. The cost of our tuition that all matters, and, certainly, the facilities and the amenities here on campus. Because you come here, you're going to leave here when you graduate prepared to go out and compete and win around the world. That's the best we can do for everyone, and that's a pretty good thing for the pioneer land-grant university in the world.

White:Here, here. Any final thoughts from either of you for those joining in on our conversation?

Beekman:Well, Russ, I'd just say that, I'll borrow words from our former board chair. Whenever Trustee Ferguson makes a comment at a board meeting, he typically ends his comments by saying that our best days are ahead of us. I think we're making tremendous progress, and our best days are ahead of us. There's just a lot on the horizon.

White:Here, here. 

Engler:That's right. I think one of the other trustees says, "Keep your head down. Go straight ahead. Good things will happen."

Beekman:Yup.

Engler:That's what we're going to keep doing.

MSU Today airs Sunday afternoons at 4:00 on 105.1 FM and AM 870.
 

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