As news of Kevin Guskiewicz’s departure as president of Michigan State University continues to unfold, community members are sharing mixed reactions to the university losing its sixth president in recent years. Some expressed gratitude for Guskiewicz’s leadership, while others voiced frustration and uncertainty about the university’s future.
First-year MSU medical student Eric Randhawa said Guskiewicz made a positive impression during his short time in East Lansing.
“He was a really cool guy. I had a great time with him,” Randhawa said. “I feel like he did pretty well with the One Health Initiative, and at least during my senior year, students here had a good impression of him.”
The initiative Randhawa referred to is the planned integration of the MSU College of Human Medicine and the College of Osteopathic Medicine. His hope for the next president is to focus more on the importance of global health.
Wednesday’s announcement comes during a tumultuous period for MSU. Two weeks ago, a divided Board of Trustees voted to increase Guskiewicz’s salary from more than $1 million to $2 million annually.
At the time, Trustee Sandy Pierce said Guskiewicz was being pursued by other universities and that retaining him was important for the university’s stability.
For MSU faculty member and Department of Mathematics associate professor Willie Wong, dissatisfaction with Guskiewicz stemmed from several recent controversies.
“(Guskiewicz) has put us through quite a bit of unnecessary pain in the past several months with the push for the One Health system, where he really was going over the heads of the faculty in both health colleges,” Wong said. “Also with this push to essentially silence two of our trustees for speaking out with their own personal opinions, and then turning around and pointing fingers at them on his way out of the university. And finally, with this whole business of driving up the $2 million salary issue, which really made us a laughing stock at many colleges around the country, only to turn around and essentially diss us by leaving and taking a much lower offer at Clemson.”
Wong said he first learned about Guskiewicz’s departure through a breaking news alert.
“We found out by having it pop up in our Google News feed that Clemson is hiring him,” Wong said. “Some of my text messages started buzzing around the same time The Detroit News broke the exclusive.”
Guskiewicz is the sixth president Michigan State University has had in the past eight years. His departure raises new questions about who will serve as interim president and how the university will move forward. Wong said those decisions now rest with the embattled Board of Trustees.
“When things just keep not working out due to conflicts between the president and trustees, the question really becomes whether the trustee system is working for MSU or whether they are just working for their own agenda, which is not really good for the university, “the education mission or the people involved,” Wong said.
For Susannah Dorfman, a faculty member and associate professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Guskiewicz’s departure adds to existing concerns among faculty members about university-wide instability.
“I think we are a bit tired of the uncertainty,” Dorfman said. “It has been a lot of change in the past number of years. We’ve been really worried about the budget cuts, particularly the 9% cuts that have come down on all of our departments as we try to continue fulfilling our teaching and research mission.”
Dorfman said faculty members are also concerned about changes to the university’s curriculum goals and the institution’s evolving approach to artificial intelligence.
“One of the other things we’ve been worrying about a lot were supposedly imminent changes to the university curriculum,” Dorfman said. “The core curriculum goals of the university are changing. And once again, everything is thrown up in the air and we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Dorfman said she was surprised to learn Guskiewicz would be leaving MSU for Clemson University.
“I do think that we had some sense of positivity that he was bringing as president,” Dorfman said. “The idea of having some stability going forward was really the only positive thing in the announcement of the huge raise he was about to get. I don’t think it’s been all bad, but I don’t think we had enough time to really see whether the decisions he was making were going to work out.”
Looking ahead, Dorfman said she hopes the university can find a way to retain its next president for a longer period of time.
“I would hope that we can figure out a responsible way to keep a president for a longer term,” Dorfman said. “I understand the need to compete with other universities for talent, but maybe that’s too much to put on any one individual. Maybe a single leader cannot solve all the problems and make all the plans for the university. It may be better to leave more of this in the hands of faculty leadership, who are meant to run the university.”