Endzone: The Rise, Fall, and Return of Michigan Football by John U. Bacon
Author:John U. Bacon [Bacon, John U.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781466891548
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-08-31T22:00:00+00:00
CHAPTER 43
THE STUDENTS WIN A ROUND
While the elected student government officers wrestled with general-admission seating, the elected Regents had to find a new president.
Mary Sue Coleman’s two-year extension would run out in 2014, so the Regents knew they had to start looking for her replacement by the summer of 2013. The first order of business was to assess where they were, and therefore what they needed from the next administration.
“Mary Sue [Coleman] is very well liked by the public,” said Regent Kathy White. “She raises a ton of money—no president has done it better—but it’s generally for the sexy stuff: the Life Sciences building, the Walgreens Theater, the business school, the law school.
“But she was not focused on raising money for the core mission of the university. I want to raise money for the English department, for the math department. Of course, it’s a lot harder to make that sale to donors. We’re building a graduate-student dorm for $100 million, but we don’t even know if people will want to live there. Maybe they will, but endowing more professorships would likely be more successful; $100 million can get you 40 endowed professorships. That’s a department’s worth!
“If you look at the core mission of the university—English, sciences, languages—it’s in the center of campus. But it’s the fancy stuff outside the Diag that gets all the money—law, business, medicine, engineering, athletics. What about history? What about biology?”
When the Regents—who serve as the committee for all presidential searches—sat down in the spring of 2013 to consider the criteria for the next president, they knew the health system, the cost of tuition, and athletics would always be important responsibilities for any Michigan president. They also knew one of their prime candidates, Brown Provost Mark Schlissel, had no experience with big-time college athletics.
“But [in 2013] I wasn’t that worried about the finances of the athletic department yet,” White said. “It was still okay in 2013, because we had 2012 Fiscal Year data. But we already knew Dave’s leadership style was a problem. This was partly because [President Coleman] was not taking an active interest in reining him in. If there had been some ‘parental supervision,’ it might have been fine, but we didn’t have that. The parents were not home. The president’s office did not, and was not, going to pull him back in.”
The presidential search was well under way, however, when the Regents realized they’d forgotten an essential part of the process: student input. When the Regents announced the people they had picked for their search advisory committee—which had no students on it, unlike previous searches—and did so after graduation, when the students had already gone home, Michael Proppe let his displeasure be known to Royster Harper, the vice president for Student Life, who works closely with the Central Student Government.
“What Royster did that was so great,” Regent Kathy White told me, “she told me how unhappy they were. We hadn’t realized, though we probably should have, but once we knew, we could do something about it.
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