I had the great privilege to be part of the inaugural Spartan Bus Tour last week. President Guskiewicz, myself and about 50 other faculty and administrators spent three days, Oct. 21-23, traveling the western half of Michigan’s lower peninsula. Three straight 14+-hour days, 13 stops, and 734 miles later, we got back to campus late in the day on Wednesday, Oct. 23.Reflecting on the trip, I'm feeling very optimistic about MSU right now. This year marks my 20th year at the institution. I arrived in 2005 as an assistant professor in James Madison College, and after 10 years there, I moved over to Lyman Briggs College where I served as associate dean and then interim dean until 2018. I was interim dean in Lyman Briggs during the year that Nassar's crimes were uncovered, and I became associate provost (now called vice provost) of Undergraduate Education the following year when MSU continued to be rocked by leadership changes. Over the next several years, the COVID-19 pandemic, additional leadership changes, and distracting Board of Trustees activities made focusing on our important student success work at MSU incredibly challenging. We got so many great things done during that time, but it often felt like we were swimming against very strong currents.
Despite – perhaps in some cases because of – all these changes and challenges, we have accomplished a tremendous amount over the last six years. Our assertion that “every student admitted to MSU has the capacity to learn, thrive, and graduate, and it is our responsibly to fully support every one of them to do so” was first stated in 2018 with hesitation. After all, for the last half millennia universities have imagined that their primary task was to sort the “good students” from the less good.
Much more recently, we have come to appreciate the tremendous loss of human potential that all this sorting has produced. Progressive institutions – especially very large land grant universities like MSU – have conscientiously shifted from “sorting” to “catalyzing” with the stated belief that our job is not to sort, but to help every person engaged with our university become better, stronger, wiser, and more capable of positively impacting the greater good. This has been a great deal of work, and it certainly has not been easy. “Burnout” is a word I frequently hear on our campus and others, which is certainly understandable.
Understanding all this, I think there are two reasons I found the Spartan Bus Tour so rejuvenating: first, at the 15 stops we got to see some of the breadth of impact MSU has on our state. From apples to Parkinson's, from "forever chemicals" to the sand on our beaches, and from the legacy of settler colonialism to our future teachers, MSU is involved so much great work!
Second, I was given the opportunity to spend a lot of intense, quality time with people who I would not have had the time or opportunity to come to know. The nature of leadership at my level allows me to have many fleeting conversations with a great many people every day, but I often do not get the opportunity to engage deeply with most of my colleagues, and there are so many amazing people who have found their way to MSU. Each and every one of them is motivated by the opportunity to make contributions to the greater good.
When we got back to the President's house late on Wednesday, University Communications showed us photos and a video they had created over the course of the previous days. Given how intense the experience was, the pictures and video had a dreamlike quality; I remembered being in all those places, but the images were shot from a different place than I had stood when we were there. Derrick Turner, the university photographer, is so incredibly talented, and he captured the light and shadows of the moments we all shared in such magnificent ways.
I want to end by say what an honor it is play a role in an institution that so many people rely upon. As some of you know, I sent my oldest child off to college this fall, and I know how much faith a parent has to have in a university to entrust it with something so valuable as their child. We understand the incredible responsibility that imposes on us to make sure that every student is supported to learn, thrive, and graduate!
