When Teresa Woodruff, Michigan State University’s interim president, stepped to the podium on Sunday to announce the suspension of the football coach, she repeatedly stressed one message: The “MSU of today” is different from the “MSU of old.”
The “MSU of old” was tarnished by scandal, as well as accusations that university leaders had no interest in serious oversight. For instance, in April 2014, a recent Michigan State University graduate filed a sexual-misconduct complaint against a university doctor who was a big name in national gymnastics circles. But the university cleared Larry Nassar, and the board later said it never knew about the complaint.
Then, in November 2017, three board members and their guests flew with the basketball team to a tournament that stretched over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. As the trustees were waking up on the West Coast, Nassar, whom the university had fired the year before, pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting women.
Board members defended their trip — a common practice, an investigation later found — but the bad optics carried the heavy implication that the board was more interested in hanging out courtside than in oversight.
The board pledged increases in transparency, hoping to correct the impression that it was more interested in obscuring misconduct than correcting it. But in the ensuing years, two trustees resigned while publicly accusing the group of failing to live up to its promises of openness after the Nassar fallout. “Knowing the institution’s history,” one wrote in his resignation letter, “I can no longer serve on a Board that purports to promote cultural change yet struggles itself to be transparent.”
Finally, in December 2022, a development with echoes from the past: A sexual-misconduct complaint was filed against Mel Tucker, the university’s football coach and the highest paid state employee in Michigan. Trustees were informed of the complaint, but only that it involved alleged sexual harassment, not assault. The full details only emerged last weekend — over eight months later — when USA Today broke the news of the complaint, which accused the coach of harassing Brenda Tracy, a prominent rape survivor and activist.
For many critics and insiders, the crisis now embroiling the university reeks of issues unresolved since the Nassar days, of board members and top administrators burying their heads in the sand, willfully ignoring sexual misconduct on campus, and of board members more concerned with their status than with governing.
“They don’t care, and you can tell they don’t care by their actions,” said Rachael Denhollander, the first woman to publicly detail Nassar’s sexual assault. Denhollander is a lawyer who spent years trying to work with MSU’s board to put in place reforms and new processes. “They don’t want outside accountability. We tried to fix these issues. This is a repeat of 2014.”
Known Unknowns
Tracy’s complaint carried alarming allegations. Among them, as USA Today later revealed, was that Tucker had masturbated on the phone with the activist, whom the program had brought in to speak to players. And that Tucker had admitted to it. Tracy said the phone sex was not consensual.
After the news came out, Tucker said he and Tracy had developed an “intimate, adult relationship” that was consensual and that harassment charges were “completely false.”
But it seems that few leaders knew of the details of the complaint — even months after it was made. No board member would talk to The Chronicle about the situation. MSU’s public-relations staff did not answer an email with comprehensive questions.
They don’t care, and you can tell they don’t care by their actions.
In late December, members of the board were told by administrators that an allegation of misconduct had been filed against Tucker. Details of the allegation and the name of the person who filed the complaint were not disclosed, and the trustees were told, according to a statement from the board, that the person was fiercely protective of her privacy.
Tucker was not suspended immediately, in part because of those privacy concerns. Administrators who knew about the allegation and Tracy’s identity were worried that a Tucker suspension, coupled with Tracy’s disappearance from the MSU football program, where she had spoken to the team and served as a game captain, could lead observers to arrive at the truth.
An external investigation was commissioned, and the board was updated on the timeline. In July, the external investigator’s report about its investigation was completed. But what the report found, or Tucker’s response to the allegations, was not shared with the trustees — or even Woodruff. (The interim president said she learned Tracy’s identity then, but no other details.)
Then, on September 10 — a few weeks before a scheduled disciplinary hearing — the news broke. Tracy later said publicly that she had been working with USA Today for an article to possibly publish when the university’s investigation concluded. However, after someone leaked her name to a reporter, she agreed to have the report published sooner. When the article went live, leaders ostensibly learned the details for the first time.
Less than a day after the story’s publication, Michigan State suspended Tucker.
The suspension seemed to affirm the severity of the allegations. But the university had detailed knowledge of the allegations for months. So why didn’t it act sooner? University officials said Woodruff and board members deliberately stayed away from any details of the case in order to protect the identity of the complainant and also to avoid accusations that they were meddling in the case, a common complaint in past years at MSU.
So assertions about overly aggressive board involvement are fresh again in East Lansing. While the Tucker investigation was going on, a dispute over disciplining the ouster of the business-school dean inflamed the campus. The push by the board for the independent investigator led to the ouster of President Samuel L. Stanley Jr., who quit, saying he lacked confidence in the board. “The actions of the campus over the past month have shown the world that Michigan State University will not accept micromanagement by board members of the operations of this great institution and that we will hold individuals, no matter what their rank, accountable for their action,” Stanley said in a blistering four-minute video announcing his decision.
But Title IX experts said there are ways for leaders to stay informed about disciplinary processes without violating privacy or risking micromanagement.
“If a credible allegation of misconduct is made against a university executive officer or high-profile person like a head football coach, it is appropriate and often necessary for the university president, and in many cases, the board, to be made aware of the allegations against that person so that they can assess how best to respond,” said Bradley Dizik, executive vice president of Guidepost Solutions, the consulting company the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor hired after allegations of sexual misconduct were made against its provost.
It would not be unusual for a president to be notified by the university’s general counsel when a high-profile employee, like Tucker, was the subject of an investigation and to have details shared, several experts have said.
Or the university could have conducted a parallel human-resources investigation into the allegations. When Tucker admitted in March to investigators that he masturbated while on the phone with Tracy, a vendor for the university, it could have triggered the suspension or other discipline, the Title IX experts said. The report’s completion in July could have also triggered discipline.
Delays in the hearing process could also have pushed the case to the attention of campus leaders. “If a person is not cooperating or resisting, the president and even the board should be informed, as they have the power to compel cooperation,” Dizik said. If there is no cooperation, that also could trigger further discipline, including possible termination.
It is possible for universities to run investigations quickly. For example, the University of Michigan received an anonymous complaint on December 8, 2021, that its president, Mark Schlissel, was engaged in an inappropriate relationship with an underling. The board commissioned an outside investigation and fired Schlissel just over a month later for violating the university’s supervisor-relationship policy.
Tucker’s fate has fiduciary implications; he is in the early years of a $95-million contract, and every month earns about $750,000.
“They should have known, because they have fiduciary responsibility,” Denhollander said. “Yes, you could have known, and you should have known.”
‘Churning Through Presidents’
In the pre-Nassar era at Michigan State, board service was relatively easy. The big decision each year revolved around whether to raise tuition. Board members, many of them tied to Spartan athletics, got status in a town filled with politicians and lobbyists who worked at the state Capitol just four miles from campus. It also allowed MSU’s trustees to host friends in football-stadium suites, basketball-arena front rows, and even fly on team planes, a perk no other Big Ten college offered its board members at the time of the trips.
Board members are still using their status to get trips on the university’s dime, including several trustees flying with the basketball team to the Bahamas for a tournament over Thanksgiving 2021, according to two university officials with direct knowledge of the trip. A basketball trip in 2022 to play a game on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier was loaded with trustees and their friends.
Lou Anna K. Simon was the university’s president from 2005 to 2018, and during her tenure trustees largely ceded authority to her administration. A leadership vacuum emerged when she resigned in the Nassar scandal’s wake, coupled with calls for the board to be more aggressive and reform-minded.
But a few tensions complicate that work. Even in private meetings of the board and administrators, board members asking too many questions can be seen as micromanaging and not supportive of the president.
Then there’s the sensitivity around managing risk — where the board and top administrators often delegate authority to the general counsel’s office. That can lead to scant information, even when it’s in the public interest, being made public.
“Institutional cultures that do not value accountability or transparency typically endure crises at a greater magnitude of harm to the institution,” Dizik said. “When there’s a crisis at an institution with such a culture, whatever semblance of trust exists in the university community at the time will probably erode immediately, and the institution’s exposure to liability amplifies to include a reputational harm where the attention transfers from what the bad actor did to how the institution handled the bad actor and their conduct.
“Strategically, the best practice to mitigate against such risk, is to always err on the side of a culture that values transparency and accountability.”
There have been efforts to do so, but they have been stymied.
After Stanley was hired as president and began the reform work he promised at MSU — including having an outside law firm do a regular review of Title IX cases for irregularities and changing several campus policies — Denhollander said she sent him a message of warning that predicted a power struggle he would ultimately lose.
He lasted three years.
Now the board is searching for another president. Woodruff, who was the odds-on favorite to get the job when she was named interim, announced last month that she would not pursue the permanent position.
“I don’t know how they recruit someone worthwhile,” said Mary Williams, an alumnus who was visiting her daughter on the East Lansing campus this week. “They keep churning through presidents, and really, who would want to work for that board?”
MSU isn’t the only Michigan university to have a major sexual-abuse scandal on its campus in recent years. The University of Michigan had a football-team and athletic-department doctor who sexually assaulted more than 1,000 students and athletes over decades at the university. He died in 2008.
Michigan State University will not accept micromanagement by board members of the operations of this great institution.
In the aftermath of the news about Anderson being made public, administrators in Ann Arbor made a number of changes, including forming a new ethics and compliance office.
MSU had formed its own compliance office in the aftermath of the Nassar scandal, but months after it was formed, it was folded into an existing audit department. Higher-education governance experts said that stifled what the office was created for because auditors looked for issues and then moved on, while compliance would check to make sure the changes were in place and working.
Michigan State has made other changes, but the broader culture, especially among board members, still needs help, some observers say.
“MSU keeps defaulting to addressing issues through Title IX” instead of also using other processes to investigate employee matters or working on changing culture at the university, Dizik said. “You have to approach these issues holistically. If you don’t have a culture focused on integrity in everything people do at the institution, efforts to fix problems will not be sustainable no matter how many resources you throw at it.”
Denhollander is skeptical of whether MSU will improve its processes. ‘It’s a design flaw they decided not to fix,” she said.
After all, she said, they’ve had plenty of chances to do so over the past decade.
