In her more than 40 years at Michigan State University, Lou Anna K. Simon has had many titles.
Professor.
Provost.
First female president.
But a year after she resigned the presidency in the wake of a sexual-abuse scandal involving a former university sports doctor, Simon has a new title: defendant.
She was charged in November with four counts of lying to investigators about what she knew of the crimes of Larry Nassar, who is serving a minimum-40-year prison sentence for sexually assaulting women and girls under the guise of medical treatment.
Now there’s a real possibility that Simon, too, could be put behind bars. Among the charges are two felony counts, each punishable by up to four years in prison, alleging that she knowingly misled the police.
Simon, who is 72, has pleaded not guilty. Her lawyer describes the case as a ridiculous act of prosecutorial overreach, an effort to pin the actions of a monster on a model citizen who ought to be able to live out her post-presidential years in peace.
For professors who have known Simon principally as an administrator, her transition into the role of an accused felon is jarring. The image of Simon at her recent arraignment, looking gaunt and vexed behind a plaque that read “Defendant,” is difficult to square with her well-established identity as a loyal Spartan leader.
As Simon winds her way through the justice system, more is at risk than her own fate. For Michigan State, bonds of trust and community are under threat. An institution that for generations has been a beacon of pride now presents a more complex story, forcing professors and alumni to reckon with the notion that their beloved university — like Simon herself — may have failed in its most sacred duty to protect young people.
For colleges and universities, tragedies of this scale more commonly take the form of fatal accidents or mass shootings. In such cases, campus communities tend to pull together rather than split apart. The failure of a leader as a moral actor, however, elicits a different kind of grieving. This is an angry grief, a confusing sorrow that tempers enthusiasm for the institution with a kind of quiet shame. It is a phenomenon that finds its singular historic parallel at Pennsylvania State University, where top administrators were criminally charged with covering up the crimes of a serial sexual predator.
As at Penn State, where Graham B. Spanier served for 16 years as president before he was fired and later convicted of endangering the welfare of children, Michigan State struggles to come to grips with what the Simon era means now. Her prosecution brings that struggle to the fore in ways that her long-serving colleagues had not fully anticipated, opening a dam of emotion and ambivalence.
Living in an Alternate Reality
Many professors at Michigan State would prefer not to talk about Simon at all. Let the justice system sort it out. Focus on your job. Be vigilant so this never happens again.
That might be possible if not for the incessant reminders. Every day, it seems, brings a new local news article about the fate of the past president. There’s a new photo of her in court. There’s a mug shot of William D. Strampel, Nassar’s dean in the College of Osteopathic Medicine, whose own litany of alleged misdeeds includes failing to enforce the protocol that Nassar, after having been investigated by the university’s Title IX office, wear surgical gloves during examinations.
It’s all enough to make Douglas D. Buhler think that he’s living in an alternate reality, where people he has long trusted and respected may have done horrible things. Buhler, who served two terms as dean of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources during Simon’s tenure, says he lurches from confusion to sadness. He had traveled internationally with Simon. He goes back years with Strampel. Now the world is presenting Buhler with another picture — and it’s grotesque.
Within a year the university lost two chief executives — Lou Anna K. Simon, sank by the scathing, heart-rending testimony of the sports doctor’s scores of victims, and John M. Engler, whose interim presidency ended amid a backlash over his bare-knuckled tactics.
“It’s a very different type of experience,” he says, “to see somebody that the whole world is passing judgment on that you knew as a human being.”
There was a time not long ago, Buhler says, when his wife asked him a troubling question: Was he certain that in all of his years of administration he hadn’t done something that could come back to haunt him? Think of all the documents that flow in the course of a week, a month, a year. Was there anything that he had overlooked or couldn’t defend? He lives now with that kernel of doubt.
“When you go through something this traumatic, there’s going to be a price to pay,” says Buhler, who now directs AgBio Research and serves as assistant vice president of research and graduate studies. “The reality is, this is a very serious thing, and we’ve got to make sure nothing like this happens again. That’s going to take some time and some effort, and that’s going to make us uncomfortable — and I think we need to be uncomfortable.”
Once commonplace in East Lansing, Mich., sightings of Simon are rarer now. Professors say they still see her from time to time on the campus, where she is an education professor. A faculty member, who asked not to be identified because the subject of Simon is so fraught, says that every time he has seen her, she’s wearing green, as she did as president.
“She is very clearly engaged in a campaign to still show her Spartan colors,” says the professor, adding that he would prefer Simon to retreat from public life because he believes she is guilty of the charges against her.
But Spartan green is not what it once was. Michigan State colors were once ubiquitous in the Detroit airport, where fans would call out “Go green! Go white!” to strangers passing by. That sort of camaraderie is less prominent now, professors say. The university is going through a moment of quiet shame, punctuated by the cries of abuse survivors, who reliably show up at trustee meetings and shout at the leaders they say failed them. There is a sense that nothing will ever be the same.
Thomas G. Coon, who directed Michigan State’s extension program during his 25 years at the university, says that when he saw pictures of Simon at the defense table, he felt a profound sense of sadness and loss.
“It was pretty tumultuous emotionally,” says Coon, who in 2014 became vice president for agricultural programs at Oklahoma State University. Michigan State “is part of who I am, and to see it torn this way — to see young people victimized by an institution that I felt committed to, that’s tough.”
“I have two sons who are proud alumni,” he continues. “It’s tough for them to know how to feel. They’re proud of where they’re from, where their degrees are from, and they are certainly not proud of what happened there.”
‘A Kind of Social Death’
The only clear template for this kind of experience is at Penn State, where the crimes of Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach who was convicted of sexually assaulting boys, still cast a pall. There, too, a campus has struggled to reckon with the legacy of a tarnished president.
Like Simon, Spanier had been a towering figure at Penn State and beyond. That made it all the more striking to see him, on an early-spring day in 2017, brace for a guilty verdict in the Dauphin County Courthouse, in Harrisburg, Pa. His trial had been a cathartic and tearful exploration of failed leadership, following the guilty pleas of two of his deputies, Timothy M. Curley and Gary C. Schultz, who have since served prison terms for their roles in what prosecutors described as a cover-up that valued the Penn State brand over the safety of children.
Spanier is appealing his conviction in court. Meanwhile, he has become a pariah in a community where he was once so influential that he seemed more like a mayor than a university president.
“There is a kind of social death that happens when somebody goes through something like this,” says Matthew F. Jordan, an associate professor of media studies at Penn State, where he has worked for 17 years. “He was at a party I was invited to last summer, and it was awkward, I have to say. People who had known him for decades found it awkward.”
The Sandusky scandal erupted more than seven years ago, and people still don’t know how to talk about it, Jordan says. A statue of the late Joe Paterno, the legendary Nittany Lions football coach, remains locked away, a relic of an era that the university hasn’t figured out how to acknowledge.
Closure? If what’s happened at Penn State is any indicator, there’s no such thing in a case like this.
“There are still people fighting in this community over what to do with these issues,” Jordan says. “If coming to terms means we need to come to a consensus, there is no consensus yet.”
So brace yourself, Michigan State, for the big and small ways in which your world is sure to change. What’s at risk is the very notion of community.
Before Sandusky, for example, locals in State College, Pa., would drop by the gym for pick-up basketball games, allowing easy interaction between university employees and community members. That’s more difficult now, because people need a university ID card to enter the gym, a security measure that was instituted in part because the former coach had used his unfettered access to university facilities to molest children.
In the grand scheme, pick-up basketball is a small price to pay. But it’s one way that a scandal of this sort can reshape the culture of a university, bit by bit.
“There will be all kinds of things that you won’t expect to come out of this that will,” Jordan says.
What She Knew
The charges against Simon hinge on whether she knew more about Nassar than she has let on.
Simon has maintained that, when Michigan State’s Title IX office investigated Nassar, in 2014, she learned of only minor details. She says she knew only that a “sports-medicine doc,” whose name she wasn’t told, was under review. Simon said she did not know the substance of the allegation made by Amanda Thomashow, then a recent graduate, who told university officials that Nassar had sexually assaulted her.
Nassar was cleared in the Title IX inquiry. He continued to treat patients until women publicly came forward with their accusations.
Investigators aren’t buying the assertion that Simon, known as a detail-oriented president, settled for such vague information about the Nassar inquiry in 2014. When she spoke with the police, in May 2018, prosecutors argue that she played down her knowledge to save face and avoid legal problems.
By that time, Nassar was already locked away in prison, where he is likely to spend the rest of his life. But the state attorney general’s office says an investigation of “criminal sexual conduct” was still active, as was an investigation of “criminal misconduct of a public official,” related to whether anyone at Michigan State had helped to conceal or facilitate Nassar’s crimes.
That timeline is one of the problems that Lee T. Silver, Simon’s lawyer, sees with the case. “I want to emphasize that she did not give any false information to the police,” he says. “But whatever she told investigators in 2018 is completely irrelevant to any of the abuses committed by Larry Nassar, because at that point Larry Nasar had already been charged in three different courts, had already pled guilty, had already been sentenced, and was already in prison. Whatever Dr. Simon said on May 1, 2018, would have no effect whatsoever on preventing Larry Nassar’s abuses.”
Those details are significant for Simon’s defense, because penalties for lying to the police depend in part on the severity of the crimes being investigated at the time. In order for the felony charges against Simon to stick, Silver says, prosecutors will have to prove that the police were still investigating “criminal sexual conduct” when she allegedly misled them.
Silver did not respond to a request to make Simon available for an interview.
There is plenty of speculation that Simon was charged for political purposes, providing the illusion of accountability to an angry public. That kind of thinking has abuse survivors and Simon’s critics seething. They’ve said all along that she was lying, and now they see evidence of it. In an affidavit supporting the charges, investigators cite documents that show a 2014 meeting between Simon and Paulette Granberry Russell, senior adviser to the president, at which Nassar and the investigation were discussed, according to the affidavit.
Documents related to the meeting include Russell’s folder, the outside of which contains a handwritten note: “Sports Med, Dr. Nassar, SA.” The letters “SA,” she told the police, stand for “sexual assault,” for the nature of Thomashow’s complaint. Investigators also obtained Simon’s agenda for the meeting, which includes an entry for “Sexual Assault Cases.” Next to that entry, in Simon’s handwriting, is the notation “COM,” for College of Osteopathic Medicine, where Nassar worked.
For some people who knew how Michigan State operated during Simon’s tenure, it beggars belief that she would have had a meeting about a potentially explosive case of sexual abuse involving a prominent sports doctor and not be told his name or even think to ask. It doesn’t jibe with what Lauren C. Allswede, who worked as a therapist in Michigan State’s sexual-assault program, observed during her eight years there.
“Anything high profile or with an athlete was only dealt with at the upper end of the pyramid,” says Allswede, who adds that she resigned, in 2015, because she was so frustrated with the university’s failure to invest in sexual-assault prevention and counseling services. Simon “would have very direct knowledge about those cases,” she says.
Silver, the lawyer, would not comment directly on the assertion that a complaint about Nassar would have been described to Simon with such specificity. “We’ll address that issue at the appropriate time,” he says, “but I don’t agree with the assumption or the premise.”
‘Culture of Indifference’
The Nassar case has prompted deeper scrutiny of Simon’s record on sexual assault, and many people find it wanting.
During Allswede’s time at Michigan State, she says, she was one of just two specialized therapists serving sexual-assault survivors on a campus of 50,000 students.
“Our program was in the basement,” she says. “You had to walk down a really dark alley. It was creepy-looking. It was never valued.”
Experts argued that resources for prevention were scarce, and some were frustrated that Simon did not heed pleas for more staff members. Rebecca Campbell, a psychology professor, says only one person’s job was devoted to sexual-assault prevention when Simon was president.
“I know it’s trite to say, ‘Let that sink in,’ " Campbell says, “but let that sink in.”
Under John M. Engler, the interim president and a former Republican governor, Michigan State has created more positions to deal with sexual assault. But Engler, who has publicly tangled with survivors, has done little to restore trust and confidence. His administration’s latest decision, the closure of a $10-million fund that provided counseling to abuse survivors, was met with outrage.
Emily Gerkin Guerrant, a spokeswoman for the university, has said that the fund was always designed to be “a bridge” until Michigan State reached a monetary settlement with survivors, who, collectively, will be paid $500 million. But she could not provide any documentation to The Chronicle showing that the Healing Assistance Fund, as it was called, was meant to be temporary. A scan of minutes of meetings of the Board of Trustees also turned up no such references.
For critics of Simon’s approach to sexual assault, the closure of the healing fund smacks of more of the same indifference they observed on her watch. Even now there’s a reluctance to interrogate the university’s deeper problems, says Allswede, the therapist.
“If Lou Anna Simon is willing to lie about Larry Nassar, who else did they lie about?” she says. “Everybody wants to isolate Larry Nassar. They have tried to make him this total fluke. They don’t want to look at their own roles. They are trying to make him an isolated experience, and he’s totally not.”
William A. Forsyth, a former county prosecutor who was appointed by the state attorney general to investigate Michigan State, reached a similar conclusion in a recent report. He described a broken culture at the university that allowed Nassar to abuse his victims. Even when the nature of Nassar’s crimes was revealed, Forsyth wrote, Michigan State continued to stonewall investigators and to mislead the public. That hasn’t changed, he argued.
“Both then and now,” he wrote, “MSU has fostered a culture of indifference toward sexual assault, motivated by its desire to protect its reputation.”
Those words could have been ripped from the report that Louis J. Freeh, a former FBI director, wrote six years ago, after his investigation of Penn State. At the time, there was talk from other college chief executives about the moral duty of leaders. Simon joined in that conversation, casting the issue in black and white.
“The right thing,” she said in 2012, “is saying something when you see something, and doing something after you said something. It’s really that simple.”
Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.
