He Came From the Frying Pan. Can He Manage the Fire?

Kevin Guskiewicz stands in an entryway of Michigan State University’s College of Engineering while students in business attire and industry representatives in company-branded polo shirts swirl around him. He’s listening intently to two faculty members, and the conversation at the college’s annual Design Day is stretching long.

His hosts and guides hover nearby, glancing at their schedules and then at Guskiewicz. One of them suggests it’s time to move on.

“I’ve got another question,” Guskiewicz says, politely rejecting the nudge.

Guskiewicz, the university’s new president, is on a listening tour to learn the ins and outs of a campus he’s been hired to stabilize after nearly a decade of embarrassing leadership turmoil. He’s in it for the long haul, he said, and is determined to disrupt the sense of permanent crisis in East Lansing.

The first major test of his leadership arrived six days after his Design Day tour and a couple of months into his tenure. Students had begun setting up an encampment in a campus park, protesting Israel’s war in Gaza. The situation had the potential to go south, as some of his counterparts across the country were learning in real time. Social media was ablaze with images of helmeted police clashing with crowds of demonstrators, forcibly dispersing encampments at the behest of presidents.

Guskiewicz had a different plan. Instead of dispatching police while hunkered down in a command center, which he feared could heighten the tensions, he headed from his office across the Red Cedar River to visit the budding encampment. A photo of him speaking with protesters quickly surfaced on X, and it turned heads. “I really just wanted to learn what was important to them,” he said a few days later. “That is my style. Everyone I talk to — students, the faculty senate — I want to know what is important to them.”

This time, his strategy paid off. Guskiewicz arranged for the students to be granted a permit, and when it expired two days later, they left. Michigan State was spared another wave of bad headlines and Instagram photos.

In high- and low-stakes moments, Guskiewicz’s listen-first approach has earned cautious optimism on a campus that’s grown skeptical of its top administrators. That’s been his style for years, those who know him say. “Kevin has a very personable way of listening to folks, even when their ideas are not ones he shares,” said Holden Thorp, who rose through the administrative ranks at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Guskiewicz, both ultimately becoming chancellors. “That’s a skill not all college presidents have. Some of us — certainly this was true of me — are too easy to read when we disagree. People want to see themselves in the institutions so badly, and Kevin is very aware of that and able to act on it.”

When Guskiewicz took the top job at Chapel Hill, the university was mired in a seemingly endless crisis loop. He told the board there, “I won’t be your crisis chancellor,” and he echoed those words when he arrived at Michigan State, a university caught in a similar vortex.

At events like Design Day, and in classrooms and labs, Michigan State continues to shine as one of the nation’s booming land-grant colleges. But the university’s administrative offices and board room are known as one of the nation’s leaders in dysfunction.

“There’s a reputational gap here,” Guskiewicz said. He was hired to close it, but his success rests nearly as much on the board as it does on him.

Not quite a decade ago, Michigan State appeared to be sailing on glassy waters, led by Lou Anna K. Simon, the ultimate insider president who had worked her way up Michigan State’s ranks the same way Guskiewicz did at Chapel Hill. The board, whose members are publicly elected, was known for its rubber-stamping of the administration’s plans and members’ desire for football suite tickets, rides on university planes to sporting events, and good social standing at the local country club.

Then the Indianapolis Star wrote about Larry Nassar, a Michigan State and USA Gymnastics doctor who had sexually assaulted hundreds of athletes. It was revealed that Michigan State had cleared Nassar of any wrongdoing when first told of the assaults. Simon was forced to resign. A former Michigan governor, John M. Engler, a Spartan alumnus, was brought in to stabilize the ship and use his political strength and connections in Lansing and Washington to protect the university. He too ended up being forced out after making derogatory remarks about the survivors.

At the same time, board members began to depart, either through resignation or electoral defeat, and were replaced by members determined to demand more answers from the administration. They hired Samuel L. Stanley Jr. from outside of Michigan State to stabilize the institution. But if the board had been too lax in the years preceding the Nassar scandal, the pendulum now seemed to swing too far in the other direction. Stanley quit, criticizing the board’s “micromanagement.” Stanley’s provost, Teresa K. Woodruff, was named interim president; she led the institution through a mass shooting on campus and the firing of the football coach for sexual harassment. She had detractors on the board, some of whom criticized her handling of sexual-misconduct-policy violations by the business-school dean when she was provost. Buffeted by political disputes on the board, she withdrew her name from the search for a permanent president.

The squabbling between board members hasn’t stopped. Hours before Guskiewicz took office, the board voted to recommend to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat and a Spartan alumnus with close ties to the university and some board members, that two trustees be removed over complaints of meddling in the day-to-day operations of the university. Rema Vassar, who resigned that night as board chair, is being investigated for allegedly making an obscene gesture at other members during a virtual meeting.

It was amid an onslaught of headlines like these that the presidential search began to unfold. Guskiewicz was first approached last summer, but he demurred. Then, in the fall, while he was in Michigan for a wedding, he got a second call about the opening. He decided to jump in.

Hannah Jeffery, a Ph.D. candidate in plant breeding, genetics, and biotechnology who served on the search committee, said she was struck by his confidence. “He doesn’t back down from a challenge.”

In Chapel Hill, he had plenty. “Every day seemed to be an emergency,” he told The Chronicle, remembering his early days there. One of his biggest crises came when the university hired Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and lead author of The New York Times Magazine’s politically charged “1619 Project,” as the university’s Knight chair in race and investigative journalism. When news broke that the job offer did not include tenure — a perk all previous Knight chairs had been given — controversy erupted over whether administrators had caved to politically or racially motivated misgivings from donors or board members.

Protests followed, with Black students showing up to board meetings, accusing the board of being racist and Guskiewicz as a words-only chancellor who had failed students. The board eventually offered Hannah-Jones a tenured position, which she rejected.

Chronicle reporting at the time revealed that it was Guskiewicz and Robert A. Blouin, then the provost, who were behind the decision to remove tenure from the job offer in response to perceived resistance from at least one member of the board. In an interview then, Guskiewicz offered a bland statement about the matter: “It is a complex governance structure that I work within,” he said. “I value the unique perspective that each of those board members brings to the table for addressing the issues that we were faced with.”

The situation was a vivid illustration of the constraints Guskiewicz worked under at Chapel Hill — constraints that often took on a partisan hue. He reported directly to a system president and had two boards — the local Chapel Hill board and the system board. The state legislature, which has been controlled by Republicans for over a decade, elects members to the system board, which elects the president. That board and the legislature split appointments to the Chapel Hill board. Each of the three power centers have been perceived as pushing the flagship to embrace a more conservative perspective, clashing with the largely liberal faculty and students on campus and creating a tension for the chancellor to manage.

That tension ultimately came to a head with an informal agreement between the chancellor and the system’s leadership that Guskiewicz would step aside by the end of the 2023-24 academic year. This hung over Guskiewicz’s head as he considered the Michigan State job — a chance to stay at a public university and for some opportunities that Chapel Hill didn’t have. He was intrigued by the opportunity to learn about types of schools and colleges he’s never worked with, like Michigan State’s agriculture college. In addition to the formal interview process, he and his wife snuck into East Lansing on a football weekend and left excited by the campus spirit.

After his name was leaked as the sole finalist at Michigan State, his inbox filled up with people asking him to stay. “Please hang in at Carolina,” wrote Paul Fulton, a former dean of UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and a former trustee. “I can only imagine how difficult and frustrating your job is. But you have been a damn good chancellor in a very difficult period.”

But those pleas were too late. Guskiewicz put away his Carolina blue and borrowed a green tie from a colleague to be introduced via Zoom to Michigan State’s campus president in early December. Three months later, he was on campus.

A couple of months after that, Guskiewicz greeted me as I walked up to the president’s house on campus. Not much was stirring on campus in the early morning hours. A big room on the main floor still had tables set up from the previous night’s reception with 250 soon-to-be graduates — an opportunity for them to get a picture taken with the president and for Guskiewicz to meet another crop of students.

Guskiewicz’s home office, just to the side of that room, was neat and orderly. Before sitting down to chat, he made sure his laptop and a few other papers were stacked together in preparation for his next meeting, which was being squeezed in before the visit to Design Day. A few personalized Spartan jerseys hung in various spots around his office.

Listening tours mean a lot of meetings. Guskiewicz had 48 stops — the various colleges, schools, and units that make up the university — scheduled. He got briefing papers from each one and asked questions. But he was doing more than just gathering information — he was looking for clues that would help him learn the culture of the institution. Who is looking to their boss for permission to talk? Who are the leaders in the room?

Guskiewicz didn’t need to learn a new culture in Chapel Hill; he already knew it through osmosis. He started there as a professor in the mid-1990s and became a renowned expert in brain injuries in sports; he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2011. He rose up the ranks and was chosen as chancellor in 2019.

His lack of deep institutional knowledge about Michigan State has helped him during his visits, he said, because he’s not bringing preconceived ideas with him. He’s compiling all his notes from the meetings and working on developing his vision for the university.

That vision will include changes to the ways things are done now, he said, including rewarding programs that are interdisciplinary and reassessing the general-education curriculum. He is likely to bring in some new top-level staff, although he describes the crop of current deans and administrators as “battle hardened.”

As Guskiewicz makes his way through the displays at Design Day, a pair of passing students looks at the entourage surrounding him — various administrators, a couple of photographers, and others — and does a double take.

“Is that the new president?” one asks the other.

“I think so,” the other responds as they continue down the hall.

Guskiewicz might not ever be the most recognizable face on campus — it would be hard to top longtime basketball coach Tom Izzo — but he’s got a secret weapon: Koda, the family’s new Cavapoo. Taking her for strolls through Adams Field, next to his house, has sparked conversations with students, he said.

He greets students — both on dog walks and during events — with a simple “Hi, I’m Kevin.”

During Design Day, he listens to presentations, leaning in to look at rows of data on Excel spreadsheets, and then invariably asks, “What should your new president be doing?” A trio of freshmen looks flustered when he asks, and they demur. “We’re only freshmen,” one says. “You should ask some juniors or seniors.”

A group of upperclassmen are sitting at a nearby coffee shop, working on a group project. When asked, they share a bevy of concerns, including about campus safety and surveillance. After a mass shooting on campus a year ago, Michigan State is beefing up the number of cameras used on campus and undertaking several campus-safety upgrades.

“I want to be safe, and I think they need to do more to do things like lock down buildings with the push of one button, but I’m not sure about putting up a ton of cameras,” says Melissa Wall, a junior. “I worry what all that is going to be used for.”

But it doesn’t take long for the elephant in the room to show up. “I just don’t want people to laugh when I tell them where I go to school or have to be disappointed in the board doing dumb stuff again,” says Marcus Williams, also a junior.

Some faculty members feel similarly. “He really has got to demonstrate he’s not a shill of the trustees,” said Jack W. Lipton, chair of the Faculty Senate. “He needs to demonstrate his independence. If it feels like he isn’t holding them accountable, he will lose credibility.”

The board didn’t afford Guskiewicz’s predecessors that level of independence, but not because of partisan strife, as in North Carolina. Seven of the eight Michigan State trustees are Democrats, but personal requests and intra-party feuds have pushed through to the president’s desk.

The best president and board relationships are built on clear definitions of roles, accountability, and most importantly, trust, said Sondra Barringer, an associate professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University who studies boards and presidents. It’s a tricky relationship, she added, because “the president is in their job because of the board.”

That relationship matters — not just for the president’s sanity, but for creating a widespread impression of stability. “When you have stable leadership, when you have leadership you can see working together, that sends a clear signal,” Barringer said.

Much of Michigan State’s existing reputational gap, Guskiewicz said, “comes from being humble” and not doing a good job of touting successes. “This is a board that is committed to supporting a new approach. Now we have to demonstrate that through actions. The board has been following my lead in expressing what this place is and its strengths. Everybody is singing from the same sheet of music.”

If the harmony breaks and the board starts to meddle in the day-to-day affairs of the institution, Guskiewicz said, he has a trump card — a pledge each board member signed as part of Guskiewicz’s hiring to not do so. He said he hasn’t had to wave it at any board member yet.

If that continues, Guskiewicz could succeed in delivering on some faculty wants: fostering a sense of belonging at Michigan State, particularly for minority students; making the campus safe and secure; providing better pay; and restoring Michigan State’s relationship with the state legislature to protect funding, Lipton said.

“My impressions have been pretty good,” Lipton said, noting Guskiewicz has reached out informally several times to have conversations about issues. “It doesn’t feel performative. I didn’t feel like he was handling us with kid gloves. He’s treating faculty leadership as peers.”

Still, the campus community is cautious.

“So far people are optimistic,” said Hannah Jeffery, the Ph.D. candidate and search-committee member. “They are waiting with bated breath. The people of Michigan State University are tired of being disappointed in the people who are appointed to lead them.”

Back in the halls of Design Day, there’s not much talk about the past. It’s a perfect Michigan spring day outside, and graduation is just around the corner.

Guskiewicz continues on to the next display on his tour, this one focusing on improving efficiency at the Tillamook County Creamery Association, in Oregon. He cracks a joke to the presenting students, who have small cheese pins affixed to their shirts. Better a pin like that than the massive cheeseheads worn by fans of the Green Bay Packers, he says with a smile.

As he talks, a company representative runs up with an individually wrapped chunk of cheese. Guskiewicz tucks it into his suit-coat pocket, but it reappears a few minutes later when he takes a photo with the students. Photo session over, the cheese is back in the pocket and Guskiewicz heads down the hall.