Wayne State U.’s Board Can’t Even Agree On Whether It Fired the President

Wayne State University’s embattled president sat in his office on Wednesday, but whether he still has a job depends on whom you ask.

A hurried attempt late Monday night to fire the president, M. Roy Wilson, has cracked apart an eight-member governing board, which has been at loggerheads for nearly a year. The fallout from the vote, which followed the president’s bungled announcement of free tuition for Detroit high-school graduates, reveals that members of the Board of Governors disagree not just about Wilson’s performance but also about the nature of the board’s own responsibility.

Defenders of the president say the actions of his board opponents will harm Wayne State’s ability to recruit future talent — perhaps even Wilson’s replacement. His opponents argue that the other four governors are “cheerleaders,” favoring Wilson as an individual over the university at large.

The clash over a free-tuition plan for Detroit students accepted at Wayne State was far from the first board brawl this year. Four members sued the other four over the summer. One member who has opposed Wilson was criticized for getting too close to the campus’s daily operations. In an emotional meeting in March, the board’s chair all but stated that poor behavior by board members was rooted in racism.

With each conflict, governors have offered the public a glimpse into a research university’s board in disarray. But for some governors, the free-tuition plan — called the Heart of Detroit Tuition Pledge — was the last straw. Several said they do not know how the board will move forward. Members of each camp have called opponents secretive and bitter.

“The division now is I feel very Trumpian in nature,” said Sandra O’Brien, who has served as a governor since 2013. “Four of us are willing to do our constitutional job. ... Some of my colleagues are just not. They are almost beholden to Roy, as if Roy is the institution.”

The chair, Kim Trent, said she was “shocked” by her colleagues’ behavior. “They seem to have lost all sense of proportionality, all sense of appropriate behavior, all kind of fidelity to the mission of the university,” she said. “I feel like the university is being held hostage.”

Questions remain as to the legitimacy of the vote to oust Wilson. After an informational meeting about the tuition plan, one board member, Michael Busuito, moved to terminate Wilson’s contract should he not resign, according to both supporters and opponents of Wilson.

There was a second to Busuito’s motion, and four members voted in favor. One member was out of the country, and the three remaining governors walked out. They subsequently said the vote was ineligible because of the nature of the gathering.

No matter. The train had left the station. Opponents of Wilson wrote after the meeting that the campus police chief “has been advised to … implement the termination in accordance with the law.” Trent emailed employees, assuring them that Wilson wasn’t going anywhere. (Representatives of the university declined to make Wilson available for comment on Wednesday.)

Now, faculty and staff members are trying to sift through the mess.

The news hit Provost Keith E. Whitfield’s cellphone minutes before he walked into a regular check-in meeting with deans. Naturally, they had questions about what it all meant. He told them to focus on their jobs and try not to worry.

Charles Parrish, a professor of political science who is president of the university’s AAUP-AFT chapter, was plain in an email to members of the faculty bargaining unit on Wednesday afternoon: “The present situation with the divided board is not helpful for the board and, consequently, for the university. It is virtually impossible for the university to function effectively in the present situation.”

Expectation of ‘Nonsense’

Bryan C. Barnhill II won his election to Wayne State’s board last year with more votes than any other candidate. With experience in the mayor’s office, he said, he thought of the unpaid job as a low-profile gig.

He soon realized he was mistaken. Before he was sworn in, Barnhill attended the board’s December 2018 meeting. Members split on Wilson’s contract renewal, and Barnhill realized how deep the divisions went. “I had no idea what I was stepping into,” he said.

Several governors traced the current divide to that meeting. The contract renewal passed 5-3, with the votes of two board members who had recently lost their seats and were about to leave the board.

That day, the tenor of the board changed, O’Brien said.

Wilson had previously enjoyed the board’s support. When he was a candidate for president, O’Brien thought he was a “perfect match” for the university. He had worked at the National Institutes of Health and at university health-sciences centers and medical schools across the country. “We needed someone who spoke the medical schools’ language,” she said.

Wilson has been praised for improving graduation rates at Wayne State and expanding the research portfolio.

But at that December 2018 meeting, her last as chair, O’Brien felt that her colleagues had pushed through Wilson’s contract renewal. That gave Busuito pause after watching Michigan State University struggle to navigate the fallout from the Larry Nassar scandal.

Trent, who has supported Wilson, took the helm of the board soon after, and said she has been dismayed by the “level of animus.”

Conflicts came one after another. The two sides battled over a prospective medical-school partnership. They questioned payments to consultants. Local headlines reported FBI and accreditor inquiries. Over the summer, the faction that would vote to fire Wilson sued the rest of the board, accusing them of violating open-meetings law and unfairly counting Wilson as a board member to make a quorum and push through agenda items. (A judge ruled against the plaintiffs.)

“Every day you wake up with the expectation there is going to be nonsense,” Trent said.

The structure of university governance in Michigan is unusual. Separate eight-member governing boards oversee the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Wayne State. Each governor serves for an eight-year term without compensation.

Candidates are nominated at party conventions that are closed to the public, according to the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, and are not approved by the state governor’s office, said Robert A. Scott, author of How University Boards Work and a former president of Adelphi University. The divisions on Wayne State’s board are not along party lines; Democrats outnumber Republicans seven to one.

Those structural issues can aggravate underlying tensions in multiple ways, said Sondra Barringer, an assistant professor of education policy and leadership at Southern Methodist University.

First, having an even number of board members, precluding a tiebreaking vote, she said, is “one of the things that everyone advises against.” Second, the board’s small size means that “personalities can come to the fore.” And third, electing trustees may mean that a board does not have complementary skill sets.

A board could be made up of members who are entirely unfamiliar with finance, athletics, hospitals, or fund raising — hugely important pieces at any research university, Barringer said.

The Divide Sharpens

Problems simmered all year. But they boiled over last month, after a flashy rollout of the free-tuition plan.

Wilson stood at a podium as Trent, the provost, and Chrystal Wilson, assistant superintendent of Detroit’s public schools, looked on. They wore matching green T-shirts with the name of the program: The Heart of Detroit. Students, carrying pompoms and wearing the same shirts, cheered their approval. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Mayor Mike Duggan issued statements of support.

Absent from the fanfare? Some members of Wayne State’s Board of Governors. Several said they hadn’t known the announcement was coming until less than two hours before it began.

At the time of the announcement, some members didn’t know the funding source for the program, said O’Brien, who added that constituents asked why a state university was offering such a program for “one city and not another.”

The lack of advance knowledge surprised Scott, author of the book on governance. “I would think this was a rather historic program and announcement,” he said. “I would say this is a controversy that deserves close examination as to questions of communication between the president and the board, the full board, and how policies are developed and implemented at the university.”

Supporters of Wilson, including the provost and board chair, have acknowledged that keeping the announcement from the full board was a mistake.

Dawn Medley, associate vice president for enrollment management, said the plan would rely largely on existing grant programs, aided by a recent fund-raising campaign. At a fall planning meeting, she said, attendees discussed inviting all of the board’s members. “I’m not sure who didn’t notify the board,” she said.

Trent, the board chair, said she had received a preparatory packet on the announcement about a week before it took place. She said she thought “it was curious” that the talking points provided for her did not acknowledge other board members in attendance. The tuition announcement didn’t come up with other members before the event, she said, although she acknowledged that board members had met the day before the rollout to discuss health affairs. “It was a pretty big blunder.”

Wilson’s opponents were furious. O’Brien said the snub was indicative of a pattern of opacity. She, along with Busuito and Thompson, put out a statement criticizing what they characterized as a last-ditch effort by Wilson to gain outside support.

“This tuition pledge has major financial, political and reputational implications, yet the president did not inform nor discuss with all members of the board the details of the pledge prior to the morning the tuition pledge was announced,” they wrote in a statement released to local media.

The criticism elicited further blowback. Busuito said he and like-minded governors suffered politically for their statement. Even though they were criticizing the process and not the “benevolent intent” of the plan, he said, observers did not separate the two and saw their statement as racist, as most of the students in Detroit’s public schools are black.

It wasn’t the first time that issues of race have emerged in the board’s disputes.

In March, the president’s critics slammed spending on consultants and accused the university’s administration of avoiding accountability.

At that meeting, one of the governors, Dana Thompson, urged Wilson to resign. Citing the ousted president of Michigan State, she said, according to the minutes, “Lou Anna Simon could have been viewed as a successful president, but it took one major failed decision to squander her perceived successes. The [medical-school] deal is becoming Roy Wilson’s albatross.”

Thompson said the president had pitted board members against one another. Trent, the chair, who is black, said that board members’ conduct “was never a problem until this little brown girl became chair of the board.”

On Wednesday she called the March meeting “an emotional moment” and said, “I don’t think my colleagues are racist.” Still, she hears comments indicating that certain board members criticize the high salaries of some Wayne State employees of color. “The disrespect continues.”

Looking Ahead

In her report at Wednesday’s meeting of the Academic Senate, Linda Beale tried to stick to the facts. Beale, the senate’s president and a professor of law, kept her message brief, knowing that professors had likely seen reports in the news media and emails on the subject.

The governing board’s divide worries the faculty about long-term consequences to the university, Beale said, adding that the legitimacy of Monday’s vote is likely to play out in court or in another outside process. “You soldier on, you do your job, you continue to meet with students and teach and work in the community,” she said. “But it remains a nagging concern for many of the faculty, how it’s ultimately going to impact the university.”

Members of the Board of Governors interviewed by The Chronicle expressed uncertainty about how to proceed after Monday’s vote and the larger schism. O’Brien’s and Trent’s terms will expire in 2020, when the next election will take place.

As on many other issues, the two board members have opposite perspectives on how to move forward.

“For the good of the institution, it’s time to part ways” with Wilson, O’Brien said. “When you have lost the confidence of half the board, it’s time to do the right thing and move on. This is not some kind of flash in the pan.”

Trent said she was not confident that Wayne State will still be able to attract qualified candidates. “Our ability to attract talent is going to be severely compromised if they are successful in running him off,” she said.

Barnhill, the board member who joined this year, was in India during the vote. He has struggled with how to proceed, he said. If the president “were to resign, it would lend credence to the idea that being disruptive and uncivil is what you need to do in order to accomplish your goals and objectives.”

But eventually the board must move forward, said Eric Lupher, president of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, who analyzed the state’s university-governance model last year.

The university cannot come to a standstill, he argued. “Students are going to enroll. Professors will be hired. Departments need budgets. The board is going to be forced to return to regular operations and deal with some of the more mundane stuff of running a university.”

“That might force them in some ways to coalesce around issues and get over whatever was keeping them apart before. Or it might just lead those big problems to fester.”

Lindsay Ellis is a staff reporter. Follow her on Twitter @lindsayaellis, or email her at lindsay.ellis@chronicle.com.