People called Lou Anna Simon one of MSU's best presidents. Then came Larry Nassar.
RJ WolcottEAST LANSING - Kaylee Lorincz couldn't hold back tears.
She was at a podium in front of Michigan State University's Board of Trustees in December, describing the first time former MSU sports medicine doctor Larry Nassar sexually assaulted her.
Trustee Brian Mosallam cried as she spoke. Other trustees apologized to her after the meeting.
Lou Anna Simon, MSU's president, was stoic as Lorincz described the abuse and left the room as soon as the meeting ended.
"I couldn’t tell if she was really listening," Lorincz said, recalling the moment in an interview this month. “She didn’t have any emotions.”
That perception — that Simon lacked empathy — would become more pronounced in the weeks following as she tried to lead MSU through the anguish and anger tied to Nassar's serial abuse of patients.
Simon had never been known for expressiveness. In more than four decades at MSU, she built a reputation around her encyclopedic grasp of the details of operating an enormous institution, made a virtue out of wonkishness.
"People say Lou Anna isn't charismatic," Trustee Joel Ferguson said in 2004, shortly after Simon had been picked to succeed Peter McPherson as MSU's president. "Her charisma is in her knowledge and expertise."
And her style seemed to work. Simon left an imprint on the university that few of her predecessors can rival. She pushed research productivity, presided over the construction of a spate of new research buildings and saw the combined endowments of the university and the MSU Foundation nearly triple, eclipsing $3 billion.
She had critics -- those who disliked her top-down leadership style, her "corporate" approach to higher education -- but until Larry Nassar, mentions of Simon more often focused on her achievements.
Although Nassar was fired in September 2016, the criminal investigations were just getting started. As the number of reported victims grew steadily through 2017, so did the lawsuits ascribing fault to the university. And Simon's critics grew louder, calling her response woefully inadequate.
Simon's public remarks often appeared to deflect responsibility. She said experts had told her it was “virtually impossible to stop a determined sexual predator" and that "sexual assault and child sexual abuse are societal issues."
Simon apologized to victims this past December, at the meeting where Lorincz spoke.
"I'm sorry a physician who called himself a Spartan so utterly betrayed your trust and everything this university stands for," Simon said, in part.
Lorincz said she didn't believe the apology was heartfelt.
In January came Nassar's sentencing hearing in Ingham County Circuit Court, seven days of women and girls describing their abuse — and most of them took the opportunity to criticize MSU, Nassar's employer for two decades. Simon resigned her position as president on the same day Nassar was sentenced.
All eight MSU trustees supported Simon almost until the end. Republican Mitch Lyons was the first to peel away. Dianne Byrum, a Democrat, was the second.
Byrum is a former state legislator who now runs Byrum & Fiske Advocacy Communications. She said Simon’s failure was one of communication, both within the university community and outside of it.
“In a lot of ways Lou Anna’s accomplishments will be overshadowed by that failure, and the university’s failure to handle this tragic situation.”
More than a dozen former and current MSU administrators either did not respond to interview requests or declined to speak on the record for this report, among them Provost June Youatt.
Simon herself gave a brief statement when contacted this week.
"It was a privilege to serve MSU," she said, adding that she and her husband, Roy, "deeply love the university. Our thoughts and prayers remain with the survivors."
Before MSU's role in enabling Nassar's crimes became a public question, trustees and colleagues compared Simon's accomplishments to those of John A. Hannah, who built MSU from a regional agricultural college into a massive research university. Some of them still do.
"John Hannah brought us into the 20th century," said Peter Secchia, an MSU alumnus and donor. "Lou Anna brought us into the 21st century."
Hannah's name adorns MSU's administration building, watched over by a bronze statue of the man himself.
It's uncertain whether history will be so kind to Simon.
Lou Anna Kimsey comes to East Lansing
Before she became the first woman to lead MSU, Simon became the first person in her family to go to college.
She'd gotten a practical education weighing nails and measuring boards in the Atlanta, Indiana, lumberyard run by her grandfather and went on to Indiana State University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master’s degree in student personnel and counseling.
She first set foot on MSU's campus in January 1970 to meet with Paul Dressel, director of Institutional Research.
Two weeks later, she got a letter offering her a position in Dressel's office. He'd enclosed a graduate school application.
When she married Roy Simon two years later, she gained access to the university's inner circle.
Her father-in-law, Ted Simon, headed the physical plant on campus. The T.B. Simon Power Plant on campus now bears his name. Her mother-in-law, Mary Jane Simon, played bridge with Hannah's sister, Julia Vandenberg.
"So I became a part, not simply of the current generation of people who were at Michigan state at that time," Simon said in a 2006 interview, "but of the past generation of people."
She finished her doctorate in higher education in 1974 and joined the Office of Institutional Research and the faculty, teaching courses in statistics and higher education administration.
It was a federal audit of MSU's affirmative action compliance efforts that moved her into the orbit of the administration.
It required "an enormous amount of data," Simon said in 2006. "This is not what I would call sensitivity programs. This was basic data, workforce analysis, goals, timetables, boxes of data."
She also worked on Title IX issues after the MSU women's basketball team sued in 1979 for travel allowances equal to those of the men's team. The women got a promise of equal per diems in 1984.
By 1987, Simon was an associate provost.
"Anybody who knows Lou Anna knows her strength is the ability to be able to conceive and manage a very large scale organization," said retired professor and administrator Frank Fear, who met Simon more than three decades ago. "You could see that capability when she was associate provost."
Dolores “Dee” Cook, who became an MSU trustee in 1991, met Simon at her first board meeting.
“It was obvious she was a very impressive, very take-charge person,” Cook said. “She was calm and had a great understanding of the university.”
Simon’s delayed ascension
The year 1993 was tumultuous at MSU.
The Board of Trustees was searching for the university's next president, a successor to John DiBiaggio, who'd left for Tufts University. It wasn't going well.
Then-Florida State University President Dale Lick dropped out after students learned of past comments he'd made about black athletes, saying they were better at some sports because of genetics, comments widely taken as racist.
As the process stretched on, two others dropped out.
That left Simon, the last of four finalists. And not everyone was convinced.
Eli Broad, the billionaire MSU alumnus who had just given $20 million to the university and had the business college renamed in his honor, pushed for someone with presidential experience.
“The team in place is working,” Broad wrote in a memo faxed to the trustees. “Based on all the dissension on the board in the past, I’d think they’d want to go forward and find someone they’re all happy about – even if it took another six months or a year."
The board shocked the MSU community that August when they picked Peter McPherson, a former bank executive, to lead to university.
McPherson nominated Simon, then 46, to become the university's provost, its chief academic officer.
“We didn’t always agree,” McPherson said in 2004 reflecting upon his time as president. “When she doesn’t agree, she tells you.”
Simon got her first chance to lead MSU in 2003, when McPherson left to rebuild Iraq’s economy for the George W. Bush administration. He resigned as president the following year.
Some trustees favored a nationwide search to find a successor. They never held one.
Instead, at a meeting in June of that year, they surprised the campus by simply voting to approve Simon.
“People are horrified by the process,” Sheila Teahan, an English professor, said at the time. “You can only know you have the best candidate if you have a pool of candidates.”
But Cook said she was comfortable with the choice. “She had demonstrated her ability in a very important time, when (McPherson) left the United States."
Simon became MSU’s 20th and first female president at the start of 2005.
“She never forgot who she was,” said Paula Cunningham, who met Simon in the late 1990s and became president of Lansing Community College in 2000. “She never forgot the real values of life and what’s important.”
Being the first female leaders of their respective institutions was something they shared, and the two women met once or twice a year for lunch, typically at an East Lansing hamburger joint.
“I don’t eat red meat, but wherever she wants to go, we go.”
They'd talk about their husbands and the books Simon wanted to write. They played golf together. But Simon would find less time for golf. In her first year as president, her handicap dropped from 12 to 20.
Hitting the ground running
Simon’s first major challenge revolved around MSU's College of Human Medicine. Her predecessor had unveiled plans to move the college to Grand Rapids and drawn the ire of Ingham County leaders in the process.
Secchia, who donated $10 million toward the college’s headquarters in Grand Rapids, which now bears his name, had a front row seat.
She appeared to work "28 hours a day incessantly," Secchia said. "She was the energizer bunny, so busy, so involved."
And unlike McPherson, Simon sold MSU's Grand Rapids venture to the local community, said Mark Meadows, East Lansing's mayor.
"Lou Anna stepped in and changed the tone of that discussion," Meadows said, and changed the plan from a relocation to an expansion.
"That didn’t mean she didn’t continue to work toward making Peter Secchia happy," Meadows added, "but nevertheless she changed the way it was being done and how it was billed."
Simon began pushing big plans early: increasing MSU's research productivity, expanding its international reach and local engagement, moving students through to graduation more effectively and bringing more students from out of state and out of the country.
Don Heller, who served as dean of the College of Education from 2012 to 2015, said not everyone agreed with Simon's push to raise MSU's research profile, "but the leadership of the university and the Board of Trustees certainly thought this was a priority, and Lou Anna really drove the process."
"The getting of externally funded research grants became more and more emphasized," he said, and that was reflected in increased expectations for faculty seeking tenure or promotion.
The push worked. Between 2004-05 and 2015-16, grant awards increased from $350 million to nearly $600 million.
A significant portion of that has come from the $730 million Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, arguably Simon's greatest accomplishment.
“It was unprecedented that a university would have a Department of Energy accelerator for national use,” Director Thomas Glasmacher said in 2016.
Simon was undeterred by the challenge. She helped to pull together a coalition that included Michigan's congressional delegation, business leaders, scientists and even students.
"The odds were that we were going to lose,” Simon said in 2008, “But we were able to get assets together ... and work across divisions that don't always work together."
Other accomplishments under her tenure included the complete overhaul of MSU's residence and dining halls, construction of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, the unprecedented success in football and men's basketball.
If there was one area Simon pursued with vigor, "it would be to enhance, expand and deepen Michigan State’s corporate approach," said Fear, who retired in 2012 as a senior associate dean in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
And she did so, he said, "by emphasizing the importance of leadership coming out of the president’s office versus the more engaged approach where large numbers of people are involved over an extended period of time in thinking through the direction."
She prized loyalty. "Lou Anna hired implementers," Fear said, "and you can’t have a good implementer unless they’re on board."
The rising tide of sexual assault
In 2011, the U.S. Department of Education took the unprecedented step of telling colleges that they should investigate cases of sexual assault and harassment as gender discrimination under Title IX.
In the years that followed, more than 100 colleges and universities were put under the microscope, MSU among them.
In September of 2015, federal officials revealed their findings: MSU was taking too long investigating cases, potentially creating a “sexually hostile environment” on campus.
“This is a societal issue that needs a societal conversation,” Simon said in a statement issued the day the findings were released.
Several former students sued MSU later that year, alleging that MSU had botched its response to their cases. The lawsuit is still pending.
Simon had planned to retire as president in December of 2016, just before her 70th birthday, she disclosed in her resignation letter.
But in September of that year, the Indianapolis Star wrote the first story about Nassar, accounts from two gymnasts who accused him of sexual abuse. Nassar was terminated eight days after the story was published.
With a deluge of lawsuits came claims that MSU officials had been told about Nassar's abuse as far back as 1997 but failed to listen.
Details emerged that a university Title IX investigation of Nassar in 2014 concluded that the woman who reported him didn't understand the “nuanced difference” between sexual assault and an appropriate medical procedure.
"These cases are often complex," Simon responded, "and we are committed to making the best decisions with the best information we have available to us."
Eventually some Simon supporters began expressing concerns about her approach to the growing crisis.
"I think a lot of us saw her frankly dig her heels in over the course of months, and a number of us reached out to her," MSU professor Sue Carter, who had known Simon for decades, said in an interview on ESPN's Outside the Lines in January.
Once Nassar's victims began to describe their abuse at his sentencing hearing in Ingham County Circuit Court last month, the storm of criticism became a typhoon.
The four-day hearing stretched to seven days as more victims asked to speak publicly. The proceedings were broadcast live to a growing audience that reacted in horror.
Simon wasn't in the courtroom on the first day of the hearing. She came on the afternoon of the second.
Larissa Boyce, who said she reported Nassar's sexual misconduct to then-gymnastics coach Kathie Klages in 1997, was among the survivors who gave statements during the sentencing hearing.
She saw Simon sitting the back of the courtroom. After reporters were done asking questions, Boyce approached and asked Simon to come back later in the week to hear her statement in person. Simon told Boyce her schedule wouldn't allow that and said she'd watch via the live stream.
Former MSU President Lou Anna Simon briefly spoke with media on the second day of Nassar's sentencing:
"I feel like I can’t judge someone based on that, but it made me feel like we were a burden, and I was a burden," Boyce said in a recent interview.
Simon never returned to the hearing. A week later, she tendered her resignation as president, though she has the option of returning to the faculty.
Simon might have been able to hold onto the reins, Boyce said, had she been more transparent and empathetic toward the survivors of Nassar.
"But instead it was about denying any responsibility and to say that the only one at fault is Larry Nassar," Boyce said. "And that’s not true."
Secchia calls Simon a scapegoat, someone who he believes didn't know the extent of the Nassar's predations on young female athletes.
"We are really going to miss her," Secchia said. "I don’t know if we'll ever replace someone with her talent."
Simon, he maintains, "was maligned by the moment, the moment got volume, a big wave washed people ashore, and took others away from it."
Cook followed Nassar’s sentencing hearing from her home in Florida. She said it's been an emotional time, reconciling her love for Simon and MSU with the desire to support the victims of sexual abuse.
Her admiration for Simon persists.
“All of us somehow have to come to peace with our feelings, and I know (Simon) is suffering. I know that she is in pain.”
Matthew Miller contributed to this story. Contact RJ Wolcott at (517) 377-1026 or rwolcott@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @wolcottr.
How Lou Anna Simon's tenure changed MSU
MSU and MSU Foundation endowments, 2004: $1,049,400,000
MSU and MSU Foundation endowments, 2016: $3,075,113,000
Total faculty, fall 2004: 2,521
Total faculty, fall 2016: 3,036
Adjunct faculty, fall 2004: 670
Adjunct faculty, fall 2016: 1,059
U.S. News & World Report ranking among national universities, 2005: 71
U.S. News & World Report ranking among national universities, 2018: 81
Fall enrollment 2004: 44,836
Fall enrollment 2017: 50,019
International student enrollment, fall 2004: 3,370
International student enrollment, fall 2017: 7,170
Chinese student enrollment, fall 2004: 543
Chinese student enrollment, fall 2017: 4,216
Federal research awards, 2004-05: $189,035,700
Federal research awards, 2015-16: $272,382,000
Total grants, 2004-05: $350,753,949
Total grants, 2015-16: $588,921,000