Couch: MSU community won't find trust again until Engler, board of trustees are gone

Graham Couch
Lansing State Journal
MSU Trustee Joel Ferguson (left) and MSU Interim President John Engler listen to public statements during the public board meeting inside the Hannah Administration Building.

EAST LANSING – Michigan State University’s failures in responding to and preventing sexual assault are larger than interim President John Engler. They are too ingrained to pin on an elected, volunteer and part-time board of trustees.

But, after Friday’s board meeting, it’s clear MSU won’t regain the trust of its students, faculty and larger community until all of them are gone.

It felt like the campus was coming apart at the seams inside MSU’s administrative building Friday. The point of unraveling came when one of Larry Nassar’s victims, Kaylee Lorincz, recounted that, during a private meeting, Engler had asked what it would take to appease her financially.

“Mr. Engler then looked directly at me and asked, 'Right now if I wrote you a check for $250,000 would you take it?'” Lorincz said.

There were gasps and boos from the audience, which included other Nassar victims and their parents, as well as concerned faculty and students. Lorincz went on to depict a conversation with Engler fraught with insensitivity. After the meeting, Engler left the room quickly without taking questions. 

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Two months ago, as Engler replaced disgraced former MSU president Lou Anna Simon, I thought he might be a decent choice for MSU, even considering the grumbling from those who didn’t agree with his politics or like him as Michigan’s governor years ago.

Engler is, first and foremost, a bully. But if he’s your bully, that can work. He got things done as governor because Republicans in the state legislature, his own party, feared him. 

MSU needed someone to rattle its cage and stick up for it as it tried to move on — and protect it financially. His forceful personality and polarizing legacy, I thought, would make it easier for the next president to lead, as well. I still do.

The problem is you can’t bully sexual assault victims or students of a public university.

The problem is Engler doesn’t do anything with finesse. 

This past week, these last couple months, have required it. If you can’t see that right now, you shouldn’t be part of MSU’s leadership.

And yet, Friday, trustees Brian Breslin and Joel Ferguson both praised Engler for his guidance and governance. This isn’t the time for a pat on the back.

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Progress is happening at MSU — some of the early details were laid out Friday. But few in that room trust Engler or this group of trustees to see it through. Or to take the next step. Or to understand what that step is.

Among the more impressive and reasonable voices in the room Friday was Stephanie Nawyn, the co-director of the Center for Gender in Global Context. Her job is to oversee faculty who are teaching the value of things such gender equity.

I’m quite sure Nawyn understands more about the reasons MSU finds itself in this crisis than Engler or anyone at that table.

The fix, she said, is about making women a priority — first, financially. To her point, while the state legislature acts appalled at what’s happening at MSU, the state’s ever-dwindling funds for public universities share in the blame. So, too, do the priorities of donors.

“They want to give money to us because they’re invested in a winning football team, a winning basketball team,” Nawyn said Friday evening. “Things that make the university look bad, like news getting out that women and girls are being assaulted on our campus, that’s not helpful for raising money, at least through the donor networks we have cultivated. 

“The few times when President Simon would bring this up publicly and take a stand, she got pushback from the people who thought she was bringing negative attention to the university. And you see it from the Board of Trustees meeting (Friday), there is this tendency to laud the things that MSU is doing and not spend enough time looking critically at what we’re doing wrong.”

Campus leaders functioning in a bubble, which has prevented healthy communication from students and faculty up the chain, is another problem, she said. Anyone at Friday’s meeting could see the bubble at work.

RELATED:  At MSU: Assault, harassment and secrecy

Nawyn’s own program isn’t permanently funded. Some years, she has to schedule the next year’s classes before she’s sure she can pay for them. 

Another speaker at Friday’s morning’s meeting brought up the loss of MSU’s Women’s Resources Center, which closed in 2016 amid Title IX concerns. Why not a Gender Center?, the speaker asked.

“Everybody’s got a gender. … That’s a real easy fix,” Nawyn said.

“It just feels like people in power in this university just don’t care enough about women.”

It certainly felt like that this week, even before Friday’s board meeting, as MSU responded to a lawsuit filed by one its students alleging it discouraged her from reporting her rape by three MSU basketball players in 2015.

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The university — after taking two days to investigate and craft something with the proper tone, if at all — released a callous statement with a needless level of detail, enough that it might have violated privacy laws. That much Engler apologized for Friday, before also later apologizing to Lorincz, though denying asking if she’d take a check for $250,000.

RELATED:  Michigan State regrets 'unnecessary detail' about alleged rape victim

I don’t understand why MSU is so bad at this. 

The original response to the young woman alleging fault with MSU’s counselors should have read, in part, like this:

“We find these allegations deeply troubling. We want all of our students to feel safe and valued on our campus. While our initial findings don’t coincide with what is alleged in the lawsuit, we will investigate further until we have a complete understanding of what happened to this young woman.”

That MSU couldn’t find a way to show empathy without culpability is incredible, though not unbelievable, given what we’ve seen the last few months.

The Board of Trustees probably should have followed President Simon out the door, offering to resign two months ago. I get the inclination to be part of the solution. Nawyn moderated trustee Brian Mosallam’s town hall conversation on sexual assault on campus at Kellogg Center in early February.

“I do think he’s a good egg. I do think he wants to do the right thing,” Nawyn said. “And I would assume that the other trustees are the same way.

“But there’s been a huge loss of confidence, and you don’t just get that back by saying a few good things. You can’t just come back from something like this and say, ‘We’re doing better.’ No one’s going to believe you because you dropped the ball.

“If they want to stick around, they need to accept the fact that nobody is going to just have faith that they’re going to make the right decisions, that they’re going to have to go to board meetings every month where angry people are there making demands and pushing them. They’re not going to be just trusted that they’re making steps and making improvements. People need to see that and people need to see it repeatedly over time.”

I think it’s too late for this group.

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.