John Engler (Wikipedia photo by Chuck Grimmett)
John Engler (Wikipedia photo by Chuck Grimmett)
Former Michigan Gov. John Engler isn't exactly the fresh face that represents a fresh start for Michigan State University.
Nonetheless, the Board of Trustees makes him interim president of a school in dire need of a leadership overhaul.
Detroit News columnist Daniel Howes writes this in a column headlined "MSU trustees don’t inspire confidence:"
As confidence-building measures go, Michigan State University’s decision to name John Engler interim president doesn’t rank among the best of them.
Instead of a steel spine connected to a fresh face, the trustees privately decided at least a day before their open meeting Wednesday to unanimously name the former Republican governor to perhaps the hottest college presidency in the nation. And to appease the Democrats officially comprising half the board, it appointed former Gov. Jim Blanchard a “special adviser” to Engler.
All of this maneuvering under enormous pressure exposes just how nakedly partisan the governance of MSU really is — and how irrelevant faculty and students are to key board decision-making. Forget about transparency. The trustees are demonstrating they have no intention yet of wooing an outsider to clean up the mess left by the Larry Nassar sex-abuse scandal and the MSU’s botched management of it.
Doing the right thing the right way would be too hard and too unpredictable. It would be too likely to culminate in conclusions people accustomed to controlling things could not control — emblematic of The Club in East Lansing whose only door is painted green and white.
Hail return of the well-connected Old Guard, familiar faces comfortable working the cozy corridors of power and its informal networks. Sure, Engler has a well-earned reputation for making tough calls. But, as you’d expect from a three-term governor, he also has long-term connections to his alma mater, MSU, and some of its most prominent donors..
