DETROIT – This may sound odd, but when Michigan State University’s board fired John Engler last week, the first person I thought of was the late Ohio governor, Jim Rhodes.
Both men were huge political forces in their time. Both were once stunning electoral giants who couldn’t be beaten.
But in the end, they both lost touch with reality, and were humiliated. Ohio’s Jim Rhodes ended his career with a painfully out-of-touch try for a fifth term as governor, losing by a huge landslide to a man he had once beaten, Dick Celeste.
What happened to John Engler was, sadly, in a sense worse. He won three titanic victories running for governor in the 1990s.
But this month he was ignominiously dumped as interim head of Michigan State University, a position he assumed almost exactly a year before. Members of both parties had seen him as the potential savior of school ripped apart by the Larry Nassar sex abuse scandal.
Less than a year later, Engler was told by the board of trustees to resign immediately, or be fired. He asked to resign in eight days, and the board terminated him on the spot.
When it was over, there was general relief – and a near-universal feeling he was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The mystery is why Michigan State’s board thought a 70-year-old, pugnacious politician would be the right man to deal with a university atmosphere and hundreds of sex abuse survivors.
Yet they did. Nobody wants to admit this now, especially the Democrats, but when MSU trustees picked Engler, as the troubled school’s interim president a year ago, the vote was unanimous.
Not only were the four Republicans on the board firmly behind the choice, the four Democrats were too, even though Engler had been a highly partisan, very conservative Republican.
The Democrats could have fought for Jim Blanchard, another former governor and alum who wanted the job.
But they chose Engler instead, because they figured he would be best positioned to reassure the GOP-dominated Michigan legislature that the school was on the right track.
The MSU trustees felt that he could safeguard their funding, and send the message to students, parents, alumni and donors alike that the school was in good hands. But they were utterly wrong.
What they neglected to consider was that the world had greatly changed in the years since the once-powerful governor had left Lansing. Thanks to term limits, nobody was still in office who had been there when he left government and the state itself in 2003.
Plus, the world had radically changed – and the skills needed to be a successful university president at a delicate time were vastly different from those needed to boss around a legislature in the ‘90s. Indeed, when he was governor from 1991 to 2003, Engler was deservedly famous for being ruthless – and ruthlessly effective.
That’s not surprising, given that he had spent 20 years in the legislature in those preterm limits days before defeating incumbent Democrat Blanchard, who was trying for a third term.
While he was in office, nobody knew as much about the levers of power as Engler. As governor, he could, and did, call in or call up a legislator from some blue-collar or rural district and bully, promise, horse-trade, and cajole them into submission.
But running a university is entirely different.
Strong-arm tactics don’t work in a university setting, and it especially doesn’t work with students, much less survivors of sexual assault, as in the hundreds of women physically abused by former MSU sports medicine doctor Larry Nassar, who is now in prison.
Curiously, Engler, long seen as a master politician, seemed incapable of learning this, and got into hot water again and again for treating the survivors as if they were just another interest group.
Last April, one of them, 18-year-old Kaylee Lorincz, claimed the interim president essentially offered her $250,000 as a settlement, something John Engler eventually denied.
There were numerous other incidents, from canceling a healing fund to pay for counseling for the victims to appointing a raft of his cronies to high-paid positions at the university.
The last straw came when, in an interview with the Detroit News editorial board, he said that Nassar’s victims were “enjoying the spotlight,” while MSU was “trying to go back to work.”
That was it. Twenty-three top MSU administrators demanded he be ousted, and so he was. “John Engler’s reign of terror is over,” said Brian Mosallam, a Democratic trustee.
The former governor’s reaction was reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s when he resigned. Nixon took no blame for bringing his presidency down; instead he told the nation he had lost the support of Congress. Engler left a mind-numbing, 11-page letter that began by claiming he was the victim of partisanship. “The election of two new Democratic members and the appointment of a Democrat to replace Trustee George Perles has created a new majority on the board,” he said.
Except that wasn’t true. Perles was, at least on paper, a Democrat. He was replaced by former Henry Ford Health Systems CEO Nancy Schlicting, who has no party affiliation.
The fault, however, for MSU’s latest humiliation wasn’t just the miscast former governor. The biggest blame goes to Michigan State University’s trustees, who did little as the Nassar scandal unfolded. They didn’t investigate, or push then-President Lou Anna Simon for answers. Now, they’ve made two major mistakes in two years.
Next, they have their biggest challenge: Finding a permanent MSU president to clean up the mess and get the school known for something other than scandal again.
Michigan State can’t afford to blow this one.
Photo By Chuck Grimmett from Amherst, Ohio
