Voters will decide who will serve on the next Board of Trustees at Michigan State University on Tuesday, Nov. 5. There are eight people vying for two spots that expire in January.
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Michigan State University Board of Trustees 2024 Election Results
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This election season, voters across the state will fill two seats on the leadership boards of Michigan’s three largest universities, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Wayne State University.
The state constitution gives statewide elected boards general supervision over each institution’s finances, as well as over the hiring of top university positions — including its president. Each board’s eight members serve staggered eight-year terms, with candidates nominated at party conventions.
Wayne State University Board of Governors
Incumbents Mark Gaffney and Michael Busuito are running to keep seats that expire in January.
Gaffney is a Democratic nominee. He’s a retired Teamster and former president of the Michigan AFL-CIO. He teaches in Wayne State’s labor program.
He says he’s proud of the work the board has done during his tenure and wants to continue that work.
“We want to continue to raise the graduation rates,” Gaffney said. “We want to increase the diversity. We want to be more welcoming to all kinds of students, and we want to better market the wonderful news about Wayne State University.”
Gaffney points to Wayne State’s status among research universities and says he wants to make sure it’s accessible to students who face both economic and academic challenges.
He says all students should feel they have a place and a voice at the university, adding that recent student protests around the conflict in Gaza and university investments have challenged the university to strike a balance between sometimes competing viewpoints.
Suzanne Roehrig, the Working Class Party nominee, says she visited the pro-Palestinian student encampment on campus in the spring and feels the university should work harder to protect student rights.
Roehrig says she was eight months pregnant when she started at Wayne State, making it difficult to juggle the responsibilities of single parenting and school work. Roehrig studied education and library science and has worked as a teacher and librarian in Detroit and Ferndale.
She says her education came at a financial cost, and believes college should be free.
“In the wealthiest country in the world, there is more than enough money to make this a reality,” Roehrig said. “The working class produces what is needed to run our society. They have a right to a free education.”
Rasha Demshkieh, the other Democratic candidate in the race, came to the U.S. from Syria when she was 19 years old. She is an alumna of Wayne State’s pharmacy school; served on the Port Huron Area School District board for 13 years; and served for eight years on the Michigan Civil Rights Commission.
Demashkieh says she’d like to see the diversity of Wayne State’s student body and faculty reflected on the board, and wants the university be a bigger part of the cultural and economic development in Detroit.
“I wanted to be a part of being able to push in that direction where we provide different opportunities to our students,” Demashkieh said. “When you provide them with a good job that helps the economy of Michigan… we want our students to stay in the area.”
Republican businessman and Wayne State Alumnus Sunny Reddy is also on the ballot, along with Farid Ishac from the Libertarian Party, William Mohr from the U.S. Taxpayers Party, Sami Makhoul from the Green Party, and Kathleen Oakford from the Natural Law Party.
There are no incumbents running to keep their seats on the Michigan State University Board of Trustees this election cycle. Eight candidates are vying for the two spots left vacant by outgoing board members Democrat Dianne Byrum and Republican Dan Kelly, whose terms expire in January.
Rebecca Bahar Cook, a 1992 MSU graduate and parent of two Spartans, is the Democratic Party nominee. She’s worked for several political campaigns and served on the Ingham County Commission and on nonprofit and public boards. She says one of her big concerns is the cost of tuition.
“Michigan State was founded to be the university for ordinary, everyday Michiganders who want a higher education,” Bahar Cook told WDET. “I think there has to be sort of a recommitment to keeping college affordable.”
Mike Balow says he has probably been to every board meeting for the past four years. The Republican candidate jokes some people call him the “ninth trustee.”
“Michigan State’s had its own very public and particular set of challenges over the last decade,” Balow said. “I became very dissatisfied that the administration there and the board was dealing with the problems in an open, honest, transparent and forthright way.”
Balow says the university’s handling of the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal and its survivors was “abhorrent.” And he also says tuition is too high.
Green Party candidate John Anthony La Pietra says the party believes college should be free.
Though not a former Spartan himself, he took a training there when he was preparing to teach English as a second language in Japan decades ago — and he says he later joined protests on campus against the war in Iraq. He wants to make the university a place he would be happy to send his own young daughters one day.
La Pietra suspects he’s pretty different from current and typical board members.
“I am someone who is independent of the big money or big influence that seems to be prevalent on University Board,” he said. “It’s almost like legacy positions in some ways.”
Democrat Thomas Stallworth III says he was politically active when he was a student at MSU and thinks it’s important to provide students space for that.
Stallworth served two terms in the state House. He says MSU helped him find his talents and led him to a successful life and career.
He says he’s concerned that recent crises have caused conflict among board members. He hopes to bring some stability to the body.
“We’re at a point in time where we really need to learn from the experiences that we’ve had,” Stallworth said. “The Nassar incident, the shooting on campus, the firing of the football coach… These are all occurrences that have resulted in significant, traumatizing experiences for students, staff and the state. We need to be focused on understanding how we can perform better.”
Julie Maday is also on the ballot for the Republican Party, along with third-party candidates Janet Sanger and John Paul Sanger of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, and Grant T Baker, representing the Libertarian Party.
The University of Michigan football stadium is shown in Ann Arbor, Mich., Thursday, Aug. 13, 2020.
University of Michigan Board of Regents
Republican candidate Carl Meyers has run for the U-M Board of Regents several times before. He says with six of the eight current members being Democrats, it’s hard for Republicans to win a space on the board.
Meyers says one of his concerns is how expensive a U-M education is, and how much debt students and families take on to fund it.
“My mission is to increase access to the university system by controlling costs, which will increase diversity,” Meyers told WDET. “If the University of Michigan is something made up of the Uber wealthy, it’s a bad thing.”
Democrat Denise Ilitch is the only incumbent running for reelection. Ilitch has held her seat since 2008, and says she has been “laser focused” on affordability. The program that makes tuition free to most families in the state was created while she served on the board.
She says her work on the board has also included advocating for an independent office to report sexual misconduct.
Ilitch says when students complained that it was hard to get mental health services on campus she advocated for the expansion of Counseling and Psychological Services.
“I have advocated for putting more resources towards that so that students can see therapists and counselors much quicker, particularly if they have an emergency or crisis on hand,” Ilitch said.
Republican Sevag Vartanian graduated from Michigan in 1991. His son graduated from the school last year. He says to lower tuition, the university will have to have different priorities.
“It’s got a huge budget, especially with the medical system,” Vartanian said. “We really need to look at what is essential to the student experience and what is not. And you have to make hard decisions, and you have to cut programs that don’t have a positive net present value return on them.”
Vartanian also says the university has too few spots for Michigan residents, relying on higher out-of-state tuitions to fund its projects. He points to the Ross School of Business expansion planned for California.
There are six candidates running for two Regent spots that expire in January.
Other candidates in the race include Democrat Shauna Ryder Diggs, Libertarian Andrew Chadderdon and Donna Oetman of the U.S. Taxpayers Party.
The general election is taking place on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. For the latest election information, visit WDET’s Voter Guide at wdet.org/voterguide.
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In addition to the presidential, Congressional, and state House races, voters across the state will be casting their votes for who they’d like to serve on the boards of Michigan’s three largest universities.
There are two seats up for reelection on the Michigan State University Board of Trustees in November. University board members oversee financial operations at the institution, and are responsible for the hiring of the university’s president and other key responsibilities — per the state constitution. Board members serve staggered eight-year terms, and serve without compensation.
WDET distributed surveys to university board candidates on the Michigan ballot in November to gain a deeper understanding of what’s motivating them to run. Below, you’ll find candidate bios and their answers to WDET’s questions about their platform and political priorities.
For more information about the November election, visit WDET’s election guide at wdet.org/voterguide.
Responses have been edited for clarity and length.
WDET strives to make our journalism accessible to everyone. As a public media institution, we maintain our journalistic integrity through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.
DETROIT (AP) — Thousands of documents turned over by Michigan State University reveal nothing new about what the school might have known about years of sexual abuse committed by Larry Nassar, the campus doctor who assaulted female athletes, the state attorney general said Wednesday.
“It was surprising to me that we did not find anything that was incriminating,” Attorney General Dana Nessel said at a news conference.
“It seems sort of improbable to us, right?” she said. “This is a major university, obviously extensive number of employees that work there. I guess the expectation is that we would find a little bit more than we did.”
Nassar, who also worked for USA Gymnastics, which trains Olympians, is serving decades in prison for sexual assault committed under the guise of treatment as well as other crimes. Michigan State in 2018 agreed to a $500 million settlement with hundreds of people, mostly women, who said he abused them with his hands.
For years, Nessel and her predecessor clashed with Michigan State’s lawyers and its elected governing board over the release of records. While more than 100,000 documents were initially turned over to investigators, another batch of 6,000 was withheld under attorney-client privilege until this year.
Since the Nassar scandal broke in 2016, Michigan State has repeatedly said that no one at the school covered up his actions. Former gymnastics coach Kathie Klages was found guilty of lying to investigators about allegations told to her back in the 1990s, but the state appeals court threw out the conviction.
Former Michigan State President Lou Anna Simon, too, was charged with misleading investigators during a 2018 interview, but that case was dismissed before a trial.
After seeing the records, Nessel believes the university was wrong to claim attorney-client privilege over all of the documents, though a judge in 2019 had agreed with the school’s position.
The attorney general accused Michigan State of giving victims a “sense of false hope” that the records would be revealing after finally giving them up. Nessel plans to make them publicly available.
“Simply put, there remains no fulfilling answer to the question of how this abuse was able to be perpetuated on so many, for so long, without MSU, or anyone else, putting a stop to it,” Nessel said.
Michigan State spokesperson Emily Gerkin Guerrant said the university has taken significant steps to improve campus safety and culture since 2016.
Ripples from the Nassar saga have spread widely. In April, the U.S. Justice Department announced a $138 million settlement with more than 100 people who accused the FBI of mishandling allegations against the doctor in 2015 and 2016, a critical time gap that allowed Nassar to continue to prey on victims before his arrest.
A Justice Department internal watchdog recently said the FBI has failed to report some child sexual abuse allegations to local police or social service agencies even after its poor handling of claims about Nassar led to changes.
As polls and political pundits work to predict the still evolving presidential race, an expert in Michigan says if the vote is close, one group “could potentially decide the state.”
Erick Gonzalez Jeunke is a political analyst specializing in Latinx politics at Michigan State University. In an interview with the Michigan Public Radio Network, he said the state’s 400,000 eligible Latinos voters could hold the key to winning in Michigan, if the campaigns reach out to them.
Listen: Political analyst says Michigan Latino voters ‘could potentially decide the state’
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Michelle Jokisch Polo, WKAR News: In 2020 Joe Biden won the presidential election in Michigan by fewer than 200,000 votes. With more than 300,000 eligible Latino voters in Michigan, this group could prove vital in the state. How are parties engaging this voting bloc?
Erick Gonzalez Jeunke: I haven’t seen a lot of engagement for specifically this voting block. What that means is what they should have been doing and what I haven’t seen a lot of, but a lot of this happens behind the scenes, obviously, are registration drives. One of the gaps for Latino voters nationally, and then of course here in Michigan, is not just turning out to vote, but being registered to vote. A large part of that gap — about 70% of eligible voters — are even registered to vote. And so that’s part of the big gap. I mean, this is one of the lingering things, if you account for that, once you just look at registered voters, Latinos turn out at about the same rates as other groups, but the gap is really in getting individuals registered to vote. So that requires a lot of work, that requires the parties caring about these voters. Now when we get into this part of the season, a lot of the parties both nationally and here in Michigan, either leave that up to other groups, or they say, ‘look, we have limited resources. We can’t go out and mobilize people who aren’t registered.’ So a lot of that work takes place in the years and months that lead up to these elections.
MJP: This time around, it seems that there may have been fewer young democrats showing up to vote like they did in 2020, in the state primary election. Why do you think this is and tell us about the young Latino vote in November?
EGJ: I think it’s probably due to a not very competitive set of federal races, and then earlier in the year, a not very competitive presidential primary. But it’s also just an enthusiasm gap. We’re right in the middle of seeing this change with the change at the top of the ticket from Biden to Harris. I was just looking at some national polling data today, and what’s happening here in the Midwest and in Michigan is that Harris has seemed to have activated — particularly younger voters’ — enthusiasm about this race. So paying attention, getting excited, and that excitement turns into actual voting. It can turn into knocking on doors. It can turn into working for the campaign. So it’s still a little bit early to see what the overall effect of this is, but the early signs indicate that a change at the top of the ticket may reverse some of this lack of enthusiasm that we saw in the primaries, and particularly for younger Latinos.
MJP: How important do you think the Latino voting bloc is for the state’s general election?
EGJ: It depends how close the race is. It could potentially decide the state, and yet that depends on if the parties do the work to mobilize and get Latinos who aren’t registered, registered to get folks to turn out. So unfortunately, we won’t know until after the election. And it comes down to how close is Michigan actually going to be? It’s looking a lot less close than it did a month ago. But things could change, and we could go back to a really close race, if I had to put money on it right now, that it’s probably not going to be as close as we thought it was a month ago. But if it’s close, the Latino vote could be really, really important, and the Democratic and Republican parties could say, ‘boy, we really should have done more work to mobilize Latino voters in Michigan, because we could have taken it.’ And I think both parties would say the same thing about Pennsylvania andWisconsin.
Use the media player above to hear the full interview with Erick Gonzalez Jeunke, political analyst specializing in Latinx politics at Michigan State University.
Trusted, accurate, up-to-date.
WDET strives to make our journalism accessible to everyone. As a public media institution, we maintain our journalistic integrity through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.
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