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Jun 10, 2026
I started to see these signs on campus and near my neighborhood this week. I was confused at first because our president is leaving, and is taking an $800k pay cut to do so. I thought maybe these signs were a joke, or maybe they were meant to be ironic. But, as I saw more and more of them, I realized that they might be sincere.
The signs were organized by the Gillespie Group, a massive developer in our region. This group received a nod from MSU Trustees to develop Spartan Gateway District before it was scaled back.
May 18, 2026
Photo by Ari Saperstein, The State News.
On Sunday, Michigan State’s Board of Trustees held a special meeting. It was announced the same morning. The Board did three things in a single Sunday night Zoom call. They voted 6-1 to double Kevin Guskiewicz’s salary, from just over a million dollars a year to two million, with a contract extension through 2031. They voted to overhaul the board’s code of ethics to prohibit individual trustees from publicly disagreeing with majority decisions. And they did all of it with less than twelve hours public notice, in a meeting the university acknowledged is not subject to Michigan’s Open Meetings Act.
Apr 27, 2026
The Rubin Observatory operations team. One name on the building. Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.
I grew up in South and Central Texas. Mission, then San Antonio, then Austin. I got to this endowed professorship at a public land-grant university in Michigan through public education. Not through grit. Not through some exceptional quality that set me apart from the people I grew up with. Through public money, public schools, and people who did work that made my education possible and never got credit for it.
Artist: