welcome

turn down the raise, kevin.

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.

labor is the hidden curriculum

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.

show me your budget, and i'll show you your values

I am not a scholar of public education, nor do I study public funding, history, or higher education policy. I have worked in STEM Education for 15 years. And I have been a Latino in America my entire life. I’m a first-generation college graduate. My perspective is informed by those experiences.

I learned the idea of “show me your budget, and I’ll show you your values” from my friend and colleague. I only leave them unnamed because they do not post their views publicly, but they have been an inspiration to me for years. They are a brilliant scholar and a passionate advocate for access and equity in public higher education. And while we don’t share the same experiences and background, they are also a first-generation college graduate.