welcome back, kevin. now earn it.

posted on Jul 14, 2026

danny caballero

Let’s review the last seven weeks at Michigan State.

The Board of Trustees called a Sunday-night special meeting to double President Kevin Guskiewicz’s salary and extend his contract through 2031. Ten days later, he announced he was leaving for Clemson. A developer papered our town with “We ♥ KG” signs. Our athletic director left for Kentucky in the churn. And then, last Monday, Kevin announced he is staying after all, at $1.5 million a year, funded by “non-university resources”, after reports that trustees, donors, and Tom Izzo worked the phones to bring him back. This week, voting closed on a Faculty Senate referendum asking all 4,000-plus members of our Academic Congress whether they have confidence in Kevin, and whether they have confidence in the Board. Results land Wednesday.

A month ago, I wrote that Kevin was gone and we should let it go. I meant it. He came back anyway.

I was wrong that he was gone. I don’t think I was wrong about anything else.

So let me be straight about where I stand. I am not celebrating Kevin’s return, and I am not mourning it. I’m not positive or negative about it. Whether this turns out to be good news is not up to the Board, not up to the donors, and honestly not up to Kevin’s letter of apology. It’s up to what he does now.

why this actually matters

I’ve heard some colleagues shrug this off as executive theater. I understand the impulse; I’ve written about my own numbness to the revolving door. Seven presidents in thirteen years will do that to you.

But I don’t think a shrug is the right response this time.

Continuity has real value, and we have had almost none of it. Kevin knows our budget mess and he knows the federal landscape that is strangling higher education. He started a strategic plan, a capital campaign, and a set of budget decisions that someone was going to have to either finish or unwind. An interim president followed by an external search that would be conducted by this Board, with our recent track record of leaking finalists until they flee, was the realistic alternative.

And there is something genuinely different about a president who looked at the exit, walked through it, and turned around. Kevin has now seen exactly what leaving looks like. If he’s staying, I hope he’s staying with his eyes open. That could be the foundation of the most stable stretch of leadership MSU has had in a decade.

“Could be” is the operative phrase.

the vote is real, and it’s close

This isn’t hallway talk anymore. Our Faculty Senate Steering Committee put two resolutions to the full Academic Congress (more than 4,000 of us) asking whether we have “confidence and trust” in Kevin to lead this university, and whether we have the same confidence in the Board that rehired him. Voting ran from July 8 to July 14. Results are due Wednesday.

I want to be honest about what I’m hearing ahead of that count. Colleagues I trust are voting no confidence and colleagues I trust are voting confidence, sometimes for the same reasons pointed in opposite directions. That split is itself the finding. A faculty that felt certain wouldn’t need a formal referendum to say so.

I said a version of this a month ago and I want to be more careful with it now: my instinct is still that no confidence is a tool built for misconduct and failed leadership, not for a president who explored his options and used them. Kevin shopped the job. He accepted another one. He apologized for the uncertainty he created only after deciding to come back. He returns with a $500,000 raise while our departments absorb 9% cuts and layoffs that he announced. Set aside the title and look at the behavior: that’s a worker with leverage, negotiating. I have spent years organizing with our faculty union so that the rest of us could do a fraction of what Kevin just did.

The difference, of course, is that when a lab technician negotiates, the university doesn’t wobble. When a president does it in public, an entire institution holds its breath. That asymmetry is why the standard for him is higher.

But I’m no longer confident that argument settles it, and I don’t think the vote being split is faculty being confused about what no confidence is for. It’s faculty being genuinely unsure whether what happened here was hard-nosed negotiation or something that broke faith with the people who work here. Both readings are defensible. That’s what a serious, divided faculty looks like when the answer isn’t obvious. It is not indifference, and not overreaction.

but trust doesn’t transfer back

Here’s the part that worries me, and it’s not the salary.

Kevin says he’s returning in part because of the Board’s “improvements” to its Code of Ethics and Conduct. That would be the same ethics overhaul, passed in the same twelve-hours-notice Sunday meeting as his raise, that bars individual trustees from publicly disagreeing with majority decisions. I wrote in May that the Board bought the president’s silence and institutionalized everyone else’s. Kevin is now citing the institutionalized silence as the reason he feels comfortable coming back.

The thing that reassured Kevin is the thing that should worry the rest of us.

Maybe there’s more to the governance changes than what’s public. Kevin says there were weeks of productive conversations. Fine. Then tell us what changed. A president who returns on the strength of private assurances from a board with this history should understand why the people who work here aren’t reassured by a press release.

It gets worse the closer you look. Kevin has since said he began exploring the Clemson move back in March. This is well before the Board’s Sunday-night raise, not because of it. And at least one trustee says he wasn’t shown the new contract before it was signed and announced to the public; he learned Kevin was staying hours before the rest of us did. The university’s defense is that the Board authorized its chair and finance-committee chair to negotiate this alone, so a full vote was never required. Maybe that’s technically true. It is also the Board doing to itself exactly what it’s accused of doing to the rest of us.

And the raise itself keeps generating new fine print. On top of the $500,000 salary increase, the deal now includes personal use of a private aircraft, ten hours a year, paid for by unnamed “philanthropic sources”. I don’t know who those donors are, what they want, or what claim they now have on the president’s time and attention. Neither does anyone else outside a small circle at the top of this university. When most of a president’s compensation runs through the general fund, his incentives are at least legible: the university pays him, he answers to the university. When a growing share of it runs through unnamed private money instead, that’s no longer true, and nobody has explained what replaces it. If we can’t say who is paying for the president and why, we can’t say with confidence who he is actually loyal to.

Because here’s what the last seven weeks made plain: the Board can rehire a president. Donors can fund his raise. Izzo can make his calls. But none of them can re-trust him on our behalf.

I’ve written before that the MSU community is the moral center of this university — the faculty, staff, students, and alumni who do the work and carry the mission. Trust here isn’t a line item. It doesn’t come back with a signing announcement, and it can’t be paid for out of “non-university resources.” It gets rebuilt the same way it gets built: in the open, over time, through choices that cost something.

Kevin apologized. I want to acknowledge that plainly, because apologies from people in power are rare and this one seemed sincere.

It’s a start.

what earning it looks like

I don’t want this to be a vibes-based probation. If I’m asking Kevin to demonstrate that he’s earned the right to lead this university, I owe him a list of what that would look like. Here’s mine.

Account for the money. Tell us what “non-university resources” means, who is paying (for the salary, and for the ten hours a year on a private plane) and what they expect in return. A president’s compensation funded by unnamed private actors is a governance question, not a compensation question. And Kevin, my earlier ask still stands. Redirect a meaningful piece of it to the programs and people who absorbed the cuts. You now have a second chance to make that choice.

Say where you stand on the ethics code. You cited it as a reason to return. Defend it in public, in your own words, to the people it silences or push the Board to fix it. Hiding behind it is not an option for someone who made governance the public reason for both leaving and returning.

Close your loops. Two years ago you did a listening tour and sat with my colleagues and my students to hear about our STEM education work. We never heard what you did with it. That pattern, listening as ceremony rather than as input, is exactly what makes faculty tune out presidents. Pick the threads back up. Tell us what you learned and what you’re doing about it.

Show up for the people carrying the cuts. The energy that donors and trustees spent bringing you back? We watched it. We noticed that it exists. Spend that same energy on the staff who were laid off, the programs that are being zeroed out, and the students whose support was stripped. The money is always there for certain things. Make it be there for these things.

Treat the faculty and staff as partners, not as an audience. We have a faculty union now. We have faculty and staff who have carried this institution through seven presidents. Govern with us. You’ve seen what leading from the front gets you here. Try leading from the middle.

These aren’t hoops. They’re the job.

welcome back

Kevin, I mean that. I said in May that you weren’t my enemy, and you still aren’t. I said I wanted you to succeed, and I still do. You came back to a university that is bruised, broke, under federal attack, and deeply skeptical of the people who run it. And you came back knowing all of that, which counts for something.

But you should know what you’re returning to. Not the rock painted with hearts. Not the donors’ phone tree. You’re returning to ten thousand people who kept this place running while you decided, and who will keep it running whatever you decide next. We’re not hostile. We’re not celebrating. We’re watching.

You’ve been given something almost no one at MSU gets: a second chance, publicly, at the same job, with more money. The rest of us would have to earn that.

So earn it.