“I’ve Had It”: Why Tom Izzo Is Angry at Michigan State

“I’ve had it,” Izzo told reporters. “It’s self-inflicted. We just lost the best president who’s ever been here. One of the best. There’s other dominoes that get affected when things go wrong like that. I’m very upset about it. And I’m sick of it. … I think 600,000 living alums better start rallying together. If there’s ever a time we need to rally together, it’s now.” 

So what’s going on at Michigan State that provoked Izzo like this?

Guskiewicz announced he was leaving for the same job at Clemson in May after only two years in East Lansing. Batt, who was hired by Guskiewicz last June, was hired by Kentucky earlier this week after his buyout dropped from $5 million to $2.5 million without Guskiewicz. 

Now, Michigan State is looking for its seventh president and fifth AD in eight years, the latest upheaval in a decade of turmoil that included the Larry Nassar debacle and the harassment scandal that led to the firings of football coach Mel Tucker and athletic director Alan Haller.

In his departure message to the campus, Guskiewicz called his relationship with the eight-member Board of Trustees an “unsustainable situation.”

“Our ability to make meaningful progress is hampered when disagreements move from offering alternative perspectives into publicly undermining decisions and putting personal interests above the best interests of the university and our faculty, staff and students,” Guskiewicz wrote. “What is perhaps most troubling is the actions of some to abuse their access to privileged and confidential information to misrepresent facts, manipulate situations and selectively use and leak that information to promote personal agendas.”

In an interview with the State News student newspaper, board chairperson Brianna Scott called Guskiewicz’s exit “devastating” and “entirely preventable.”

“It honestly is going to force us to confront a really painful reality that we can no longer afford to sweep under the rug,” Scott said. “The decision that he made is the direct result of an unsustainable environment created by the unfettered and disruptive behaviors of three of my colleagues on the board. These individuals routinely use their positions of public trust, not to govern, but as weapons against our administrators and our presidents.”

Ironically, it was political interference from trustees that led Guskiewicz to leave North Carolina, where he taught for 24 years before becoming chancellor, to go to Michigan State. He then hired Batt, a UNC grad, from Georgia Tech to lead a massive overhaul of the athletic department, landing a $401 million donation from booster Greg Williams, hiring Pat Fitzgerald to reboot the football program and preparing to spin off revenue-generating elements into a nonprofit called Spartan Ventures with a separate for-profit component.

Disagreement among the trustees over the Spartan Ventures plan was one of many areas of friction that led to Guskiewicz threatening to leave. Michigan State offered to almost double his salary in May in an attempt to keep him, but Clemson already was moving quickly to bring him in. Three trustees — two Democrats and a Republican on a Democrat-dominated board — voted against his raise and a revised code of conduct. Two of them have since been censured by the board for refusing to sign the new code.

“The constant transition in the president’s office here at MSU and turmoil among the Board of Trustees is frustrating for faculty,” history professor John Aerni-Flessner, the chairman of the faculty senate, wrote in an email to Hoops HQ. “We were hired to teach the next generation of students, conduct world-class research, and find ways to bring those new insights to the citizens of the state of Michigan and the world.

“We have been carrying out the core mission of this institution — ’to advance knowledge and transform lives’ — despite the turmoil at the top. We will be able to do that work even better when the Board can find stable, consistent, mission-driven leaders who will work with us in this quest.”

Michigan State trustees are elected rather than appointed, which has led to partisan conflicts and personal agendas on the board. As a student at Michigan State three decades ago, Dave Diamond actually ran for the board in an attempt to more narrowly focus representation on the needs of the university.

“I think that the BOT’s position should not be one that’s political,” Diamond, now a lawyer in Los Angeles, told Hoops HQ. “It’s one that should be based upon wanting to do what’s best for the university as a whole – infrastructure, finances, communities, students, professors, everyone involved. Sometimes when people are elected to positions, one forgets what their obligations really are.”

So when Izzo talks about getting the Michigan State community to rally, what he’s really talking about is finding a way to get the trustees on the same page and create a leadership environment that will attract top candidates for important positions … like Guskiewicz and Batt.

“I’m not an alum,” Izzo said. “I’m a very invested stakeholder. But the alums better stand up. I’m going to ask the alums to stand up. What happened with our president is ridiculous. He said it. We know the reasons. I’m ashamed. Disgusted. Hurt.”

From Izzo’s perspective, the situation is no doubt magnified by his inevitable, if not impending, retirement. Without an obvious succession plan in place, having the right president and athletic director will be essential to maintaining the culture of Spartan basketball that Izzo, 71, inherited from Jud Heathcote and has strengthened and deepened over his 31 years in charge.

At a university that appears increasingly rudderless, Izzo is increasingly the lone voice of leadership.

“I just met both the AD and president when MSU came out here to play USC (in football) and everything I gathered was the excitement and renewed energy around the university,” Diamond said. “So I was a little bit surprised it all happened so quickly. You see that in college sports now, usually more with coaches than presidents and ADs, but it was shocking. I understand Izzo’s disgust.

“It does give some rise to concern, but I’ll tell you the one thing that keeps the ship on the right course is that Tom Izzo is the pillar and the backbone of this university. His commitment to not just his basketball players but the students and the family and the alumni does help assuage any concerns that I might have or any of the alums I’ve been talking to have.”