The next U-M president needs to LEAD

The next president of the University of Michigan will confront challenges and crises generated by President Donald Trump’s tyrannical and authoritarian administration, and U-M administrators’ reckless consolidation of power. The person who assumes this role must do so fully prepared to confront the former and undo the latter. So, I say to that person, to effectively lead the institution, you will need to actually LEAD, by which I mean Listen, Educate, Acknowledge and Divest.

You should listen to the multiplicity of voices, appeals and ideas that come from beyond your inner circle of the University’s Board of Regents, executive officers and donors. During former University President Santa Ono’s brief and unhappy tenure, various parts of the University community spoke in a wide variety of ways. This included speaking at regents meetings, holding rallies and marches, staging protests, presenting faculty senate resolutions, sending open letters and mass emails and writing Op-Eds in The Michigan Daily. These went largely ignored and dismissed by U-M leadership. You should welcome and genuinely engage such efforts. One way to signal your commitment to listening would be to hold monthly town hall meetings. 

You should embody the educational mission of the institution by first educating yourself, and then educating the Board, your executive leadership team and the general public about the underlying causes of the discontent, distrust and conflicts that have embroiled our campus. This education will begin with the listening that you have done as described above. I urge you to deepen this by studying the history of protest in Ann Arbor and finding ways to impart your understanding of this history and the contemporary conflicts to the campus community and the public at large.

You should acknowledge the harm and detrimental impacts caused by this institution’s misguided actions and policies. Our current leadership has much to answer for: the reckless and arbitrary dismantling of the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; the targeted (and likely illegal) firing of employees, such as Rachel Dawson, former director of the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives, and Zainab Hakim, a program specialist in the International Institute, for alleged statements and actions which constitute protected speech; the regents’ unilateral revision of the Statement of Student Rights and Responsibilities and Standard Practices Guide; the authorization of police violence against students; the use of chemical irritants against students, staff and faculty at protests; the hiring of private security to surveil students on and off campus; the repression of students through employment bans, campus bans and referrals for formal criminal charges; and most recently the corruption of the Office of Student Conflict Resolution, turning a restorative justice process designed to mediate conflicts between members of the University community into punitive disciplinary proceedings lacking due process and beset with procedural violations. 

Through a rushed process that began over the summer, OSCR is conducting disciplinary hearings against student protestors (including some who have graduated) in which OSCR itself, acting as representative of the University, simultaneously serves as the investigating body, the complainant and the convener of the hearings. These are not simply poor decisions or policy choices from the past; they are ongoing administrative actions negatively impacting members of the University community right now, including alumni. Admission of these violations of student rights, free speech and the principles of academic freedom must be followed by action to restore balanced procedures and policies. Acknowledgement requires apology and affirmation. You should personally undertake an effort to publicly apologize to those harmed and the community at large, while making amends to those who lost employment and suffered in other ways. You should then craft robust ways to reaffirm these vital values and core principles: fairness, free speech, academic freedom, shared governance and yes, diversity, equity and inclusion. 

Finally, you should commit to divesting the University of Michigan from the apparatus of surveillance that it has erected through private security, amplified policing and widespread use of video cameras. You should commit to divesting the University leadership from its current approach to governing, characterized by a consolidation of power, diminution of shared governance and degradation of trust. You should commit to divesting the University from the framework of punishment it has recently constructed, whereby multiple offices and officers of the institution are engaged in the repression of dissent, suppression of speech and curtailment of expression. You should commit to divesting the University from its apparent adherence to the national political currents that cynically misappropriate civil rights language and law in the service of reactionary and racist aims, derisively distort the meaning of DEI, denying its origins in the struggle for racial justice and contemptuously conflate criticism of the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel with antisemitism. 

When you do all of this, you will conclude that you must also lead the effort to divest the University of its financial holdings related to Israel, just as the University previously divested from apartheid South Africa, from the tobacco industry, from fossil fuels and most recently from Russia. Your studies in this area will reveal that an ignoble stain lingers on the University, and particularly the Board, as they resisted, for many years, the call to divest from South Africa, thus placing the institution on the wrong side of an international movement against apartheid. I trust that you will find it instructive as you learn how the University was ultimately compelled to divest from South Africa in the closing decades of the 20th century. Apartheid was formally instituted in 1948, the same year as the founding of Israel. Today, Israel has constructed an apartheid state, and the decades-long international movement calling for divestment from Israel has grown as we witness the current genocide in Gaza. If you listen, you will see that the students and others who have been calling for the University to divest from Israel have this history on their side. You have the opportunity to chart a different, more humane, more just course for the University. 

I know that each of these, and especially the final one, will be hard to accomplish. But this is what the circumstances of the historical moment require, and the dictates of the principles we should hold dear demand. In short, your challenge is to affirm in word and deed the University as a public good. If you do, you will help the University realize its mission, and perhaps even offer an alternative to the current evisceration of both of those ideals — the public and the good — being authored by authoritarians and autocrats far and near. 

Stephen Ward is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor, Department of Afroamerican and African Studies and the Residential College and can be reached at smward@umich.edu.

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