Most people would read that as a not-so-subtle dig at the slightly older and slightly larger university in Ann Arbor. And this week, that’s probably exactly what that means.
Both schools have undefeated football teams, which smash into each other Saturday in Ann Arbor. For the next three days nobody’s going to be talking about collaboration between universities. Yet off the football field, both schools have a great deal more in common than most of their screaming fans may recognize. They are each led by brilliant, driven women who know that these two schools are essential to Michigan’s hope for a better future, and who have to wrestle with politicians who would sacrifice the future to the present.
Lou Anna Simon, president of Michigan State since the beginning of 2005, is almost unique among modern university presidents. She’s spent her entire adult career at MSU, from the time she arrived as a new graduate student in 1970.
President Simon knows the school, its faculty and mission as perhaps no one ever has since the legendary John Hannah, who ran the place for almost thirty years and turned a small agricultural college into a vast modern university. She also knows the idea that “MSU is the university of Michigan” has nothing to do with Ann Arbor.
It has to do with MSU’s unique outreach role as the nation’s pioneering land-grant university. From the start, the idea was that Michigan State would not only educate people, but a do research and outreach directly aimed at improving people’s lives and livelihoods.
Originally that meant agriculture, and to an extent still does. But it means a lot more than that. State beat out every other school in the nation to win the half-a-billion dollar Facility for Rare Isotope Beams a few years ago. MSU reaches out world-wide, and has more students and programs abroad than any other university. “We were global before global was cool,” President Simon says. But she is concerned about the future. Higher education took a minor cut in the current state budget.
But next year looks like a ticking time bomb. Vast deficits are looming, and university presidents are worried about what that might mean. Last year Simon had to fight to save MSU‘s agricultural extension stations, which share the benefits of modern, high-tech research with the state‘s growing agribusiness sector.
In a real sense, MSU is now itself serving as the seed of what hopefully will be a better economic tomorrow.
“If you believe that creativity and knowledge will be needed to make a better tomorrow, that’s really universities,” President Simon says. “We think that the studies we produce, research people think about today as not having a purpose, tomorrow may be the basis for a new plant, perhaps a new industry.”
Yet there is a mentality that says that “everything can be cut.” That, she knows, isn’t so. Michigan State “has become much better academically, and even truer to our land-grant mission, in a modern sense,” she says. The farmers MSU was created in 1855 to help knew enough not to destroy their seed crops. She hopes that the Michigan Legislature is smart enough to understand that too.
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