Leaders on Leadership featuring Dr. Kevin Guskiewicz, President of Michigan State University

Episode Transcript

Jay Lemons:

Hello and thank you for listening. I’m Jay Lemons, welcome to Leaders on Leadership, brought to you by Academic Search and the American Academic Leadership Institute. The purpose of the podcast is to share the stories of the people and the forces that are shape leaders in higher education, and to learn more about their thoughts on leadership in the academy. Really delighted today to be joined by Dr. Kevin Guskiewicz. Kevin serves as president of Michigan State University, a role he assumed in 2024. Since arriving at Michigan State, he has led a comprehensive listening tour across campus, introduced a one team approach to leadership and launched key initiatives aimed at expanding access and supporting student success. Among these efforts are the Green and White Council, expanded pathways for community college transfer and underserved students, and a $4 billion comprehensive campaign titled “Uncommon Will, Far Better World,” designed to increase opportunity, advance research, and enhance the university’s long-term impact.

Kevin is also a nationally recognized neuroscientist. His research on sports-related concussions has really shaped safety standards across collegiate and professional athletics, earned him a MacArthur Fellowship, as many of you know, known as the Genius Awards, and has also received recognition by Time Magazine as a game changer. He literally has been a game changer. Prior to serving Michigan State, Kevin served as the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also held academic leadership roles, including the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and where he rose up through the ranks. A 2020 National Athletic Trainers Association Hall of Fame inductee, Kevin earned a bachelor’s degree in athletic training from Westchester University, a master’s in exercise physiology and athletic training from the University of Pittsburgh, and a doctorate in sports medicine from the University of Virginia.

Welcome, Kevin. It’s a pleasure to have you with us and to welcome a fellow Wahoo who walked the grounds about the same time that I was there. So thank you for joining us.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

Jay, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure and an honor. I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Jay Lemons:

As am I. Well, one of our goals is to ask leaders to reflect, not something we get to do much in leadership. Consider and think about their own pathways with hope that others might be touched or inspired or in some way draw direction in their own lives. So Kevin, I’d love for you to share your leadership journey story with us and talk about maybe some of the people, the events, the opportunities that really have forged you into the person and leader that you are today.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

Jay, I was fortunate enough to have been mentored by some incredible leaders themselves, individuals that I had the opportunity to watch and listen to and try to pick up on some of the great things that I saw them doing in their leadership roles, while also sitting over a coffee or a beer or a meal and hearing some of the things they wish they had done differently. One of them, in fact telling me that… Don Boulton the wonderful leader at UNC Chapel Hill who led student affairs there for many years, told me after I became chancellor at UNC, he said, “Kevin, I want to give you the best advice that I could give you. And that is to live your life to only make new mistakes and not to repeat the ones you’ve already made.”

Jay Lemons:

I love that. Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

And I think the best leaders are those who know that they’re going to likely make some mistakes, have a few hiccups along the way, as I like to describe it, but to learn from them and to acknowledge them and to move on. I think if you do that, you’re going to have fewer mistakes along the way and you’re going to build trust with your community. I think some of the other lessons that I’ve learned along my journey has been that servant leadership is really important. And what I mean by that is that I’ve always told those that work with me and alongside me that they don’t work for me. I don’t like to be called boss. I like individuals that are helping me to move our mission forward to always know that we’re working alongside each other in a partnership. And again, I think that comes from listening, and regardless of what constituent you’re meeting with that they truly believe that you’re listening and going to act as best you can on their ideas, their concerns.

When I became chancellor at UNC, and then president here about five or six years after that, I did a listening and learning tour, which I think was really important and getting out to all the units across campus. And here at Michigan State, it was a 52 stop listening and learning tour, it took about six months. But I would come into a room with a group of leaders, oftentimes the dean and some of the senior leaders and some faculty that the dean viewed as helping to carry forward their mission. And I would start those meetings off by saying, “What are you afraid that your new president will do? What are you afraid that your new president won’t do?” And you learn a lot from conversation like that. There’s usually a pretty long pause, and then it’s interesting to see who leans in. And sometimes it’s the person or people that you’d least expect to lean in, feeling maybe somewhat vulnerable to lean in and tell the new president what he or she’s afraid of you doing or not doing. But I’ve pulled some of those individuals into my tight circle of confidants of people that I really believe can help us together working as a team to move forward.

So that’s a little about sort of my approach, my style, and I’m really proud of the way that others have come along on this journey with us. I think the last thing I’ll say is that you have to have a vision, obviously, but it’s how you articulate that vision I think that brings people along. I don’t like to call these strategic plans, because oftentimes as you know faculty, “Oh gosh, not another one of those.” But if you call it a strategic roadmap, for some reason, that change in the way you describe it, a roadmap that gets you to a destination that we all agree on as being what we aspire toward, it’s really important. It creates alignment on your leadership team. It creates alignment, maybe taking a little more time to get others to join that and align to that, but they begin to see themselves within those priorities that you have articulated are going to help to move us forward, the path that we’re going to take to get there. But a good roadmap also tells people what we’re not going to do.

Jay Lemons:

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

I think the best leaders are those who can clearly articulate what we want to be great at. And if you try to be great at everything, I believe you’re typically average at a few. So strategic roadmaps are important and I’ve used them in every leadership role that I’ve had to help move the institution forward.

Jay Lemons:

Just curious, these listen and learning tours, when you’ve had these meetings, what size groups?

Kevin Guskiewicz:

We have 18 colleges here at Michigan State. Some of them obviously are a little smaller than others, but I would ask for anywhere between 10 to 12, 15 people at the table. And not just all senior leaders. Like I said, I think some of the best conversations we’ve had have been ones where the dean, maybe a few associate deans, maybe the CFO for the unit, and some of the star faculty, but also some of the up and coming, maybe junior faculty that I want to learn a bit from in terms of what’s working well for them and how I might be able to help them. That’s what I found works best and it’s a more intimate setting where everybody has an opportunity to share their thoughts.

Jay Lemons:

Absolutely. No, thank you for that. And I love those two questions. What are you afraid your new president will do? What are you afraid your new president will not do? Fabulous questions. And there is maybe nothing better than the art of a good question. I say to search committees all the time, “Watch how your candidates, when it comes their time to ask you questions, watch how they handle that time. Because that’s an indication of how they will lead. We lead through the questions we engage others in.” So really love that. And also the placement around fear is such a powerful, unfortunate and often destructive, but it can be so revealing what getting at our fears. I think that’s really powerful. Excellent.

Hey, tell us in your mind, what makes a good leader? And here, I’m on a one person sort of crusade to reclaim good and not as grade B, but as what makes a good leader? And by that, I mean someone virtuous and effective and ultimately successful in helping to advance the mission of the place they serve.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

As I think I already said, a lot of it has to do with listening. I think understanding the importance and the value of being a servant leader, someone who is a clear communicator who removes any question about how transparent they will be or will not be. And I think the transparency is really important. And obviously there’s certain things that personnel decisions, et cetera, that maybe you can’t be as transparent as some might want you to be. But I think outside of a few situations like that, I think that transparency usually wins the day.

We had to put some budget reductions in place about a year ago, some of it coming out of the changes at the federal level with funding, and others just to try to rectify a structural deficit that I had inherited when I got here. But we went through a process to go through that. I knew that it was going to be a challenge because it might involve the need to cut back some programming, potentially lay off some employees or eliminate positions, but we went through a process and we were very transparent about why we needed to do this, why it was necessary, the process we were going to use to get to the reduction that was necessary. We agreed through a listening session with leaders and faculty senate and others that probably to do this reduction over two years as opposed to one year, do a 6% reduction in one year and a 3% in the other. Making it clear that these couldn’t just be horizontal across the board cuts, but that we were expecting some vertical cuts that really encouraged leaders to look at where there may be underperforming or under enrolled programs that might need to be rethought and potentially cut. And through that process, we got to a good place. Was everybody happy? Absolutely not. But I believe that because of transparency and the way we communicated it, that was helpful.

I’ve also learned… This is maybe one of Don Boulton’s. I’ve learned early on in my career it’s helpful sometimes to have some number of those within that constituency that you’re messaging to read a draft message. If I’m writing a campus message or a message to deans or the CFOs or our alumni, I’m writing it and then sort of proofreading it through a lens that only I can see through.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

You have to view it through the lens of others and make some adjustments to it. And I think that helped us in this situation to be able to communicate effectively. So again, having the roadmap, being able to articulate that alongside the vision, getting the alignment, communicating clearly and being as transparent as possible are some of what I think help to make the best leaders.

And the last thing I’ll say is that I’ve got a consistent sort of motto, I guess you might call it, that I use. I mean to the point where a lot of folks on campus, they’ll see me walking across campus and they’ll say, “Strategic, bold, and student focused. Strategic, bold, and student focused.” I use it all the time. It helps me to remember that we’re always going to be strategic. We’re going to be bold, which means we’ll take some risk on occasion. We might have to pivot if it’s not working. But I always end with student focused, because that’s why we’re here, it’s why we do what we do. And people have sort of bought into that, both at UNC and now here at Michigan State.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you for that. And thank you for bringing that focus to the leadership of really distinguish very large, complex, R1 institutions. Sometimes I worry about our enterprise losing a focus on student centeredness. It’s much more common in the smaller institutions, but that focus from the leadership of an R1 and AAU institutions is really extraordinary. So bless you for that.

I know this about you, that leadership is not an individual sport, leadership’s a team sport. When you’re creating that team of people that you, as you said, share leadership with, what do you look for in those leaders?

Kevin Guskiewicz:

I’m a big believer in surrounding yourself with people that certainly that you trust and that trust you. Individuals that can view challenge and an opportunity through a different lens than the one I can view it through, going back to what I said previously. And I think if you hit those two things in an individual that you want on your team, they’re going to challenge you when you need to be challenged. To allow you to view an issue through a different lens and to maybe rethink it or to adjust it a bit, the decision and the process by which you’re going to ultimately get there and announce a decision.

As a neuroscientist and something I learned at the University of Virginia through one of my great mentors, David Perrin, who has been a really a lifelong professional mentor for me, taught me that it’s always about asking a good research question. It’s putting the methodology in place to answer the research question, which means in many cases the right people around the table. It’s about then conducting the research, and I’m a very hypothesis driven researcher, hypothesis driven leader.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

So you run the experiment, you have an outcome, and then it’s about, as you well know, the most important part as I’ve always told my students, and I learned this from Dave Perrin, the most important part of that research paper is the discussion. It’s how you communicate the findings and the implications of those findings.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

And so I have, whether I was a department chair for eight years, a dean for six years, a chancellor for five, a president now for two plus years, I have always led through a hypothesis driven sort of research approach. How I learned how to do this 30 years ago as a researcher. And I think if you do that, you get to the right place. Even those who may not like the outcome or the decision, if they know you’ve gone through a process to get there, they’re more likely to accept the outcome.

Jay Lemons:

I’d love to have you talk a little bit more about the application of essentially the scientific method in the day-to-day conduct of leadership in a modern institution. And I don’t mean to be too granular, but I know how darn fast-paced it is. So how do you keep the discipline to do that?

Kevin Guskiewicz:

Wow. Yeah. Well, you’ve been there too, Jay, so you know. On any given day, you could come into the office thinking that you’re going to work on items A, B, and C, and by 9:00 AM you might have already pivoted to D and E and you may never get back to B. And so that’s just the life of a university leader, I think. And I wouldn’t even say during these challenging times, I think probably during normal times. But I do believe that you have to be versatile, you have to be able to pivot, you have to know how to delegate. And if you’ve done the right things in building your team, which we talked about earlier, it’s a lot easier to delegate and know that whoever you’ve delegated this particular issue to or assignment to, that they’re going to come back to you to help make a decision around it in a way that you can stay focused on your agenda.

Another great mentor of mine was Dr. Bill Roper. Dr. Roper ran the CDC for many years before coming to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as Dean of Public Health, and then very soon thereafter became Dean of the School of Medicine and UNC Healthcare. But he then became president of the UNC system, he hired me as the interim chancellor and then ultimately the chancellor there. But I remember him sitting in my office not long after he appointed me as chancellor and he said, “Kevin, I’m going to give you some advice and I really hope you’ll take this the right way.” He said, “You need to be doing only the things that only the chancellor can do.” And he said, “I know you well enough.” He said at that point, he’s like, “I’ve known you for 14 years and you’re a great leader, but everybody knows you. Everybody has your cell phone number.” At that point, I had been at UNC for probably 22, 23 years.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

And he said, “Delegation is going to be important, and you need to have a team that together you’re going to help develop a strategy, but then it’s how you have the time to execute that strategy that’s going to be important. And if you’re caught up in the minutiae of a lot of other things that any leader can get caught up in, you won’t be doing the things that the chancellor, and only the chancellor, should be doing.”

Jay Lemons:

I don’t know whether you knew Leonard Sandridge, who of course was an extraordinary leader at the University of Virginia. And when I arrived as a young person in the president’s office there, Leonard said, “Never be too proud to do whatever needs to be done at a given moment.” He was sort of the embodiment of being a servant leader. And I think the advice you got is important, because for those who do feel called to serve, they can get caught up in doing things that other people can and should be doing rather than the things that the leader’s called to do. So I love that advice, it’s so important. Do only what you, and you alone, can do given your positional place in the organization. Fabulous blessing.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

Yeah, yeah. No, I would agree. And I think what Dr. Roper was, he wasn’t suggesting that I shouldn’t roll up my sleeves and get involved, but it was just that you can get caught up in doing too much of that, not trusting your people to do their job. And then the execution work that really the CEO should be doing gets delayed, or perhaps never gets done.

Jay Lemons:

Yep. Gets lost. Absolutely. Knowing that many of our core listeners or people who are thinking about or aspiring to leadership positions, advice for them?

Kevin Guskiewicz:

Yeah. It’s a question I love answering because I’ve had a lot of folks ask me this over the years, and while it certainly worked for me, I’m hesitant at times to offer this up as advice. But I leaned in pretty early. I had another mentor, someone who saw something in me was Dr. Fred Mueller, who was the chair of the Department of Exercise and Sports Science that hired me back in 1995 right out of Virginia. And probably 18 to 20 months in, he asked me… He saw something in me very early and he said, “Kevin, our director of graduate studies has just announced she needs to step down at mid-year, and I think you’re the right person to step in and take on that role.” Now here I am in my second year on faculty as an assistant professor, focused on what I should be focused on, that is just trying to make sure I get tenured. I was building a research lab at the time, but Fred saw something in me.

And granted it was a small department. This was a department of probably about 16 to 18 faculty, and probably five to six of them were fixed-term faculty. But at any rate, I thought about it for a week and said, “Yes,” I needed to make a decision quickly. And it was a great decision for me because I did that then for about six, seven years, and then I was sort of groomed by Fred and then a few others to become department chair.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

July 1st, 2005, the first day as full professor in the department, I became department chair the same day.

Jay Lemons:

Wow.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

And so at any rate, but I leaned in. So people saw something in me, and I’d like to think it’s because of some of the things I’ve already described about the way I make decisions, the way I build teams, the way I always try to operate as a servant leader. I believe that worked for me.

Advice I would give others though, lean in, but be careful of taking on too much too soon. Getting tenured and going through that process of getting tenure is important. And lean in, but make sure you’re leaning in toward the right opportunities that are going to help you stay inspired to lead, and not one where you’re going to find yourself trying to solve a bunch of problems right out of the gate. And then I think the last thing I’d say on this, Jay, is be able to articulate your vision and to keep it focused. The mistakes I’ve seen in young leaders that sometimes don’t succeed in their roles is that they try to take on way too much. They’ve got 12 priorities instead of three or four, and then very little gets done. So I think being able to focus those priorities, show progress on them, and then say, “Once we’ve accomplished this, we’re going to pivot to this next set of goals and priorities.”

Jay Lemons:

Yeah, thank you. So that kind of brings me back to the value of strategic, bold, student centered. That sort of focus. When you think about 2026, what are the most critical challenges facing leaders in higher ed?

Kevin Guskiewicz:

I think that we have to be sure that the American populous knows who we are, why higher ed is important, why a four-year degree for an 18 to 22, 23 year old is so important. Not just for them personally in terms of thinking about the opportunity for upward mobility as an individual, but the societal benefits to having an educated populace in a country. I sit on the Council for Competitiveness, it’s a group of business, government and academic leaders, I think there’s 13 or 14 university presidents. We meet a few times a year in DC, and the last two meetings we’ve spent a lot of time talking about higher ed needing to make a stronger case for the value of it, value proposition. And it’s not just about that upward mobility I’ve talked about, but it’s also about maintaining our competitiveness as a nation. The importance of our research universities, helping to drive the economy, helping to provide the R&D that’s so necessary for a nation like ours.

So I think getting back to your question, it’s a responsibility that I think we have, I know I feel as a university leader, that we have to be making that case for us. But we also have to find others who can help make that case for us. Business leaders, healthcare leaders, government leaders. If it’s just university presidents, it sounds self-serving as you know. You’re nodding your head, I know you agree with me. So we’ve got to do a better job of making that case. And then we have to… This plays right into some of the changes that we saw last January, February, March coming out of DC with cuts to federal funding, some of the changes that were made through executive orders that dramatically impacted higher education. We have to get to Congress, we have to go and meet with our congressional leaders, which I have spent more time in DC over the last year than I have probably in the last four years combined. But it’s telling our story, it’s getting in front of congressional leaders who, in many cases, they want to be educated.

One of the toughest meetings that I went into was one where a congressional leader from Michigan, she said, “I’m not happy with higher ed right now.” But I listened for 20 minutes, and then she said, “Okay, now I want to listen to you.” And I really appreciated that from her. And the meeting was supposed to last 30 minutes, it lasted about an hour and 15 minutes. She gave me her cell phone number at the end of the meeting and she said, “I can’t thank you enough, and I’m going to go and fight for that funding that you need for the Flint registry,” that the CDC funding had just been cut. And 10 days later, we had that funding restored because I told her the story of how important it is and some promises that I was going to continue to work toward to make sure that we’d address some of her concerns. So we got to find that compromise. So that’s maybe more than you wanted to hear, Jay, but I think we have a responsibility to tell our story and advocate.

Jay Lemons:

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, and you began in some ways by striking a different balance between the personal gain of higher education versus the public benefit that comes from having an educated population. So I really appreciate that.

I want to move us towards a little bit of a lightning round. Shorter questions, answers can be whatever you’d like. Who’s had the most influence on you?

Kevin Guskiewicz:

I mean obviously my parents, who I’m so blessed to have both my parents healthy and happy and visiting as often as they can and still living in Western Pennsylvania. But they’ve inspired me to be a leader, but to do it my way. And I grew up blue collar, Western Pennsylvania, Latrobe Pennsylvania, but they always were there to help me get to where I wanted to get to. I’ve got an incredible wife, Amy, who is by my side every day of every week, and these jobs take two to make them work. It’s a partnership. But I think I’ve looked, as I said, to other leaders. I’m teaching a course called The American Professoriate that I took at the University of Virginia and I co-teach it with Dr. Kris Renn from our College of Education here at Michigan State. And I took that course at UNC, and I’ve got sitting next to me is a book called Academic Duty. I don’t know if you’ve seen this.

Jay Lemons:

I know the book. Absolutely.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

By Donald Kennedy, I’m sort of a scholar of Kennedy, former President of Stanford.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

I’ve always felt that along with academic freedom and tenure comes a responsibility that faculty have. They have to earn that, and that comes through an academic duty. That means that our teaching and research and service to society needs to be at the forefront. If you get that right, then you deserve the academic freedom that many of us enjoy.

Jay Lemons:

Absolutely. Well, you raised up. I don’t know if you want to point to Donald Kennedy’s book, or if there’s another book that may have had the greatest influence on you?

Kevin Guskiewicz:

Yeah. I was asked this recently. I love to read, I just don’t have time to read.

Jay Lemons:

Understood.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

But I do. I mean my wife could read a book a week, or maybe two books a week. I’m lucky if I get two or three in a year. I’m a Grisham fan. I’m friends with John Grisham, their neighbors of ours in Chapel Hill. So I love a Grisham book, and he’ll often, when his new book comes out, he signs it and sends it my way. So I try to keep up on those. I’ve also had the great fortune of meeting Malcolm Gladwell, and he interviewed me at one point regarding my research on traumatic brain injury. Gosh, it’s probably been 15 years ago. So I love any new Gladwell book that comes out, probably Outliers and Tipping Point are two of my favorites.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

And then I’ve got, just behind me, I’ve probably got about every leadership book that you can imagine. And some might say, “Kevin, you should have read some of them and followed them.”

Jay Lemons:

Well, let me take you back to Westchester University. Is there a fondest memory you have of being an undergrad at that wonderful institution?

Kevin Guskiewicz:

Yeah, it’s a place that gave me the opportunity to explore. I mean I arrived there wanting to jump into their athletic training sports medicine program, I think I got the last spot in the program. Another great mentor of mine, Phil Donnelly, who sadly passed away about a year and a half ago, was an inspiration to me and allowed me also to explore while being part of that program, which required a lot of clinical hours at the end of the day, working with the athletics teams there. I was a minor in journalism and I wanted to write for the student newspaper, and so I enjoyed that opportunity and ended up becoming the co-editor of the paper my senior year.

Jay Lemons:

Wow.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

And had to decide after I graduated in 1989 what direction I wanted to go, either journalism or sports medicine. I had been wait-listed at Columbia for their journalism program, master’s degree, which is a pretty good program, as you know.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

At the same time, I’ve been accepted to University of Pittsburgh for my master’s in sports medicine, and an incredible opportunity to work with the Pittsburgh Steelers as a grad assistant there. And I had accepted that offer, so I was pulling out of Westchester on the same day that I got lifted off the wait-list at Columbia. And I’m like, “What do I do?” I made the right decision, but fast-forward, my wife will remember the day I came home one evening and I said, “Gosh, I cannot…” This is when I was chancellor at UNC. “I can’t believe what the Daily Tar Heel what they said about me today.” And she kind of smiled and you know where this is going. She said, “Well, what goes around comes around.” Because she also graduated from Westchester, and she probably recalls some article where I was being critical of the administration as the editor of the school newspaper of the president.

So anyhow, that’s sort of fun. But I have really fond memories of my time at Westchester. Again, it gave me opportunities to explore and find a pathway and mentors that stuck by my side over the last 35 years.

Jay Lemons:

In so many ways, you really have had a world changing impact in neuroscience through your work on TBI and concussions. You had a totally separate sort of life as a leader in higher education, but if you hadn’t worked in higher education or hadn’t done work in neuroscience, is there another pathway? Well, maybe you said it. Journalism may have been it. Would you trade that MacArthur Award for a Pulitzer?

Kevin Guskiewicz:

That’s a great question, Jay. I love to write, and the opportunity to… Who knows? Had I gone to Columbia, I mean there might have still been an opportunity to become an academic leader. But I did have the opportunity to write for the Philadelphia Inquirer for a while after graduating there at Westchester where I was working a sports medicine clinic, doing some writing for the Inquirer for their local county affiliated paper. But yeah, I don’t know. I mean I also had the opportunity to, even after I was at UVA for a year, had a knock on the door from the Pittsburgh Steelers to come back as an athletic trainer. For a minute I thought about it, because it was… I grew up right outside of Pittsburgh. And so who knows, but I was grateful that I stayed the course at UVA, got that degree from that incredible institution, as you well know, and stayed on this track and journey that I’m really happy that I did. But you never know. I could have ended up, who knows, maybe being a head athletic trainer in the NFL, or maybe writing for the New York Times. But I’m happy with where I landed.

Jay Lemons:

That’s fabulous. Well, one of the things I love about the world of higher education is tradition. And I wonder if there’s a tradition that you have witnessed, been a part of, that you’d hold up as one of your favorites?

Kevin Guskiewicz:

Yeah. I mean every institution has its… There’s something special that they try to weave into the student experience. And I have really fond memories of my time at UNC Chapel Hill. And my office there looked out over the old well, the iconic old well, which is sort of the symbol of the institution. And on the first day of class every year, students line up down Cameron Avenue and I’d look out my window from the south building, but they line up to take a sip of water from the old well. Because as legend has it, take a sip on the first day, you’re going to turn a 4.0 that semester. I’m not sure who came up with it, and I don’t think we’ve ever conducted a study to see if that is in fact the case. I would probably bet against it. But I always enjoyed standing out there for several hours on the first day of class, shaking hands, talking to students, getting to know them better.

And then I guess here at Michigan State, something that Amy and I’ve really enjoyed in terms of tradition is that the House here, which I’m sitting in my office here at the house, Cowles House, sits right in the heart of campus and there’s a field that sits just to the west of the House here… I mean I can look out my window on the other side looking out over the field. But it’s where the marching band warms up on Saturdays prior to every football game, and the band marches up the main street into the stadium on game day and the president and his guests walk in and march in with the band. No instruments in hand though, I can tell you I cannot do that. And that’s been a lot of fun with the streets lined with our students and fans and alumni. And so Amy and I have enjoyed that tradition of marching in with the marching band on game days.

Jay Lemons:

That’s awesome. Well Kevin, I could keep chewing on things with you. I’ve really appreciated this. But one of our traditions here on Leaders and Leadership is we really like to close by inviting our guests to think about and share with our listeners the distinctive qualities of the institution they’re serving. So in this case, what is it about Michigan State that calls upon you to give it your every measure every single day? Tell us a little bit about the organizational DNA of what makes a Spartan?

Kevin Guskiewicz:

Our slogan here is Spartans Will, and that slogan’s been used for probably two decades. Interestingly, we just celebrated last week the 100-year anniversary of the Spartan mascot previously. The institution’s 171 years old, the first of the land grants.

Jay Lemons:

That’s exactly right. Yeah, James Best. Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

Yep. The institution was founded in 1855. The land grants, as you know through the Morrill Act, was [inaudible 00:36:52] 1962, but MSU got it sort of retroactively as the first. We were previously called the Aggies because it was Michigan’s agricultural college, but 100 years ago this week became known as the Spartans. And we’re a proudly public university. I talk often about a leading global public research university. President John Hannah, who served from 1941 to 1969. Imagine that, Jay, 28 years.

Jay Lemons:

28 years. Wow.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

President, his vision was that this would become the very best global university in the nation, and worked really hard. We had a dean of international studies and programs and study abroad in 1959.

Jay Lemons:

Wow.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

Most universities didn’t begin thinking about study abroad and international studies until probably the early ’80s. So he was well ahead of his time. And so that’s one of the things that we’re really proud of. It’s a place that’s proudly inclusive. We’re one of only five institutions in the country that has an acceptance rate above 65% with a graduation rate above 80%. So very proudly inclusive. We work really hard to be strategic, bold, and student focused.

Jay Lemons:

Love it. Thank you, Kevin, for joining us on Leaders on Leadership. We’re glad to have you and really appreciate you so generously sharing your insights and wisdom about leadership. I welcome any parting words you might want to share with our leaders.

Kevin Guskiewicz:

Leadership roles are so important, they’re not easy. In fact, I have a little placard on my desk that was given to me by a close colleague because she had heard me say on many occasions as we were wrapping up a tough meeting on trying to get to a solution to a problem, but I often say that, “Easy is boring.” We’re not getting bored. We have to take on the tough things. And it takes, I think, strong leaders in higher ed to be willing to roll up their sleeves and take on the tough things, and know that most days are not going to be easy. But that’s what makes us stronger, that’s what makes us capable of making a strong case for the importance of higher education. America’s leading universities have such a critical role to play in gaining our competitiveness as a nation, as we said earlier, and I hope others were inspired to lean in and lead.

Jay Lemons:

Well Kevin, thank you so much again. Listeners, we welcome your suggestions and thoughts for leaders we should feature in upcoming segments. You can send those suggestions to leadershippodcast@academicsearch.org. You can find our podcast wherever you find your podcasts, and it’s also available on the Academic Search website. Leaders on Leadership is brought to you by Academic Search and the American Academic Leadership Institute. Together, our mission is to support colleges and universities during times of transition, and through leadership development activities that serve current and future generations of leaders in the academy.