Mark Schlissel OUT
October 5th, 2021 at 5:13 PM ^
I think it is important to highlight any *recent* President has been supportive of athletics.
In the 1890s/early 1900s our President Angell tried at length to limit the power of college athletics.
October 5th, 2021 at 5:33 PM ^
How did that work out?
October 5th, 2021 at 5:50 PM ^
The athletic department persists, but Angell got his name slapped on a building. I think we can call this one a draw.
October 5th, 2021 at 4:44 PM ^
I have a lot of problems with Schilssel and his lack of concern for athletics is way down the list.
October 5th, 2021 at 4:35 PM ^
Well if nothing else, U of M is losing one sweet ass.
October 5th, 2021 at 4:38 PM ^
I am shocked - SHOCKED - that the guy who wrote an FOIAable email to another Big Ten chancellor asking if emails were FOIAable turned out to be bad at being a university president.
October 5th, 2021 at 4:46 PM ^
Will be interesting to set who they hire
October 5th, 2021 at 5:02 PM ^
Not only set who they hire, but also see who they hire.
October 5th, 2021 at 4:50 PM ^
nah he tweakin
October 5th, 2021 at 4:53 PM ^
I liked that he started an initiative to end poverty and that he started at home with an annual salary of $927,000.
October 5th, 2021 at 5:06 PM ^
October 5th, 2021 at 5:13 PM ^
So you think we should work for free or maybe $20 / hour tops! Geez, BTW, he is not the highest paid at U of M by a long shot!
October 8th, 2021 at 9:54 AM ^
His salary is in line with the current rate for his position but $450/hour would have seemed obscene, even adjusted for inflation, 30 years ago.
I'm a little salty because I work in a university health system in another state. Both the health center and counseling center have been overwhelmed with demand; the increase is mostly due to covid and its related effects. I have been hearing about upper administrators (the same ones using university health services as a marketing tool) making mid-six figures at the schools in our system holding long meetings to try to find money to pay for more counselors at ~$60,000 and more physicians at ~$120,000. I have some ideas about where that money might be found!
October 5th, 2021 at 5:23 PM ^
As much as it pains me to defend schissel on almost anything, I wouldn't be surprised if $920k was probably slightly over a starter home in Ann Arbor these days.
October 5th, 2021 at 5:35 PM ^
Being able to buy a home on just one year's salary is the standard? I want to work for you.
October 5th, 2021 at 10:11 PM ^
Plus he gets free use of the President's House anyway.
October 5th, 2021 at 4:53 PM ^
Probably useful to add the context that he agreed to leave with a year left on his contract, which was set to expire in 2024. So he's still going to be around for at least another 15 months.
October 5th, 2021 at 5:28 PM ^
That's how they do severance packages now.
October 5th, 2021 at 4:55 PM ^
June 2023? Lets pump the breaks here no need to rush to anything too hastily.
October 5th, 2021 at 5:04 PM ^
Yeah, let's not break the brakes.
October 5th, 2021 at 5:10 PM ^
I need a break from all of these brakes breaking ?
October 5th, 2021 at 10:23 PM ^
Let's break bread instead of breaking brakes.
But only break freshly baked bread.
October 5th, 2021 at 5:26 PM ^
That’s the quickest you can get rid of someone in this position without directly firing them and naming an interim. Basically the hiring process could take up to a year—it’s very secretive and you’d want the new person in after all this COVID/Anderson stuff is settled.
The new President will be named in late 2022 and will probably take over shortly after that.
October 5th, 2021 at 5:24 PM ^
Seeing Schlissel leave can't happen soon enough for me. Each university has its own culture and Schlissel never seemed to be a good fit. Many of his decisions relating to Covid and other goings on seemed to be reactive and not proactive. His lack of at least having a Zoom call with athletes last fall when sports were initially cancelled was ridiculous.
October 5th, 2021 at 5:29 PM ^
How much influence does the president of a university have on the athletic department in general, and football and basketball especially?
Can they have a negative or positive influence on athletic donors?
Can it have an positive or negative effect on recruiting for major revenue-producing sports?
October 5th, 2021 at 6:07 PM ^
My impression is they can hurt much more than they can help. Basically they can only hire a good Athletic Director, who hires good coaches, and make sure the fundraising train keeps moving. If you do it well, you just did your job. If you screw it up, everyone notices and it's almost a fireable offense.
Best you can do, I think, is set a tone within administration that athletics are important and not to be overlooked (as they could be by arrogant academics who like to "tut tut" about "sportsball"), and let them run themselves, with a proper level of oversight (particularly involving Title IX and health/safety of the atheletes). It is bad to micromanage the football team from the President's office; it's equally bad to let it run on it's own without keeping an eye on it for issues. Athletic department scandals took down the Presidents at PSU, MSU, and Baylor, among others.
October 6th, 2021 at 1:35 PM ^
Well, I would argue that last season's performance was entirely a consequence of the campus's COVID protocols. Students who were allowed to be in facilities together had to be 6 feet apart, we couldn't be in breakout rooms together as recently as even this last June.
Layer that on top of a conference football season which went from being cancelled to uncancelled suddenly, and the team really hadn't even been allowed to practice together before competition started.
October 5th, 2021 at 5:31 PM ^
"I hope he doesn't fire me"
How the world turns...
October 5th, 2021 at 6:17 PM ^
It's funny that if you read E. Gordon Gee's Wikipedia page, the whole Ohio State section just talks about the dumb things he said and had to apologize for as President. Very little mention of the actual administration of the school in his tenure there, just back and forth over his Grampa-like jokes about Little Sisters of the Poor and dealing with the Catholics at Notre Dame.
October 5th, 2021 at 10:17 PM ^
Considering that the a huge part of a university president's job is to be the PR face of the university, that seems appropriate enough.
(I enjoyed the part about how much OSU spent on bowties.)
October 5th, 2021 at 5:34 PM ^
Hello: RS
October 5th, 2021 at 5:39 PM ^
Not a snowball's chance in hell.
October 5th, 2021 at 6:38 PM ^
2 x alum, beloved by rich people and bottled water drinkers alike, and tremendous support among the staff. Not sure how he’s anything but the front runner.
October 6th, 2021 at 2:22 PM ^
Tremendous support by the staff?
I'm pretty liberal and I acknowledge there's no way the more left-leaning-than-me faculty will accept the guy that was in charge during the Flint water crises.
October 5th, 2021 at 5:51 PM ^
Is Mary Sue still alive? I haven't seen her since we went drinking together. Always a good time.
October 6th, 2021 at 9:39 AM ^
Yeah, but she is still hungover from the Nebraska game.
October 5th, 2021 at 5:59 PM ^
Isn’t this the same guy who fired Brandon and brought us Jim Hacket, swim lanes and Harbrough?
October 5th, 2021 at 6:05 PM ^
I think the Regent’s will come to regret this. Much of what they are bitching about is relatively minor in the grand scope of things. I think Schlissel has done a pretty good job all things considered. Many of the problems were not of his making. He merely inherited them. He also raised the academic standing of the university considerably by emphasizing more consistent outreach to the public. Fortunately, Michigan is a destination job held in high esteem. Hopefully the regents and their pettiness won’t scare good candidates away. On a side note, it would be nice to have an officially designated alumni regent whose constituency is solely alums because many alums are now out-of-state and get no representation or say on the university’s governance despite being constantly approached by university fundraisers for their supposedly deeper pockets.
October 5th, 2021 at 8:01 PM ^
Upvote on the idea of a regent representing the alums. That said, I don’t think we’ll live to regret. While our academic reputation did improve he was hamhanded with just about everything else
October 5th, 2021 at 9:56 PM ^
Fair enough. I was not aware of how socially obtuse he was with university community members until people posted anecdotes that they personally were privy to. That said I don’t quite understand this problem with him because he was supposedly turning Michigan into an Ivy. Frankly, considering that Michigan out-of-state costs more than most Ivies after financial aid is factored in, I think providing more bang for the buck on the reputation front is a good thing. It is possible to be elite without being elitist—and this is what we should strive for. If you want lowest common denominator then Michigan State and other non-flagship publics make more sense. But as much as we are rivals with Ohio State and Michigan State in athletics, our real rivals in everything else are Berkeley, UCLA, UVA, Texas, Washington, Illinois, Wisconsin, and the rest of the top-flight publics. That is what we should aspire to and is what Schlissel has emphasized. He should not have to apologize for that.
October 6th, 2021 at 3:26 PM ^
It is odd for me to hear the thing about turning Michigan into an Ivy. Michigan has broader and deeper academic excellence across the board than many Ivies. IRL we compete with Ivy grads all the time. If there is this sense that, oh noes, Michigan is becoming for the elites. Well, it is, and has proudly been for a long time.
October 5th, 2021 at 6:23 PM ^
Tom Brady will be the next POTUS of Michigan.
October 5th, 2021 at 7:28 PM ^
*POTUM -(of Michigan)
October 5th, 2021 at 6:24 PM ^
I may be in the minority on this site, but I'd rather prefer that the next University President still has a strong academic first, athletic department down-the-line stance. Sports, definitely, has a place at the University, but it shouldn't be the sine qua non of running an elite academic University.
That being said, let's go a little younger this time. There's an alum who has been a fast riser in life. He's worked in government, and is currently the President of the Rockefeller Foundation - Rajiv Shah.
October 5th, 2021 at 7:29 PM ^
I think there's a difference between Gordon Gee and getting a guy who values Michigan athletics as a consistent competitor on the national landscape. You can value academics and athletics at the same time as was done from the 60s until the early 2000s at Michigan.
October 5th, 2021 at 6:26 PM ^
This title is out
October 5th, 2021 at 6:33 PM ^
In before this gets locked!
October 5th, 2021 at 7:26 PM ^
The guy fired Dave Brandon. He's a hero in my book. The regents leading the charge haven't presented a very clear case of what the issues may be with his performance. The issues seem to be transparency and communication (which is another way of saying transparency), which is ironic because those are the issues I have with criticisms of Schlissel. Seems that there must be more to what is motivating these moves than what has been articulated.
October 5th, 2021 at 10:15 PM ^
Basically he's a huge asshole, even to people predisposed to sympathize with him. Occasionally his asshole nature served him well (as in firing Brandon) but mostly it just alienated everyone around him.
October 6th, 2021 at 3:13 PM ^
Based on the near-universal reaction here (even JUB took a shot at him on TWTR) he is massively unpopular. Leaders need the support of their constituents, that's how it works in every organization and especially a leading university. Eight years is a decent run in a job like this, and Michigan does not owe him anything.