The Evolution of Higher Education with Mary Sue Coleman
Willy Walker: Good afternoon, and welcome to the Walker Webcast. It is my great pleasure to have Mary Sue Coleman join me today. Let me do a quick intro, Mary Sue, and then we will dive into my questions.
Mary Sue Coleman is an American biochemist and academic administrator who served as the 18th president of the University of Iowa from 1995 to 2002, the 13th president of the University of Michigan from 2002 to 2014, and interim president of the University of Michigan in 2022. She was president of the Association of American Universities from 2016 until 2020. She has been awarded 12 honorary degrees, named by Time magazine, and also one of the nation's ten best college presidents and is the recipient of a Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she earned her PhD and the Alumni Award from Grinnell College, where she earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry.
So, Mary Sue, let me start here. Your doctoral thesis was about the incorporation of radioactive precursors into polynomes and RNA, a mammalian brain, during short-term behavioral experiences. Can you translate that for our listeners?
Mary Sue Coleman: That sounds like a daunting time. But what I was trying to show and did show is that short-term memory is actually encoded in some molecules in the brain called RNA. This is the first time that this had been demonstrated. The technique that I used was one to show that you could see the rise in these molecules when you created the memory, and you could see the fall when you destroyed the memory. So it was a pretty interesting finding. And I loved doing the work.
Willy Walker: So you taught for many years. You taught at the University of Kentucky after getting your Ph.D. from UNC and then went on to administrative jobs at UNC and the University of New Mexico. What job at Kentucky did you get that made you say, maybe I want to move from the academic side to the administrative side. And was it that job that made you realize that you were really good at it, or was it a subsequent job that said to you, “I got a real future here as being an administrator and a leader?”
Mary Sue Coleman: Well, one of the most surprising things that happened to me at Kentucky, and I loved being there, was that at one point, I was asked to help develop, and hire a director for the cancer center, and think about sort of the visioning for the future of the university. And in those roles, I had to do things that were new to me. I learned about the rest of the university. I learned how to hire people. I learned about how you actually start development projects. I had to do a lot of fundraising to make all that happen. During that whole process, which went on for several years, this was not something that happened overnight. I really realized that I had a talent and that I really enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed the research. I love working in the lab, but it also came to me that I could have a bigger impact on the university and an administrative role than I could in my narrow field of biochemistry that I was working on. And that's really how it all started. And then, I started looking for new opportunities. And the rest of it sort of fell into place.
Willy Walker: But your number two benefit, if you will, was hugging people. And the third was raising money. Talk for a moment about the importance of those two things in administrative roles in large universities.
Mary Sue Coleman: I learned early on that when you're in an administrative role, decisions come to you, problems that haven't been solved at lower levels. And so you're called upon to make consequential decisions. And I guess maybe there was something about my scientific background. I don't know if this is true, but I learned it was really important to listen and to be willing to change your mind based on new evidence and new information. I think it's one of the most marvelous things that students have to learn at a university. And I was a good listener. I was willing to consider new arguments. But then I knew that I had to make a decision. When I did make the decision, I needed to let the people who were disappointed know why I made the decision. And I learned in that process that one of the most important things about being an administrator is to hear people out. Even if you don't agree with them in the end, it's important to hear what they have to say. So that was a good lesson for me.
The second part, I learned about myself, is that I really didn't mind asking people for money in the development world because it was such a good cause. Universities are wonderful, just institutions in our society. And if I could present a vision, people want a vision. I need to listen very carefully to what the donors are interested in. If I could find a match between their vision and what the university needed, then it would almost always be a successful conversation. And development takes time. I made friends with donors, and I learned the power of philanthropy.
Willy Walker: When just hearing people out when you're going to make a decision, as a beginning administrator at the University of Kentucky, the issues that came to you, you talked to a working group, you talked to certain people. But as you move up and become the president of the University of Michigan, some of these issues not only have massive consequences for Michigan but they have huge consequences for the education system in the United States of America. And we'll get to affirmative action in a moment once we move into your tenure at Michigan. But on an issue like that, there isn't enough time to listen to everyone. How did you manage the cut-off of the feedback, in the sense that with someone with your job and with all the input and all the people who had big emotions around an issue? At some point, you have to say, “Okay, I've heard enough. I need to make a decision.” That had to have been challenging as the issues got bigger and bigger, and the input of people wanting to give you feedback got voluminous to a point where you could never get to it all.
Mary Sue Coleman: That's certainly a good point. One of the strategies is that we use, and I always had a great team. I don't want to imply that I was a singular individual, particularly when you become a president. Having a good team around you, people who will be honest with you, and then, develop a strategy because when I was making decisions, I used to always think about, “Who is most affected by the decision?” And that was the first question I asked before I thought about the input that I would get. The people whose lives will be changed, their careers will be changed, or their apartments will be changed. Whatever it was, I needed to understand that because many people have opinions, but they may not be affected by the decision. At some point, you have to decide what input you're going to get. And sometimes you can have surrogates help get information for you. And it was always a process. Every decision was different. But I had a framework that I could use to try to get where I needed to be. I guess that's the best way that I can describe it.
Willy Walker: So you became the first female president of the University of Iowa? And I'm curious, on that day, when you think back, was the emotion that day more of pride or pressure?
Mary Sue Coleman: I was excited beyond belief. I grew up in Iowa. My husband was born in Iowa, a native Iowan. We went to college in Iowa. That's where we met. And I felt I was ready for this step. And it was just one of the best days of my life. It was amazing. So was there pressure? Yes. I understood that I was in some of what I didn't know. When you go into a job like that, there's almost nothing that prepares you for a presidency. Sometimes, I tell people that I was grabbing the brass ring by taking on that job. But also, in some ways, I was jumping off a cliff, not knowing where I would land. It was a great day.
Willy Walker: At that time, Mary Sue, I look back at female presidents and at major universities at that time, there were really only two other female presidents, Donna Shalala at Wisconsin. And then Duke had a female president. Being a female president of a major university at that time, today, it feels like there are female presidents everywhere. But at that time, there were really only three of you who had leadership roles at major universities. As it relates to the pressure on you, anything you thought about as you were heading into that job or as you were acting in that role had the context of being one of the pioneers of female presidents of large universities that made you either do something or not do something.
Mary Sue Coleman: So I don't want to forget Hanna Gray. She was president back earlier at the University of Chicago and Donna Shalala at Wisconsin. And then Keohane at Duke. And I knew both Donna and Hanna. What I really understood early on is that I needed to be equally open to preparing young men and young women. I didn't ever speak about “I’m the first woman to do this”. I always spoke about the opportunity for everybody. But I thought that this was important, and I wanted to help prepare both women and young men. And I think that served me well in Iowa. And just served the culture of Iowa, it was a more socially liberal state in that period than perhaps it is today. I haven’t been in Iowa for a long time, so I don't really know. But yes, I was very cognizant of the fact that I was the first woman that I didn't ever talk about in those words.
Willy Walker: And then you're called by Michigan to become the president of Michigan. Talk for a moment about what it was because you've told me that you loved being the president of the University of Iowa. Being in Iowa, you liked the university. You were doing really well in your role. What was it about the offer to go run Michigan beyond the fact that it was the University of Michigan?
Mary Sue Coleman: Well, of course, as you say, it's a globally prominent university. And that attracted me. But the thing that really made me really want that job was the fact that it was a defendant in lawsuits about affirmative action. I admired the university so much for being willing to expend the resources and the effort, which ultimately both the undergraduate admissions case and the law school admissions case went to the Supreme Court. And I thought that was a very important bite to have, and I wanted to be part of it. The other thing that really impressed me about the University of Michigan was the research that they had done over a number of years about the benefits of affirmative action to all students, not just those from underrepresented minority backgrounds. It had a profound effect. Those experiences you had five years out from graduation, ten years out, 15 years out. And I want to be part of that. So it was very exciting for me.
Willy Walker: So in 2002, you went with the part of it to support, if you will, affirmative action and take on that case. Now, here we are in 2024, with the Supreme Court having overturned affirmative action. What do you think are the implications of that ruling by the Supreme Court?
Mary Sue Coleman: I think they're going to be profound across all of higher education. You may not remember this, but the decision came down for holistic admissions. That is, we could use affirmative action as race is one of many characteristics in admissions decisions in both law school and undergraduate admissions. So, between 2003 and 2006, we had to continue to use affirmative action at the University of Michigan. In 2006, the voters of Michigan changed the Constitution of the state to outlaw the use of affirmative action in Michigan. So from 2006 on, we hadn’t been able to use it. In the period of the last 15 to 16 years, the University has poured millions of dollars into trying to find alternatives for affirmative action to create a more racially diverse student body. Nothing has worked. Nothing is a proxy for race. People say, “Well, we'll use lower socioeconomic status or low income, not a proxy because there are more majority of people who are poor than minority populations; they are poor.” And so it just doesn't work. The diversity, particularly in the African American population, and Hispanic, that I was most worried about, at the university, maybe half to 60% of what they were before affirmative action was banned. And so I suspect, I don't know this because I haven't seen the data from last year with most selective universities. I think we're going to see pretty devastating consequences. I hope this is not true. But that's what I'm worried about.
Willy Walker: I was at Harvard Business School yesterday, one of my fellow alums asked the dean about the Supreme Court ruling, where the school stands as it relates to the admission of minorities for the class of what will be the 2026 class. And he got a very direct answer, which was, “We don't know. We won't know until September 2nd when they all show up on campus.” The concept that there is no insight into what the mix of the class will be and that there's absolutely not a single data point is astounding. The concept that it is a surprise on September 2nd what the composition of the class is going to look like. To your point, my assumption would be that it is not what they would like to have designed it to look like. But we shall see.
Mary Sue Coleman: Absolutely. We don't know. And the Supreme Court has ruled. And so we're all going to have to live with it.
Willy Walker: So you arrived at Michigan, and on your son Jonathan’s, one of my dear friends, 32nd birthday, you gave your inaugural address. And in your inaugural address, it was entitled, “Look to Your Roots to Discover Your Future.” What was the core message behind that address of looking to your roots to discover your future?
Mary Sue Coleman: Well, I thought long and hard in talking about what I wanted people to understand, that I understood about the university, which certainly has an illustrious past. And it's one that we shouldn't forget. I used it as a symbol for my inauguration. The sun copper bird. And I don't know if you know about it from Africa.
Willy Walker: It flies forward and looks backward. It's got a head surround.
Mary Sue Coleman: You have to reflect on the past to build a successful future. And I thought this just perfectly embodied what I wanted people to remember about the institution. And, even at that time though we had done a good job of sort of reviving the history and remembering our history, we still weren't particularly honest about some of the things that we've done in our past that have not been great for the university. And in fact, during my tenure at Michigan, I knew we were coming up on the bicentennial. And so we'd have a big celebration for that. We started the Heritage Project during my tenure in order to examine the stories of our past and maybe some uncomfortable truths about the university's stance or what it had done in the past. Then, during my 2022 return to the university, we began the Inclusive History project, where we're going to go back to the original. We have a big effort that is headed up; one of the chairs of the whole work is Earl Lewis who is a distinguished historian. And to really look at times in the university when perhaps all the voices who should have been part of the conversation were not, and what we can do to rectify that?
A lot of people know this, and now we talk about it, but we didn't when I first went to be president of Michigan that in 1817 and the Treaty of Meigs, three Native American tribes deeded almost 2000 acres of land along the Detroit River for the establishment of the University of Michigan because they wanted their children to be educated. We didn't talk about that for a long time. But now, because of all this, looking to the past, in almost every public event in Michigan, we acknowledge that land gift. Now, eventually, we move the campus from Detroit to Ann Arbor, Michigan. But without that initial land gift, we wouldn't have been able to have the University of Michigan. And so, I just think It's that recognition and reminder of who we are and where we've been that helps us think about, “Okay, what are we going to do to constantly reinvent ourselves? Because that's what the university does.”
Willy Walker: And was there any time in your tenure as president, Mary Sue, where someone would criticize that you were either not thinking enough about the past or moving too fast towards the future? Because meeting that balance that says that I'm going to remember the past, but I'm also going to push us to the next level always has friction. I experience it in my job at Walker & Dunlop, where I was sitting there saying, “That's the way we used to do something. We need to do it this way. And there's always the friction of people wanting to keep doing it the old way.” Was there anything in particular that you might have forgotten to look at in the past, a little bit of some tradition that had been around that you said, “We don't need to do that anymore, and you got a lot of backlash for it,” or you were pushing too hard for the future and people just didn't buy into it?
Mary Sue Coleman: Well, I can certainly say that there were probably people who were angry at me over the time of my tenure for some of the decisions that I made. Nothing really stands out to me. Of course, people wanted to criticize me, but usually, it came with athletics because we had one of the issues that I faced going to the university. In fact, it's interesting on the day I was announced as president, one of the principals in the basketball scandal that happened in 1991, with the Fab Five ten years before, agreed to speak to federal prosecutors. His name was Eddie Martin, and he was a booster from Detroit who had been paying players to go to the University of Michigan. It was a scheme. All of a sudden, I had to make a tough decision. Once the NCAA had sort of done its investigation of the whole thing, and the whole scheme came to light, to take down the championship banners from those years at the University of Michigan in basketball. And that was a tough decision. But I thought it was the right thing to do. I got criticized for it. But I got a lot of kudos for it too for being honest and owning up to our mistakes in the past. And that's the way I always had to view it. I just knew that I had to be as honest as I could with people, even if they disagreed with me.
Willy Walker: Talk for a moment about the consequences of leadership. Yesterday, when I was at HBS, there was a conversation about AI, and one of the alums in the classroom said, “Can we get to a point where students can become avatars, and you can create a simulation where they have to make a business decision?” And it all sounded great and good. And the professor who was teaching the class said, “Yeah, we could, we can get to the point where we can do that.” And I'm sitting there going, “Well, yeah, but it's a game,” and they know it's a game. There are no consequences. You win or lose the game. But there's not some friend who didn't say ‘you're no longer my friend. Some booster who was a big supporter of the school didn't say you've now lost my support. Talk for a moment about the implications of leadership and how you process that. Because being in such a public role, I think it's one thing to make leadership decisions. A sports team, you're the captain of the team, and you're a leader, but there's not a captain of a hockey team that makes a decision that makes it so that he or she is frowned upon by their friends. Maybe there's an incident. But generally speaking, it's a leadership role that's all good. And it's in those leadership roles where it's not all good that I think people sometimes forget that there are consequences of being in the spotlight like you were. How did you process that? How did you deal with that, if you will, negative feedback?
Mary Sue Coleman: Well, for me, part of my success at Michigan was related to the fact that I had a great team around me. And I was conscious these are the executive vice presidents or the vice presidents who have various roles within the university. My team was half women and half men, and they were all excellent at their jobs and smart. And oftentimes, when I was making a consequential decision, I sought advice from the group of people in the cabinet that I worked with. But I knew that I was going to be responsible no matter how much advice I thought I was going to have to live with the consequences. And oftentimes, when we were making a decision, and I knew what I had to do, then we would do scenarios. Okay, what are the people going to think who are not going to like the decision that you made, and how are you going to respond to that, what are you going to do? And that's why I tried, in every instance that I could, to be as open and honest with people who were disappointed in the decision. It was the only way that I knew to lead. And it worked for me. I think that at the end of the day, everybody wasn't happy with me, but most of the people were happy with the direction that I was taking the university. And frankly, Willy, the biggest challenge that I had was a financial one. And that was in 2008. The Great Recession came to Michigan because of its dependence on the auto industry before it came to almost the rest of the country. And, one day, we got word from the governor's office that we're going to get a 35% cut in our state support. Now, our state support was and still is a small part of the funding of the University of Michigan. But it's unrestricted money, and it's very valuable. And when I had to go from one day to the next, knowing I was going to get a 35% cut in that budget was a true crisis. And we got through it. We scoured every part of the budget. We created a single budget. We didn't let separate budgets exist. We went through that recession with no furloughs and no layoffs. During that time, I also understood that this was the time to hire a new faculty members because other institutions were not hiring. I knew that it was time to invest in buildings. I knew it was the time to do everything that we could to keep the university strong. And in a sense, I knew we were a symbol for the state. And so we had to give the state hope we could get through it. And it was exhilarating to figure out that we could do it. It was very tough. And every day, I'd wake up and think, I have to have enough liquid investments to pay people. And that was scary. But I had a great executive VP for business and finance, a fellow named Tim Slaughter, who was fabulous getting us to that.
Willy Walker: Talk for a moment, Mary Sue, about the finances of the university, because in 2023, the revenues of the University of Michigan is about $12 billion. I don't think that people know how large an institution it is. And as you just said, the state support for the university is very small. I think in 2023, the state is giving the University of Michigan $350 million. Out of a $12 billion revenue, they're getting $350 million from the state. So, the state really does not have basis points. It's percentage points, but it's small percentage points. Talk for a moment about revenues as it relates to tuition. And state support is only about 25% of the operating budget. The other 75% comes from the endowment and from ancillary services, which are the medical system, sports, publishing, and student housing. Talk for a moment about how that evolved or changed during your tenure as president of the University of Michigan.
Mary Sue Coleman: Well, one of the things that I understood as a consequence of the recession, and I knew this even before going into the recession, is that we had to substantially ramp up our philanthropy. We had to have big capital campaigns. We needed to focus on the issues in those campaigns, the elements that we most needed. Student support has always been our number one priority, financial aid for students. But we did need to do building renovations. We needed to hire new faculty. Just to give you another example of how important fundraising has been because our endowment now sits at about $19 billion at the University of Michigan. The distribution from that endowment was $470 million this year. So it's substantially larger than state support, so that's an important element. The health system revenues are also an important element of the whole budget of the university. Interestingly enough, a lot of people think that athletics is such a big budget at Michigan, remember the $12 billion. The Athletics budget is about $250 million. It's 0.5% of the total budget of the university.
Willy Walker: That's on the revenue side of it. And it basically breaks even. Athletics made a little bit of money last year. But basically, it's $250 million in revenue and about $250 million in cost.
Mary Sue Coleman: That's right. They may save a little bit of money every year. There's totally self-supporting. The only way the university helps with athletics is if they're doing a capital project. And we have a Triple-A bond rating. And so that really helps on the lending cost, borrowing cost rather, for the university. So you know it.
Willy Walker: And how does that $250 register? And how does that $250 at Michigan compare to an Ohio state or a Michigan state?
Mary Sue Coleman: Well, Ohio State is slightly more. They write a little bit more revenue, Michigan State, less revenue they raise than we do. But we have the biggest stadium in the country, Michigan Stadium, and it's usually sold out every game. I used to talk about it, and I still think this about Michigan Stadium. I used to come with the gathering of the clan coming in supporting this great university. And it's just a real experience. Renovating Michigan Stadium was one of the big projects that I had to take on because when I went to the University of Michigan, my husband had already come for a visit to the university, and he told me that Michigan Stadium was crumbling and that one of the issues that I had to face is the renovation of the stadium during my presidency. And we did that, spent $286 million on the renovation. They did it themselves. And it was an amazing renovation. It's a beautiful place.
Willy Walker: Talk about launching the Michigan Difference because you went out with a goal of raising $2.5 billion, which was the largest capital campaign ever embarked upon by a public university. I guess the first thing is, what gave you the audacity or gumption to think that you could raise $2.5 billion for a public university? And I will give the punchline to this, which is that you raised $3.2 billion in that, so you well exceeded your goal. But I want to understand where you thought you could set a goal of $2.5 billion for a public university and actually execute it.
Mary Sue Coleman: I may have been a little bit naive going into it. But I was really lucky. One of the first hires that I made at Michigan was Lee Bollinger, the tremendous predecessor to me, a tremendous president. His chief development person, vice president for development, had gone with him to Columbia. So I had to hire a new individual and was able to hire Jerry May from Ohio State University, who originally had been at Michigan. One of the best fundraisers in the country. And he convinced me and the team because they've done an analysis, a feasibility analysis before going into the campaign. We're pretty sophisticated about it. And the feasibility analysis came back, saying that we could probably raise the $2.5 billion. So I had some confidence going into it. But, sure, there was a bit of maybe time, but then I learned during that whole process that when you can match the vision of what donors have and what the university needs, then the rest of it's relationship-building and confidence that donors have in the institution and in its president; the president will make their vision become reality. And I still maintain friendships with some of those great, wonderful, and generous donors to the university.
Willy Walker: If I think about Michigan in scale, you raised $2.5 billion in that capital campaign. You then went on to raise another $5 billion in another capital campaign. You said, previously, that Michigan now has a $19 billion endowment, the 10th largest endowment of any university in the United States. Having been at Harvard yesterday and thinking about the size and scale of the Harvard endowment, I think what you gave me yesterday was that the endowment at Michigan per student is $450,000. And your thought was that it's a couple of million dollars per student at Harvard.
Mary Sue Coleman: It's $365,000 at Michigan is probably at least $2 million per student at Harvard. So we were big. And the important thing is and as you just mentioned, endowment per student, but Michigan does at its scale. Harvard's teeny compared to Michigan.
Willy Walker: Well, that's my point. That's where I want to go. So why doesn’t Harvard scale to be the size of Michigan? Or why doesn't Michigan scale to 100,000 students from 40,000 students?
Mary Sue Coleman: This is a conversation we used to have with Larry Page early on, who got his undergraduate engineering degree at Michigan. He said, “Oh, you should just double the size of the institution.” And I said, “Well, Larry, that's a really good idea, but there's a lot of thinking that goes into that.” I don't know about Harvard and what decision Harvard should make, but I'm so proud of the fact that Michigan does excellence at scale. We have 52,000 students, probably about 30,000 undergraduates now. And our graduation rate is 93%. We do, as well as most of the elite privates who are much smaller than we are. And that, for me, has been the genius of Michigan. And it speaks well to the faculty and the staff and their dedication to providing an unparalleled experience. And I think it does that, and it's just tremendous and continually surprising to me.
Willy Walker: I don't want to make excuses, but one of the reasons that some of the smaller elite universities would say they can't grow is because of land and the ability to physically grow their campuses, resources, build cafeterias, dormitories, whatever else. I believe it was 2009 when you bought the North campus. It was a big campus that Pfizer had owned. And you went and bought it for $100 million?
Mary Sue Coleman: We already had a North campus. That was about 50 or 60 acres. The Pfizer property was 174 acres contiguous to that North campus. In fact, 50 or 60 years earlier, the University of Michigan had sold that property to Pfizer to build its big research and development campus. So, it was such an attractive property. 2009 was still part of the Great Recession. The pharmaceutical industry was consolidating. Pfizer was abandoning that whole property, and we got it for $100 million. The best real estate deal ever. We got 28 buildings and some wonderful laboratory space. We did not have a plan for the use of that property when we bought it. I just knew. And our regents were very supportive. We just needed it. Since then, it has become a wonderful opportunity for the university to create some new entities and to put them there. And now, finally, Willy, after many years, the university is actually talking about creating an electrified connector elevated between that north campus area, the central campus, and the athletic campus so that the university will have a seamless, we hope, in the next ten years transportation system that doesn't involve automobiles.
Willy Walker: Like a monorail going to Disney.
Mary Sue Coleman: Well, the university is looking at many different vendors for this particular connector. We're calling that the connector now. And I don't know what it's exactly going to look like, but I'm ecstatic that it may finally come to fruition.
Willy Walker: I think it's so interesting that when you were talking about leadership challenges, you went back to 2008 when the governor's office called and said, ‘We're cutting your funding by 35%’, and how challenging that was for you to manage through no furloughs, no layoffs and get through that time. And yet it was a year, or maybe even less from that moment and all the struggles that came from that, that you made one of the biggest and most important strategic decisions in the university's current history to go and make that very significant capital investment. I think back to ‘08 and ‘09 in my own life and think about some of the things that we did. And it's just so interesting when you get pushed to that level on both the bad and then also the opportunity. And so rarely do people look back and say they wish they hadn't done something like what you did. In other words, I just heard the excitement in your voice of the best deal we ever did. And one of the deals that we did in 2009, was the best deal that we ever did. And it's just so interesting that when things are go-go, everyone wants to jump into the party and have a great time. But it's actually really when things aren't that great that you have to have that leadership in the chutzpah to lean in on something like you spending $100 million to buy that campus.
Mary Sue Coleman: Well, it was interesting because the original price tag on it was $200 million, and I wasn't going to spend that. And I knew there weren't any other buyers. And so I said to the CEO of Pfizer, who called me about it, and said, “We're going to pass on $200 million, but we'll offer $100”. Basically, we're happy if you can sell it to somebody else who will create economic activity for the region. But I knew they couldn't. But again, I had this great team behind me say, “Hold on for a hot minute. You're not going to go any higher than $100 million”. And it was fingernail-biting time but we got there.
Willy Walker: So final thing on the finance side, you mentioned that Michigan issued a 100-year bond. When I was chairman of the D.C. Water Association, we did one of the first 100-year bond issuances in 2010 or 2011, I think in the U.S., we did it with Goldman Sachs. And it turned out to be just one of the greatest things we've ever done. Michigan did a 100-year bond in ‘21.
Mary Sue Coleman: 2022 March 8, $2 billion.
Willy Walker: at 4%
Mary Sue Coleman: 4%
Willy Walker: Yeah. It looked really smart right now.
Mary Sue Coleman: I was corresponding with my executive VP for business and finance about what a brilliant move that seemed. Seems now at the time but took a lot of guts. $2 billion. We didn't know that the interest rates were going to go up. We thought it was a good bet that we should do it. And I think we're one of the very few universities that did it. But now, the university has that to rely on to make some big investments, such as the connector. The connection between the campuses will be enormously expensive but is the right thing to do. And I think issuing those bonds was the smart way to make it happen.
Willy Walker: Let's shift to athletics for a moment just because, as you accurately said, it's only $250 million. My friend Paul Vieira attended the University of Michigan and is a big alum. He got mad at me in our publicity of this discussion, saying, “You led with sports, dude. We got so much more at Michigan than sports.” Even though Vieira loves Michigan, sports are on the sidelines in every home game. He gave me a hard time for putting your national championship up front on this one. But I did go back and look Mary Sue, your football teams against Ohio State were 2 in 10 during your tenure. I never go to a Board of Regents meeting. And they said, “Mary Sue, you and your team have done a fantastic job this year, but you lost to Ohio State.”
Mary Sue Coleman: Actually no. One of the things that always made me feel so comfortable about Michigan is that the governing board, the Regents, didn't ever say, “Boy, you're really failing in athletics.” They understood the struggles that we were going through. And finding the right coach at the right time is challenging. But I have always had great athletic directors, such as Bill Martin and Warde Manuel. And they're the ones that are actually doing the hiring. They needed to get my approval for the final say, but they did a great job. During that time, people forgot even though we were struggling in football, John Beilein made it to the championship game in the final four. We only lost to the University of Louisville. And their win was later disqualified because of some cheating that was going on at that institution. And we were having success in softball. We won the championship in 2005 in softball and across the board. And we're going to the Frozen Four this time for the third time in a row in hockey. So there's excellence across the board. And I was actually quite proud of the fact that while I'm sure that our athletic directors got a lot of flak from the fans, particularly from my regents and from the public, I didn't get a lot of criticism about it. But I was unhappy that we weren't winning. And I was sometimes unhappy with the academic progress of student-athletes and talked to the athletic directors about that.
Willy Walker: Thinking about the stick-with-it-ness that must be required. So with Lloyd Carr, he'd had a perfect season in ‘97. So Lloyd Carr had a background. But when he went 7 and 5 in 2005, that was a bad season for Michigan football. But when that happened, was that the first time? You've been in Iowa. You've been to big state universities before, but this is football, and this is Michigan. In that year, did you get a lot of blowback, or was it all going to your AD, and it really didn't come up to you?
Mary Sue Coleman: I don't recall it as being a big issue. Lloyd Carr did retire later. Eventually, I think in 2009, maybe when he retired. And he was just such an upstanding person. People respected him. I'm sure he got tremendous criticism in the ‘80s, and I'm sure Bill Martin did, too. But it was not something that I really obsessed about. And during that time, too, you know, it was when we made the decision to do the big renovation of Michigan Stadium, which was a tremendous, I think, vote of confidence in the future of the football program. You remember I didn't hire Jim Harbaugh, but you recall that the university stuck with him, even at a time when some of those early seasons didn't seem so great.
Willy Walker: Of course, he's rewarding that loyalty today. Not anyway. I had to just insert that. One of the things that I would throw out there. I don't know whether you know this, but Bill Martin's son, Seth Martin, is actually a good friend of mine and is actually in the real estate business. And so when I was at the national championship and saw Jonathan, I also lost Seth at the same time, and it was just really fun. It was quite the atmosphere. So, the one other thing, you mentioned the hockey team going back to the Frozen Four for the third consecutive year, and the broad need to invest across the board in athletics. How hard was it, given the revenues and the visibility of football and basketball, to not have a two-tier system where you look at those two sports, and they might have distinct dormitories, they might have distinct travel, all that stuff? How do you keep everyone feeling they're playing for Michigan athletics when you have these two teams that are generating so much of the revenues.
Mary Sue Coleman: Sure. Well, we've long understood the revenue sports men's, women's basketball, and football. And for us, hockey, in some way, do generate revenue for athletics. But the athletic directors and their finance people are responsible for the investments that they make. Because as I said, almost no university resources or student tuition go into supporting athletics at Michigan. It's all self-supporting, except when they have a big capital project, and we may help them. They can use our triple bond rating. And so, athletics does a lot of philanthropy. They do a good job at philanthropy. I think the athletic directors both make excellent decisions about investments and awards too. And in Michigan, we want to be excellent across the board. I hope we no longer do, I don't think we favor sports over other sports. And I think that's shown in the results. I think last year Ward told me they had 13 Big Ten championships across the board in sports. And so the idea in Michigan has always been to do the best we can and every single thing that we start out to do. And I think the record shows that's happened.
Willy Walker: So two final questions on sports. And then we're going to move to some other topics. You were on the board of the NCAA?
Mary Sue Coleman: Yes.
Willy Walker: Name, image, and likeness. Good or bad for college sports.
Mary Sue Coleman: Well, I think it was inevitable. And one of the things that I've talked a lot about with Jim Bellamy was the commissioner of the town for many years. He and I are friends. And we've talked about the fact that I think, presidents and aiding back in the ‘90s and early 2000 when it became evident that giving up our media rights, to form the rights for the entire conference, individual institutions gave up their media rights, so that we could be a more, bargaining power with the media companies. And the money started flowing into the big conferences, just in unbelievable amounts. And then what happened is that coaches' salaries started escalating enormously so that tension between what the coaches were making and the players, even though they with full scholarships, were getting virtually free education. It just became too great. So I think it's enough that I thought it was inevitable. I don't know where it's going. I don't know where the NCAA is going. I can imagine a different future in ten years. I think that the growth in the widening between the haves and the have-nots will continue. Maybe the Power Five conferences will decide to do something different. I don't know. And it's hard to predict. What worries me the most, though, Willy, one of the things that worries me. Two things, I guess. The transfer portal, because it's just now players if they don't get to play, they transfer, which is their right. I understand, but it's created a different dynamic. The other things are betting, force betting, and pro-betting. It scares me to death because now bettors can bet on whether or not Caitlin Clark is going to make a free throw or is she going to score 30 points? This is just ripe, in my view, for abuse and for scandal. And we'll see what happens. But it's going to be a different world, and I can envision a future. I don't know whether it's going to happen. I hope it doesn't because I think the intersection between athletics and universities is unique in the U.S., and I think it's been a positive for the country. But it's not true anywhere else in the world and may not be true in the future in the US. It could be that sports teams become affiliates of universities, and they're not really part of it. I don't know, but we'll see.
Willy Walker: So, going back to your 2002 inaugural address at Michigan, you said, “How can we maintain privacy and civil liberties in the information age? Post-October 7th, do you think that Michigan and other universities are addressing that question properly?
Mary Sue Coleman: This has been such a difficult time, and I think I'm a big proponent of free speech and being able to express opinions and listen to diverse points of view on campuses. But when I was confronted with it during my tenure at Michigan, wars weren't going on. And now there are two, you know, one in the Middle East, one in Russia. And students are hurting. Students, whether they're Arab American or Jewish, or whether they have strong feelings about the wars and what's going on. It's a very rough time to be a leader. What I think is important for universities is to have good policies. I thought Michigan did have good policies about setting the parameters for being able to express diverse opinions versus destructive behavior. And that's really the issue now on campuses, disruptive behavior. And is it okay for one group to prevent another group from hearing a speaker? So this challenging time and universities, I think, are going to have to examine their policies and see if they need to be altered. Make sure that everybody understands the policies.
I did have an incident though it was at a different time, and I don't want to equate it to what's going on now in the country. When I first went to Michigan, there was a very prominent aggressive agitator speaking on college campuses about advocating for suicide bombing as an effective strategy for protest against Israel. That speaker had caused a riot at Berkeley. I knew that somebody would invite him to Michigan. Knew it was coming. And so, I spent a lot of time reaching out to all the communities, talking to them about it, developing trust, and explaining free speech. I didn't have to like the speech. My goal in free speech is that sometimes you have to host speakers that you don't agree with. And so we set out, and that speaker came to campus, and it was a non-incident, but this is a different time. And I just think the university leaders should think about what their strategies are if something's coming up, do a tabletop exercise. How are you going to deal with it? I have found two resources that I think are really good. One is a little book called Free Speech on Campus. The editors are Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gilman. And I think it provides some good guidance. And the other is, you know, the past is always relevant. One of the former presidents of Michigan, Robben Fleming, who, in his memoirs, wrote about Tempest and Rainbow: Managing Conflict in Turbulent Times, about setting out principles and trying to adhere to those principles. But this is definitely a difficult time for university presidents.
Willy Walker: Yeah. I guess I'd go from there to this, which is that, when I was at Harvard yesterday, the interim president of Harvard said, in his 15 years at Harvard, this is the most challenging time. So to echo what you just said, but he was asked at lunch, Mary Sue, about faculty and about faculty tenure and about the fact that it's widely known that the majority of faculty at Harvard are liberal in their stances on most issues. And this person was asking, using the classroom as sort of a pulpit to espouse their own political views, to which the president of Harvard said, “First of all, we shouldn't allow for that and don't want that to be happening at Harvard.” But then it went to the issue of tenure. And how do you lead in the proper direction to get an environment of free speech and the exchange of different opinions when you have a faculty that is tenured and really can't be changed that quickly. At Walker & Dunlop, if somebody is saying things that they're not supposed to be saying, I have the ability to either have them stay as an employee of Walker & Dunlop or not, as the case may be. You don't have that luxury, if you will, in a large university, particularly one like Michigan or Harvard. How do college presidents lead us back to an environment that allows for the free and open exchange of diverse opinions?
Mary Sue Coleman: Well, we did talk about Michigan. I'm sure we still do and we did it at Iowa too. In fact, in all the places that I've been, we talked about the importance of being able to express diverse views. I've never found that most faculty are very careful about what they do in the classroom, not to express their personal opinion, particularly if an issue has different points of view and conflict. My husband's a Latin American, and I know that when he was a faculty member at the University of Kentucky, during a period where there was much disruption in Latin America and a very difficult time. The students always used to get mad at him because he wouldn't express his point of view. He would try to let the conversation go to express all points of view on the sides of the conflicts that were going on. And I think most faculty want to do that. I think it's quite rare. And I would agree with Alan that Michigan doesn't condone faculty members using their status as a bully pulpit to try to indoctrinate students. In fact, there are procedures at Michigan, if a person feels this is not living up to the ideals of the institution to sanction them.
But tenure is so important. And I want to make this point because I was a faculty member back at the University of Kentucky when the problems of tobacco smoking were in the headlines, the research was beginning to be revealed about the health damages of smoking. Kentucky, one of the biggest tobacco states. Tenure was enormously important because tenured faculty could get up and talk about the research that they had done on the dangers of smoking without fear that they were going to be fired by somebody. The university was pressured to fire them because somebody in the legislature was mad that the faculty were speaking against smoking it. Tenure is essential because faculty research sometimes goes into areas that are unpopular and that people don't like. And it's not just health research, it's all kinds of research. So it's our obligation as institutions to uphold both the value of tenure and the importance of making sure that you don't try to abuse it in ways to promote ideas that don't allow for other ideas to grow and be discussed. It's very important. But if we ever abolished tenure, we would have far less prominent and poorer institutions. I think it's a very important element of US higher education.
Willy Walker: I'm going to end our conversation on that because it's a wonderful thing to end it on. Mary Sue, you've been so generous with your time. Thank you for all you've done for education in America, for the University of Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina, for the University of New Mexico, for Iowa, the University of Iowa, and for the University of Michigan not once, but twice.
Thank you for taking me to sit in your box once at a Michigan football game. It was one of the highlights of my life to sit up there and watch the game from your box. I don't know whether you remember, but that was when they gave you your jersey for your 12 years at Michigan. And you went down on the field and they gave you a microphone. And in that massive stadium, your voice was reverberating off the sides. And so you got that feedback. And so you slowed down your speaking, and people thought that you actually had something to drink in the box. And as someone who was in the box, I can guarantee everyone you hadn't seen alcohol in a very long period of time. But it was quite something. And lots of people don't understand the trials and tribulations of being a major university president. And one of them is getting reverberated in the big house, I guess.
But anyway, Mary Sue, thank you so much, and I look forward to seeing you soon.
Mary Sue Coleman: Thank you. Goodbye.
Willy Walker: Have a great day.
