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During Board of Trustees meeting, one alumnus escorted out by police

December 12, 2014

During Friday's Board of Trustees meeting, President Lou Anna K. Simon received a salary increase of $230,000 with a $100,000 bonus, putting her total compensation at $850,000 and making her the third-highest paid president of a Big Ten university.

While this is her first increase since 2007, Simon explicitly asked to not raise a pay increase in the past, and previously donated bonuses back to the university.

The raise did not come without protest from students attending the meeting, though, who initially came to voice their displeasure with controversial commencement speaker George Will, who is scheduled to make an appearance on Saturday.

During the meeting, MSU alumnus Noah Saperstein voiced his displeasure with Simon's increase, prompting officials to escort Saperstein from the room.

A struggle ensued in the hallway, where Saperstein could be heard yelling, "get your hands off me," repeatedly.

It is unclear if charges are being filed against Saperstein.

During public comment, multiple faculty members and students voiced their concern with hosting Will, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, during commencement because of unsavory comments he made about rape and sexual assault in a column published earlier this year.

One of the students who spoke during the meeting was comparative culture and politics senior Kyra Stephenson, who is also the President of MSU’s Sexual Assault Crisis Intervention program.

“Once again we’ve had a strong showing of students come and tell the administration what we want and why we don’t want George Will with our earlier actions in the week and it doesn’t seem like there’s much university engagement with this issue,” Stephenson said. “Commencement speakers are meant to send the students out into the world. When your commencement speaker has a message that your own president admits is going to be painful for graduates, why is that the message our University wants to send."

Simon was directly questioned during the meeting, with speakers asking if the university would have invited Will to be a speaker after his column was published.

Simon said she was not going to speculate, and added the university tried to "have people with views that were not simply centrist, but had respect and be part of the political spectrum.”

She said one of the biggest criticisms the university faces is that it is biased when taking on issues in that it  doesn't give weight to conservative views. She said it’s something MSU is working on, which is why George Will was chosen as the commencement speaker.

“I did that because I felt that the credibility of the university and the kind of political climate that we’re working in requires that we can show that we can have people and views from a variety of political perspective and some of them extreme,” Simon said.

The students present at the meeting, however, didn't see it as an issue of politics.

The last speaker during the meeting, history senior Duncan Tarr, an organizer with MSU students united, said MSU is sending the "message that its commitment to fighting sexual assault is nothing more than cheap lip service," by inviting Will.

“They always play these word games, they can say ‘it’s on us’ as many times as they want, they are still making the same mistakes, they are not taking cases of sexual assault seriously on campus, then they’re inviting a rape apologist to speak," he said during his speech. "They’re just words, just meaningless words that they’re saying, there’s no bite to them if they’re still invite people like George Will and they’re going to give him a degree.”

Numerous student organizations, including ASMSU and the Council of Graduate Students have challenged Will's invitation to speak. A protest is set to be had outside of Breslin Center during commencement on Saturday. According to the event's Facebook page, more than 800 people plan to protest. 

Administrators have maintained Will was chosen as a speaker because of his achievements, and his views on sexual assault do not reflect the views of the university.

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