A faction of Michigan State University’s Board of Trustees is displeased with the performance of the institution’s top lawyer.
Elected board members have long endeavored against General Counsel Brian Quinn, sources tell The State News. Now, his critics have assembled a dossier addressed to the university president that details their allegations.
“There are serious concerns with the MSU Office of General Counsel (OGC),” says a draft copy of the document, which was obtained by The State News. “The concerns are both about overreach and also about decisions made by the OGC that have seriously injured MSU.”
Their campaign comes as Quinn passes a decade with the university — a period that has been one of the most tumultuous in its history. As trustees and administrators have gathered to deliberate on one controversy and feud after another, the career attorney has consistently been in the room.
In the dossier, Quinn’s critics take issue with his handling of a host of high-profile sagas: the withholding of the so-called “Nassar documents,” a faculty members’ lawsuit against trustees who conspired to attack him, university lawyers’ interference in independent Title IX investigations, and a new revenue-generating initiative by the athletics department that has been shrouded in secrecy.
The conflict pits Quinn’s detractors and defenders on opposite sides of a weighty question: did he guide the university through those tough times, or help create them?
To his critics on the board, Quinn’s advice has served to fan the flames and spur new troubles for the university. Meanwhile, his allies in and around MSU say the institution has been lucky to have Quinn in its corner through all the scandals. They describe him as a skilled, level-headed attorney who knows his proper place; a legal advisor, rather than an ultimate arbiter.
To be sure, the job of top lawyer at a major public university today is not simple. An expert on university general counsels noted the perpetual dilemma that comes with having to advise both the institution’s president and board, given their capacities to disagree — a tension that MSU knows uniquely well.
And that’s to say nothing of the challenges presented to general counsels by the rapidly shifting legal landscape of higher education under President Donald Trump, who has sought to dramatically change how the country’s universities function.
The stakes, then, of Quinn’s work are certainly high. And yet, understanding his thinking is a true challenge. His office is among the university’s most opaque, often employing the sacrosanct legal principle of attorney-client privilege to shield its work from public discussion and records requests.
