An oversized appointment book sits open on Cindy Alex’s desk every day, with places, people and times ready to be added, crossed out and erased.
There is no ink in the book - only No. 2 pencil.
Provost Lou Anna Simon’s schedule is too unpredictable for Alex, her executive assistant, to bother with permanence.
“I really enjoy it - if you don’t have to see her today,” Alex said earlier this week, already making changes to a packed day. “Next week, there will always be plenty of room.
“You feel like you’re doing something important just to make her day go smoothly.”
The provost’s duties include everything from academics to admissions to athletes. Simon is nearly the top official at the university, second only to President M. Peter McPherson.
With eight years together as president and provost, the duo is the longest-serving pair in the Big Ten.
But unlike McPherson, who came to MSU after years of business and politics, Simon came to the university decades ago, fresh from college and small-town Indiana.
“It was a little bit of a shift,” she said. “I had to figure out what I was going to do when I grew up.”
The early years
Growing up in Sullivan, Ind., Simon didn’t know where or what she would end up.
She dabbled in skateboarding, played with chemistry sets provided semi-willingly by her parents and made plans to make a home in New York.
“I wanted to play for the New York Yankees,” she said. “They just weren’t ready for me.
“My parents didn’t put limits on my dreams. They didn’t force me to be consistent from year to year. In their eyes, I could do anything - the Yankees, they were a little skeptical about.”
As a first-generation college student at Indiana State University, Simon commuted 60 miles a day.
She laid out advertisements for the school newspaper, was president of the Residence Hall Association and worked as the switchboard operator in women’s dormitories to supplement her income.
She graduated with a degree in mathematics, with specialties in chemistry and physics - subjects a female high school math teacher had inspired her to learn.
But that didn’t mean she bothered with graduation.
“Now that I’m provost, my mom reminds me every year that I made a big mistake by not going to my graduation,” Simon said. “But it wasn’t as fashionable to go to your own commencement in the ’60s.”
Moving out and moving up
While working at Indiana State and completing her master’s work for a counseling degree, Simon received a proposition from a mentor.
MSU needed people, and she was ready to go.
“It sounded like a good thing for someone with no career plan,” she said. “I’m not a very good example of systematic career planning.
“I’ve been bumming around in jobs here ever since.”
Many of her colleagues attribute her effectiveness as provost to the wide variety of jobs she’s held here - from doctoral student to professor to affirmative action officer to director of planning and budgets.
“Dr. Simon is unusually knowledgeable,” McPherson said. “I think we work extremely well together. We have different backgrounds. They’re very complementary actually.
“I have no question Lou Anna could be a president at another university. I’m very pleased that she continues to stay at MSU.”
While serving as the interim provost in 1992, Simon was even considered for the presidency at MSU.
After narrowing a search of 171 candidates to four, Simon was selected by the search committee as the best candidate for the job.
But the Board of Trustees deadlocked 4-4 on the decision, and went back to the drawing board, picking up McPherson in a controversial 6-2 vote weeks later.
“I believe that she has all those attributes that we were looking for,” said Trustee Dorothy Gonzales, who voted to make Simon president. “She’s very capable, competent, and she’s been around the university for a long time. Her track record speaks for itself.
“I want to be like her when I grow up.”
At home
Despite the speculation and interest in her career and talents, Simon said she isn’t going anywhere yet.
“As long as it’s interesting and people will tolerate me, it’s a pretty good fit,” she said. “I wanted to try to find something that could blend the various talents I have. I like ideas, and I like people.”
And while many students wouldn’t recognize the provost as she walks through campus, she is there.
She and her husband, Roy Simon, eat in residence halls several times a week to chat with students and instructors - and to avoid her cooking.
“I’m a terrible cook,” Simon laughed.
She enjoys walking through campus, particularly near the Beal Botanical Garden and the area near Beaumont Tower.
She watches, but she doesn’t get in the way.
“The faculty and the staff and the students do all the good stuff,” she said. “You hire really good people and give them space to do their thing.
“If it goes smoothly, you don’t need me so much.”
When the Women’s Resource Center was created in 1993, it didn’t have a place to call its own.
But center Director Pat Lowrie said Simon gave them room in the Union, and a helping hand when they needed it.
“She allows you to make mistakes,” Lowrie said. “She gives you all the room you need to make those mistakes, but then she tells you about it. But then, you move on.”
Lowrie said Simon serves as a role model to women, even by having held her position for so long, as well as gaining respect as the chairperson of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a 12-university consortium.
“She’s had an investment in the outcome,” she said. “Because she is so adept to change, and is not satisfied with the status quo, she doesn’t believe that just because it’s been done that way, it should be done that way.
“She’s not afraid to take risks, and she’s not afraid to be herself.”
The hard life
And while fearlessness can be fitting for the pinch hitter on MSU’s team, Simon’s duties and decisions are not always popular.
“The hardest things are taking the ideals and ideas and dealing with the art of the possible,” she said.
She’s recently come under fire after a freeze was placed on the enrollment to the College of Education’s visual impairment education program.
The program serves as a national supplier of educators for blind and deaf children, but concerns about staffing, budget and necessity have caused program officials to review the major.
“There always is the tension of what the collective university needs and what is negative for the individual,” Simon said. “While you think your batting average is good, there are always things you wish you would have done differently. I sound defensive sometimes, but I try to listen to what is being said.
“The people will always be better than the dollars we have.”
When she grows up
In the future, Simon wants to see fewer restrictions on undergraduate education, making it easier for students to graduate in four years with knowledge they will use.
She wants to see humanities education evolve into jobs.
She wants the entire university to evolve.
And that kind of drive and ideas is attracting more of the idea-makers Simon enjoys working with.
Beginning as the new dean of the College of Social Science in August, Marietta Baba said she was attracted to MSU by many things.
Lou Anna Simon was one of them.
“I had a number of meetings with her, and I was incredibly impressed of what a command she had of the institution,” Baba said. “I’ve worked with other provosts. I’ve never known anybody who had such command. There wasn’t a thing I touched on that she didn’t know.”
Being herself
Even among her equals - other provosts - the woman who runs a 40,000-student university is held in high regard, especially when people need advice or ideas
“She’s a wise person,” said Nancy Cantor, provost at the University of Michigan. “She’s got a very good sense of the academic. She’s just excellent. Just terrific.”
But when the last penciled-in appointment is completed and Simon settles down with some reading - technology journals, education studies or the occasional murder mystery - her hold to MSU doesn’t stop.
“It’s all-consuming,” she said. “You’re never off. But you have to stay connected.”
One of the best ways to stay connected?
Volleyball.
Basketball.
Football.
Anything else you can play rough.
“She knows more about athletics than some people working in athletics around the country,” said Demetrius Marlowe, assistant director of athletics and director of Student Athlete Academic Support Services. “I think that her presence at any of those events isn’t by coincidence. She’s genuine.
“She supports student-athlete success like she supports success of other students.”
Despite her talents with the chemistry set and the baseball bat, the farm girl from Sullivan, Ind., never expected she’d be here.
After 54 years of scripting her life, things have changed for her, she said.
But not that much.
“Forty years ago, women weren’t supposed to have these kinds of aspirations,” she said. “It’s not really about building dedications and football games or national championships. It’s the little things.
“I still like ideas and I still like people.”
Jamie Gumbrecht can be reached at gumbrec1@msu.edu.
