The Michigan State University Board of Trustees has imposed stricter rules for naming campus buildings and facilities, after a donor who went on a racist tirade had his name removed from a university lab in October.
The board unanimously voted to approve the revisions to its existing policy on buildings and facilities naming at its Friday meeting.
The changes outline a more detailed process for changing or removing previous naming, and expanding the role and composition of a Naming Committee which advises the university president on proposed names or changes to names.
With the updated policy, any proposed naming is first submitted for review to the Naming Committee, instead of the president. The committee now has Vice President for University Advancement Kim Tobin as chair, one university dean, an additional MSU student and several administrators.
The committee will now go through “thorough, factual investigation of the proposed honoree,” according to the updated policy. Buildings that aren’t being named after people do not have to go through the committee.
Buildings and facilities can no longer be named after public officials while they hold office.
MSU can remove an existing name from a building “under extraordinary circumstances when the continued use of the honoree’s name would compromise the public trust and adversely reflect upon MSU and its reputation,” the policy states.
The decision follows a lengthy battle over what’s now the Eli Broad College of Business Entrepreneurship Lab.
The facility was originally named after Larry Gaynor and his wife. Gaynor, the CEO of TNG Worldwide, donated $3 million to MSU in 2017.
But after a video surfaced of Gaynor making several obscene remarks regarding Vietnamese business competitors during a private business webinar in 2020, the student government at MSU worked to pass two bills in 2022. These measures aimed to establish stricter guidelines for naming buildings, thereby demanding higher accountability from donors. Immediately following the webinar in 2020, Gaynor apologized.
That’s not the first time a donor’s name was removed from a university building. In 2020, trustees voted to remove former board member Stephen Nisbet’s name from the human resources building, due to his discovered involvement with the Klu Klux Klan.
University spokesperson Emily Guerrant said the recent controversies spurred the proposal to the board.
“You have the culmination of those things all happening, and it was just a decision that we need to reevaluate what our policy is,” Guerrant said.
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