More than two weeks after President Kevin Guskiewicz’s appointment at Clemson University, it is still unclear when his last day at Michigan State University will be.
Board Chair Brianna Scott said during the MSU Board of Trustees’ June 12 meeting that the announcement of MSU’s next leader will be in the “coming future,” with the help of consulting firm Isaacson Miller.
It is unclear if this concerns an interim or permanent presidential candidate for the university. But Vice President of Communications and MSU spokesperson Emily Guerrant says that she assumes the forthcoming announcement will be an Interim President.
"I'm assuming interim, because I don't think they're just gonna jump to naming a president, I really don't," Guerrant said over the phone after the board meeting.
In the president’s October 2025 contract, Guskiewicz has two avenues he can take to resign — without good reason or with good reason. If Guskiewicz resigns without good reason, he is obligated to give the university six months' notice before leaving the job.
“It would be up to the board to make a decision on if it is a good reason or not,” Guerrant said. “That is the negotiations that the board and the president have to engage in now to pick an actual date.”
Guerrant said that if negotiations didn’t happen, it would be assumed that he would have to stay at MSU for six months.
His departure marks MSU’s seventh leader to hold the position of university president in ten years.
In a last-ditch effort to keep Guskiewicz, the board approved a $1 million raise for the president and a contract extension through 2031 during the May 17 special meeting.
During the June 12 meeting, Trustee Sandy Pierce jokingly said that “didn’t work.”
The raise Guskiewicz was offered could set the bar high for prospective candidates. Scott says this should not be assumed.
“Maybe that's close to it, but it could be less,” Scott said at a press conference after the meeting. “I don't want someone to have any thoughts that just because that is what we had offered to him, that means the next person's automatically getting that amount. That's not true.”
Scott says they are looking for “someone that understands the political nature of Michigan, and that you do have trustees that are elected that understands higher ed and where we are as far as the defunding we have been seeing over the years”.
“Someone who is willing to work with our board despite the past history of our board, someone who comes in and thinks they can work with us,” Scott said.
Guskiewicz pointed to discord among the Board of Trustees as the reason for his departure from the university in a campuswide email sent after the announcement.
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