This weeks news about the recent mass shooting at Michigan State University has prompted me to feel more positive emotion about the place than I have felt in decades. I attended MSU from 1971-1974 and after a fair-to-middle career there transferred to a small private college in Michigan . . . which I have named before and shall not name now. (It has its own deep wrinkles several and strengths.)
The moment that grabbed me was a video clip in the news, showing MSU students laying flowers in from of "Party," the statue of a Spartan that greets those who cross the Red Cedar River from the north side to the athletic kingdom portion of the south side. I remembered that Sparty was often the tagline of cringey jokes about when he'll drop the helmet he's carrying in his right hand. ("When a MSU grad gets a Rhodes Scholarship" --turns out there have been 20, most recently in 2019--or "when a virgin graduates from MSU" and who knows when that first happened?) Sparty was the victim of a great deal of vandalism over the years, mostly from fans from the other place before the annual football game that brings the state to a halt. He was renovated in 1988, recast and relocated in 2005, and still stands, a testament both to Leonard Jungwirth, sculptor, and John Hannah, legendary MSU president 1941-1969.
I remember the saying, "the concrete never sets on Hannah's empire," because John Hannah transformed a modest State College to a major institution, now with 50,000 students over something like 5,000 acres (2,00+ hectares). The sheer size of the place has its own quality: an academic city with its own transit system.
My fair-to-middle experience encompassed a year in the Music Department, a failure partly of my own making, and two years in Justin Morrill College, a liberal-arts "alternative" residential college that ultimately failed largely because it was never adequately funded or supported to succeed. MSU is an intensely practical place, and real liberal arts education has always been an awkward fit there. JMC was intended to be a complement to James Madison (public affairs) and Lyman Briggs residential colleges, which have endured. JMC was revived in a sense in 2007 with a generically-named Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) in the self-same Snyder-Phillips residence halls --what goes around comes around, I guess.
In 1971-1974 the baby boom crop was nearly at its peak, moving through higher education, and undergraduate students were surplus. The Music Department employed a number of rigid and only modestly competent faculty whose job was to get reduce enrollment. (They succeeded—there were other far better faculty there, but freshman were not permitted contact with them.) Given the realities of the draft in 1972, the easiest path was to transfer across campus. I learned a lot at MSU about self-discipline and inner motivation, a several remarkable faculty were immensely patient with my confusions, in particular Donald Weinshank and R. Glenn Wright. I eventually settled on Classical Languages as a concentration—how totally out of mainstream MSU!—and when an immensely dedicated and talent professor suddenly died (Carolyn Matzke, some of whose books I still possess), I began to look elsewhere, and transferred out.
So my undergraduate years were bifurcated between two almost entirely different worlds, that of a gigantic Big-10 campus and that of a small church-originated liberal arts college. I wound up, somehow, with an excellent education that combined intensive work in languages with a sense of the world vastly larger than the cloistered life of Dutch West Michigan.
Tim Alberta wrote a beautiful piece Requiem for the Spartans for the Atlantic (February 15, 2023). He remembered MSU in a very positive light, moving past the negativity of the sexual abuse scandal centered on women's gymnastics and Dr. Larry Nasser, the cover-up of which brought down two university presidents and forever soiled MSU's reputation. (See Maria Vinci's opinion piece in the Detroit Free Press, 2018.)
Alberta centered his Atlantic piece on "Spartans Will," what he calls a deft motto, "a defiant mentality that makes the school exceptional." Whatever truth the motto may hold (video) measures how far MSU has come since the early 1970s, when it was still very definitely second fiddle to … the other place in Ann Arbor. Some would say it still is; the comparison is not apt, because the two institutions are so different. In many states, MSU would be the flagship university. Its stature, combined with the other place, illustrates how Michigan (the actual state) has changed over the decades, where two such universities would now be an unattainable luxury and achievement if they did not already exist.
I long pre-dated "Spartans will," but I do recognize the chin-out assertive persistence that it highlights. I remember how differently class dynamics then played out: many of my fellow students were the children of industrial workers who really wanted something better for their kids. The place in Ann Arbor was out of their league, but they still wanted that experience rather than study at one of the smaller regional universities (Eastern, Western, Central, Northern, Wayne State, or Oakland, then growing out of "Michigan State University at Oakland"). Striving was the order of the day, even in the early 1970s. It was accompanied by something else: a strong libertarian streak that contradicted the expensive vision of social justice for farmers that originally underwrote Michigan Agricultural College. (There is still a M.A.C. Avenue!) Also: a dawning environmental awareness of the fragility and beauty of Michigan's environment that was not already degraded by chemical and automobile companies. At MSU I encountered Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons (later substantially modified by Elinor Ostrom and others), and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
The northern part of MSU's campus, with substantial plantings in and beyond Beal Botanical Gardens, cannot be lightly dismissed. Berkey Hall, the center of the latest tragedy (with the neighboring Student Union) is square in the middle of that sea of tranquillity. Tim Alberta's description is apt: "the stately buildings and the sprawling green spaces, the roaring football stadium and the whispering river, the camaraderie and the conviviality and the bottomless school spirit." (The southern part of the campus is much more institutional modern.) The tragedy of the mass shooting was how preventable it was, and how such events are never prevented --that we as a society have settled for mass killing as the price of certain warped ideas of political liberty. Much since D.C. v. Heller, 2008--and I curse the life or memories of Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas (that fraud!) and Samuel "the arrogant" Alito.
I didn't experience the trust the Tim Alberta experienced at MSU. I do know about its social cohesion: "Go Green" response to "Go White" (!--only in the context of Green!) is a reality, a response to the other place's Go Blue (or Go Blow, as MSU alumni/ae like to repeat). I did grow in ways salutary and painful, and in the end I left, because my life was going elsewhere and my thinking led me out more than it ever led me in. (I went to MSU originally almost by mistake.) I do recognize the resilience, the sheer grit at MSU, and I do take solace that despite the serious and irrevocable losses, the shooting will not prevent their victories at MSU. (An allusion to the fight song.)
I despair for MSU, for Michigan, for America. We are unable to stop the slaughter. Of course it will happen again at other universities like MSU: what will stop it? The generation of students (some enrolled at MSU) who survived Sandy Hook, Oxford High School (Michigan), and countless other tragedies, will take with them an awareness: the political and social orders have failed them. I don't see an available alternative. When one arises, it will sweep away much that is good as well as, I hope, much that is evil. Government for the smug by the smug may yet fall, and with it the dangers of chaos. Would that chaos really be worse than what we have now?