[Anbender/MGoBlog]
President Schlissel:
“Good afternoon everybody, and thank you for coming. This morning I accepted the resignation of Athletic Director David Brandon. Dave feels that it would be in the best interest of our student-athletes, the athletic department, and the University community if he moved on to other challenges and allowed the important work of the department and the University to continue without daily distractions. I agree with this decision.
“I’ve spoken regularly with Dave over the last few weeks and we both want what’s best for Michigan athletics, which is to be able to pursue the highest levels of excellence in all of our programs for our 931 student-athletes, and to advance the strong bond that athletics has helped the University foster with our students, our alumni, and our fans. I believe Dave has always had the best interest of the University of Michigan in his mind and in his heart. He is fiercely dedicated to all of our student-athletes regardless of their sport or background. During his nearly five years as Athletic Director he worked to ensure the well-being and the athletic and academic success with programs and facilities that helped them grow as individuals as well as teammates, and to succeed as students.
“For years Dave’s commitment to Michigan has touched many other parts of the University as well. He co-led the campaign that raised funds for the construction of the new C.S.Mott Children’s Hospital. He and his wife Jan personally donated $2 million for the creation of our neonatal intensive care unit. Dave has also provided support for the arts on campus, student scholarships, and many other academic and educational priorities. He served on the Board of Regents also from 1999-2006. Dave’s first connection to the University of Michigan was as a student-athlete himself when he played football under coach Schembechler and earned his undergraduate degree. There is no doubt that Dave loves the University of Michigan and wants to see us move forward and succeed. I thank him for his long service and life-long commitment to Michigan.
“I’ve appointed Jim Hackett as the Interim Director of Athletics. The interim appointment is effective immediately and will become formal with approval by the Board of Regents at their next meeting. Jim is a highly experienced and respected business leader, a man of integrity, and a devoted member of the Michigan community. He was a student-athlete and graduated from the U of M in 1977. In 1994 to 2013 he served as Chief Executive Officer of Steelcase Incorporated, the office furniture company based in Grand Rapids. He led the company in their transition from traditional manufacturing to an innovate global company and now brings that success and experience in heading a complex organization into his interim role here. I’m also very pleased with his interpersonal skills, his value system, and his long-standing commitment to serving the University. Jim is currently on the Board of Trustees at Northwestern Mutual Life and on the Boards of Directors at Ford Motor Company and Fifth Third Bancorp. Perhaps most importantly he serves on the Board of Advisors at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy and Life Sciences Institute.
“I am confident Jim will immediately begin the process of moving the department forward, including working closely with me to develop a plan to identify and recruit Michigan's next permanent athletic director.
“To our alumni and others in the Michigan family, I want you to know that we are working to establish the right balance between academics, the competitiveness of our athletic programs, the financial stability and the athletic traditions that we hold dear. To our students and student-athletes, I want you to know that the University of Michigan is behind you always. To our fans, I want you to know that we value your input, your support, and your spirit. Recent events have only reinforced my belief that it is important to listen and to engage in dialogue with all of our stakeholders.
“It is clear that Michigan athletics helps unite us as a community. It has an enormous reach that I've seen firsthand and the connections it fosters are deeply personal. These connections cross state and national borders, they spans decades, and they're shared across generations. The force that has this amazing power to join us together, the connective tissue if you will, is the heartstrings of the Michigan faithful.
“At a recent fireside chat with students, a student in the crowd further illustrated this point for me. She had lived in a major city in another state, but she could always count on hearing “Go Blue” when she walks down the street wearing her Michigan sweatshirt on a Saturday in the fall. Those moments, those uniquely Michigan moments, take place because of our unique sense of community. Before I turn things over to Jim I invite everyone in our community to help us as we begin a new chapter in the history of Michigan athletics. I hope we can join together as we move forward to preserve and enhance the qualities that make us truly special for the ultimate benefit of Michigan athletics, our students, and our great university. Thank you all very much and ladies and gentlemen, it's my pleasure to introduce Jim Hackett.”
[More after THE JUMP]
Jim Hackett
“Good afternoon and thank you Pres. Schlissel. I appreciate those kind remarks. I'd like to make a few specific comments. First, I'd like to think Dave Brandon for his commitment to Michigan. The athletic department is in great financial position. We have varsity sports they continue to make Michigan a destination for aspiring student-athletes. Dave has worked extremely hard to modernize Michigan's athletic facilities. Dave was a teammate of mine in the 70s and I knew him during my business career here in Michigan. I have a tremendous amount of respect for him and I'm thankful to him for his extraordinary commitment to this university.
“My time as a student at Michigan would introduce me to two people who would become lifelong heroes of mine: Early on it was Bo Schembechler and the other was Pres. Gerald Ford, whom I met later in his life after he retired from public office. Both of them would be quite certain that the future of Michigan is not in doubt. They would be reminding us of the legacy of extraordinary performance in the classroom and on the field and how that unique combination puts us in a very rare position.
“Now, as we gather for homecoming weekend to honor our shared history I hope fans, former players, students, and my fellow alumni come together in support of our team. This is a time for alumni to remember what has been special in their lives at this university. The University is here for students. They're not just temporary residents of the Big House, but rather it's their house. We are first here for them. Michigan has a stellar record of extraordinary performance academically and, as we mentioned, athletically and our potential is just not in question. I'm humbled to help during this transition and to keep our momentum moving, and let me add my own “Go Blue!”
Q&A with Pres. Schlissel
What qualities will you be looking for most in a new athletic director, and do you want to find someone who has Michigan ties or has been at the University before?
”The Athletic Director position is a very important position at the university. I'll be looking for someone who prioritizes the welfare and experience of our student athletes, a person of unquestioned integrity – not just integrity to the level NCAA rules but someone with integrity to the Michigan way of athletics. I’ll be looking for someone who appreciates the bond and the cultural aspects of this great athletic program and what it does for our community. I’ll be looking for somebody who wants to make the athletic program as tightly integrated a part of the overall university environment as possible. Beyond that we’ve yet to move forward and find a more specific job description.”
Do you need someone who’s been at Michigan and understands some of that to do that job?
“I think we need the very best person possible to do this job. Certainly people who have a connection to Michigan, who know many things about the university- I can tell you though that despite the fact of only being here for about 110 days I feel like a Michigan man already.”
Is Jim a candidate for the full-time position and have you narrowed down a short-list of candidates?
“You’re putting the cart way before the horse. Events are evolving quite rapidly. I’ve only prevailed upon Jim to serve as the interim director and he very graciously agreed. We’ll be working together to formulate a way forward hopefully in a reasonable timeframe to do a very serious and involved search for a permanent athletic director.”
Is there an ideal timeframe?
“[Can’t hear the first part]…for the permanent athletic director? I think I want to take as long as necessary to make sure that we find a person that matches the set of ideals and is a great fit for what I think is actually the best opportunity for an athletic director in the country so I don’t have a particular time frame, I have excellence in mind.”
I know you’ve only been here 110 days but I think you recognize how big football is here. As an athletic director how important is it for the football decision that may or may not be made and how concerned are you about the state of the football program?
“I certainly have learned something that intellectually I knew on the way in the door but boy did I sense the passion that the fans and the alumni and the supporters of our athletic programs have in general and [for] football in particular. I am not willing to address specific questions about the future of the football program other than to say [that] like everything else we do at the university we try and do it at a level of excellence, a level of competitiveness and in a way that just excites and involves our entire community.”
With Dave’s resignation was his contract null and void or was there any kind of buyout?
“Sure. So will release, the public affairs group will release later in the day the detailed terms of Dave’s resignation.”
What went into the process and the timing on the decision?
“Sure, of course. So the Athletic Director and I have been in very frequent contact and communication really since I began as President but certainly more so in recent weeks. At the same time, I’ve been looking out and reaching out across the community to students, to alumni, to faculty in various settings trying to learn as much as I could as quickly as i could about the nature of athletics and the importance to the University of Michigan. In one of our most recent conversations the Athletic Director reached out to me and said he’s chosen, for the reasons I’ve outlined, to resign and I agreed with his decision.”
Was there a specific date for that?
“He spoke to me about this on Wednesday of this week, the day before yesterday.”
You mentioned in your remarks what you were going to be looking for in your permanent athletic director. One of the first things you mentioned was the welfare of student-athletes. The incident recently with Shawn [sic] Morris; how has that moved that welfare issue up a lot more on that list?
“Actually, no, it hasn’t. It’s always been top on the list. SO we make a commitment to the students that come here to play and represent our university and the very first thing we commit to is they have an outstanding experience as student-athletes, they have an excellent experience as students, they get a great education at the University of Michigan and that we keep them safe, well-trained, well-coached with good facilities so it’s all about the student-athletes. The events, the injury that happened to Shane a number of weeks ago, was extremely unfortunate. Football is a very rough- it’s aggressive. it’s a violent game in many ways. We learned from that incident. We’re reviewing our procedures. We’re developing ways to make as safe as possible football and all of our other sports and I think we’re making progress.”
You came from Brown over the summer. When you took this job what was your stance on big-time college athletics in relation to academics in higher education and how it ties into the school’s identity as a whole?
“Sure. The University of Michigan is a university. It’s a great university, a great public university perhaps in the handful of great universities in the world. Our mission is to transform lives through education and to do research and to conduct scholarship to the public benefit. That’s our mission.
“There are many other aspects of our community that make this a wonderful place, that help bind us together that turn us into a community. Athletics is one of them. It’s a wonderful thing. I experienced the excitement of sitting with 110,000 people in a football stadium, something I had never experienced at Brown, certainly. And it was glorious, so at its best athletics is just so deeply engrained in the culture of the university and really does serve to bind us all together, bring us through the generations, develop memories and associations that reach back and help us support this great institution but at our core we’re an academic institution and we do other things as well that are important.”
You spoke about football earlier. Will any evaluation of the football program as you move forward effect the timeframe of hiring a permanent AD?
“So football, like all of our programs, is evaluated by the athletic department through the season but particularly at the end of the season. I would imagine that the interim athletic director will be intimately involved [and] in charge of the evaluation of football and these things have a cadence and we’ll figure out how to move forward as we would for all of our sports.”
So the interim athletic director would be in power to make the decision on firing a coach if he wanted to?
“Well the interim AD is the athletic director until we hire a permanent AD and as you know I feel comfortable hiring deans and provosts. I feel a little bit less comfortable- I’m not the person to make a decision about a particular coach. We have an athletic program that I give that authority to.”
Before Dave told you on Wednesday that he was going to resign had you told him that you wanted him to resign, and if he did not were you prepared to potentially fire him?
“I’m not at all prepared to deal in the hypothetical but he and I had been working closely, as you might imagine, through the controversial events of recent weeks and we had discussed iteratively how to set the athletic program in a stronger direction and we’d been working closely on that. It was Dave that mentioned and raised the prospect of his decision to resign. It was a couple of days ago and I accepted that this morning.”
I was going to ask something similar, but I was going to ask was there something this week that triggered Dave in his discussions with you to resign and also how much influence did the regents have with you in this process?
“It’s very difficult to me as well as I’ve gotten to know Dave working closely together and to really respect him [but] I really don’t know the ultimate factors that led him to make this decision at this moment so I really can’t speak to that.
“The issue of the Regents: the Regents are a wonderful resource for the university. I’m in close consultation with them on all kinds of matters and I’m also in close consultation with all kinds of stakeholders and what I do when making challenging decisions is I take advantage of lots of input, I think hard about things, and I make the best decision for the sake of the university. The decisions are mine but certainly I value the Regent’s input.”
You do know that there has been a lot of talk about their influence politically on this decision-making process. Did that factor in at all?
“All I can say with 100% certainty and honesty is politics has absolutely nothing to do with the way the athletic department is run within the university. At least not in my book anyway.”
To what extent is the university going to change or improve its working relationship with the athletic department going forward and [inaudible, sorry].
“Yeah, Sam, that’s a good question. Beginning shortly after I arrived and as I continued to learn about the role of athletics in our community and the sort of details on the ground I had already begun working with the athletic director on things we could do to really make the relationship even closer than it already is and to make the athletic program and our student-athletes an even bigger part of our overall student community and a part of campus life, so what I’d begun with Dave will most certainly continue in my collaboration with Jim Hackett as the interim and whoever it may be that we’re lucky enough to recruit here.”
Would you characterize that there are changes that need to be made in that working relationship?
“Oh goodness, I think there are always changes in every aspect of our enterprise which we’re always trying to make it better and athletics is included in that.”
You spoke before of a cultural change that may be necessary in the athletic program when you first got here. Now that you’ve been here do you feel that there is any lessening of your support of athletics? Do you think football in general is too big in any sense at all?
“Boy, that’s a difficult question. I think football is extremely important to our community. You can tell by we’re sitting here wringing our hands because maybe there will be 95,000 instead of 110,000 watching a football game, so it’s really important to a lot of people in lots of positive ways and I think the sport of football and college athletics in general is certainly a matter of discussion and debate around the country. I’d like to develop clearer opinions. I’d like to work with our interim and new athletic director to contribute to the process of evolution of college athletics in a direction that I think is more closely linked to the fact that these are academic institutions and students are here for both an education and to pursue the sports they love but that’s as far as I’m able to go now.”