Michigan State University’s trustees have enacted a legal gag order to protect a compromised president, weaponizing the very concept of fiduciary duty to silence dissent. In a single meeting, the board voted to increase President Kevin Guskiewicz’s salary to two million dollars—placing him among the nation’s highest-paid public university leaders—and simultaneously passed an ethics update that redefines a trustee’s obligation to the institution into a demand for total submission to the majority. The new policy requires trustees to “support and not undermine decisions made by the majority,” to “uphold the university’s reputation,” and to act “consistent with our fiduciary duties, including the duty of loyalty.” Failure invites public censure, denial of access to events, and referral to the governor for removal. Whatever the public framing of this vote—and it has taken on the shape of a loyalty pledge more than an ethics code—the architecture is already built. As the board itself has made clear, the administration spent months consolidating power, and the trustees were already dividing the university over loyalty and speech.
We who have lived inside the institutional apparatus for thirty years know this shape by heart. We have sat through the budget committees, argued over the policy details, learned to read the room, and watched how quickly a fiduciary duty of loyalty can be weaponized against the minority. This is not about fiduciary responsibility. It is about protecting a man who is leaving, paying him handsomely to go, and then legally binding the remaining board to say nothing unpleasant about how they sent him off. The governing board of Michigan State University has effectively declared that for a trustee, the highest fiduciary duty is not to the public or the institution, but to the board’s own majority. There is a profound moral failure in the demand that a public representative suppress their conscience to maintain the appearance of institutional unity.
Mark 10:42–44 records the text plainly: “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them.” Jesus does not use “lording authority” as a polite metaphor for governance. He names it as a corruption of the human spirit, a twisting of power that turns servants into masters. When a fiduciary duty of loyalty is twisted into a mandate to suppress the dissenting five, it becomes the very lording of authority the text condemns. You do not uphold your house by locking the mouths of the people trying to keep it from burning; you only succeed in building a mausoleum.
Amos 8:4–6 names the corruption that hides behind procedural obedience: “skimping on the measure, boosting the price and cheating with dishonest scales.” This is the captured operation’s reading of “duty of loyalty”—the dishonest scale that weighs the truth against the majority’s desire for quiet, skimming the truth to boost the board’s sense of control. The chasm between the text’s plain language and the apparatus’s reading is absolute. The text demands justice; the apparatus demands silence.
The board’s simultaneous decision to hand the president two million dollars only heightens the nature of this capture. This is a board that has decided the cost of institutional image management is high, and that the first line of that defense is the total suppression of internal disagreement. When trustees are threatened with removal under MCL 168.293 for refusing to parrot the majority, they are effectively being told that their role is not to lead, but to serve the board’s internal political machinery. This is not governance. It is administrative public relations.
We are witnessing a troubling pattern emerge in higher education. When public bodies reach for the gag order as their primary tool for stability, they telegraph a lack of confidence in their own legitimacy. As governance challenges erupt across the sector—with ongoing legal scrutiny regarding similar suppression tactics in places like Pennsylvania—any board that views itself as a closed loop immune to external scrutiny or internal dissent will drift toward the very corruption it claims to police.
True institutional strength does not require the silence of dissenters. The people of Michigan deserve trustees who understand that their mandate comes from the public, not from an agreement formed in a Sunday night meeting. You cannot erect a durable public trust by mandating loyalty to a majority; you build it by acting with such integrity that dissenters have nothing to validly oppose. The trustees may sign this policy and censure the dissenters, but they cannot write a new constitution for the human conscience. The plain language of the text demands that we speak against the dishonest scale. A fiduciary duty that requires silence is no fiduciary duty at all.