The life & times of Lou Anna K. Simon

She never pictured becoming the university's first female president, sitting atop the Administration Building in her fourth-floor office.

As a child, she envisioned herself as the starting catcher for the New York Yankees.

Back then, she didn't know women weren't allowed to play professional baseball.

Roy Simon, her husband, said some mutual friends gave her a humorous office gift to remind her of those childhood memories.

They created a plaque with a baseball card of Yogi Berra, a former New York Yankees catcher. On the plaque, Berra was quoted as saying, 'When I was growing up, I wanted to be a university president,'" Roy Simon said, laughing.

Later, she decided she might play professional golf.

She imagined shooting 3-under par on the Ladies Professional Golf Association, or LPGA, tour. She almost did, too, but it didn't pay well enough.

So Simon embarked on an academic career that led her to an administrative position at MSU. She worked her way up the ladder from a graduate assistant to the university's 20th president.

"I've been on the board for 20 years, and she's the best president we've had by light years," Trustee Joel Ferguson said. "She's so good."

And that's just a start.

Eating without tablecloths: a modest beginning

John Kimsey, Simon's brother, said he knew she was destined for greatness.

Simon attended Sullivan High School in Sullivan, Ind., home of the Golden Arrows. She had a two-acre backyard where she raced go-carts and motor scooters with her younger brother and only sibling.

She loved her pair of canvas lowrider Keds that she wore every day, even in the winter, which caused a lot of "discussion" with her father, who Kimsey said was "self-taught, self-motivated and very driven" — all qualities Simon embodied.

Kimsey said the two were "sort of opposite" from each other: She was a jock, he was a photographer.

"She got all the brains and beauty, and then there was me," he said. "She was obviously very studious, a very good student. I was the A/V boy — 'I can get the film projector for you.'"

Simon's love for sports and academics grew, but her life would change in the middle of her high school years, when Simon's father got a job with a power plant company that moved the family from rural Indiana to Philadephia, which was "quite a change," Simon said.

Here, she was introduced to Hidden Springs Golf Club in Horsham, Penn. It was there she seriously considered playing in the LPGA. Her father had taught her how to golf, growing up.

"Hidden Springs was just a golf club out in the middle of nowhere," she said. "I went out there for the summer, and it hosted an LPGA tournament. So I fiddled around and decided I'd probably play.

"There were some people out there who were prepared to pay the sponsorship for me to play out of this relatively rich area, so I thought about it for awhile."

Outside of the city, in what she calls "horse country," Simon lived with her family and watched her father travel into the city to work.

"All of a sudden he's in a suit, and he's taking a train into the city," she said.

In the summer, she played golf in the wealthy side of town, at a local country club where her parents held memberships.

"My family had never eaten dinner with a tablecloth," Simon said, laughing. "There were restaurants (at the club) with tables and tablecloths, and I thought, 'Who the hell are these people?'"

But she would not have to endure this different lifestyle for long. After her father was let go from his job, the family returned to the house where her mother was raised in Indiana.

Simon picked up textbooks rather than a putter.

"(Golf) didn't work out well," Simon said. "I hated the lifestyle because you couldn't make any money. I guess that worked out OK."

And nowadays, she doesn't really have the time to play anyway.

A sorority girl

Simon attended Indiana State University, where she received her bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1969 before completing a master's program in student personnel and counseling the next year.

Kimsey said even in college at Indiana State, Simon always was watching his back.

"This one gal that I liked in her sorority, Sigma Kappa, she told the gal she had to go out with me as part of her pledgeship," Kimsey said, laughing. "It actually happened. We dated for awhile, and then one summer she worked at a Montgomery Ward's store and ran away with someone in the housewares department — I didn't shop there for 10 years."

When she wasn't matchmaking, Simon was striving for her degree.

"I wanted to be a coach," she said. "I learned in order to be a coach, I had to take dance, archery and swimming. I didn't want to take any of those, so I became a math major."

Kimsey remembers moving Simon and her roommate into an apartment complex in Okemos in 1970, when she headed to MSU to begin her doctoral degree in philosophy, administration and higher education.

"They had banana boxes full of books," he said. "I always remember telling them to get a ground-floor apartment, not a third-floor apartment. It gets a little heavy there."

Simon worked for then Assistant Provost Paul Dressel as a graduate assistant.

"And I thought he was just some math guy," she said. "I started working full time for Paul in 1972 as an instructor doing research projects. I was actually pretty good at it. I did some teaching … statistics, evaluation, that thing."

It also was around this time she met and married Roy Simon.

"We met in an office early in our careers in the Administration Building," Roy Simon said. "We actually had the same chair on both of our doctoral committees — that was another connection."

In July of this year, they will celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary.

"She's very bright," Roy Simon said. "She extremely good at analyzing and evaluating any situation, but that's all overshadowed by the fact she really cares about Michigan State University.

"I would be a harsh critic on that because I was born in Lansing, I've lived here all my life, I have three degrees from MSU and I've observed — she really cares about the best interest of Michigan State."

M. Peter McPherson, who was MSU president when Simon was provost, echoed Roy Simon's statements.

"She's extremely hardworking," said McPherson, who was president for 11 years until 2004. "She has lots of energy and a deep commitment to academic quality. I think very highly of her, and I think what stands out is her long and deep commitment to students."

"This Proposal 2 stuff is so ironic to me"

Edgar Harden, MSU's acting president from 1978-79, summoned Simon to his office one day while she was working for Dressel. Harden offered Simon a position as the assistant to the president for a "short period of time."

But this "year or two" stint became much longer as the university needed an affirmative action plan, which was necessary to contract for the Cyclotron.

"This is why all of this Proposal 2 stuff is so ironic to me," Simon said.

The university had pieces, but it didn't have a plan then, she said.

"My job was to get this affirmative action plan written in a way to release the cyclotron project," Simon said. "It was socially and economically important to get the right plan together. The institution really needed this plan because it meant a lot."

But her appointment was met with great opposition.

This was just before Title IX, a constitutional amendment making it illegal to discriminate against someone based on his or her sex. At the time, a coalition of campus minority groups protested that the board appointed a "majority woman."

"This is in the late '70s, so there's more classical civil rights issues," Simon said. "I was approved by a 5-3 vote with the two African American trustees voting against me — and with protest by almost everybody."

Then it got worse.

The women's basketball team sued the university, Simon said.

"Just when I thought I was finished," she said. "I've been through this before. We were having women athletes sleep four to a room when the guys got better treatment. There weren't any practice facilities — none of that existed. A lot of programs for women in whatever came out of that time period.

"What is at issue now are a lot of programs … I helped start. I understand why they're there and why they're needed."

She's done this before.

"Now I'm in the position of being 'the establishment,' and a set of students who feel the establishment — not me personally — has turned their back on them because somehow this proposal passed when passage of the proposal has little to do with what we're doing," Simon said.

"Part of the challenge is to try to figure out how we're going to be very inclusive in the future. Inclusion means now we're being sensitive to issues that are ethnically based, not simply racially based. We are very sensitive to the concerns of intellectual inclusion."

Despite her position as the university's top decision maker, Simon maintains she's no different than anyone else.

"I don't juggle or anything like that," she said. "I'm just sort of your plain, Midwestern girl."

Kristi Jourdan can be reached at jourdank@msu.edu.