Trustees have become the target of public frustration over the recent departures of university President Kevin Guskiewicz and athletic director J Batt — backlash that has escalated into concerns for their safety.
Hours after the announcement that Batt would join the University of Kentucky, men's basketball head coach Tom Izzo voiced his frustration with the successive departures, saying, "I'm a very invested stakeholder, but the alums better stand up. What happened with our president is ridiculous, he said it, we know the reasons and I'm ashamed, disgusted, hurt."
Izzo's calls for "Spartan Nation" to stand up fueled existing public criticism of the trustees on social media, where students and alumni jointly championed petitions, mass email campaigns and spreadsheets doxxing trustees' personal information amid calls for the immediate resignation of members of the Board of Trustees.
"I think it's very easy for some people to interpret that as a call to action, that they should take adverse action against people on the board," trustee Mike Balow said of Izzo’s comments.
Balow clarified that he did not want to speculate on who on the board Izzo was referring to.
"It's all of our responsibilities right now as leaders of this university to kind of lower the temperature," Balow said.
Balow said that public pushback has gotten "really worse since Monday" and that he has "seen some pretty ugly emails that people have sent that are threatening in nature, and even racial hatred in nature, and it's very disappointing."
"It's kind of sad, disappointing and a sad state of affairs ... that people who say they love MSU would engage in behavior like that," Balow said.
Vice President of Communications and MSU spokesperson Emily Guerrant said that Izzo "didn't mention board members" but that "he just expressed frustration and talked about alumni being engaged, but he didn't even say a board member's name or the board as an entity."
"The university does not condone offensive or derogatory or disrespectful language and outreach against any member of our community," Guerrant said.
