Mackenzie Mrla brought spray paint, a blanket and green Michigan State mittens to ward off the biting cold. But someone had already repainted the university’s rock, a rough boulder by the river that is by turns a billboard, a rousing sideline cheer and a plaintive glimpse into the university’s collective soul.
It had a quiet message Thursday evening. “Thank you,” it read, simply, with a heart. Next to that was a long list, names carefully traced in, of all the women who had told their stories about a university doctor who abused more than 150 women.
For days, the words – and tears, fury and revulsion – spilled out from a courtroom nearby as the women confronted the onetime physician, Larry Nassar, at his sentencing.
By the end of the week, Michigan State, a powerhouse public university, sat quiet. It was cold and still on campus.
“Somber,” said Lorenzo Santavicca, the student-body president for the 40,000 undergraduates.
The campus had been convulsed by the revelations of the evil perpetrated by Nassar and by the collateral damage, including the resignation of the school’s longtime president.
Many people grieved a loss of trust in the university they loved, Santavicca said. Some talked about shame, wondering if Michigan State, the pioneer land-grant university, had now become a symbol of the worst kind of transgression. Some were rethinking their own memories.
“My parents went to med school at Michigan State,” junior Eli Pales said. They took classes taught by Nassar. “They cannot believe that this was permitted to happen for so long – that people knew about it and nothing was done. It disgusts them.”
People knew, after Nassar’s conviction in November, that there had been a sexual predator on campus for many years. But the women’s statements – day after day, victim after victim – made the horror, the sheer scope and impact of the crime inescapable. The women’s words rang out from the courtroom, from laptops in dining halls, from TV screens and social media feeds.
“Everyone was so laser-focused on each woman who spoke, and the pain and the tension was palpable,” said Ewurama Appiagyei-Dankah, a senior from Michigan. The rising chorus of testimony echoed the national #MeToo movement, she said, voices refusing to be silenced by a culture that doesn’t take their pain seriously.
And then the judge spoke. At Michigan State that day, Appiagyei-Dankah said, people stopped to listen, clustered around cellphones to hear Judge Rosemarie Aquilina sentence Nassar to 40 to 175 years in prison, telling him, “I’ve just signed your death warrant.”
Politicians had demanded new leadership, editorials called for dramatic change, campus groups rallied against the administration – an intensifying clamor that stopped, suddenly, Wednesday night. Michigan State University’s president, Lou Anna Simon, announced her resignation.
Some were shaken by the loss of Simon, a woman with more than four decades’ worth of friendships and tussles and initiatives at Michigan State. “She was a cornerstone,” Santavicca said.
She was known for being smart, and tough – she somehow kept a roiling cauldron from boiling over, one professor said – but she also had earned deep affection, and was known to many, after all her years there, simply as Lou Anna.