When asked about the state of higher education in America today, University of Michigan’s president, Domenico Grasso, is unabashedly ambitious about what needs to be done and who needs to do it. “As the most comprehensive and distinguished university in the world, the University of Michigan bears a profound responsibility not only to lead in scholarship and innovation but also to serve as a thoughtful compass in challenging times,” he wrote in a recent white paper. 

Grasso is leading Look to Michigan, a multi-faceted, multi-year mega-plan that is at once a capital campaign, media blitz, and strategic realignment aimed at optimizing Michigan’s inner and outer strengths. With five priorities, including the establishment of the American Dialogue Center, Look to Michigan assumes a leading role in demonstrating to the American public why higher education is such a valuable asset at a time of diminished support and extreme politicization. As the title suggests, Michigan asks, “If not us, then who?” 

Launching such a bold, public agenda may seem unusual for a president serving in an interim capacity, but Grasso vowed he was never going to be just a placeholder when he took over the role from former President Santa Ono. Grasso is the former chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, a branch of Michigan that serves largely first-generation students. He’s a staunch believer in the life-changing power of higher education.  

As a Michigan alum, and a rabid Wolverines football fan, Grasso is as comfortable talking about Michigan’s waste production during home football games as he is running the Prez Quiz during T.V. timeouts, when students answer trivia questions to win U-M swag. In this interview with LearningWell, President Grasso offers his perspective on the many issues he and his peers are dealing with and why he believes the best defense is a good offense. 

LW: As a Michigan alumnus and a chancellor here for many years, how did you feel when you were chosen to be president of the University of Michigan? 

DG: I would first say that I was surprised because I did not expect it. And I did not seek it. But of course, it was an honor because Michigan is, in my mind, the best university in the world. We have 110 programs in the top 10. We have a world-class medical center that’s unrivaled. We have an athletic enterprise that is second to none as well, and all that is together under one roof with three campuses that have different missions and constituencies. It’s just a terrific place.

LW: Speaking of the three campuses, U.M.-Dearborn, which you oversaw as chancellor, is very different from Ann Arbor. Have your experiences at Dearborn influenced your new role? 

DG: One of the things that I experienced at Dearborn is that it has a very close-knit family of students, faculty, and staff. Everyone is super nice. They are not internally competitive with one another. They come from modest means; they are authentic and are there to improve their lives. Many of them are very humble while also having a great deal of talent, and that always impressed me. 

The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is a very high-powered school. There is a lot of, I would say, energy on this campus that we all benefit from, but I’m trying to bring some of the values — the empathy, the family-like interactions — I witnessed at Dearborn here to this campus.  

LW: I read your LinkedIn post with a message to your students about civility and kindness. Is that part of what you are talking about?

DG: I am a staunch advocate of the First Amendment, and I’ve said that in multiple places. But being a staunch advocate of the First Amendment doesn’t mean that we have to give up our kindness and civility in exercising our First Amendment rights. This is one of the things that I would like to bring to campus: the ability to talk across differences and perspectives in a way that we are truly trying to reach common ground and not just trying to preserve our own particular views.

LW: How do you go about doing that? 

DG: It’s not easy. I think that the first thing to do is to model it. I have a lot of people around me with very strong opinions. How I interact with them models how to interact with people that may have differing opinions from you. Before this semester, a number of my senior staff and I met with every single Jewish group that we could find in southeastern Michigan. And we also met with every single Muslim and Arab American group, all part of an effort to encourage a peaceful and collaborative reentry into the fall semester. 

So far it seems to have paid dividends because we have not had a lot of the acrimony that we had on this campus in the past. People want to be heard. They want to express their opinions, and they want to be taken seriously. And that’s what we’re trying to do. For me, it’s about this concept of intellectual empathy: trying to understand other people’s perspective. Not just tolerate it but to really understand it. You want them to find their voice but also have open ears.  

LW: You are hitting the ground running with the announcement of the Look to Michigan campaign. What is that all about? 

DG: We have our $7 billion capital campaign, which we recently launched, and a strategic vision we are now calling Look to Michigan, which is consistent with our capital campaign but different. 

There are five pillars of Look to Michigan. The first is transformative education: the need to deliver life-changing education focused on students’ agency and purpose, empowering them to lead with integrity, intellectual empathy, and rational thought. The second is human health and wellbeing, which has to do with all sorts of things for which Michigan is so well known, from health equity to cutting-edge medical care and transformative medicine. 

The third one is civic engagement and democracy. Here, we are launching a civil discourse center, tentatively called the American Dialogue Center. The fourth pillar is energy and climate change, and the fifth is advanced technologies — everything from AI to nanotechnology. We’re investing $1 billion over 10 years — a hundred million dollars a year — in these initiatives. This isn’t a check-the-box to get everything done in a year or two. This has a 10-year shelf life, and we’re only in year two. It’s a vision that spans a decade and is centered on these core initiatives.

LW: These are not just internally facing initiatives. This is also a public campaign, correct? 

DG: Absolutely. One of the main focuses of the Look to Michigan campaign is to regain the public’s trust in higher education. The University of Michigan was founded in the public interest in 1817, and it’s remained there ever since. A lot of schools have been struggling to make a case as compelling as ours in this regard, but here it is in our institutional D.N.A. 

The Look to Michigan campaign is also a media campaign. This month, we’re going to have full-pageads in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Atlantic, and other publications — digital, print, audio, social media. And it’s going to explain that we are committed to the public interest and why that matters to every citizen in this country.  

The United States of America is the greatest country in the world, in large part because we have the world’s greatest universities. If we do anything to threaten that, we’re threatening the future of the United States, and we have to make that point very clear. Some of my colleagues at Princeton and Harvard are saying the same thing, but this is Michigan’s chance to move into the passing lane and to be the leader in reacquiring the public trust in the mission and purpose of higher education. 

We have 7,000 faculty members. I want each one of them to consider themselves public intellectuals and ambassadors for this cause. I want them to explain their work to the general public in terms everyone can understand. They have to be able to translate what we do in a way that a farmer in Nebraska, a textile worker in New England, or an office worker in the southwest will understand. As part of the campaign, we’re going to use digital storytelling to connect to the public good and explain why Michigan is so special — unique — in this area. 

LW: Does it help your message that you are such a highly regarded public university?  

DG: We are a public university, but I want us to stop using that as a qualifier because I don’t want us to be the best public university in the country or in the world. I want us to be the best university in the world that is in the public interest.  

LW: How much of this is to fend against what’s going on in Washington? Or is it more of a long time coming?

DG: I think it’s the latter. In certain ways, it is a defense against criticism that has been directed at higher education. But we should have been doing this whether it was Trump or Obama or whoever in the White House. I think we need to have a better social contract with the American people as to why higher education is so valuable, so worthwhile, and so worthy of investment and trust. The erosion of it started many, many years ago — well before MAGA. I watched this happen, and I thought it was devastating for universities and for America, and I thought that Michigan was well-positioned to take the lead on reversing this trend.  

LW: That’s a lot to take on for an interim president.

DG: I told the board of regents right at the start that I was not going to be just a placeholder. Either we were going to move the university forward or I wasn’t interested in the job, and everybody agreed with that.

LW: I am guessing that the “attack on science” is not going over well at Michigan.  

DG: No. We are a very science-focused school, and a lot of great things have come out of the University of Michigan. Science comes from “scientia,” which is the Latin word for knowledge, and it’s hard to argue against wanting to obtain knowledge. I know people think there are different views of it, but the whole scientific method — the Enlightenment — was all designed to help us improve the human condition, not to determine the human condition. For us to walk away from that at this point in time would be devastating for the future of humanity.

LW: Is it difficult to keep everyone on campus calm among such uncertainty in higher ed? 

DG: Everybody is concerned about the future because every time we open up a newspaper or a website, another school, or another nine schools, is in the hot seat. Everybody is a little bit on pins and needles, but I don’t want that to influence our commitment to who we are and to what we do.

LW: You’ve been a Wolverine for a long time as both a student and administrator. Now that you are head of the pack, are you having some fun as well?  

DG: It’s a lot of work — an enormous amount of work — and it is all-consuming, but it is also so much fun. As graduates — my wife Susan is a graduate three times over — we have such a sense of love and affection for this university, and it is terrific to be here in this position. It’s surreal, and it’s just been a wonderful experience. 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.