Dive Brief:
- The University of Michigan’s incoming president withdrew from the appointment Wednesday, about less than three months before he was slated to assume the leadership role.
- President-elect Kent Syverud, whom the board unanimously selected in January, said in a Wednesday statement that he recently received a brain cancer diagnosis and is undergoing treatment.
- U-M plans to restart its presidential search process, according to a board statement. Until a permanent leader is selected and begins, Domenico Grasso will continue serving as interim president after stepping into the role last May.
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Dive Insight:
Syverud’s appointment as U-M’s next president was a homecoming for him. He earned a master’s and law degree from the institution and later served as a professor and administrator in the university’s law school.
Syverud is receiving cancer care from the U-M’s medical center. While his diagnosis and treatment will prevent him from taking over the leadership role, he has accepted an invitation from trustees to return to U-M as a law school professor and special advisor to the board.
“I am approaching this with optimism, with determination, and with full confidence in the people who are caring for me,” Syverud said.
At U-M, he would have succeeded Santa Ono, the university’s last permanent leader. Ono announced his departure last May after being selected as the sole finalist for president of the University of Florida. But that university’s board of regents ultimately rejected Ono because of his diversity, equity and inclusion work U-M.
Grasso, U-M’s interim president for the foreseeable future, previously served as chancellor of University of Michigan-Dearborn since 2018.
In sharing his diagnosis, Syverud championed the work of higher education, drawing a line to his own treatment.
“I also find myself reflecting on what this moment has made so vivid to me: the extraordinary gift of great research universities,” he said. “These institutions, places like Syracuse, like Michigan, exist not only to educate and to discover, but to translate that discovery into care for people when they need it most.”
Until his diagnosis, Syverud served as chancellor of Syracuse University, a role he’s filled since 2014.
Mike Haynie — the university’s chancellor-elect and currently the vice chancellor for strategic initiatives and innovation — will take over leadership at the university while Syverud underwent treatment, according to the Wednesday statement.Haynie was previously slated to take over the top leadership post from Syverud on May 11.
In recent years, Syverud led the private New York institution through multiple headwinds in the higher education sector.
With numerous research universities cutting their workforces amid the Trump administration’s disruption of federal research funding and international visa slowdowns, among other challenges, Syracuse has so far largely avoided painful cuts.
“Many of our peers are running serious deficits and are experiencing deep budget cuts and large-scale layoffs,” he said in a community message last September. “That is not the story here, although it’s not a happy story entirely here either.”
Syracuse missed its graduate enrollment targets in the fall, in part due to the Trump administration’s restrictions on the student visa process. The university recently unveiled a plan to cut more than 90 of its 460 degrees and certificates in a realignment of its offerings, and it has offered early retirement buyouts to a relatively small fraction of its faculty.
But in recent years, Syracuse’s overall enrollment has held steady at around 22,000 students, and the university has brought hefty budget surpluses.