I began thinking at the last Board of Trustees meeting—sometime in between an attorney serving the Trustees with a lawsuit and faculty liaisons turning their backs to Dennis Denno during his remarks—about why most of the people I speak to don’t know who any of Michigan State University's eight Trustees are. The board brings the theatrics of politics to campus and a front row seat is free of charge.

I use the word politics because, well, the board members are politicians. The state of Michigan uniquely elects them via ballot in November and is similarly one of the few states that treats university boards like their own seat of government. In the case of the average MSU student, it's easy to chalk up ignorance as the culprit, but to do that is to assume that Michigan State University students have been given a valid reason to care about the eight officials who govern the university.

They haven’t, and because of that there’s a thick pane of foggy, opaque glass that exists between the board and the student body; a glass that doesn’t become any more transparent the more you wipe away.

The board sat down around 9:00 a.m. on April 11 to a mixed audience. Protesters in support of Palestine have become common in the last year of meetings, sometimes disrupting them to the point of suspension and other times just sitting quietly. This particular meeting followed a day after 19 protesters were arrested for a sit-in, so this time they would not seek to disrupt. But nonetheless there’s still a tenseness, if one of them gets up to use the restroom a flock of heads in the audience would rubberneck to the protestors in anticipation.

Amid all the drama, a more-than-typical amount of votes were not unanimous; three of the ten.

Trustee Mike Balow voted no on all three.

Back in the fall, Balow ran on a campaign promise of breaking down MSU’s “green wall of silence,” a metaphorical lack of transparency that he believes has been an issue at the university for years. To combat that, he said he’s tried both to dissent when he isn’t satisfied with a bill and be more vocal when he does so.

This kind of dissent isn’t exactly common among the MSU board, at least publicly.

Going back through 2020, around 94.4% of the board votes were unanimous. This number represents a thick layer of opacity that exists between the university and the MSU community.

When I asked if he was comfortable with that number, Balow said he wasn't.