Like so many institutions of higher learning across the nation, Detroit’s Wayne State University is experiencing its own sea change in financial backing. The school’s finance base has shifted from two-thirds state funding to two-thirds tuition support.
If the Michigan Legislature approves the current governor’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year, state appropriations for Wayne State would be at their lowest level since 1989. Amid the fiscal turbulence, former auto industry executive Allan Gilmour was coaxed from retirement last summer to run the school as interim president.
Gilmour took on the challenges with gusto and quickly began wowing the school’s various constituent groups. By winter, the 76-year-old former Ford Motor Company vice chairman had so impressed the Wayne State community that the school’s Board of Governors dropped its search for a permanent president and unanimously selected Gilmour for the post, which Gilmour agreed to take on for three years.
“I thought for a pinch hitter it would be interesting and important,” says Gilmour about taking what he thought would only be a temporary position.
In 2010, Gilmour inherited a well-regarded but demoralized school suffering through a litany of problems.
It had severed ties with Gilmour’s predecessor, who had served as president for just over a year. The provost had been on the job barely a month. There were three dean vacancies, and the school’s veteran head of business operations and finance was preparing to retire. To top it off, the university was battling its perennially low retention and graduation rates.
Gilmour says he rarely has a dull moment running the 32,000-student university. Despite having served in a variety of management and finance capacities over nearly four decades at Ford, he says the company was still a single-product organization — automobiles. “Now, every day I turn a different page,” he says. “It’s so different from what I did in the past.”
