Voices & Hands: Remarks on the Institutional Stewardship of Professor Ken Harrow

Note: These remarks were originally composed in 2018 for a joyous occasion, when students of Ken Harrow returned to the MSU campus to honor his legacy on the occasion of his retirement. Ken passed on April 14th, 2024 at the age of 80. I share this short tribute in his memory and to honor his life and work.

Good morning to all of you! Welcome and welcome back to East Lansing and a beautiful Spring day on the MSU campus. It is truly a privilege today to honor the career of Professor Ken Harrow and to recognize his record of intellectual leadership on behalf of the College of Arts & Letters and Michigan State University. All day on this fine program coordinated by Professors Singh & Ibironke, you will hear from Dr. Harrow’s students, and there is no more fitting tribute to his work than hearing from those whose lives and careers he has helped to nurture and grow.

This morning, I want to say just a few words to recognize Professor Ken Harrow’s dedication to institutional stewardship. I first came to know Dr. Harrow in his role as Faculty Excellence Advocate in the College, a role meant to lead departments and programs in living up to our values of transparency, inclusion, equity, and reciprocity. Because of his work in that position, we are a better place to work and learn.

As we heard from our inspirational speaker Tarana Burke last night at the Wharton Center, institutions need people to lead change. People like Ken Harrow and all of you hold institutions to their highest ideals.

Not just with voices, but with hands in the process.

Institutions are not only the best of what our values portray, as we see in ad campaigns and recruitment brochures. We are also, as the events of the last year have made clear on this campus, a flawed system in need of improvement.

Honoring the victims of Larry Nassar and addressing the structural problems that allowed his behavior to affect the lives of so many means doing the kind of work that I have seen Ken Harrow do here at MSU. There are two important components:

1) Make a clear-eyed critique of systems that contribute to or perpetuate inequity, injustice, or violence.

2) Work to change those systems from the inside out. Remaking them by teaching the people of the institution to behave differently.

MSU’s legacy, we are often told, is a proud one. Embodying the land grant mission of equal access for all. But it is also true that we stand here today on lands once stewarded by Anishinaabe and Odawa peoples. Their removal from this land was an instrumental piece of establishing the land “grant” to educate largely European settlers about how to work and care for it. The removal of indigenous people from this space was also a removal of generations of knowledge. MSU and its founding were part of a broad political and intellectual movement to replace that knowledge, including its foundational ethic of responsible stewardship of the water and soil that nurture life, with scientific know-how. The values set down in our charter that education would be offered to common people — all the people of Michigan — and not just elite landowners was indeed remarkable for the world of higher education. But this achievement does not erase the settler colonial legacy. MSU is born from both. One drives our vision of access for every child to a transformative set of experiences that will improve their lives and the lives of generations to come. The other gives us tragedies like the Flint water crisis.

It is people like Ken Harrow who keep our attention focused on what it takes to make institutions like Michigan State live up to its highest ideals. With scholarship that awakens minds to the historical and cultural legacies that give rise to institutional power, and with the hard, day-to-day work to transform institutions so that they work in the service of equity and justice.

On behalf of the College, I want to say thank you, Professor Harrow, for your leadership, the relationships you have built, your scholarship, your example. I look forward to working with all of those assembled here today to do what you have dedicated your career to doing, which is to leave MSU better than we found it.