“I had the really fortunate opportunity to go to undergrad during what is now considered Web 1.0, Russ,” says Schram. It was the time when we all took our AOL dial-up internet experience and brought it to broadband. And actually, that's one of the reasons I chose to live at Holden Hall in South Campus. At that time, it was, I think, the first or second residence hall on campus to get wired ethernet, high-speed internet. And by high speed, I think it was at one or two megabytes at the time, but that was incredible at the time. I actually spent my experience in East Lansing working full-time.

“I grew up in a media family. A lot of my dad's contemporaries who ran radio and TV stations were looking for people to build them these new-fangled web pages. I had taught myself in high school very basic HTML and JavaScript and was fortunate to have this confluence of high-speed internet where I lived and worked. I was able to do that remotely. So way before this COVID economy, when we're all at home, I was doing it remotely. And I grew up in an industry that I loved, but I realized that I wasn't going to be the person to be behind the mic like my dad used to be when he was growing up in the business and that I could actually forge a new path by really embracing my history and marrying it with this future opportunity.”

Schram recalls how smartphones came online and we no longer had to be behind a laptop or desktop to interact with the internet.

“To be able to have these brand relationships with consumers that were on the go and harness all those tools just fascinated me and really stoked my curiosity. So after an incredible seven-and-a-half year run at ePrize, I met Ted Murphy from IZEA. And Ted actually was a partner of ours. He was talking early about social media endorsements. There wasn't a name for it yet. It wasn't called influencer marketing back then.”

Schram eventually decided to join Murphy at IZEA.

”We talked about what today in 2021 we would call The Creator Economy. We talked about this mass opportunity for democratization of storytelling and advertising messaging and how the proliferation of social networks would change all of this. The inefficiency of traditional advertising and marketing can benefit our company. And so in the fall of 2011, I was named the firm's first ever Chief Marketing Officer. And that's brought me to where I am today. And it's been an amazing nine year run.”

Schram defines influencer marketing and talks about its origins and evolution.

“I draw from my background growing up in broadcasting. The most valuable inventory is when a personality opens a mic in a stop set, breaks the norm from the reported commercials, and talks to you about a local dealership, or their favorite restaurant, or something they've seen or done with their family. That is a paid endorsement deal. In radio, the combination of that storytelling and the theater of the mind makes it the most single valuable inventory in the entire arsenal of what those stations sell to advertisers. So if you think about modern influencer marketing, it's the same idea.

“But instead of having one morning show personality doing it, it can be hundreds or thousands of different individuals from all walks of life, all shapes and sizes of a follower base, across all multitudes of social platforms. But the basics are the same. They're being compensated in cash, product, or both by brands to create that content. That content can be written word on a blog. It can be video on YouTube or Twitch. It can be an Instagram story. It can be all those things. But the idea is what's happening from an outcomes perspective is incredible amounts of reach and engagements and authenticity that transforms what would normally be a one-to-many marketing message that a brand would traditionally do to many perspectives in modern influencer marketing.”

What are some trends in influencer marketing?

“The first is the continued advancement of diversity and inclusion in the work that we're doing. And it's not only people of color. It's really embracing the entire spectrum of diversity and bringing more equality to the influencer marketing space. Because very fairly, the industry has a bad rap. We’re thought of as young white girls making duck faces on Instagram; that’s kind of what people think influencer marketing is. But the very best influencer marketing is a broad range of voices and perspectives across a complex matrix of societal norms and un-norms.

“And we've seen over the last several years, not only the recognition from our brand partners that this was so critical, but we also see it where the rubber hits the road, which is the average cost per post, meaning what someone's being paid for that sponsored endorsement. People of color, in fact, African American females earned more than all other race types here in 2021, which is the first time it's ever happened before on average. I like to believe that we're starting to see the evidence well that while we have a long way to go, the industry is trying to really understand what does inclusivity look like, and how do you make that part of the fiber of what makes this industry great?”

Schram talks about the “elastic workplace” of the future. And he wonders how the social media can and will evolve.

“The challenge we're having right now, post election in this COVID economy, is the fact that we have a lot of people who have a lot of time on their hands who are very apt to be behind those keyboards or thumbing through their phones and saying or doing things that they wouldn't ordinarily either have the time to do, the thought to do, or both. And so the platforms are really trying to figure out what is their role in all of this without limiting free speech, but also at the same time, not being a vector for promoting hate. And the good news is we're talking about some of the most valuable well-resourced organizations on the face of this earth with some of the smartest people in our space. And I think that there will be a path forward to doing that.

“What the last 12 months or so have taught us as a society of human beings on this planet is that there is some good in all of this. There's the connective fiber that we've had while being so lonely and being by ourselves at home that, at least for myself, has been very good for my mental health. To be able to still talk to people and interact with them like you and I are doing over Zoom right now in recording this podcast, I wouldn't have the chance to be able to see you or talk to you in real time if it weren't for these types of tools. And for that, I'm grateful. I think about even Christmas day in our family, I ended up buying Facebook Portal TV devices for members of our family that couldn't safely travel to Michigan for the holidays.”

What’s your advice for today’s Spartans who may be interested in a career in influencer marketing?

“You need to be hungry and humble from the start. Those who really succeed the best don't form a sense of entitlement. They realize that there's tremendous equity in being able to be self-starters. And I think that Spartans are really well equipped for this. Spartans tend to be people who are a little bit more entrepreneurial in nature, a little bit more focused on the substance versus the sizzle.

“And ultimately, in an industry like mine, where there's plenty of frothiness and plenty of shiny coins going on, at the end of the day, the types of young professionals that we're looking for are those who can really separate the wheat from the chaff and say, ‘Great. Our business is elevated by some of those frothiness types of things, but it doesn't change the fact that we need individuals who...

“It's an awesome feeling,” says Lynch. “I arrived at MSU in the late 80s. I was a criminal justice major. I'm a product of the School of Criminal Justice. Actually, I started as a police officer at Meridian Township Police Department. That evolved through the police cadet internship program. I had the privilege of working at Meridian Township Police Department as a cadet first to get an idea of what it's like to be a police officer then actually began my career as a police officer prior to completing my undergraduate degree.

“The connectivity is coming full circle. I've been in policing now for 28 total years, 25 years in campus policing within higher education. Universities are anchor institutions in their communities. They connect to the city they reside in and have a positive impact on the community. The School of Criminal Justice provided that educational background, and I stay in contact as an alumnus. I'm on campus three to four times a year. To come back full circle as chief is a great feeling.”

Lynch currently serves as chief safety officer for the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. In this position he oversees more than 180 individuals in police, health system security, emergency management and community services. He jumped at the opportunity to guide his alma mater’s police department.

“This is the first time in 40 or 50 plus years that the MSU has actually opened up the position to external candidates. This is not something you look at and say, ‘Oh, well, it'll come back open at some other point.’

“I’ve always had the goal to have a role in police leadership and had identified this particular job as one that I would keep my eye on. If an opportunity presented itself, I most definitely would pursue it. The circumstances are ripe as well. I'm originally from Chicago and it's just a short drive. My family is still in the area. I actually spent a lot of time on the MSU campus growing up as a kid. I have three uncles who live in Lansing, and I have a bunch of cousins in the area. Every summer I'd come up to Lansing and spend a couple of weeks in the area and we'd come over to campus. I've been familiar with MSU for a long time.”

As vice president for public safety and chief of police, Lynch will lead the university’s 120-member police department including community engagement, cybersecurity, emergency management, parking enforcement and traffic engineering. His emphasis will be on community policing and enhancing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

“Being part of the community is extremely important in campus policing. My philosophy is based on that: How do we engage our community, our students, our faculty, and our staff? One way to do that is to create opportunities where the community helps define the role of the police services they want, what services they receive, and how they receive them. This is a part of what we're seeing today in the national narrative on police reform.

“All of those can be applicable to college and university campuses, but it's extremely important not to take a cookie cutter approach. What I would like to do with our community is identify what's appropriate for our community and integrate those services into our department through collaboration. Create opportunities for engagement, seek input, and the accountability will come with it.

“Policing has to evolve. Our laws and ordinances are based on what society wants. That's how they're created; what are the social norms? Things have changed and it's time for some laws to change with them. Again, engage the community and find out what they expect to define the role of police.

“And there are opportunities to police in a different way. Police are always on 24/7, 365. And over the years, responsibilities have evolved to include services that were eliminated elsewhere, like some social work. ‘We’ll train the police to a certain limit to provide those services.’ We've outgrown that. The police can do a lot and they can be trained to do many things, but some of the things that we're encountering now in policing, there are experts for this. There's a reason why there are social workers. There's a reason why there are mental health professionals. There's an opportunity for joint response and to have those services be collaborative. Those opportunities are there, and I'm definitely open to working with our community to identify them.”

Do you have some short and long-term goals for the department?

“Short-term, I think it's important to get to know the staff within the department. This will be a new transition for the department, integrating a police chief who is not from within the department. Also, the listening tour with our community is going to be extremely important. I’ll spend a lot of time meeting with our stakeholders on campus and off. Our relationships with East Lansing and Ingham County are important.

“Long-term goals are to focus on the accreditation process. There will be a mix of short and long-term goals in regard to defining the role of police and the direction of our community policing strategies. But it'll all begin with direct feedback from our communities. There are some core foundational components that will need to exist, and how we fill out that framework will come from our community.”

Challenges and opportunities ahead?

“The challenge is what is the immediate need, right? It's identifying that immediate need and being effective and efficient in how we provide solutions. That's a challenge, but I also think there are opportunities.

“It's an experienced team within the Michigan State Police Department; that's an advantage. That's not always the case within university police departments. There's an experienced team here.

“We're going to have to work on our overall representation of the department. Diversity means a lot of things to a lot of people and we need to be representative of our community. The MSU community is extremely diverse, not just in race, but in gender and lifestyle, too. It's important that our police department reflect that. Those are opportunities to me.

“There will be some change that will take place, but our community will be part of that and be directly involved in how that takes place. I'll always be available. I will be on campus and I'll be actively around all the time, reacquainting myself with the institution and the university grounds. I look forward to being an active part of the MSU community and to being engaged and around all the time, not just when things may not be going well.”

MSU Today airs Sunday mornings at 9:00 on 105.1 FM, AM 870, and however you stream your shows. Find “MSU Today with Russ White” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your shows.

“As athletic trainers, we arrive here in the morning before the athletes usually go to work out, go to lift weights, go to other workouts, practices, or whatever,” Nogle tells Beekman. “We help get them ready for that. We might stretch somebody. We might tape somebody, put a splint or brace on, whatever they need before they go work out to do their lifting, their conditioning or practice. There are administrative tasks, too, like giving an injury report to a coach. 

“Then treatments start and continue throughout the whole morning. You're doing rehabilitation all morning long for all the injuries that have happened. You may use modalities like the ultrasound, electrical STEM machines, heat, or cold, and then we do hands-on rehab. Then we get to the afternoon and do a lot of taping for football because all their ankles will be taped. Then the practice comes, and so we go out to practice and we cover the practice and we watch them work out and watch the injured people to see how they're performing. Are they getting better or worse? What's happening there? Then we evaluate and take care of any new injuries that happened at practice. It's a long day.”

Nogle tells Beekman she talks a lot about hydration, sleep, and nutrition with athletes because that's the best way to recover, to be honest, she says. She likes athletes to get eight or nine hours of sleep, too.

“It doesn't happen very often, but we do like them to get eight or nine hours of sleep. That's what they need at that age and for their body to recover faster and better. We talk about hydration because if you're hydrated, you recover faster and then nutrition can help you with recovery. Our dieticians help the athletes know what to take and when to take it, and that helps them recover also. Between compression units, rolling out, ice tubs, and lifestyle, I'll call it, that helps the athletes recover faster.”

“With all of the fancy technology and tools and other things available to us, it sort of comes down to kind of what your mom told you when you were in high school: get a good night's rest, eat healthy and take care of yourself,” quips Beekman. “Those are the biggest keys towards wellness for people or for our student-athletes.”

What about some changes to athletic training over the years?

“When I first started, some of the things were crazy,” says Nogle. “You think about the surgeries. If someone had a meniscus tear in the knee, their season was done. You had to open them up, and the season was over. People had trick knees. We didn’t call them ACLs to be honest, we'd call it a trick knee. Now, you have arthroscopy and now you can fix the ACL. The PCL, the other ligament in the knee, we never fixed before. Now we can fix those. Doctors can fix those. I think the biggest thing is these athletes are going now year-round. They had an offseason when I first started. Trying to help them through year-round athletics and make sure they do get some rest and recovery away from their sport or away from the repetitiveness of it is something we deal with now that we didn't deal with 25 years ago.

“Concussions, obviously, have changed immensely. We did what we thought was best at the time. There were concussion protocols that we followed. We followed them and believed in them because that's what we were told by the neurosurgeons in the country. In the end, obviously, it wasn't the right advice. “Now, we've changed what we do. They don't go back into a game again if they've had a concussion. Before, if they cleared up in 15 minutes, you put them back in. We would never do that now. We think that'd be terrible. Back then, that was the norm and you were following what was best practices at that point in time. That part's changed a lot.

“Some of our modalities that we have now to treat injuries have improved. There's a lot more knowledge. The research that's been done in athletic training is improved a lot. Sports medicine's improved a lot. We now know the techniques that will help us get an athlete back faster or the surgery that's better to do than we did before. We've had a lot of advances in 25 years.”

Nogle talks about how the pandemic has impacted athletic training and about what inspired her to get into the field. She tells Bill about some of favorite memories, like the Rose Bowl and Cotton Bowl victories but says her favorite memory may have been when Amp Campbell returned to the field after being injured the previous season.

“He broke his neck when we played at Oregon. Then a year later, Oregon played here and he picked up a fumble and ran it back for a touchdown. That was just like, ‘Wow!’ because I never thought he'd make it back to playing. It’s one of my memories that was really special.

“That's why our jobs are great. You get the highs and the lows as they go through the rehab process. Then to see them compete, which is their ultimate goal, is really exciting. It makes it all the work worth it.”

Audio courtesy of Scott Moore and the Spartan Sports Network.

MSU Today airs every Sunday morning at 9:00 on 105.1 FM, AM 870, and however you stream your shows. Find “MSU Today with Russ White” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Tucker recalls the challenges of being hired on February 12, 2020 and then shutting down the program a few weeks later due to the pandemic.

“I was just in the final stages of assembling the staff and had just put the strength coach in place and got everyone under contract,” Tucker tells Beekman. “We were actually going to start spring ball the following Tuesday. I was going to make a trip down to Indianapolis for the Big Ten basketball tournament, and I got word that they weren't going to have fans. And then a couple hours later, I got word the team was headed back to East Lansing. And at that point, that's when my world had changed forever.

“Our staff did a great job adapting quickly to the situation. I sent everyone home and said that we're going to be working from home for a while so get with the IT guys to get packed up and get your laptops and whatever you need to work from home. Then we started talking to our academic folks about what our players were going to do and they started mentioning something called Zoom. They said that the professors on campus were using Zoom and they recommended that we do the same. And so, we're all saying, ‘What the heck is Zoom? I've never heard of that.’

“So our first challenge was to figure out how to use Zoom to communicate with our players and have team meetings, have unit meetings, individual meetings, figuring out how to put a background on the Zoom, Zoom etiquette, lighting, auto mute, all of those deals, and it was fun. We recognized right away that that was going to be our most daunting challenge. How do we connect with our players when we're a new staff? All the players have been sent back to their permanent homes and they don't know us and we don't know them. Take out the X’s and O's, just to introduce ourselves and just get to know each other as people was done completely over Zoom and FaceTime and phone calls and text.

“And then we needed to install our playbook on defense and special teams and so we did that through Zoom and our coaches became very creative on how to incorporate chalkboards and telestrating and unit meetings with guys in various places in the country. And it was just fascinating how quickly the players and the coaching staff adapted. And now you look, Zoom is like walking the dog now. It's like riding a bike; it's just normal. But at that time, it was not, and there was a learning curve. Some of the learning curve for some of our coaches was steeper than some of the others,” Tucker quips.

“You started your early coaching career as a graduate assistant at MSU back in 1997. So now going on 24 years ago, when you think about what it was like back then in the football program and across campus, what's changed? What's the same? What were some of the things that you've noticed as you've been back on campus,” asks Beekman?

“Those were great memories,” Tucker continues. “I remember I felt so fortunate to have the opportunity that Coach Saban gave me to come here and start my coaching career at a great university with the football tradition. I mean, it was just huge. When I got here, my focus was, ‘what do I need to do to make Nick Saban happy?’ That was my goal every day. ‘What do I have to do to get the job done? What does he need done? What do the coaches need done?’ And so my focus and my world was very, very small. It was pretty much the Duffy Building and Kellogg Center for me. I didn’t get to know a lot of the campus at that point.

“When I came back this past February, I got a chance to see a broader scope of the university, and I became even more excited. I saw some of the changes, like the 1855 Building. That wasn't part of the campus landscape. With the Skandalaris Center and the North End Zone I just really felt like I was walking into a great situation at Michigan State.”

Tucker talks about the coaches who have influenced him most: Nick Saban, Barry Alvarez, Jim Tressel, and Romeo Crenel. And he describes some of the differences between college and professional football.

“In the NFL, it’s all business. For those players, it’s their livelihood. That’s how they feed their families. So when you're coaching an NFL player, they don't have any use for you if they don't believe that you know what you're doing. All they want to know is can this coach help me stay in the league. Can he help me in any way provide for my family? And those NFL players, they make those assessments very quickly. And so you have to, in short order, gain the trust of your players and prove to them that you are an asset and that you can help them in their career.

“But one of the things that's very similar is that at the end of the day, it's still football. There are fundamentals of the game, whether it's Pop Warner, high school, college, or pro that don't change.”

Tucker tells Beekman about his recruiting philosophy.

“Recruiting is the lifeblood of your organization. Good players make you a good coach; great players make you a great coach. And when it comes down to it, when you look at the best teams year in and year out, they usually have the best players. The purpose of recruiting is to improve your team. It’s very similar to the National Football League. The purpose of the draft and free agency is to improve your team. You always have to ask yourself, ‘Is this player better than this player that's already on your roster?’ Can this student athlete make us better?’

“You have to recruit every day and your players have to be a good fit. Character and academic standing are extremely important. We want guys who want to graduate from Michigan State and have the ability to do that. We also want players who want to buy into something bigger than themselves. They're all highly recruited players who have individual aspirations. They all want to go to the NFL, but we want guys who believe in the concept of team who are unselfish and who pour themselves into the team and who understand that the better the team does, the better they do individually.

“And so it's not just an athletic evaluation; we're also doing our best to evaluate some of the intangibles and the things you can't see on tape. Character, unselfishness, teamwork, discipline, maturity. But it's an inexact science. We lay out the standards and we communicate the standards to the coaching staff. We all know what we're looking for. And at the end of the day, I have the final say; the buck stops with me.”

Tucker says this time of the year “is one of the more exciting times of the calendar year. Our players are back. We've been able to evaluate our guys who are returning, and we know what they can do, what their strengths and weaknesses are. The guys who are back are guys who want to be here. And we want them to be here. They bought into our culture, they understand the expectations and the standards, and they're ready to work. I like to coin this time of year as the out season. I believe there's an in season and an out of season; there's never an off season because football is a year-round sport now. Recruiting and training never stop.

“In this out of season time, it's time for our coaching staff to do scheme evaluation, scout, and look for new ideas and look for things that we know can help our players. It's also a time for us to indoctrinate our mid-year enrollees and our high school players and our transfers. The onboarding of those student athletes to our culture is critical. We’ve begun our Spartan Training Program, STP. We'll have eight weeks of training in our weight room with our strength and conditioning staff. Coach Novak he has a great staff. And I told him that I wanted this to be the most rigorous, demanding, out of season training program in the history of sport. He guaranteed that it would be.

“I truly believe that your team is built in the weight room. You want your team to fi...

Henry Ford Health System and Michigan State University, two of the state’s leading education, research and health care institutions, are partnering to make Michigan a national leader in providing access to exceptional health care for all residents, scientific discovery and education for providers, patients and families.

In a landmark partnership that will last for at least 30 years, both institutions are committed to aligning efforts across key departments and programs to achieve critical health care and educational goals, while addressing social issues that impact health outcomes for patients in Michigan and beyond.

Here to talk more about the partnership are Dr. Norman J. Beauchamp Jr., MSU executive vice president for health sciences and Adnan Munkarah, M.D., Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer for Henry Ford Health System. Dr. Beauchamp will chair the board selected from leaders of both institutions.

Key features of the agreement include fostering innovative, groundbreaking research; providing best-in-class cancer care; interprofessional training; increasing diversity among the next generation of health care professionals; and addressing the needs of traditionally underserved communities. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are core components of the partnership and are embedded throughout the agreement in a commitment to addressing access to health care and health disparities in both urban and rural communities.  For more information about the partnership, visit www.henryford.com/msuhealthsciences.

MSU will expand its presence in Detroit through the development of a regional campus, located within the existing Henry Ford Detroit Campus footprint. The institutions will create a new Health Sciences Center (HSC) that tightly aligns basic and translational research, fueling innovation and discovery through an academically and clinically integrated network of health care providers, scientists, academicians and public health practitioners.

A new urban-based public health program is planned to focus on education and research, as well as provide a platform to collaborate with other institutions. With the planned expansion of their combined research enterprise, Henry Ford and MSU are developing a joint research institute, the Health Sciences Center, dedicated to research and academic activities.

Alignment between a top academic institution and a leading integrated health system will accelerate the recruitment and retention of top clinical and academic talent, which is essential for advancing research, providing superior patient care and educating the next generation of premier health care professionals. 

With the MSU partnership, the Henry Ford Cancer Institute will expand research and clinical applications to create an international destination for access to the most advanced cancer therapies and research. With its focus on innovative cancer treatments, prevention and screening protocols, the institute will offer vast improvements in population health, fuel discovery in basic sciences, support translational research aimed at curing cancer and close the gap in health care outcomes for cancer patients based on race, ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status.

Diversity, equity and inclusion are foundational to Henry Ford and MSU’s partnership and are articulated in key goals and deliverables that seek to eliminate health disparities, address the social determinants of health, and remove barriers to care and opportunity for medical education. This includes a commitment to educate diverse health care providers and ensure equitable access to quality health care for historically disenfranchised and marginalized populations.

This partnership is not an acquisition or merger. The Henry Ford and MSU names will not change, and both organizations will maintain their respective autonomies. The goal is to combine the strength of both institutions’ legacies and storied brands toward their shared goals. By mid-2021, there will be co-branding within some areas, including joint research efforts, and the Center will establish an umbrella entity for its activities and a joint identity. Several of the partnership’s advancements will result from the integration of both institutions around key research and program elements, while others, such as capital projects, are dependent upon securing private and philanthropic funding.

At the core of the partnership is a unique primary academic affiliation. As the partnership evolves and expands, Michigan will be established as a destination for exceptional clinical care, advanced research and innovative medical education. The partnership will chart definitive progress in eliminating health disparities and addressing the needs of marginalized communities, improving health care for everyone. Most important of all, this partnership will provide improved care options and increased hope to patients and families facing disparate medical challenges, including cancer.

MSU Today airs every Sunday morning at 9:00 on 105.1 FM, AM 870, and however you stream at home. Follow and subscribe at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Texting is the most alarming distraction. Sending or reading a text takes your eyes off the road for five seconds. At 55 miles per hour, that's like driving the length of an entire football field with your eyes closed. You cannot drive safely unless the task of driving has your full attention. Any non-driving activity you engage in is a potential distraction and increases your risk of crashing.

Using a cell phone while driving creates enormous potential for deaths and injuries on U.S. roads. In 2018 alone, more than 2,800 people were killed in motor vehicle crashes involving distracted drivers.

On September 19th, 2016, MSU freshman Mitchel Kiefer was tragically killed in an auto accident caused by a distracted driver on I-96 on Mitchel's way to the MSU campus. Steve Kiefer is Mitchel's father. Steve earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Michigan State University, and he is a member of the Michigan State University College of Engineering Alumni Association Advisory Board. He's GM's key executive at Michigan State University and is a member of GM's senior leadership team. He is senior vice president and president of General Motors, South America and International Operations, meaning he's responsible for GM operations outside of North America and China.

Soon after Mitchel's death, Steve founded The Kiefer Foundation to honor Mitchel's legacy. The mission of The Kiefer Foundation is to end distracted driving and all associated traffic deaths and injuries. The foundation focuses on three pillars to support its mission, awareness, technology and policy. Within each of these pillars are specific goals they hope to achieve and initiatives in which they hope to get involved. They've already made some progress, but still have a long way to go.

“Until something like this happens to you personally, I don't think people really understand the magnitude of this problem,” Kiefer says. “It's important for people to realize that, around the world, because this is a global problem, 1.25 million people are killed on the highways of the world every year. It's a huge number. Some 50 million are injured or disabled every year in car crashes and pedestrian related car crashes around the world. We lose somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 people on the highways of the United States each year. It's a staggering number.

“The folks who do the analysis on distracted driving estimate that about 10 percent of those are due to distracted driving. We honestly believe that number is way under reported. As a matter of fact, the stats would generally say that 94 percent of crashes that occur on the highways are due to some type of human error. It could be speeding or drinking and driving or drowsiness, but we know a large percentage of those are distracted driving. The simple statistic that I think is most staggering is that, in this country, 10 people every day are killed by distracted driving. And it's just, again, until you go through it, it's just hard for me to imagine that today and tomorrow and the next day, every day, we're going to have another 10 people, another 10 families going through what my family has gone through. And it really is one of the prime motivators for us to get something done here and really bring an end to distracted driving.

“The story never gets easier to tell, but as you said, it was September 19th of 2016 - the worst day of our lives. Mitchel was in his first month at MSU. He had come home for a nice weekend to go see a Lions game. He was driving up to MSU on I-96 early Monday morning about 7:50. It was a beautiful Monday morning, the sun was out, the roads were dry, and there was no reason for a crash to occur. There was a little bit of traffic congestion. The traffic slowed down, and Mitchel slowed down. The young lady behind him did not. She impacted Mitchel's car at about 82 miles an hour.

“As most people probably know, when airbags deploy, there's a flight recording function inside modern automobiles. You get the forensics from the vehicle. It was clear that the car was going 82 miles an hour, but also that, at the time of impact, the driver's foot was on the throttle, not on the brake. That's a pretty clear indication that the young lady was not paying attention and never touched the brakes. That resulted in Mitchel being rear-ended and driven across a very narrow median on I-96 near Dietz Road, a narrow median that had no guardrails at the time. Mitchel was driven into oncoming traffic where he was hit by a large truck and killed instantly.

“It's a horrific thing to think that one small act of lack of paying attention, of distraction, can just really destroy lives forever.”

The Kiefer Foundation focuses on three pillars to support its mission, awareness, technology and policy.

“First and foremost, we learned how large this problem is, and interestingly enough, we referred to it as a global pandemic several years ago before the more recent pandemic,” Kiefer continues. “And I really believe that it is a global pandemic. This is certainly, as I covered in the earlier stats, causing deaths and disabling injuries all over the world. So we felt, first and foremost, it was important to make as many people realize this as possible. You do find that there are families like ours all over the country that have a similar goal. We do things like advertising, billboards, and a number of community events to help raise awareness. We engaged with a nonprofit organization in Grand Rapids, Michigan called the PEERS Foundation, which brings simulators into schools and churches around the state and around the country to educate young people on the dangers of distracted driving.

“We're able to put them in a car and let them drive in a simulated fashion and then distract them and show how it causes crashes. We also had the opportunity to do some things to memorialize Mitchel and to create awareness. “Mitchel was a hockey player. He went to Detroit Catholic Central. He was part of the 2016 State Championship Catholic Central Hockey Team. And he was a goalie. They won that state championship at a USA Hockey rink in Plymouth, Michigan. We worked with the USA Hockey Foundation and actually dedicated that rink in Mitchel's honor. So that ice rink is now known as the Mitchel Kiefer Memorial Ice Rink, which really feels good from the perspective of a father to memorialize your son.

“More importantly, we didn't just put Mitchel's name on the rink. It's covered with distracted driving messages. There's a locker room that has a video that runs with distracted driver statistics and other messages. There are 500,000 people who visit that ice rink each year for various activities, whether it's hockey games, ice skating competitions, or figure skating competitions. And I can't tell you how many people contact me and say, ‘Mr. Kiefer, we're in your son's ice rink right now. And it's given me an opportunity to talk to my children and my family about these dangers and your message is having a huge impact in this ice rink alone.’ There are several other examples I could give, but that's probably the one that's kind of closest to my heart because every time I visit that ice rink, it's such fond memories of Mitchel and the state championship, but also a really effective way to spread a message of driver safety.

“There are many aspects to the technology pillar. In some cases, it's related to awareness and educating people that you need to be more cautious when driving. There are a number of technology tools that people can be using right now. One is using the safe driving mode and do not disturb mode on your Apple phones an...

This month’s guest is Dr. Jakana Thomas, an Associate Professor in MSU's Department of Political Science whose research focuses on political violence, how violence influences conflict resolution, and the determinants of a successful peace process - items that are no doubt on the minds of many Americans today.

“The drop in the economy in Michigan and everywhere else was dramatic in April of 2020. Really, by many measures, April 2020 was the worst month in American economic history,” says Ballard. “We previously thought that the 100,000 jobs lost in Michigan in January of 2009 was really horrendous; in April of 2020 we lost 10 times as many. We lost about a million jobs.

“I think there are a couple of things going on. One is the federal government has stepped up and has relieved the burdens in many ways. Another is that we have learned a lot of businesses have been able to continue to operate better than maybe we first thought in an online, remote environment. So the good news is that the budgetary situation for Michigan is not nearly as bad as we once thought.

“The not so good news is that the recovery appears to have stalled out.”

“Can we keep injecting federal money into the economy,” asks Weinfeld?

“On the one hand, I think this is not yet the time to worry about balancing our budget because our economy is still in deep trouble. On the other hand, the federal deficit for the fiscal year that ended last September was more than $3 trillion. And now the total accumulated debt is pushing toward $22 trillion. So far, the world credit markets seem happy to gobble up that debt and we don't have to pay very high interest rates. I do worry that there will eventually be a day of reckoning. I hope that once we get past the worst of the COVID crisis, which I think we may well be able to do that by summer, then it will be time to have a serious national discussion for the first time in a long time about maybe paying our bills.

“I think that the tax cuts that were passed three years ago were absolutely wrong-headed because introductory macro economics tells you that you should balance your budget or run surpluses when the economy is good leaving some room for deficits when the economy is struggling. But the tax cuts that went into effect three years ago meant that we were running a trillion a year even when the economy was doing well. That's a concern, but I feel like I'm kind of a lonely voice in the wilderness when I say that. Because in order to deal with it, you're going to have to cut some spending or you're going to have to raise some taxes.”

Weinfeld asks Grossmann to reflect on the events of January 6th and how corporate America has seemingly taken a different tact with its philosophy on donations.

“First it's too early to say on the donation patterns,” says Grossmann. “This is right after an election; this is not usually a high time for corporate PAC donations. Many of the businesses that have made announcements have just said they're not making donations for the next six months or doing some kind of pause. Overall, actually the data shows that corporate donations tend to moderate representatives. It's actually the individual contributions that are more likely to lead to more extreme representatives. It's not clear that those patterns are really going to change our polarized landscape.

“On the stimulus, I just want to make sure everybody understands that although state and local government funding wasn't directly included in the December stimulus, Michigan is still vastly helped in its state government by that stimulus package. Not only is money that is for health and education likely to be fungible in the state budget as it was almost entirely in the last state budget, but we also benefit in terms of revenues from those higher unemployment benefits and from checks going to individuals. So those stimulus packages before really helped to alleviate what would have been big pain in the state budget.

“Going forward, if we do get to that point that Charley mentioned where we start to see if not austerity, at least a turning off of the hose of federal money, we are likely to have postponed that potential pain in the state budget rather than gotten rid of it completely.”

Weinfeld wonders whether Democrats and Republicans may or may not work together more closely in the wake of November’s election.

“It doesn't seem like it's so far,” Grossmann says. “We're a few days after the inauguration and already there's a dispute about even how to form the Senate committees. There's no evidence that there's Republican support for any of the initial legislative proposals that Biden put forward, either the immigration one or the stimulus proposal.

“So there's a lot of talk about unity, but most of that was about being unified in values or against extremism or maybe toning down the culture war. There's not really a whole lot of sign that there's going to be bipartisanship when it comes to public policy. Democrats do now have full control and there are a lot of people who are going to want to use that full control to enact a lot of policies. We also know that the party out of the presidency tends to win the midterm election, and so they are going to see this as a fleeting chance that they have to potentially enact new policies.

“Now at the state level research shows that the party out of power in Washington is more likely to move their states more ideologically in the opposite direction. So we will be looking for Republican states to actually move rightward under the Biden administration while Congress tries to take advantage of its couple years with Democrats in the majority.”

“I think 2021 is going to be better than 2020,” Ballard adds. “But that's setting the bar really low. Certainly, the Trump administration never really took fighting COVID very seriously. They viewed it as a public relations problem, not a public health problem. It will be difficult for Biden’s team not to do better. I think there's a decent chance that we will speed up the shots in arms rapidly. But since there are still bottlenecks in the system, I think it's probably summer or fall before we really start seeing major progress, and then it will take many months to put the economy together. Most economists say that 2021 will still be a rocky year and maybe we can look to 2022 to getting back to an economic more normal.”

Grossmann welcomes his colleague from MSU’s Department of Political Science, Jakana Thomas, to the conversation.

“She’s an international expert on terrorism and violence,” says Grossmann. “Jakana, talk about how you think we should see the attack on the Capitol in an international context.”

“America is not really the only country to encounter many of these same problems,” Thomas says. “This looked very much like post-election violence that we would witness around the world in other countries. And post-election violence occurs often when people distrust the electoral process or they're unhappy with the outcome and so they engage in violence. A key point of focus here is a lack of trust in the institutions and specifically in the electoral process.

“A colleague of mine notes that what we saw on display on January 6th is consistent with democratic backsliding, and this is kind of where you see a democratic state sliding closer and closer toward autocracy very slowly. Other colleagues say that there are clear indicators of some deep-seated trouble ahead for the United States, and some of the key factors that are going to cause some of these problems are the gross economic inequality and the growing polarizatio...

Today, we're joined by Dawn Kepler, coordinator for the MSU Collegiate Recovery Community, and Chris Anthony vice president of US Consumer Goods at Salesforce. We're discussing recovery, sobriety, and the de-stigmatization of both on college campuses and in the corporate world.

Dawn's passion for helping others struggling with substance use stems from her journey with recovery, 18 years in the making. With a BS in psychology and work in the substance use disorder prevention and recovery fields, Dawn strives to improve behavioral health services by incorporating research on program design with the ultimate goal of achieving sustainable outcomes for those in recovery.

Chris studied marketing at MSU and has established himself as a business leader, public speaker, coach, mentor, and lifelong student striving to be of service to others. With over 25 years of experience in technology, he currently serves as the vice-president of US Consumer Goods at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, where he grew from account executive to vice president. Chris recently opened up about his 15-year journey with sobriety and established thesoberexec.com to help others navigate recovery and sobriety.

“Our Collegiate Recovery Community here at MSU has been on quite a journey,” says Kepler. “From the very beginning, it has been spearheaded by students. It's for students and by students who have come to MSU. It was approximately three years ago that a more formal program was established that is similar to what we have today, the Collegiate Recovery Community.  MSU has the first on-campus recovery housing in the state of Michigan. It all stemmed from needs being identified then students advocating for them and working with staff and faculty on-campus to make things happen. The ultimate mission of the Collegiate Recovery Community is to help students achieve their goals - their academic goals, their personal goals, and their recovery goals - and live a full college experience feeling supported in their recovery from a substance use disorder.”

Kepler and Anthony talk about the need to destigmatize recovery and sobriety, and they discuss how they dealt with their own recoveries while on campus. And they talk about how the pandemic is impacting recovery and sobriety.

“It’s a really challenging situation we’re in for a lot of individuals,” says Anthony. “It's hard enough for people to make themselves vulnerable to reach out and ask for help. When we're quarantined or locked in place, it makes it harder sometimes to reach out to others. And with so many of us working from home, the challenge around addiction in any form whatsoever is hidden more than ever right now because we're all on Zoom; we're all on video. Someone can easily be living a very dark moment in their life and get on camera and smile to everybody. When that camera turns off, they're back in their dark dungeon of whatever misery they're experiencing. They're not going into an office space where someone can notice that they're declining, or it's easier to hide use now because you can have a coffee cup with wine in it and sit on a Zoom and do that all day long and no one knows the better.”

“There's a lot of awareness, think goodness, around other mental health issues, particularly depression and anxiety,” Kepler adds. “I think that's the direction we need to go with substance use disorders. Some of the students we have in our Collegiate Recovery Community have told us that they were diagnosed with depression years ago and sought treatment for the depression, but they weren’t made aware that their substance use might be part of the problem. They didn't see that turning point until they were diagnosed with a substance use disorder and began receiving treatment and assistance for the substance piece.”

Kepler says students in the Collegiate Recovery Community “are some of the most successful students at colleges. We see it here at MSU and the research that's been done across the country. Our students have gone on and graduated and done amazing things. As anyone who knows an individual in recovery knows, you will be able to recognize the resilience and strength and dedication of that individual. On top of that, most of our students also have jobs and do a lot of work through community service. Our students are very busy, they're very dedicated, and they do go on to do amazing things after they graduate MSU.”

After 15 years of sobriety, Anthony felt comfortable with the vulnerability of becoming an advocate for recovery and sobriety and made his feelings public in a LinkedIn post. He explains how working with both Navy Seals and the band Metallica helped him come out publicly about his sobriety. The Seals thought Anthony’s sobriety was “cool,” and Metallica thought Anthony’s talking about it publicly would help others.

“I knew that I was creeping up on 15 years of sobriety, and I was thinking a lot about the fact that here I am hitting almost 15 years and yet I really don't talk about it publicly. People around me who worked with me would know, but I didn't talk about it publicly, and that was really bothering me a lot.

“My wake-up moment was, I'm like, ‘OK, if Navy Seals think it's ok that I'm sober, and the Metallica community thinks it's cool that I'm sober, I'm like, What is my problem? Why am I so ashamed and hiding this?’ On June 20th of this year, I decided to, quote unquote, come out about my sobriety. I posted an article on LinkedIn on the 15 Things I've Learned in 15 Years of Sobriety, and I put it all out there. I was scared as could be, and I put it on a couple other social media channels as well.

“Exactly zero bad things happened to me. In fact, just the opposite occurred. In that very moment, I had discovered my why in life. I discovered my purpose in life, and I knew right then that it was simple, to be of service to others. Literally every day, since that post, I get asked for help. It's been an outstanding experience. Here I am, and it's the greatest feeling ever. And if it gives anybody an ounce of encouragement that they can speak up about being sober and be proud of it, I'm doing my job.”

Both on college campuses and in the corporate world, there can be pressure to celebrate and commiserate with alcohol or substances.

“Look, I work in sales,” adds Anthony. “Anybody in the sales culture knows that alcohol is central to it. The phrase, ‘we wine and dine customers’ denotes alcohol. And celebration often focuses on alcohol. I think in the business world, it's very typical and normal.

“I've been navigating it for 15 plus years. To me, it's about saying no, and it's about remembering that I'm simply just trying to be healthy. Never, ever apologize or feel sorry about it. For whatever reason, there is often a massive stigma attached to saying, ‘I don't drink.’ That doesn't happen with mayonnaise or cilantro when you say no to it. People don't say, ‘What do you mean? You’re not addicted to cilantro? Are you addicted to mayonnaise?’ Nope. You just have to get comfortable in your own skin answering it.

“No apology is ever needed. There is no need to ever feel bad for choosing a healthy lifestyle. Now that I've opened up about my sobriety, I hear horror stories. But I am here to say that part of my other mission is I'm going to end the stigma, but there is no need ever to apologize for being healthy.”

“I made kind of a circuitous route back to the university, Bill,” Hendrick says. “I did my bachelor's and PhD degrees here and left in 1992. I did a post-doctoral fellowship in Alaska, and then I went to Georgia for 16 years. That's where I spent most of my active faculty career then migrated back a little bit north to The Ohio State University for about seven and a half years. I came back here in the summer of 2016 as dean.

“It's an interesting and exciting time for our college, and we do a lot of different things you would expect, of course, related to food and the environment. But I have everything from interior designers to soil microbiologists on my faculty and everything in between. And so my responsibility really is to empower my leaders at many levels in order to do the teaching, the research, and the outreach missions. We are a little different than other colleges because we're also the home for MSU Extension and our statewide presence there. And then also AgBioResearch, which is our agricultural experiment station as Michigan's land grant university. We have a very big international footprint as well and are literally on every continent and in many parts around the world and have remained that way here through the pandemic as well.”

Hendrick tells Beekman how the pandemic is impacting the college’s efforts.

“We do have a very big footprint. I think we are definitely the university's biggest tenant in terms of acres occupied. When the governor's executive order initially came out, there were exemptions for things related to food and fiber production, including research. So we had both the fortune and the big lift of getting our research adapted to this new operating environment. And one of the things that couldn't go interrupted at all was all the care for all the things that we have custodial responsibility for. All of us have been focused on the two legged, right? It's about keeping ourselves and our colleagues and our students and those around us healthy. But I've got a lot to care for with four, six, eight or even 100 legs. And I have entomology and fisheries and wildlife and packaging.

“So there are spins and feathers and furs, and all those things require care. Some require more than others. Some it's feeding and watering and looking after basic medical care. But at our dairy facility, those cows need to be milked every day and now we're milking them twice a day. And so much credit to my staff and the staff leaders and faculty and my administrators for keeping all those things going. And we've been remarkably uninterrupted, but it was a very big lift early on getting things going. When we moved to remote work in late March, we were right on the cusp of the start of the growing season. So crops and other things need to go out and not just ours to support our work, but our stakeholders, we're a very agriculturally diverse state.

“We are working with our partners and on farms and with them and in their facilities year round. But particularly during the growing season, we can't let insects or disease problems that might decimate an important food crop, for example, get out ahead of us. And we're always on the outlook for animal and wildlife diseases and other sorts of things. So it was a very big lift but with the help of the university and senior leadership and my folks within the college, I think we've done a remarkably good job.”

Of the colleges brand around the world Hendrick adds “it's less about the brand and I think more about the positive impact we've had in so many places around the world and continue to have today. It’s a real point of pride for Michigan State that a lot of people probably aren't aware of.”

And Hendrick says the college faculty had been innovative and really stepped up when the pandemic arrived.

“I think finding the proper blend and balance of the hands-on and the distance or remote learning is going to be important for us to find. And that'll take a while to figure out, but the faculty have been very ingenious and the students have been very engaged and accommodating.”

MSU Today airs every Sunday morning at 9:00 on 105.1 FM, AM 870, and however you stream at home. Follow and subscribe at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Dwyer discusses his career path at MSU that began in 2006 as associate dean for research in the College of Human Medicine. He tells how the Flint Water Crisis was “when I had the privilege of becoming the director of MSU Extension. A lot of people thought, ‘Huh, this is odd. A sociologist who has spent the last decade in a College of Human Medicine with Extension.’ I think a number of people were sort of wondering how all of that worked, but I think it all comes down to the connection to the community.

“Flint's a good example of that. I actually took on this role in Extension right when the Flint water crisis became so public and actually within the first couple of weeks dug in. We were able to focus our people that were already working in Flint and Genesee County over that first year. We nearly doubled the number of people we had working in Flint because of the importance of the things that we were doing there around nutrition and around working with youth and many, many other things.”

Dwyer tells Beekman how MSU Extension works in all 83 Michigan counties. 

“I think that's important because the way we are able to reach literally potentially all residents of the state of Michigan is because we have this 100+ year history and people know us and people expect us to be there. We're truly embedded in communities. I have a little north of 600 faculty and staff all over the state. And they're not just doing a job there, but they're sitting in the pew at church with people, they're at the grocery store, they're often elected to roles in their city or township or county. They’re really an embedded part of the communities in addition to bringing the resources of a great land-grant university to that community. I really think about our staff and Extension as being sentinels in the public health sense of sentinels who really know what's going on in communities.

“They really know what we need to be paying attention to and that has been important in our ability to address many, many different topics and issues and emerging issues of importance around the state. We work in so many different areas like agriculture, 4-H, and health and nutrition. And we work with communities on strategic development.”

Dwyer talks about how Extension pivoted its programming to address the pandemic and how MSUE itself helped to fight the virus.

“We’ve been able to continue to have an impact in at least three different ways. Early on we were positioned very well in communities throughout the state, including on-campus and in the Lansing region, in being a part of collecting PPE and getting it out to the health providers who truly needed it in those early days. We developed a protocol for decontaminating N95 masks that's very effective. Our staff made over 3,500 calls to businesses all over the state of Michigan to determine their need for PPE and to make them aware of those suppliers that might be able to assist with that need. So those are just three examples of things that we would not typically have thought of ourselves doing, but because of our statewide footprint, because of our embeddedness in communities, and because of the talented people that we have willing to jump in really on a moment's notice and address emerging issues, we've been able to play a key role I believe.”

MSU Today airs every Sunday morning at 9:00 on 105.1 FM, AM 870, and however you stream at home. Follow and subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.