The Spartan bus tour is an opportunity for our faculty and administrators to visit locations throughout Michigan and to build community connections and strengthen the university's commitment to education, research, outreach and our incredible extension program. And we selected the Detroit area to be this year's spring Spartan bus tour location.
I noticed that you went on your first Spartan bus tour last fall. How did this idea get started?
Well, I actually did this when I was the chancellor at University of North Carolina, and we started it back in 2019 and I wanted to get out across the state, especially with some newer faculty, to get to know the towns and communities that that our students call home, and so that our faculty could get to to know those communities better, and to think about, you know, how their research and scholarship might have an impact in those communities. And so it was very successful. We did it, what we did in 2019 then COVID got in the way in 2020 but then we picked it back up and did it for a few more years. And I just, I wanted to bring that same sort of a bus tour here to Michigan State when I got here last year, and the one we did in the fall, back in October, mid to late October, was a huge success. And so there'll be a slightly shortened version of what we'll do in the fall, but two full days on a bus with with about 5560 faculty and senior administrators. And it's going to be it's going to be really
cool. MSU built a center here in Detroit a few years back. It's on Woodward, not too far away from our radio station, as a matter of fact. So it's obvious that Detroit plays into MS use plans. So the question is, how does Detroit play into MS use plans?
Well, I said from day one that we needed more of a presence in Detroit. If you think about the fact that we have 560,000 living alums, Spartan alums, and 280,000 of them live in the state of Michigan. And I believe, and don't hold me to the number, but it's, it's over 130,000 of those in the metro Detroit area, of those Spartan alums. And so we already there are a lot of green flags flying around Metro Detroit, but we need to have, you know, show a real presence. We were doing this through our new partnership with Henry Ford Health, which is a really important partnership that was created. We're starting our fifth year of the partnership, big research building that's coming up out of the ground as we speak, that will be finished about this time next year. We've got our MSU Detroit center and community music school down there, which is something we're really proud of. That started around 2009 I think that might be what you're referring to on Woodward Avenue. We've got our Apple developer Academy, which is in a partnership with with Apple, and we've got the Fisher building, which is owned by the university, but we're trying to create more opportunities for the community to be engaged with us. So you're going to see a lot of green flags flying around Detroit. And couldn't be a better place to be doing it as the city is really coming to life again here over the past two or three years
you're on this tour, what sorts of things do you expect to learn or experience while you're here in town? Again? I
think it's about looking for for opportunities. Jerome, it's about seeing where we might be able to bring some expertise into, you know, we have a great urban city planning program that where we can partner with, we've done this in other parts of the state, partner with communities to think about, you know, affordable housing, to think about the way you can bring back small businesses. We did a lot of work in this coming out of COVID. So that's so it's looking for opportunities like that. It's looking for similar what we did with the Apple developer Academy. What you know, what are the needs of the businesses in the metro Detroit area, such that we can create distance learning opportunities for employees that need an Advanced Certificate of learning, or a degree program that maybe we hadn't thought about, that we can provide we've talked about considering our Broad College of Business is one of the best business schools in the country, and we have people knocking on our door for having more of a presence in Detroit. So we're going to be going to be looking closely at all of this and and, but again, it's also about showcasing the talent that we have, some of the stops that we're on, we will have our faculty talking about their scholarship. So again, the taxpayers of Michigan get to see our faculty at work and in the impact. Like to have a.
