The Michigan Constitution endows the fifteen state universities of Michigan with strong, court-upheld autonomy of operations (“constitutional autonomy”), insulating these institutions from state political intrusion. Governors of Michigan and their administrations must contend with this autonomy when attempting to set higher education policy for the most decentralized public universities in the nation. Understanding this basic characteristic is a prerequisite for understanding higher education and accompanying policy in the state of Michigan. This case study of Michigan, informed by oral history and elite studies methods, explores the views of Governors, Lt. Governors, and State Budget Directors on constitutional autonomy and state governance. These former officeholders served between 1983 and 2019, and interviews for this project spanned 2021 through 2023.These policymakers used available tools, especially the state budget, to exert influence upon autonomous state universities, although state higher education governance does not typically rise to their level of attention. These policymakers believe that the state’s universities are generally high-quality and constitutional autonomy is accepted, if not warmly embraced, by them. Their primary route of interaction with university governance was making appointments to governing boards, and different administrations held different philosophies about how to select board members. In this stable environment, very few serious attempts have been made at revising the state governance structure in Michigan, although some administrations have considered it. However, several concerns linger over university alignment with state demographic and workforce trends, and particularly regarding the performance of elected governing boards. There is a sense that more state coordination would improve state universities from the point of view of these policymakers, creating a tension with the belief that the universities are otherwise high quality. The relationship between the state and the universities is defined by transactional relationships, however, making closer alignment difficult. The boundaries between the public universities and the state are unclear, with universities or policymakers rarely wanting to better define these boundaries by risking losing existing authority in the courts. Respondents were not in alignment on even something as basic as determining if public universities were part of the executive branch of state government. With this uncertainty in mind, I ultimately define a Michigan public university by the following characteristics: they possess protected autonomy in their functions; they are organizationally separate from one other as well as the state; and they have individual governing boards instead of a system governing board. They are more akin to a public corporation than their peer universities in other tightly governed states.
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