Rick Snyder is the first U-M alumnus to be elected governor of Michigan since G. Mennen Williams in 1948 — and the only governor ever with three U-M degrees. We look back at the successes and controversies of his first year in office as well as the path he took to get there.

He had led such a sheltered life,“I didn’t know what a bagel was.”

The teenager didn’t know what to expect that November afternoon in 1975, when his parents drove him to the University of Michigan admissions office. The only time he’d ever been to Ann Arbor was for a football game when he was 7 or 8. He hadn’t applied to the University— or anywhere else, for that matter. But, unlike a lot of kids his age, 17-year-old Rick Snyder knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life.
He had sketched out a plan.

“I had a meeting with Lance Erikson, the associate director of admissions, and started telling him my story.” The high school senior had it all mapped out; he wanted to get a bachelor’s, an MBA, and then a law degree—and do it as fast as possible. “I built a career plan and said I wanted to have three careers, and wanted to have three degrees to set the platform for that.”

First, Snyder wanted “to do well financially, to help people, and have fun.” Once he was financially secure, he wanted a career in the public sector, devoting himself to helping people without worrying about money. Finally, “I want to go be a professor or teacher, and do the same kind of work on a smaller scale.”

He explained as much of this to the admissions counselor as he could.

Erikson looked at the boy and said something Snyder would never forget: Start now. “You should leave high school and come here. You need to start at the University of Michigan in January,” he told him.

“That changed my life,” Snyder says today, leaning back in his executive office, where he handles day-to-day responsibilities as governor of the state of Michigan. “It was one of those moments I never expected to have happen … but it really changed my life,” he says, grinning shyly, his face at 53 still remarkably boyish under a shock of premature white hair.

Rick Snyder was one of U-M’s youngest freshmen, crammed into a triple in West Quad with two very bizarre roommates, the more normal of whom “had a significant plantation in our room.” He had led such a sheltered life, “I didn’t know what a bagel was,” he laughs. Yet he went on to earn his three degrees in less than six years. The boy who grew up in a 900-square-foot house in Battle Creek, Michigan, became a successful business executive, venture capitalist, and multimillionaire.

His parents helped him financially with school, though he paid most of his way. “They never expected to be paid back, but I kept track of it all and calculated the interest, being a good nerd,” he says. “And I gave them a Caribbean cruise and a trip to Florida the day I graduated.”

How did he do that? “Oh, I invested in the stock market and did reasonably well,” he says casually.
Figuring out how to make money didn’t come hard to Snyder, ’77, MBA’79, JD’82, HLLD’11. He finished his bachelor’s degree (with high distinction) in two years, his MBA in two more. Three years later, he emerged with a law degree; he was not yet 24. He went to work as a tax accountant and made partner in six years. Next, he left to join a fledging computer company with a few hundred employees and an office on the South Dakota prairie. Less than six years later, he was president and chief operating officer of the Gateway computer firm. When he left in 1997, it had more than 10,000 employees, and Snyder was a multimillionaire.

He returned to Michigan, he says, because he and his wife, Sue, wanted to raise their three children, Jeff, Melissa, and Kelsey, in Ann Arbor. Snyder founded a venture capital firm called Ardesta and served as chair of Ann Arbor SPARK, the successful and widely praised economic development program.

But something was eating at him. Gradually, he got more and more upset with the troubled Michigan economy and the seeming lack of leadership in Lansing.
Finally, Sue suggested he run for governor. So sometime in 2009, Snyder decided it was time to move on to his second career. With Michigan reeling from the decline of the automotive industry and the political parties hung up in partisan gridlock, he decided to do just that.

Snyder didn’t do things halfway. He poured $6 million of his own money into the effort. He burst onto the scene with a commercial—first aired during the February 2010 Super Bowl—presenting himself as “one tough nerd” and putting forth his 10-point plan to reinvent Michigan.

“At the time, I was (so little known) that I was in the margin of error,” he says. Reporters scoffed at the idea that blue-collar Michigan voters would pick an unknown candidate who cheerfully called himself a nerd. Experts said that even if he could raise his profile, a moderate who had no apparent interest in the so-called “social issues” and strongly supported embryonic stem cell research could not win a Republican primary.

Snyder thought differently. “I didn’t see a lot of attention by the career politicians in terms of doing what needed to be done, and I had a vision to reinvent Michigan, focused on jobs and kids.”

He also had a mantra: “Relentless positive action.” Fix the problem, not the blame. Figure out what needs to be done; line up the problems; prioritize them; and solve them, one at a time. He said it so often that one young staffer reports that “We tease each other—is that action relentless and positive enough?”

Something about his fresh approach resonated with the voters. Snyder won the Republican nomination for governor with surprising ease, after a tough, fourway battle. After that, he cruised to an easy victory in November over his Democratic opponent, Lansing, Michigan, Mayor Virg Bernero.

Yet there were grave doubts as to how effective he could be, given that he had never spent a day in any political office. He didn’t know Lansing at all. He revealed in an embarrassing moment during a TV interview in the midst of the campaign that he did not know the name of the current chief justice of Michigan’s Supreme Court (then Marilyn Kelly.)

But he learned fast. He knew exactly what he wanted to do and what he felt needed to be done, and he hired people who could help him do it. “This man from the start has been focused like a laser beam on the economy,” says Bill Rustem, who joined the Snyder administration as director of strategy. What followed was phenomenal legislative success. Virtually all of the governor’s agenda sailed through the legislature. Granted, his Republicans controlled both houses.

But many of Snyder’s reforms were politically hard to swallow. What Michigan needed, he felt, was a more business-friendly environment. His campaign promise to replace the hated Michigan business tax with a much lower corporate tax rate was popular … until it came time to pay for it. Snyder had come to office vowing not to raise taxes, but proposed instead taxing private pension income. That provoked fierce negative reaction from voters.

Remarkably, the lawmakers agreed to a compromise that basically took the pensions of those who aren’t drawing them yet. Also controversial was a law that enables the state to appoint powerful emergency financial managers to run financially failing local governments and schools. And the state budget process resulted in a cut to higher education appropriations that had a direct impact on his alma mater. The Ann Arbor campus absorbed a 15 percent cut from the previous year’s appropriation, the largest in the University’s 194-year history.

What was most surprising was his political skill. In recent years, quarrelling legislatures and governors often went right up to or entirely missed the September 30 deadline for passing a budget. When Snyder announced he wanted the budget passed by Memorial Day, people laughed. But the legislature did just that. There were some bitter protests, and his popularity took a nosedive. But an attempt to collect enough signatures to recall the governor fizzled out.

Many of the skills he used, Snyder says, reflecting in his office late last summer, stemmed from experiences at U-M. He told graduating seniors at the University’s spring commencement in May that a work-study job he landed as a freshman “gave me the fortitude and dedication to survive that first semester.”

He also knows the importance of grading and feels that citizens have the right to grade him, too. He knows that, regardless of early legislative successes, it will take some time to judge just how effective and success ful his reforms will be. Early on, his administration set up an online “dashboard” (www.michigan.gov/Midashboard) where people can measure the state’s progress in a number of key areas.

Snyder says he will run for a second term. So, if he wins, he will be out of office after eight years. After that, how does he want history to judge him? The governor thinks of it in terms of a report card. For him to get a passing grade, “What should my report card say? Two things: One, that I did what I said I was going to do. And the other is, did I build a long-term legacy of success that had nothing to do with me?

“A legacy, that is, that leaves a vision for Michigan that’s constructive and positive, a plan, and a cultural change, and how to operate in it, and a group of people, who, regardless of their party, are excited about it. What I wanted was to leave a legacy that no one ever says is about Rick Snyder. It is about saying, OK, here’s a good 20-year run or a 30-year run (of economic prosperity in Michigan).”

If that happens, this governor won’t have to worry about being forgotten. The life plan he crafted as a teenager calls for one more career after politics, a career as a teacher or professor. When that time comes, would he consider returning to U-M?

“Certainly!” the governor said, with a grin.

Jack Lessenberry, MA’79, is a full-time member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University, the ombudsman for the Toledo Blade, and the senior political analyst for Michigan Radio.