News Articles

It’s 8:30 a.m. and Gypsy, Carina, Echo and Fanfare are getting ready for class.

An hour ago, they were fed breakfast in the warmth of MSU’s barns, which usually consists of hay and other grains. They’ll need it for the big day of learning ahead of them.

Gypsy, Carina, Echo and Fanfare are not students. They are among the 62 horses MSU keeps on its farms and today, they are being used for Fundamentals of Horsemanship, a class that teaches students how to improve their horsemanship and riding abilities.

Animal science senior Jessica Crane grabs a brush to use on Gypsy. This is how every class begins: each of the four students cleans up their horse before “tacking” them or adding the necessary riding equipment.

Brushing, tacking, then riding.

“If there's dirt under the tack it can annoy them,” Crane said. “It's like if you had crusted mud on your shoulder and you put a t-shirt on, it's going to feel nasty and itchy, and we want the horses to be as comfortable as possible.”

It’s not just about physical comfort, though. Doing this helps create a connection between the horse and the rider.

Animal sciences freshman Abby Shaw said that the best way to bond with a horse is to spend time with them – grooming and brushing them. She enjoys spending this time with the horses before getting on.

As the students tack the horses with martingales, saddle pads, western saddles, leg boots and a bridle, their instructor, Paula Hitzler, leans against a nearby barrel with her hands in her pockets, observing. Occasionally, she shouts out corrections:

“Becca, make sure that you're doing this from the side, from his side, not from directly in front of him. Because if he bolts forward, you'll get knocked down.”

“Go ahead and get one of the bigger pads, that one's kind of short.”

“He's going to be kind of funny about his right ear, so lift that cavesson off and put it over.”

Hitzler, an MSU alumni, has been riding since she was nine and working with horses professionally since she was 18. She came back to MSU in 1989 after the university was in need of a full-time farm manager of teaching and research center. At the time, Hitzler was working in Sonoma, California. MSU had no horse classes – at least not like the one that exists today. This changed shortly after Hitzler became manager.

She's been teaching the class for 32 years. But while the university has only been teaching classes like this since Hitzler’s arrival, MSU has a long history of breeding horses.

“We're the third oldest Arabian breeding program in the country,” Hitzler said. “They've been breeding Arabian horses since 1938. We have won many, many national championship titles with students, we have been nominated as a top ten breeder of national champions on several occasions, so the quality of the horses is exceptional.”

Hitzler said MSU runs its center like an industry farm, doing everything from breeding horses, shipping semen, foaling up mares, starting two-year-olds under saddle and showing at a national level.

“When we have students that take these programs, I'm trying to prepare many of them to go into the industry in some capacity,” Hitzler said.

Not all students that take the class want to work in the horse industry, and not all of them come into class with the same levels of experience. While Crane and Shaw have been riding most of their lives, some have a much more basic understanding of horsemanship and riding skills. Despite this, all students agree that Hitzler’s expert knowledge is what makes this class so special.

Crane said she learned more from Hitzler in one semester than she did in years of riding beforehand. Shaw attests she learned more from Hitzler on day one than she has from a trainer in her entire life.

Once the horses are tacked up, the students walk them from the main barn over to the indoor training arena. Today, the class is focusing on circling, a skill that Hitzler said is very challenging, since the rider needs to keep their horse bent and forward in order to maneuver them around a cone.

They begin with a warmup and some balancing activities. Hitzler gives notes on skills. She instructs on how students should hold reins as they ride. She corrects their form, telling them to arch their backs, to stay tall.

She arranges the four cones to create a wide oval, which she stands in the middle of while the students practice circling around her. Just like while tacking, Hitzler shouts advice to the group.

“Think about riding a horse like driving a car – you have to drive it, you can't just sit there and be a passenger. You have to communicate using your legs, your seat, your hands in advance to tell them exactly how you want to go.”

This need for constant communication with the horse is something Hitzler emphasizes throughout the lesson. It's easy, Hitzler said, for students to get frustrated while learning this, especially if they’ve ridden before.

“What's frustrating for students is they've ridden, they've not fallen off very much, so they think they're advanced,” Hitzler said. “My definition of advanced is a lot more in depth than what I think students think of themselves.”

As one student struggles with her horse, Hitzler notices she might be close to crying. This is something Hitzler says is common in this class, but not frowned upon.

Crane, who is taking this class for the third time and is making perfect circles around her cone, speaks up, saying that she cried the first time she tried this skill. She says she’s fine now and she wore waterproof mascara.

“But if you cry, I cry,” Hitzler said. “That's the problem. So, if you're going to cry, I will have to wear waterproof mascara.”

Once they master circling, everything after that will come much easier, Hitzler said, and by the end of the semester, they will be different students. But to get there, she said it will take a lot of hard work, something Hitzler believes is necessary to succeed in any aspect of life.

A final time, Hitzler speaks to the group:

“Did you know that's a metaphor for life? That if you never are challenged in life, how do you expect to become strong in your character, to have resilience, to know that it's okay to fail and you still can be successful? You have to work through the failure of it. If you quit when you fail, you're going to be quitting your whole life. So, all of these things could be a metaphor for how you handle challenges in your life," Hitzler said.

Next class, they’ll all get back on their horses and try again.

After the events of Feb. 13, MSU’s campus went quiet. Students went home, classes were cancelled and dining halls reduced their hours. But along with these absences were groups of potential new students, touring campus for the first time to see if MSU would become their home for the next four years.

While most students returned to campus the following week, MSU tours took a bit longer to bring operations back. Initially, the tours program planned to resume on the Monday classes started back up. However, journalism sophomore Reese Carlson said after tour guides filled out a survey giving their opinions on returning, it was clear students needed more time.

“I'm going to assume they got an overwhelmingly, 'No', (response) because, I mean, that's what I said,” Carlson said. “They had a meeting with all of us probably two weeks after we'd been back ... and they gave us an overview and everything about what their game plan was.”

Resuming tours took a lot of planning. New routes needed to be created since all tours previously began at the Union. Currently, they start at the Kellogg Center and only go as north as the library. Carlson said tour guides avoid areas around the MSU Union and Berkey Halls in an effort to deter questions.

She said another logistical change was that they didn’t go into residential halls because students had expressed that they felt unsafe with strangers coming in their hallway. While she said some parents were upset about this, Carlson said she understood why the decision was made.

But while these logistical changes were made, it was clear it would take much more than different routes for tour guides to feel comfortable coming back to work.

Psychology sophomore Hannah Greenspan said her biggest concern was being asked about where she was the night of the shooting and having to answer questions about safety.

“This was actually something I think I texted during the shooting to one of my tour guide friends,” Greenspan said. “I was like, ‘I don't know how I'm supposed to tell people MSU is a safe place when they know this huge unsafe thing happened.’”

Carlson said she would feel awkward “hyping up MSU” when she didn’t agree with how the university handled some things. She said the first few weeks back, she didn’t talk about safety at all because she didn’t want to invite questions about it.

“I feel like I'd probably be OK answering questions now, but in those first couple weeks, I literally think I would've started crying,” Carlson said. “Coming back to tours was like, ‘Am I going to get bombarded by these questions?’ because as soon as we're left with them, they literally gang up on you.”

Carlson said she remembered giving tours following the disappearance and death of Brendan Santo in the fall of 2021 and feeling “attacked” by questions about how MSU was handling the situation.

Greenspan said anyone who would be going on a tour following the shooting received strict instructions via email before their tour and once they arrived that they were not allowed to ask tour guides personal questions about the incident. She said the guests were told to contact a supervisor or the MSU tours email if they had any questions about Feb. 13.

Greenspan said participants on her tours have followed these instructions. However, she said one of her friends who was leading a tour for middle and high schoolers had to answer some insensitive questions.

Carlson, led the first tour once operations resumed, said that MSU told tour guides if they were asked uncomfortable questions, they were allowed to end the tour and guides could leave right then and there.

Biochemistry and molecular biology/biotechnology sophomore Madison Enviya, who was in training to become a tour guide, said she feels like this policy has been helpful, and she has felt supported by MSU. 

“They did a very good job, I think, about the whole situation,” Enviya said. “They gave us support, like links to stuff to help us out. I know my tour guide class instructor emailed us separately too, and was like, 'If you guys need anything from me or the other supervisors that are in your class, we're always here to help.' And then the class that we did coming back, we spent like a little bit just talking about it.”

Greenspan also said she was appreciated MSU tours giving tour guides the time to heal, the flexibility to return and the option to end tours. 

But even when given the option to take an extended break, Greenspan said she was ready to go back to tours right away. She said while she was worried about what she might be asked, she likes knowing she’s making an impact on high schoolers’ college decisions, even if they decide not to come to MSU.

For her, going back to work was an essential part of the healing process.

“One of my favorite things about giving tours is that it reconfirms how much I love MSU because I just sit there for an hour and a half and talk about how much I love MSU,” Greenspan said. “I think that was kind of what I needed afterwards.”

While the University of Michigan Graduate Employees Organization, or GEO, goes on strike, demanding higher wages, President Ava Hill of the MSU Graduate Employees Union, or GEU, said the union supports the GEO in their goal.

According to the GEO 2022-2023 Contract Campaign, the GEO is proposing “a living wage of $38,537 per year” and their “salary pegged to the cost of living for 12 months, with the option to defer wages until the summer.” This would be a $14,000 increase to their minimum stipend, costing UM $30 million, which the GEO says is a “drop in the bucket"  for them.

While this would equate to a 60% increase in wages, Hill said the numbers can sound a lot bigger than they are because people don’t know the size of the starting salaries.

“I don't know exactly what (UM graduate employee) salary numbers are, but I know here (at MSU), the contract minimum for graduate assistants works out to like $16,000 a year,” Hill said. “So even if we were to talk about, say, 60% of that, I mean, that's a big raise, but that's still not even a living wage.”

Hill said the MSU GEU is asking for a 7% raise, which would cost MSU about $1.4 million. She said that while this may seem like a big number, like what the GEO said about their wage increase, it would be a “drop in the bucket.”

Since the GEO has gone on strike, the UM has filed a complaint with the Washtenaw County Circuit Court, hoping a judge would order the graduate students back to work since the strike has impacted the function of classes and exams.

Hill said that people tend to underestimate how much work it takes to teach a course, something that is a main task of many graduate employees. Along with teaching, many graduate employees have research and coursework that keeps them busy. And with almost half of MSU’s GEU membership living on $16,000 a year, Hill said the salaries become a deterrent for people to come to grad school at MSU.

“I think the same could be true at U of M,” Hill said. “That it would benefit the university to pay a living wage to their grad students in the long run because they'd be able to attract more and better candidates, as opposed to just whoever can afford to scrape by on that.”

Overall, Hill said that the MSU GEU fully supports the UM GEO “fighting for their members to get a living wage” and fully supports their demands. She said she hopes their strike starts a larger conversation about the way graduate workers, as well as other campus workers, are treated at universities.

“There's a lot of people here who are overworked and underpaid, and I hope that this can be a step towards fixing that for all of us,” Hill said.

Music education and vocal performance senior Troy Forbush is one of the five individuals who was critically injured and hospitalized during the mass shooting on Michigan State University's campus. 

On Sunday, Feb. 26, Forbush said he is ready to tell his story. 

In a social media post, he identified himself as one of the eight victims of the mass shooting. 

"I took a bullet to my chest, had a brush with death, and almost didn’t make it if it weren’t for the incredible doctors who saved my life in emergency surgery that night," Forbush wrote.

Forbush spent a week in an intensive care unit and three additional days in Sparrow Hospital, before becoming the first student to be discharged. He said he lives in support of the four students who are still receiving medical treatment. 

Forbush, who is the social chair of the MSU chapter of the American Chorial Directors Association and studies within the MSU college of music, said his life is forever changed.

“There was a time when I used to dream of getting into this school— now, I represent it. My world has been turned upside down so suddenly, but I refuse to be a number, a statistic," he wrote. "Alongside my family, friends, community, university, and state government officials, we will enact change. I have a long journey of recovery ahead of me."

Forbush said he "blessed to be the first individual discharged." One student remains in critical condition, one student is in fair condition and two students are in serious but stable condition at Sparrow Hospital. 

Three of the students who were injured have been identified through GoFundMes created by their families. The families of hospitality business junior Guadalupe Huapilla-Perez, environmental biology and zoology junior Nate Statly and international student John Hao are raising funds to help mitigate travel expenses and loss of wages. 

MSU Deputy Spokesperson Dan Olsen confirmed the university will be paying the hospital bills of the five students who were injured.