Spartan Profiles: Thomas Watkins
TOP EDUCATOR
Education is too important to be let alone to the educators, it has been said. If so, then Tom Watkins, ’76, named Superintendent of Public Instruction in April, was the right choise. Watkins boasts vast experience in the profit, non-profit and public sectors. A modern-day Renaissance man, he has served the economic council of Palm Beach, FL, directed the Detroit Center for Charter Schools, taught at Wayne State University, was management consultant with Plante and Moran, Inc., was chief deputy administrator of Michigan’s Mental Health Dept., and served in a variety of political posts. “I had trouble keeping a job,” Tom jokes. “But I love what I do now. I feel this is my final exam in life. This is where I can make a difference.”
A native of Washington DC, Tom moved to Dearborn Heights, where his football coach as a juvenile probation officer. “He was a great teacher and a role model,” he recalls. “I decided that’s what I wanted to do, to help people without a voice, especially kids.”
He chose MSU because, he says, “it had probably the best criminal justice program in the country.”
He supported himself through a summer job at Ford’s River Rouge assembly plant and became the first person in his family to graduate from college. “My claim to fame,” he notes, “is that my roommate was the guy who got punched by Woody Hayes (after MSU beat the buckeyes 16-13 in 1974).”
Tom approaches his current job with tremendous passion. “My goal is to remind everyone that our public schools are the true Statues of Liberty,” he says. “We take the tired, the poor and the huddled masses and create opportunity. Public education is the bedrock of this great country. Can anything be more important in economic development? Or provide a better solution to the incarceration rate problem?”
