Luke Capizzo is an assistant professor of public relations in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences. After traveling with the Spartan Bus Tour through Flint, Saginaw and Bay City, he shared these remarks at the closing reception on May 7.
Thank you to President Guskiewicz, the remarkable bus tour planning team and the incredible participants with whom I shared this experience.
As a scholar of communication and former public relations professional, I think maybe more than is healthy about the subtle and not-so-subtle impacts of the metaphors that shape our worldviews and our actions, often hiding in plain sight in everyday language.
As we reflect on the deeply moving experience of the bus tour, I’d like you all today to engage in an act of linguistic reclamation with me.
We’re all familiar with deeply annoying office jargon: We “ping” each other to “touch base” and “per my last email” we “drill down” to “move the needle.” Maybe the forebearer of these statements is our somehow deeply insidious need to “circle back.” It connotes for me the annoyance of unnecessary follow up and nauseating bureaucracy, with a tinge of condescension and paternalism.
Today, my friends, inspired by our journey, I would like to reclaim that phrase. Let me explain.
Yesterday morning, each of us sat in a drum circle at the Freedom School in Flint: A moment that took me back to high school memories, that harkens back to African roots, and that creates, literally and figuratively, circles of care for all the children it embraces.
We walked the circular path around the UAW monument at Sitdowners Memorial Park. It was a timely reminder of the power of unity; and staunch togetherness, of solidarity in polarized and economically unjust times. It is also a reminder of Michigan’s and Flint’s crucial and historic role in making our country a fairer and kinder place for all of us. Unions work because we protect each other — through nurturing and reinforcing our circles of mutual trust.
The UAW also demonstrated, as did the inspirational artists of the Flint African American Quilters Guild, particularly Mama Collins — Big Stiches — the need to prioritize and value inclusion — of opening circles — while not losing sight of the unique power found in returning to the histories each group treasures and protects. Activism and care exist in quiet community spaces as much as in protests and picket lines.
We saw so many natural cycles and circles of life, whether returning sturgeon to historic habitats or witnessing soldiers on the USS Edson given the profound opportunity to share their stories and experiences after returning home.
Maybe the largest literal circles were painted as cycles of care and reinvestment through public health, agricultural research, farming, food systems and in farmers markets for local citizens through local products and produce. Many of these innovative and impactful programs were led by individuals I’m proud to say are my MSU faculty colleagues at the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health in Flint. This is a circle Michigan State was actively founded to invest in and strengthen — and it is inspiring to see the community input and partnerships making Justin Morrill’s land-grant vision viscerally alive in 2026.
Which should make us ask: What is a university today? Certainly, it should be a place that provides useful, professional, employable skills, a place that helps to lift people up to sturdier economic circumstances, an engine of innovation and a hub of entrepreneurship. But if those are our only values, what kinds of citizens are we making? Let’s think more about how we can support students and scholars who build circles, complete circles, protect circles, and those who make them more welcoming and inclusive. Let’s remember that our students come from somewhere and go to somewhere — that we may be brief, if impactful, parts of their arc.
When taxpayers ask why they should support higher education, fund public research, and, generally, let us govern ourselves — we can’t respond only with grant dollar values, journal impact factors and citation counts. As a state university, and as the pioneer land-grant university, it has to be because we are staff and faculty, each of us, for all citizens of the state of Michigan, not just the students staring back at us in a classroom. And how can we be Michigan’s state university if we don’t see the circles — and the ripples — we’re a part of beyond East Lansing’s green borders?
In the fall of 2004 in Case Hall, I took a class on ancient political philosophy with Professor Richard M. Zinman in my recently declared major in James Madison College: political theory and constitutional democracy. For the first class, Professor Zinman, slowly and deliberately but with genuine urgency, read and turned yellowed pages that had likely been a template for the same lecture for, at that time, more than 30 of what turned out to be a 46-year teaching career at MSU. He welcomed us to a community of reading and reflection spanning more than 2000 years of texts and thinkers.
In a 2005 essay he wrote upon receiving the MSU Honors College Award for Distinguished Contributions to Honors Students, he quoted his mentor, the eminent philosopher Leo Strauss:
“'Always assume that there is one silent student in your class who is by far superior to you in head and in heart.' He meant by that at least two things. First, 'Aim high.' Second, 'Do not have too high an opinion of your importance, and have the highest opinion of your responsibility.' His advice reinforced my humility. But it also conformed to the practice of my best teachers. All of them had invited their students to attempt to discover and overcome themselves."
I couldn’t help but think of those words at Freedom School. How deeply did we see that philosophy captured in the empowerment and affirmation of their work? And an embodiment of the school’s guiding Ubuntu philosophy — I am because we are — could take no other shape than a circle.
Like so many in this room, I have been shaped in ways large and small by Michigan State University and by the state of Michigan. After eight years in professional practice and nine years as an academic nomad, I, too, have circled back. Many of you have as well. The gravitational forces of these values are remarkably strong.
As we end our journey and return to our everyday MSU lives — and as we try to be scholars and empowerers that make impacts beyond the walls of our classrooms, labs and clinics — I hope each of us continues to think about the circles that have supported you, the circles where you support others and the ecosystems of care that you’re a part of.
And the next time I hear someone ask if they can “circle back,” rather than a smirk, I will take a deep breath and think about the ways I can make my circles truer to lessons I learned on the bus with each of you. I hope you can do the same. There are reasons we come back. Maybe it is only through circling back — remembering who we are, what this place is and where we come from — that we can, maybe, circle forward.
