EAST LANSING — Michigan State University's board of trustees made a clean break Thursday with embattled interim president John Engler, accelerating his plans to resign next week and appointing a longtime engineering professor to lead the university until a permanent leader can be hired.

Satish Udpa, MSU's current executive vice president for administrative services, was named interim president less than 24 hours after Engler submitted a letter intending to resign next Wednesday "to ensure an orderly transition."

The board voted unanimously to make Engler's resignation effective immediately — and install Udpa to run the East Lansing-based school until a new president can be hired by a June deadline.

"It was time to make the break immediately with John Engler," MSU board chairwoman Dianne Byrum said.

Udpa will be the second temporary leader of Michigan's largest public university since longtime President Lou Anna Simon resigned a year ago in the fallout from the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal.

On Jan. 31 last year, a different MSU board installed the former three-term Republican governor in the midst of a crisis following public revelations of the university's failure to stop Nassar, a longtime MSU sports medicine doctor, from using his campus clinic to sexually abuse female athletes.

Drafted out of semi-retirement, Engler was bombastic and at times defiant, often angering Nassar's survivors — and drawing fire from faculty, students and Democratic politicians alike as he sought to impose order at a 50,000-student university that had become disorderly in the wake of the Nassar revelations.

"A wrong has been righted today," said Kelly Tebay, one of the newly-elected Democratic trustees on the board. "I'm sorry it took so long. I think this is a day we will all remember when the ship turned around. I hope you've gained a little more faith back in your board that we can make good decisions."

Engler's departure from a job he was doing for free came six days after he told The Detroit News that some Nassar victims were "enjoying" the spotlight, and he made questionable comments to the Crain's editorial board that same day.

Engler submitted an 11-page resignation letter Wednesday evening to Byrum that didn't address the furor over his continued commentary about Nassar victims and their motivations that led to a $500 million legal settlement with the university last summer.

The former governor once said the lead plaintiff, former gymnast Rachael Denhollander, would get a "kickback" from her Los Angeles attorney for pursuing the lawsuit against MSU. He later apologized for the remark.

"For all of the progress the university has made in terms of … reforms, changes in policy and trying to heal, the ill-advised, hurtful and harmful comments that John Engler has made on more than one occasion continues to set us backward," Byrum told reporters. "And it opens the wounds once more for the survivors."

During Thursday's board meeting, Udpa got an ovation after the board approved a resolution appointing him interim president.

"I want to thank Satish to be willing to step into this fiasco," said Trustee Brianna Scott, another new Democratic member of the board.

Udpa was eager to move on from the acrimony surrounding Engler's tenure.

"I don't want to look back and point fingers because all we'll end up doing is point fingers at each other," he told reporters. "This institution means a lot to me and a lot of us and the health of this university is very, very important."

Udpa said he would not apply for the permanent job, which Byrum said the board hopes to fill by June so a new president is in place for the 2019-20 school year.

"I recognize it's a challenge, but at the end of the day this is a job that needs to get done," Udpa said. "We can't continue to operate the way we have for the past two years."

Udpa was hired by Michigan State in 2001 as an engineering professor after teaching at Iowa State University. In 2013, he was named EVP for administrative services.

"I think he is a natural healer," said new Trustee Nancy Schlichting, a former CEO of Henry Ford Health System. "I think he will bring stability, calm, good, thoughtful decisions to the university."

Schlichting, who is credited with turning around the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, said a culture change and turnaround at MSU won't be easy for Udpa.

"These are not easy transitions," Schlichting said. "I would ask the entire academic community, students, faculty, all of the leaders, alumni to really support Satish in this role over the next several months."

During his tenure, Engler hired new administrators, including some of his longtime loyalists from his days running state government: former Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Bob Young became the university's general counsel; Carol Viventi, who was a deputy chief of staff to Engler as governor, became a vice president and special counsel to Engler at MSU; Kathy Wilbur, who served in Engler's gubernatorial cabinet, was his executive vice president for government and external relations.

Byrum said there would be no effort to push out Engler's loyalists. "People will be evaluated on their performance," she said.

Udpa previously served as dean of MSU's College of Engineering and chaired the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, according to his biography on the university's website. Udpa obtained his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Colorado State University, where he served as a faculty member before becoming a professor at Iowa State.

"The easy thing to say would be to say I knew this day was coming," said Trustee Dan Kelly, a Republican. "But that would suggest it was a partisan decision — and it's not a partisan decision."

Kelly said it would "be a mistake" to portray MSU's crisis as resolved to the person they recruit to be the next president.

"I don't believe it is over. I don't think it will ever be over," said Kelly, a Troy attorney. "I think this is a chapter in our history and we can't ignore it forget it — we have to learn from it."

— Crain's reporter Kurt Nagl contributed to this report.

