On April 1, Dr. Brendan Kelly became the 24th president of Eastern Michigan University. The university’s announcement called it coming home. Kelly grew up in Flint, holds two degrees from Eastern, met his wife on the campus and started his career there.
Three weeks after he took office, the MIFA State Finals were held in Ypsilanti, at Eastern. For Kelly, it was a familiar gathering: Michigan speech has been part of his life as a competitor, coach and educator.
Speech got him to Ypsilanti
Kelly is a 1994 graduate of Flint Powers Catholic, and that spring he won the MIFA state championship in Prose. Individual events had no class divisions that season, so there was one Prose champion for the entire state, out of a field of 30, and it was him. He had placed third the year before.
The son of Flint entrepreneurs, he was good enough at it that Eastern Michigan recruited him for its forensics program, according to the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. That is a little like being recruited to play basketball at Duke. Eastern is a founding member of the National Forensic Association and has spent more than four decades among the top teams in the country.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in public relations in 1998 and a master’s in communication in 2000, competing for EMU Forensics along the way. His wife, Dr. Tressa Kelly, is also a two-time Eastern graduate, and she went on to coach college speech and debate for more than a decade herself.
From competitor to coach
His first job in higher education was the obvious one. In 2000 Eastern hired him as assistant director of forensics and a lecturer in communication and theatre arts. In 2004 he moved to the University of West Florida as an assistant professor and director of forensics, and built a program that was winning national honors within a few years. He told the university’s news service in 2008 that students describe forensics as the richest part of their college experience, because it develops them as speakers and performers and as people.
He finished a doctorate in political communication and rhetoric at Wayne State in 2006 and kept forensics at the center of his scholarship, writing about political argument, public address and how speech ought to be taught. In 2007 West Florida gave him its Distinguished Teaching Award and Eastern named him its Outstanding Young Alumnus.
He served the activity well beyond his own team. He was president of the Florida Intercollegiate Forensics Association, sat on the executive council of the National Forensic Association and was vice chair of the National Communication Association’s argumentation and forensics division. The NFA inducted him into its Hall of Fame and gave him its Eddie Myers Distinguished Service Award. The National Speech & Debate Association lists him among its notable alumni.
From coach to president
At West Florida he rose from professor to department chair to director of the School of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts, and then to vice president for university advancement and president of the university’s foundation, where he led a $50 million campaign.
From there the jobs got bigger. He was chancellor of the University of South Carolina Upstate from 2017 to 2020, serving as interim president of the University of South Carolina in 2019. He was president of the University of West Georgia from 2020 to 2024, a stretch that brought record enrollment, the largest gift in the school’s history and a move to NCAA Division I, and Georgia Trend named him one of the most influential Georgians. In 2024 he became president of the Arkansas State University System.
Then Eastern called. The regents elected him in December 2025. He told the Eastern Echo it was the only job he applied for, and he has said that Ypsilanti and Eastern are where the seeds of whatever he has accomplished were planted. Meeting students on campus, he pointed out that he had once been exactly where they were, and that one of them would run the place someday.
It is a long way from a Prose round to a president’s office, and he got there one speech at a time: competitor, coach, professor, fundraiser, chancellor, president. If anyone asks what forensics is good for, Michigan now has a university president to point to.
On record
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