… is becoming a phrase to strike fear — or at least intense irritation — in the hearts of universities all over the United States. Whatever you think of his take on health care and other issues, Senator Charles Grassley is a fierce warden of public money, and he repeatedly goes after universities he suspects of wasting or in other ways misusing it. He writes them Grassley Letters asking them to account for what they’ve been doing with taxpayer money.
It’s usually when UD‘s talking about multiply-billioned Harvard, or football factories like the University of Alabama (which just cancelled a bunch of classes so everyone can go to a championship game), that she reminds readers of the remarkable tax breaks our campuses enjoy. They enjoy that non-profit status because they’re committed to the high ideals of educating citizens and generating important research. When it turns out that they’re just as committed to hoarding cash as they are to education, or when they ignore the whole education thing in favor of football, we should care. It’s our money they’re playing with.
America’s public universities of course don’t exhibit the structural corruption of, say, Greek and Italian universities. For the most part our schools are extremely cleanly run, it seems to UD; but Grassley and his staff have certainly uncovered questionable financial practices, and the ongoing story of the University of California San Francisco medical school is a good example. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
The UC system has agreed to hire PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct a financial review at UCSF, after a U.S. senator raised concerns about allegations of money mismanagement and university officials making misleading statements to state leaders.
The allegations came from Dr. David Kessler, who was fired from his job as dean of the UCSF School of Medicine in 2007. Kessler had repeatedly questioned what he said were “financial irregularities” in the dean’s office budget.
In a letter to UC President Mark Yudof on Monday, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote that he’s pleased that UC has agreed to an outside audit at UCSF, but noted several “troubling matters” at the university. He said UCSF administrators appear to have provided “misleading” statements to the California Senate.
… [Kessler’s] allegation relates to the dean’s discretionary funding budget, which he has said was millions of dollars less than what he’d been promised when he was hired in 2003. He conducted his own financial analysis in December 2004 and said he found an $18 million annual discrepancy…
These are large sums of money, and if it’s true that they’re missing, it would be good to know where they went.
December 10th, 2009 at 1:56AM
There is major corruption at Universities. Grassley needs to take a look at State-University Partnerships or when Universities set up sub-entities to provide "sponsored" a/k/a taxpayer funded services.
There is no oversight over these "sponsored" programs. The sponsored programs are provided as single or no bid contracts with no oversight as to cost or even whether the services are actually provided.
At least in our state. . . CPS services provided and workers trained by state Universities — corrupt; the dairy industry — corrupt, the Small Business Association and Development Programs set up at Universities — corrupt, child welfare training programs provided through state-university and other state non-profit partnerships — corrupt; state-university run healthcare — corrupt. 95% of the single bid and no bid contracts out of some agencies are going to non-profit and universities in our state.
The Federal audits on relating to University sponsored programs and State-Private and State-University partnerships are not sufficient to identify the fraud.
December 10th, 2009 at 1:58AM
Two corrections to the above post. We meant the dairy industry as it relates to University sponsored services to dairy farmers. And where we say state-private and state-university partnerships — we mean those programs and services funded with state and federal taxpayer dollars with no oversight.