Just a little shortfall

What’s $3.1 million to the UofA?

— TODAY’S QUIZ: Which is more impressive, (a) that the Division of “Advancement” at the University of Arkansas, the one at Fayetteville, the “flagship” campus, had overspent its already bulging $10-million budget by $3.1 million at the end of the last fiscal year, or (b) that the chief of said division is paid $348,175 a year to preside over such a performance?

Maybe neither. Maybe what’s most impressive is (c) that it should have taken until this week to tell Arkansas’ taxpayers, not to mention all those generous donors to the University of Arkansas’ development, about the shortfall. Even though the official in charge of that division—the selfsame chief fundraiser, Brad Choate—had learned about this little problem at the end of June. (Hey, it costs money to promote a flagship.)

Mr. Choate then spent months, with the help of the bean-counters in the university’s Finance and Administration office, trying to figure out how this could have happened. Some of us who don’t have millions to overspend are still wondering. Because $3.1 million sounds like an awful lot to lose track of.

The university’s chancellor, G. David Gearhart, has decided, understandably enough, that the university will not be renewing Mr. Choate’s appointment at the end of this fiscal year. The only question that decision raises is why it’s taking till next June to end Brad Choate’s tenure as chief of advancement, and why he’ll be retaining that now ironic title till then.

If the chancellor’s decision can be questioned, it’s only because he’s shown such extraordinary leniency. At least it would be extraordinary in the business world, surely, or anywhere else outside the mysterious realm of high-level university administrators, whose plush benefits may insulate them from petty details like keeping budgets balanced. In this case, millions were overspent without the spenders’ knowing it till it was too late to stop the drain. And it became a flood.

STRANGELY enough, this Division of Advancement and Overspending has a budget officer who’s supposed to prevent just this sort of embarrassment. Or rather did have till this little matter surfaced. Joy Sharp now has been reassigned—not fired, of course, this being a university administration—to a post where she’ll have nothing to do with budgets. It’s in Human Resources, of course, she being such a valuable one, till her appointment ends at the same time her boss’ does at the end of next June.

There’s doubtless more to come out, and it’s possible things are not what they now seem, so we’ll be standing by for the next revelation(s) in the paper, and prepared to revise any early and incautious judgments. But for now this debacle does not reflect well on the university’s administration, particularly on those who’d been entrusted with its “advancement.”

In the meantime, Ms. Sharp will have to take about a $23,000 pay cut—from $91,086 a year to only $68,314. Life can be tough in a university bureaucracy. Even in one full of cubbies to shelter officials who have messed up big-time, i.e., on a scale of $3.1 million. At least that’s big-time from the view of us working stiffs out here in the merely private sector, whose taxes and donations pay for things like the Division of Advancement at dear old UA-F. Which is supposed to be an institution of higher education, not low standards of accounting. Ah, well, you can’t say this latest episode hasn’t been educational. At least it darned well better be.

The best explanation for the shortfall Chancellor Gearhart could offer this week was that the Division of Advancement, which doesn’t sound all that advanced just now, used “anticipated investment revenues to meet current budget obligations,” a sure way to invite financial trouble. Call it deficit spending—that is, spending money one doesn’t have. Not a good habit, as almost every news story about the federal government’s fiscal problems demonstrates.

IN THE END, the chancellor and skipper of the university’s Flagship Campus reverted to the native tongue of university administrators, the dim cliché: “It is what it is,” he said. But is it what it had to be if this division of his administration had been well managed by even minimal standards?

When the university’s vice chancellor for Finance and Administration—Don Pederson—was asked if the folks in the Advancement Division had been engaging in deficit spending, he responded: “They were, and they didn’t know it.”

We’re not sure which is worse. Probably not knowing it. If money managers don’t know what they’re doing, the money is bound to go astray.

Asked to comment on this $3.1 million screw-up, Chief Choate offered not an explanation but a press release. It certainly wasn’t an apology. That would have been too simple, too straightforward, too much like accepting responsibility for what had happened on his watch. As in “I’m sorry.” (Or, if he had to elaborate, “I’m sorry, no excuse.”) Instead, he took this occasion to toot his own sizable horn—at length: “With 32 years of proven loyalty, dedication, integrity and success, my career of service to higher education stands on its own. . . . .”

Goodness. The man does sound like the stereotypical university factotum, a pompous little bureaucrat with an inflated ego puffed up by little but the power to raise and spend a lot of other people’s money. Or in this case misspend it. If his long career of public service, including its grand $3.1-million culmination at the University of Arkansas, stands on its own, then you have to wonder what stumbling would be.

Ah, well, should Chief Choate be looking for other employment as of June 30, 2013, the end of the next fiscal year, or even before, he can always send a copy of his résumé to Washington. Something tells us he’d fit right in.

Editorial, Pages 14 on 12/06/2012

Upcoming Events