UNCG's Financial Condition...Again

UNCG's budgets are big, complicated things. This makes it easy for people to blow smoke in your face when you try to talk about them. The favorite line is that money is already earmarked for certain things and that nothing, including a PowerPoint presentation from God, could change that. I will state, as I have so many times before, that is simply not the case. There's a pretty good chunk of change that could be repurposed towards our academic mission, but instead it is sitting on Wall Street earning some pretty fat dividends for its investment team. The choking off of these funds from the money flowing through the university is part of an overall scheme to shift money towards the bloated administrative machine by making the cries for austerity on the part of everyone else feel like they result from a budget crisis.

This isn't some half-cocked conspiracy theory, it's a well orchestrated in-the-open business practice. The numbers I've been giving don't come out of thin air, they come from:

• The State Comprehensive Annual Financial Report and Office of the State Controller Monthly Budget Report
• Fiscal Research Division - North Carolina General Assembly
• The College Board
• State of North Carolina Comprehensive Annual Financial Report
• 2014 Bond Report
• UNCG's 2013 Audited Financial Statements
• UNCG Office of Institutional Research
• 2014 Board of Trustees Report

This doesn't mean that I don't get a laugh when I imagine the folks in Mossman going into a Gringott's like vault to let gold coins run through their fingers as they plan their next heist...it just means that nobody should think that's what I really believe is happening. Throwing a couple of pie charts onto a website and calling it budget central doesn't really clear up the questions that I would need answered before I could let this rest:

Who earns money off of the investment of these unrestricted funds?
Why weren't they used as the rainy day fund to compensate for the disastrous $12 million 'giveback'?
What exactly ARE we saving this for if not that?

Somebody's got some 'splainin' to do and if they can't do it in language that everybody understands, they need to be fired and replaced with someone who can...that shouldn't be that hard, our university is filled with people who make it their profession to explain things to those who do not already know them.