This saved money should, by no means, be spent down to 0 and obviously the endowment is tricky, but imagine if we had used that savings account to deal with the $12 million give back. Or to provide copy paper to the campus or to pay for employee parking or, well, any number of things that would have been better than keeping it on wall street for the profit of others at our expense.
I'd say the new chancellor's first task would be setting our financial house in order - and clearly. I love his commitment to fun, but it's hard to have fun in the wake of the Brady disaster and even more difficult when the wages you live on leave you struggling to make ends meet while still paying increased parking fees just for coming to work. Add to that the distinct feeling (and overwhelming evidence) that we're being lied to about the money and it moves from fun to funereal.
Maybe in this context it's a little easier to understand the bad taste we get when we hear that the chancellor only flies business class, rides to country clubs in a shelby cobra, needs a new butler, and has gotten a fat pay increase over his disastrous predecessor. As the 'needs' at the top get bigger, the money gets diverted from below.
The NY Times has recently addressed a portion of this hoarding - using the example of Yale, but instructive for us as well. It raises questions.
Gilliam will either address them or allow himself to be bought, the choice is still his.
When you say endowment and $80 million hoard, do you think these are two separate things? That UNCG has $80 million somewhere other than the endowment which the donors have designated for a particular use and by law we can't touch except for what they (the donor) designated? In the past, yes Brady had a fund balance in her discretionary account but she flushed that a long time ago with the failed basketball debacle, so that's gone. Where do you think an $80 million hoard is being kept? Secret vaults in the basement of Mossman? Oh yeah, it doesn't have a basement. For f-ing sure the state hasn't given us any $80 million and we're a not-for-profit institution. If you can get the donors out there to cough up some non-specified money more power to you and by the way, if you spend the principal there's nothing to earn future money so keep those guys on the line for more free money to spend!
ReplyDeleteThose are two separate things. We have an endowment (which is about $251.8 million) and we have unrestricted funds to the tune of $80 million. I thought I specifically said in my post that we shouldn't spend all of our unrestricted funds...maybe that didn't come across: We shouldn't spend all of our savings, but we certainly could spend some of it. The money isn't being kept in Mossman - although that would explain why there are so few windows in that building (!) - it is being kept on Wall Street. This isn't some secret fund that I'm talking about, it's well documented and open to public record, it shows up in the audited financial statements produced by the university. The unrestricted component of UNCG's net assets was equal to $85,193,065 in 2013. UNCG continues to generate $20 million in excess cash flows every year - this is after paying for all operations.
DeleteI know Bryan has a big honkin' endowment and maybe their earnings are discretionary but even they with the biggest of the pot came beggin' to the chancellor every year for their share of her pot. Think we could get them to chip in on something Theater or English needs?
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