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.

Who Benefits from UNCG's Cash Hoard

We've all heard that things are tight, and it's true, but only because the money is being choked off. You know who isn't feeling the crunch? The private equity fund managers who are being compensated through performance fees to care for both the endowment and UNCG's $80 million hoard.

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.

A Letter of Introduction to Chancellor Gilliam

I decided it was time to introduce myself to the new chancellor and so I have written him a letter. I have sincere doubts that there will be any response, but one is not needed if actions indicate an understanding of the situation.

"Dear Chancellor Elect Gilliam:

I know we haven't been formally introduced, but I thought it was time to say hello. Your predecessor certainly knew me and the Acting Chancellor has made it clear she is familiar with my work as well. I have had high hopes for you as the first step in a new era at UNCG but am having a somewhat difficult time holding on to my optimism.

Serious damage was done to the UNCG community by Linda Brady and before those wounds can be healed, we are in need of some plain speaking honest dealings. The ugliest of the scars was created by the scandal of the UNCG3. That injury was exacerbated by the mountain of lies that followed it and the complete failure to acknowledge any error on the part of the university administration and board of trustees. Instead, we have seen how executives protect each other and we have been left twisting in the wind. 

Your tenure here has started in the midst of lies that you did not create. It is just this distance that should allow you to clear the stables and turn out the darkest pockets of failure and incompetence. Your administration can only ever hope to escape failure, rather than aspire to engender greatness, while truth continues to be ignored.

Your choice is between restoring faith and hope to the employees at UNCG or acting as a plaything for scoundrels.

Choose wisely. And remember, as always, the owl is watching.

Sophie"

Driving a Shelby Cobra to the Country Club

Call me old fashioned, but I've always thought that the French monarchy would have faired a lot better had they not been quite so ostentatious in their displays of wealth while the people in the street were starving.

I have to admit that I felt my heart sink when I saw the picture of Chancellor Gilliam and his wife in a Shelby Cobra on their way to their welcome reception at The Biltmore Forest Country Club. It's a bit different than when I took my Honda to Subway for lunch to celebrate the beginning of my employment at UNCG.

Appearances are important and first class flights, fancy cars, and country club receptions don't exactly demonstrate a presence in the trenches with the faculty and staff who are constantly being told to do more with less. I thought we were out of money? The old ball-and-chain Brady (who by the way we're paying for this year without requiring to do anything as lowly as working) was already making 11 times more than the maintenance and housekeeping staff, what are we spending now and why don't the economic hard times seem to hit those with the most cushion?

Faculty don't have phones in their offices because of budget cuts but the Chancellor is getting some extra staff for his residence. Say it isn't so. Even some symbolic cutting of luxury would go a long way toward sending the hopeful message: I am here because I want to be, not because it was the best way for me to get richer.

I've held my tongue, watched and waited, desperately optimistic, but it's getting hard to hang on to that. When I heard that Gilliam suggested it might be a good idea to reach out to the folks in Glenwood and get to know them, have a BBQ, I thought that was a good idea...or a good start (and something that has been a long time in the making). Now I wonder if he wouldn't mind taking a look at the UNCG community and recognizing that there's a lot there that could use some trust-building gestures.

Don't get me wrong, that's a sweet car, I'm not denying that, but I wonder if Gilliam has taken it by the staff food pantry recently.

A Student Has Questions for UNCG

After finding that, unfortunately, UNCG no longer ranks among the best value colleges (although three other NC universities do), students are asking questions about the difficulties they are having paying for this education. Coming it at #426, something we should find both tragic and shameful, all while raising the price of administrators and paying for a ridiculous rec center, means that students are wondering more loudly than ever: why am I paying so much and why don't I feel like UNCG is helping me get my degree?

As one student poignantly stated:

"It is so disheartening that The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), which is supposed to be giving students the opportunity to make their lives better, is so determined to implement rules and policies that make completion of a degree even more difficult than making passing grades. Not only are we forced to pay a 50% Tuition Surcharge, but we not charged said surcharge until MONTHS after they issue Financial Aid. Then, just before they drop the students' current classes, we are notified that any aid we are due in the coming weeks will not cover the previous semester's balance, so we have to come up with thousands of dollars - RIGHT NOW.

My questions for The University of North Carolina at Greensboro - UNCGare: How is this fair? How is this at all helpful to the student? How are these types of practices not a detriment to the existence and progression of "our" university? How are those of us paying for our college education independently (without the help of Mommy, Daddy, Grandparents, trusts, inheritances, and/or spousal support) ever supposed to attain the degrees we are working so tirelessly toward, if we are constantly being bombarded by financial, logistical, and administrative obstacles? Do you really care more about the date by which ONE of the MANY thousands of dollars you receive yearly is deposited into your vast bank account, than you do about allowing a student (who is not just surviving through, but THRIVING in college) to attain the degree they so desperately seek?

These questions, UNCG, are not rhetorical - I absolutely expect an answer. You do not have to answer them here, but you will hear from me in other forms and forums, so you WILL answer them at some point. You will see and hear from me very soon."

Whatever excuses the administration at UNCG wants to make (ranging from the 'everybody is doing it' model to the 'it's not our fault' version) there are things that are adding to the costs that we very clearly have the ability to control and the failure to do so is as damning as actively picking the pockets of students when they are walking to class. We continue to downgrade the quality of the institution when we drive away dedicated staff, revolt dedicated faculty, and squander our money on unnecessary bean counters with fancy titles but little to offer.

It appears, dear UNCG, that the owl may have a larger family than you expected. A response is in order - and look sharp about it.

I'm All Ears

April 22 was the last I heard of Edna Chun's grievance. Has she been healed? Has she been kidnapped by aliens? Both? I don't know, but any information anybody has would be most helpful (said while batting my long lashes and in my best southern belle voice).

People are marking their calendars for the new chancellor as if we should start counting from the year 0 again. You don't make it this far if you won't play ball though...as Tom Ross unceremoniously discovered (and he actually thought he was playing ball to, so you can imagine the surprise!) I have to admit that despite my initial, possibly espresso fueled, optimism, the more I think about it, the more I can't help but wonder how somebody who is everything that the little people are hoping for have been the person chosen for the position. Is it because Fennebresque couldn't lead the show on his own as he has always has done in his past? Is it because the trade off for getting this chancellor would make some different choice for another position more palatable?

Is this a give away because Gilliam will appear a gift while someone like Art Pope becomes president of the system?

Has some other mechanism for converting Greensboro's real estate into privately held, publicly funded projects?

Will any of this make any difference in the daily lives of the staff? Or is it the same sh*$ different day?

There are some deep, core issues here that will most likely escape the view of the new chancellor as he continues to negotiate himself into power. Maybe we can help keep those before him. We brought down Brady and a number of her creatures, but our work isn't over. Let me help in whatever way I can - I'm not only watching, I'm also listening.

uncgcleanhouse@yahoo.com - to send an email
or you can leave an anonymous comment on my blog which then comes directly to me for moderation (let me know if you don't want it published) but doesn't require an email address or name to be attached.

Keep in touch.

Hope is the Thing with Feathers

So, Brady is gone, right? Members of the university community should be linking arms and singing! Birds should be landing on our shoulders! And yet, the best we can see right now is the hope that we can be optimistic. Why is that? I think that Richard Levy has said it brilliantly, and so I share his thoughts with you below:

"Chancellor Brady is gone.  A cancer, nearly universally disliked and disrespected, has been ignominiously removed from the UNCG body.

     Yet one senses little joy as a new Chancellor will soon come on board.  Why?  Four reasons come to mind.

     --No apology has been forthcoming for the actions causing "Firegate".

     --Neither Dr. Brady nor those who chose or defended her have acknowledged what a huge

       mistake her hiring was.

     --There is no provision for rectifying the error when a bad choice is made.

     --Dr. Brady embodied many larger problems in modern university conception and

       management, none of which has been addressed.

     Dr. Brady has continued to defend her lies and inept handling of the firings that brought her down, disrupted several lives, and brought decimated UNCG's reputation.

     Her total lack of introspection is unsurprising.  But the silence of the UNCG Trustee Board and Chapel Hill higher-ups creates the scary impression that they either agree with her or just don't get it.  Either way, the continued input of these people and their future monitoring of the new Chancellor does not engender confidence.

Dr. Brady's unsuitability for the position was clear years ago.  She was temperamentally wrong.  She made no effort even to learn the names of faculty or even major financial contributors.  She ignored input and tried to rule by fiat.  She made poor personnel decisions.  She gutted academics while substantially increasing administrative and, especially, athletic budgets.

     Dr. Brady's style was already well-established.  A reasonable investigation of her time at NC State or the University of Oregon would have uncovered it.  (And perhaps it did.  Perhaps those choosing and monitoring Dr. Brady actually liked her style.). Whatever reasons allowed her to continue are scary; these folks might do it again.

     But people do make poor personnel decisions.  The question is:  How long do you go before you admit the mistake and correct it?  There was a large and growing disenchantment with Dr. Brady almost immediately.  Yet no one at the local or Chapel Hill level took action until her mishandling of "Firegate" forced Chapel Hill to force her retirement.

     These matters are all serious.  But they pale compared to the last item.  UNCG is particularly poorly run (according to a study undertaken by the NC Legislature).  But it is hardly unique.  Indeed, it is typical of public universities and colleges.  Several examples:

     --Administrative budgets, already outrageously high, continue to expand dramatically, until

       they are often equal to the educational budget, which meanwhile stagnates or is even

       reduced.

     --Athletic budgets proliferate, even as they lose more-and-more money, and at schools like

       schools like UNCG have no chance of becoming profitable and provide few measurable

       benefits.

     --A race to build silly amenities increases student fees substantially, even for those students

       who can scarcely afford it and who will seldom or never use the new facilities.  Little attempt

       is made to find out if the students even want them.

     --State universities are vastly overbuilt, under-utilized, and poorly maintained.  Most schools

       have no idea what their building utilization even is.  (Hint:  at most it is below 25 per cent if

       You count 8 AM-10PM Monday through Friday, plus summers.)

     --Universities are being re-defined so only research or majors with short-term practical

       payoffs really count.  The very real benefits of other academic disciplines are ignored.

     --Professors are asked to spend substantial amounts of time evaluating rather than teaching.

     In other words, public universities are being poorly run and dumbed down (even while their

heads claim they are being run the way a private company would operate, which is very unfunny joke).  But not a word from Chapel Hill or individual trustee boards suggests that these truly important questions are even being thought about, much less acted upon.

     That, more than anything else, explains why university communities are dispirited, and why Dr. Brady's eclipse, welcome though it is, does not lead to a re-set of confidence and optimism."

Hope may have feathers, but it will take much more to grow the wings we need to use them.

Dear Chancellor Gilliam

We have high hopes for you.

That's what I'm hearing from people all over campus. Remember what we have been through, remember to be one of us, remember to listen and to speak frankly, remember to seek wise counsel and heartfelt advice, and remember that disagreement doesn't equal enmity.

We are ready for a new era, but we still haven't put the past behind us and that will be your very first task. We can't just let it drop into the depths of our memories to fester; truth and reconciliation can move us all forward. It's the best way for you to understand where we have been and where we would like to go.

Brady was only one person, part of a structure, and that structure needs to be removed, cleared out and redesigned. We are not afraid of hard work, of careful study, of deep communication. I hope that you can be brave, courageous enough to lead us through this because the other side is a better place.

We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.

Of Blogs and Truths and Other Things

When I read my messages this morning, someone had sent me an entertaining suggestion for the best route to the truth. They are of the opinion that the UNCG police department either doesn't have the guns I wrote about yesterday and/or that it is not so out of the ordinary if they do since we are post-Columbine, post-VA Tech. In either case, they suggested that my blog post wasn't accurate and that I had been lax because:

"You could have asked the department to get the (updated) facts. "

While I am deeply appreciative of their efforts to get me the facts, something I am always trying to have a handle on, they have hit on exactly the problem. Asking questions here does not get you answers. I have spent years asking questions and the difficult is that I NEVER get answers. There are so many incidences where simple facts could smooth out any number of apparently gordian knots and yet, information is guarded as if it is a dangerous commodity, not to be trusted in the hands of the little people. 

The person who wrote was a graduate of UNCG and, I have to admit, an excellent writer. They quote (from a source I could not identify) that the six weapons in question were M-16 rifles that were given to them for free as part of the Law Enforcement Support Services and that they don't have them anymore:

"The 'found that the surplus weapons did not meet' their 'needs because of their overall length and began phasing them out for more suitable ones. Those six weapons were transferred to another North Carolina law enforcement agency and are no longer in' their 'possession.'"

If that is a statement made by someone on the UNCG police to a concerned citizen, then they are certainly not using the same spokesperson as the rest of the university, because even the simplest question gets a resounding 'no comment' slapped on it here. 

However, I'm still confused because the rebuttal states that the weapons were free whereas the documents obtained by the Marshall Project show a cost of just under $3,000. 

I am glad to hear they don't have them any more...if that's actually the case. I don't know a lot about guns and the response references M-16 rifles while the information from the pentagon references a 5.56 millimeter rifle - those might be exactly the same thing for all I know since the M-16 shoots 5.56 mm ammunition and holds 30 rounds as in the pentagon description. 

The UNCG police department has administration and it has staff, just like any other organization. At its helm has been a chief perfectly willing to arrest UNCG employees for failing to be as sneaky as those they worked for. I don't think a little extra inspection of their other decisions and processes is unwarranted.

And for those of you still hung up on my failure to be a journalist, your corrections and information are always welcome, but remember: this is a blog. 

Feel free to start your own.

Arming UNCG Police

We've seen signs of the militarization of the campus atmosphere, no surprise since our egregious leader for the last seven years comes from a military background and has the paranoia of a central American dictator. There have been canine units at tunnel openings, uniformed officers at silent vigils, and obvious police presence at board of trustees and faculty senate meetings.

The UNCG police arrested three of our fellow employees after an investigation that made the LA police/Simpson case look positively subtle. The UNCG police drew guns and assaulted a student trying to hang a banner. The UNCG police have a history of racial disparity in their traffic stops.

But never fear: now we're heavily arming them.

Recently, our little university police department was the recipient of six 5.56 millimeter rifles as part of a pentagon surplus program.

Six.

UNCG Police purchased 6 of these
5.56 millimeter rifles

I'm having a hard time imagining any situation that could be improved by this kind of firepower in the hands of a university police department. Who do they think our population is? Students, staff, and faculty are not an invading army, we are the body of the university.

I find it interesting that I am accused of potentially inciting violence but no mention has been made nor alarm raised about the possession of semi-automatic weapons capable of holding a 30 round detachable magazine whose major bragging point is "lower recoil and better accuracy providing higher 2nd shot hit probability."

When did these become necessary items to have lying around a university police department?

I mean, sure, they were a bargain at $2,994 and it is hard to resist a sale, but isn't there ANYTHING better on which that money could be spent? You mean to tell me that we were willing to pay $3,000 on semi-automatic weapons but we couldn't scrape it together to offer another section of freshman English (and at a savings!)

Wait, we spent more money on high powered rifles than the UNCG3 allegedly stole.

Faculty in departments across campus are having the phone lines cut off in their offices...but we have this money to buy assault weapons?

Everybody on campus can imagine something that desperately needed fixing, upgrading, or purchase - and now everybody on campus can know that the decision was made, instead, to buy big guns for our little police department.

I know the new chancellor is getting a significant pay raise and some nicer digs, but I didn't realize that s/he was going to need this kind of protection from the unwashed masses.

Do you think it's too late to send these back for a refund?

Jan Zink Advances Backwards

I guess managing an extra five people turned out to be too much for dear Jan “Basket Queen” Zink. But her reign was not without accomplishments, of course. It’s just that I can’t think of any of them. I’m sure something will come to me.

[Note: accomplishments to be listed here just as soon as they become clear]

She managed, in her brief tenure, to drive away Lanita Goins further reducing the skeleton crew of university relations refugees. Rumor has it that even the birds stopped singing and several typefaces left the university in protest.

She’ll probably be sad to give up Betsi Robinson’s old office as I hear she had converted it into a humidor for her extensive collection of Cuban cigars. I could be wrong though.

Meanwhile, we’ve received James Thornton to egregiously chancellorate us through the next six months. He may be a lovely person, I have no idea, but I guess by comparison, how bad could he possibly be? And, after all, with his expertise in fundraising, he may just make Zink even more redundant than she already was.

And, at the very least, Thornton wins some sort of prize for the speed with which he updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect his new position. Elsewhere, LinkedIn is littered with the former connections of our least beloved who, despite continuing to be unemployed (and unemployable) have failed to remove their “Vice Chancellor of X” designations. Of course, I’m not sure “layabout” or “disgruntled claimant” really has the cache they were hoping for.

I hope Zink recognizes that this is the signal heralding closure of her time at UNCG. She’s not long in her old position either as the word ‘advancement’ couldn’t be used to describe anything she has conjured into being since arriving on our doorstep and since she has been here for slightly over two administrator years, that’s nearly a lifetime of employment in human years.

To put all of this into context, I turn to Joe “Golden Tongue” Gallehugh who, in an effort to capture the subtleties of the complex organism that is the university, said: “No comment.”

I propose a basket of ice as a parting gift and directions to Seth Cohen’s office should she find anything about her exit confusing.

Dear Linda

Dear Linda:

I just want to say how glad I am that you did that interview with The Carolinian where you were egregiously candid enough to admit how sorry you were that we are all so difficult to work with.

I mean, if only we had known that none of this was your fault, that the problem was US and not you, and that we were simply too hard-headed to understand what was best for us, why then maybe we could have been better people. 

I’m sorry we are so disappointing.

I mean, now that you’ve explained, again, how difficult we are, I really feel like a great era of healing and togetherness is just over the horizon. After all, you only make enormous amounts of money (plus nice bennies!) to do your job, so how could we ever have expected you to be the one who was responsible for anything? I feel so foolish.

You’re right about so many things. It is tough to have a frank and open conversation when one side refuses listen. It is so complicated when something like the Faculty Senate can’t just nod and agree with everything and insists (!) on asking questions, representing various constituencies, and having access to information. Who could have known that people at a university would be so concerned with knowledge, right?

I’m sorry we’re so weird and different in that a racial discrimination scandal seems to have ended your career at Oregon State while an entirely different type of scandal seems to have brought it about here. Surely, there is nothing for you to learn from any of those situations because, as you so candidly explained, it’s everyone else.

I, for one, am enraged on your behalf that people would be so callous as to suggest that shared governance means a “sharing” of the “governance.” I can see why you would find that frustrating.

I’m sorry that the press wasn’t able to paint more glowing reviews of the change you knew was best for us. Where were the headlines saying: “New Rec Center Provides Enhanced Pigeon Roosting Opportunities” or “She’s Got a Green Thumb for Growing Executive Administration”? Instead, it was all “destroying my neighborhood” this and “overwhelming faculty dissatisfaction” that.

I mean, I know if that kind of continued conspiracy were to egregiously happen to me, the only thing I could think of to do would be to have people investigated and arrested. That’s what I did once when my cat wouldn’t use the litter box and I haven’t had a problem since!

Anyway, I know you spent a long time really doing some soul searching before you were able to satisfactorily conclude that you were blameless and that’s never easy, so I salute you.

Hopefully, everyone will be able to remember your honesty clearly when you rejoin the faculty in 2016.

Tchus,

Sophie

The Carolinian & The Owl

I spent just over four hours talking with Emily Bruzzo and Spencer Schneier. It was worth every minute.

They didn’t just ask me easy questions either.

I wore a hat and we sat in a coffee shop, just because Deep Throat was willing to meet in a parking garage doesn’t mean that I need to be so uncomfortable. They have promised me, and I believe them, that they will never reveal my identity. In fact, since they did not seem to be able to discern it, it is even more certain it would not be revealed.

They have treated the story with respect and I believe they gave Brady the best opportunity possible in which to express herself. Her message was no different than it has ever been: it’s not her fault, the faculty are irrationally difficult, times are tough.

Athena and her Owl

I do get the impression that she truly believes that is the case. I guess I find that slightly more disturbing than just assuming she was crafty. She may live in a reality where UNCG is idiosyncratic and all of this is confusing. Or maybe she’s “soul blind” it’s hard to tell, but it hardly matters since she has left. Maybe I’ll enroll in one of her classes when she rejoins the faculty.

To distill four hours of conversation down to a one page newspaper article and still capture both the essence and depth of the interview is no mean feat and I tip my hat to both Bruzzo (who endured the lengthy interview with the chancellor as well) and Schneier.

One question they did ask me but that didn’t really fit with the article is something that actually has come up twice since then and so it seemed fitting to answer it myself. Why the owl? What does it mean?

The owl is an ancient and contemporary symbol of wisdom (think Winnie the Pooh and The Sword in the Stone) and clear sight. The owl does not have her vision obscured by darkness and is able to distinguish the features of her surrounding even on the murkiest of nights. Particularly appropriate to UNCG is the close association of the owl with the Greek goddess Athena, whose Roman counterpart Minerva serves as a prominent symbol for the core of UNCG.

In ancient Roman folklore, the owl could be seen as a harbinger of death. If Sophie’s owl symbolizes death, it is only the death of a culture of bullying and of the obfuscation to which this administration has dedicated itself with the piety of ancient worshipers; however, given the paucity of ancient Romans reading this blog, I rely on the more popular understanding of the owl as a symbol of wisdom.

Finally, of course, the owl asks a very important question: “Who?” And its persistence reminds us that just because it is not easy to find the answers, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep asking the questions.