LITTLE ROCK — IT BECOMES clearer why the brass at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville would have wanted to keep a review of its Advancement Division’s fiscal misadventures under wraps. It’s embarrassing.
Once a lawsuit was filed under the state’s invaluable Freedom of Information Act (thank you, Winthrop Rockefeller and fellow reformers), the university’s administrators decided it might be best after all to let the public have a peek at this public information. As they say, the law is a great teacher.
Before pressure was applied, the university’s official reason for not releasing this trove of documents was that the officials who came off worst in them had to authorize their release-a doubtful rationale. Among those who doubted it was a professor of law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock who’s spent years teaching the Freedom of Information Act. The professor-Robert Steinbuch-said all along that the university had no business keeping these public documents from the public, and now that he’s had a chance to go over them, his opinion remains the same. Except stronger.
Naturally some sort of face-saving gesture had to be arranged when this secret review was finally revealed. Both officials in considerable question officially authorized the papers’ release, however unnecessary their permission.
Among the many still unanswered questions about the university’s handling of these papers is why this pro forma performance couldn’t have been arranged months ago, when Arkansas’ Newspaper first requested that the review be made public under the FOI Act. But as any GI knows, the brass always needs a cover for its screw-ups, especially when they’re big ones.
And this review found a number of them. In a now-released email from back in September, the university’s chancellor sounds shocked, shocked at what the review was finding. A former head of the Advancement Division himself, G. David Gearhart, asked: “I’m also being told there has been no budget formulated [for the Advancement Division] since I left the office in 2008. Could this possibly be true?”
Answer: Yes. For this shortfall turned out to be part of a pattern of ignoring deficits. “This issue has been building for many years and is not a one-year problem.” The review attributes that comment to Brad Choate, who is still head of the Advancement Division on paper. And still drawing $348,175 per annum till he gets kicked off the payroll by the end of this fiscal year. And yet various parts of the university’s overstaffed Advancement Division seem to have been operating without budgets year after year.
Embarrassing, all right.
THIS FINANCIAL review and associated emails also conflict with Chancellor Gearhart’s downplaying the seriousness of this fiscal crisis in public even as it unfolded privately. Interviewed earlier this month about the Advancement Division’s deficit last year, which was put at $3.37 million at the time, the chancellor spoke of it as “not good. … But it’s not of a colossal nature that we can’t handle.”
What a difference in tone from what the chancellor had told Brad Choate in a now-released email from August 8th of last year: “This would be one of the largest deficits of any unit in recent university history and will place a huge strain on available resources this current fiscal year.”
By September, the chancellor was describing the shortfall in another email to Mr. Choate as a “catastrophe.”
By October, he was saying the Advancement Division’s overspending “has created a colossal fiscal crisis.”
What was going on behind the scenes, as these emails reveal, was a little different-a lot different-from the equanimity the chancellor was projecting in front of the curtain. It’s an old maxim in showbiz: Never let ’em see ya sweat.
But now, in addition to a years-long pattern of deficits this cache of emails reveals, the university will need to explain its lack of candor about them. As usual, secrecy may delay the pain, but only makes it worse when the secrets have to be revealed. There’s no crisis so colossal that it can’t be made worse by trying to cover it up.
Ah, well, it’ll all come out in the wash, or rather in the audits that both the university and the state are to conduct into the operation of the university’s not-so-advanced Advancement Division.
As that noted fiscal expert Bette Davis put it in All About Eve, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”
Editorial, Pages 14 on 02/26/2013