IT NOW turns out that, two days after the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville announced the successor to its departing director for “advancement,” who was leaving under considerable pressure, a legal agreement was executed spelling out the deal. To cut through all the boilerplate, the agreement amounted to: “We won’t sue you if you won’t sue us.”
But it has taken five months for this alleged public university to let the public in on the details of the deal, and then only at the prompting of a Freedom of Information request that came from the Democrat-Gazette. Once again the molasses-like reflexes of the school’s chancellor, the redoubtable G. David (Speedy) Gearhart, came slowly into play. Very slowly.
Ah, well, at least this time the chancellor and the secretive bureaucracy he heads didn’t have to be sued to tell the rest of us what th’ heck was going on inside the water-tight compartments of the university system’s “flagship” campus, where light all too seldom penetrates.
The school was confronted by a financial crisis in its fund-raising division back in the middle of 2012, but it took till almost the end of that year for its administration to get even a loose estimate of the deficits that had accumulated in that division over the years under the direction of its chief fundraiser, who should have been operating under the guidance of that selfsame chancellor. Just as all the vice-chancellors should be.
At the end of Fiscal 2012, the administration estimated that the division had overshot its annual budget of $10 million by some $3.37 million. Despite the chancellor’s first efforts to underplay the extent of the scandal, the truth began to trickle out, and could no longer be contained once those FOI requests started arriving.
Only now do we find out the legalistic details of the agreement that both the administration and its now former vice-chancellor for Advancement reached five months ago, which left him with his title and annual salary of $348,175 through the end of the fiscal year in June. Probably plus benefits, the way we read it.
The text of the formal agreement was sent out Wednesday. (What, no end-of-the-week document drop like the kind the White House favors when issuing a flood of waivers and other amendments to Obamacare without bothering to consult Congress? Let us be thankful for little favors.)
The unending legalese of this formal agreement, if you can get through all eight pages of it, confirms some aspects of the deal that had already been announced, making it even clearer that running a division of a university into the ground can come with some handsome assurances:
“In exchange for the good and valuable consideration required under this agreement, Mr. Choate hereby grants an absolute, unconditional, and irrevocable release and forever agrees to indemnify and hold harmless the released persons and entities from and against any and all claims and liability of any nature whatsoever, whether existing at law or in equity, including, but not limited to, any and all claims of any nature whatsoever, known or unknown, arising out of or relating in any way to Mr. Choate’s employment and resignation from UAF as well as any and all additional demands, claims, causes of action, or alleged or actual violations of law now existing, currently asserted or which might have been asserted against any of the released persons and entities at any time or for any reason whatsoever prior to the execution of this agreement.”
In separate but equally opaque and all-inclusive language, the university undertakes to hold Mr. Choate harmless, too. (“We won’t sue you if you won’t sue us.”) Let’s just say the whole tumorous mass of repetitions, clauses and counter-clauses reeketh, and any similarity between legal and actual language may be purely coincidental. It all should be enough to reduce any poor English prof on the faculty to tears.
OH, YES, the agreement also guarantees the aforesaid Mr. Choate access to “information that will reflect his accomplishments and achievements as vice chancellor for University Advancement.” There may have been no need to assure him access to information that reflects anything less than accomplishment and achievement, including one lollapalooza of a fiscal crisis. Some things may not make his glowing résumé as he moves ever onward and upward in “academic” circles.
Naturally enough, the quondam vice chancellor blamed an underling for the mess in his division. For at UAF, loyalty tends to go only one way: up.
You have to wonder if these people ever served in the military and, if they did, if it taught them much about accepting responsibility for whatever their unit does or fails to do.
An investigative report released in February found “a lack of management oversight, non-compliance with university policies and procedures and deliberate efforts to disguise poor financial management.”
The response from those supposedly in charge of things at UA-F? A lot of finger-pointing. That’s quite an operation poor David Gearhart runs, or is supposed to.
However cloudy, the actual terms of this agreement do offer the taxpayers of Arkansas and generous contributors to its university at Fayetteville a glimpse of sorts into the answer to a Frequently Asked Question:
Where does our money go?
Editorial, Pages 74 on 07/21/2013