ACTA's Must-Reads
« Work not so hard, play harder? | Main | Look what we found! »
Out to lunch?
It's news to no one that many students leave college heavily in debt. But what about colleges themselves being in debt? From North Carolina comes the news that Greensboro College has rung up a $19 million debt since 2001 and has been forced to pledge its entire campus and endowment as collateral to secure bank loans. The real shocker, though, is that the Board of Trustees was, in the words of the Greensboro News & Record reporter who broke the story, "mostly removed from financial decision-making." The majority of the 40 trustees, according to the newspaper, had little idea what was really going on. As one former trustee said: "If you're told, 'Everything's running OK,' and you're not told about problems, you don't go looking for them."
This is, needless to say, not quite the right understanding of governance. Trustees' fiduciary responsibility to make sure the finances of their university are in order entails asking questions and getting answers -- particularly when the administration goes on a spending spree to acquire more than $10 million worth of nearby property and double the size of the campus, as enrollment stagnates and the endowment tumbles.
Posted by David Azerrad on July 28, 2009 at July 28, 2009 04:59 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.goactablog.org/blog/mt-tb.cgi/657