On the assumption that little will be read these next two days, little will be written.

Merry Christmas and/or happy fourth day (and pending fifth candle) of Hannukah. There appear to be no Muslim holidays pending, but the new moon rolls around the day after tomorrow, a matter noticed and celebrated by, among others, all our Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan and other assorted pagan readers.

In addition to its other significances, today marks the 15th day of the coldest 90 days of the year, according to the meteorologists at the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, who inform us that–forget the solstice–the year’s coldest quarter in these precincts commences every December 10.

To those who dislike the cold, cheer up! You’re one-sixth through it. For us cold lovers, we’d better get going–only 75 more days to enjoy before the tepid period begins in March.

This was a bizarrely warm Christmas eve and Christmas day. That’s not supposed to last. So put another log on the fire. Serious dispatches will resume Monday.–Jon Margolis

As  some University of Vermont professors see it, one big reason for UVM’s budget crunch is that President Daniel Fogel makes too much money.

So, they say, does the university’s growing corps of vice presidents and associate vice presidents, some of whom got salary hikes of 25 percent or more when they were promoted. .

Fogel does make a nice piece of change, $301,144 in 2007 (not including a generous housing allowance)  according to an analysis of university records by United Academics, the faculty union  (of which, in the interests of full disclosure, I am a member).

Nor is he the only one raking in the dough. Not far behind him, with a 2007 salary of $264,275, is….Whoops!-a professor. Right after him was a dean, also an academic, not administrative, position. In all,  seven of the 15 UVM employees who earned more than $200,000  were academics, as were a large majority of those who earned between $100,000 and $200,000.

None of which proves that Fogel and the top executives are not overpaid. But the numbers show that if all the administrators who earned more than $200,000 agreed to (or were forced to accept) a ten percent pay cut, the university would save about $162,000, hardly a dent in the projected $28 million budget shortfall.

Besides, why single out the administrators? Cutting the most affluent professors and deans by ten percent would save about as much. The faculty union doesn’t mention that.

Administrative costs have been going up at UVM. Enrique Corredera, the university’s chief spokesman, said that there are only two more vice presidential-level officials than there were when Fogel became president in 2002.  He added that “several of these positions are included due to position title changes. They are not newly created positions.”

But he conceded that a pay increase usually accompanied those title changes, and a study of  university records by English professor (and union official) Nancy Welch concluded that many senior administration officials had gotten raises of between 26 and 36 percent. She said 26 administrators make more than $150,000 a year, meaning more than Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas.

There seems little doubt that UVM’s executive suites have grown more populous and more expensive in recent years. They could hardly have done otherwise. Under Fogel, everything about UVM has grown-more students, more teachers, more buildings, more money. And the plan is for even more growth of all of the above in the future. Clearly, UVM needs a bigger logistical/administrative framework to support all that expansion.

As to salaries, Fogel seems to have followed the old rule about how you get what you pay for. A high salary doesn’t guarantee excellent job performance; at least one of UVM’s recent high-priced hires “resigned” (the official version) after breaking the rules and wasting millions of dollars. By and large, though, good salaries buy good workers. It isn’t as though the senior administrators at UVM are anywhere close to hedge fund operative compensation levels. Even in Vermont, a low six-figure salary does not catapult one into the realm of the super-rich.

The union’s rhetoric though is often influenced by a visceral populism which is not directly related to its differences with management. Communications from United Academics often end with a quote from a university of Massachusetts professor who argues that every college student in the country could go to school for free if federal tax rates went back to their 2000 levels, before President Bush took office.

Possibly true, but beyond the powers of UVM to influence, and consistent with a political point of view that confuses $150,000 salaries with oppression of the working class. It isn’t that the working class is not oppressed. It may well be; but if so its oppressors are dong a lot better than Dan Fogel, much less his associate vice presidents.

United Academics also argues that Fogel has spent too little on basic academic instruction and research in part because he spent too much on buildings, notably the new Dudley Davis student center. It cost $61 million.

That’s a lot of money. But the building is boffo, filled all day and into the evening with students eating at one of its several food outlets, using  its computer terminals, or just sitting and schmoozing.

So successful that United Academics president David Shiman, who at first viewed the building with distaste because “so much (money) was going into that, and so many people who work at the university were  still not at a livable wage,” now concedes that the Davis center is “probably a plus” because it helps attract students to UVM.

Still, he said, there remain questions about its “magnitude,” about “whether it had to be everything it is.” A slightly scaled-down version of the Davis Center-say three stories instead of four-might have been just as appealing to prospective students, and perhaps $10 million cheaper. That would be more than a third of UVM’s prospective shortfall.

As would the money wasted on PeopleSoft, the financial/employee relations software that was supposed to cost $26 million when UVM bought it in 2004. Four years later the cost was $41 million. Then things got worse. Understaffed (maybe the university needed more administrators) the administration had to hire a consulting firm, which it also overpaid. Then it had to spend $400,000 for an independent investigation and audit.

Before the whole mess ended, J. Michael Gower, the Vice President for Finance and Administration (at $216,000 a year), resigned for approving contracts with the consulting firm that had not been approved by the Trustees or the president, as required by the university’s rules. The total down the drain? At least $10 million. The editorial page of the Burlington Free Press, hardly an anti-establishment voice, said the university had “squandered millions, enough to pay tuition and fees for nearly 500 Vermonters in a single year.”

Not that UVM was the only university that had problems with PeopleSoft, whose software is used by many colleges. Still pending is a $500 million plus lawsuit against the company by Cleveland State University, with the support of Ohio’s Attorney General.

Making it even harder to understand why UVM did not tread more carefully in its dealing with the company. Fogel “unequivocally accept(ed) responsibility for what occurred” in a message to the Board. But he was never admonished by the Trustees, the governor, or the Legislature.

“I’m not sure he’s had his finger on the pulse of the finances,” said State Sen.  Donald Collins, the outgoing chairman of the Education Committee. “I’ve worked with (computer)  systems. You have to have benchmarks, you have to know what the challenges are and how much has been spent.”

Whoever was responsible, the money is gone, and the complexities of accounting render it difficult to state with any certainty that the $10 million or so frittered away by mismanaging the PeopleSoft project would be available to pay the salaries of junior faculty, whose ranks are likely to be trimmed to save money this year and next.

One way or another money will have to be saved. Some in the faculty union want UVM to hold off on raising enrollment by another 300 students next year. They’ll add to cost.

But they’re also needed revenue. With state aid declining and the income from investment on the wane, UVM is more dependant than ever on tuition and fees-about to be $12,844 a year for Vermonters, $29,682 for out-of-staters.

Like so many financially troubled institutions these days, the University of Vermont is hooked to the treadmill.-Jon Margolis

Go the State of Vermont’s official web site-Vermont.gov-and you can find links to 109 state agencies, alphabetically from the Access Board to the Commission on Women.

What you won’t find is the University of Vermont; it isn’t part of any state agency.

That’s not how it works in most states, including Vermont’s neighbors. New Hampshire’s public colleges and universities are a part of the University System of New Hampshire. In Massachusetts, the public universities are a division of the Department of Higher Education, and the State University of New York is governed by a 17-member Board of Trustees, 15 of them appointed by the governor with the approval of the state senate.

Similar systems prevail in most states, said Richard Novak of the Washington-based Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. Whether called trustees, regents, directors, or something else, he said, the people who govern public universities are “representatives of both the state and of a public entity, so the burden really falls on them to be defenders of the public interest.”

Not in Vermont, where nine members of the 25-person Board of Trustees, which “has full legal responsibility and authority for the University” are not chosen by any public body or official. These are the “self-perpetuating” members. Every other year these nine trustees-they alone, with no participation from the other 16-elect three people to six-year terms. Institutionally, at least, these trustees owe allegiance to nobody except the nine who chose them.

This doesn’t mean the public is shut out of governing the university. The governor is always an ex officio member, and the governor chooses three other members.  Using the same process of choosing three members every other year, nine members are elected for six-year terms by the Legislature. Not surprisingly, the lawmakers invariably choose one of their own, though it is not clear that they are required to do so.

The president of the university is also an ex officio member, and there are two student trustees, each serving a two-year term.

Novak said that “only a handful” of other state university systems are run by boards with self-perpetuating members, and the only two he could think of were Pennsylvania and Delaware . But in Pennsylvania, only a third of the board members are self-perpetuating, and the power of Delaware’s board is buffered by a 13-member Higher Education Commission  made up of the heads of the state colleges and universities and five members chosen by the governor.

Of all the systems of public higher education in the country, then, Vermont’s appears to be the least public, not only because the state provides little more than 10 percent of UVM’s total  revenue, but because the people who govern it are less beholden to the public than their counterparts in the other 49 states.

It is also probably the only state university in which most students are from out of state.

“UVM is less a state institution than the others,” said State Rep. Harry Chen of Rutland County, one of the nine lawmaker trustees.

If nothing else, this is a historical irony. The university’s iconic building, right at the corner of Main Street and University Place, is Morrill Hall, named for Justin Smith Morrill,  the Vermont U.S. Representative (1855-1867) and Senator (1867-1898) who sponsored the law that lead to the creation of state universities, primarily so that the children of farmers and workers could go to college. But his own state’s public university comes farther from meeting that goal than any other.

Beyond the irony, the university’s public-private hybrid status raises the question of accountability, one of the arguments of faculty members battling the administration’s plans for cutting the budget by some $28 million.

“What kind of accounting assumptions have been going on for the last five years,” asked English Professor Nancy Welch, a leader of United Academics, the teachers union which opposes the way President Daniel Fogel wants to cut the budget. “We’ve had real revenue accumulation. The General Fund is up some 50 percent but (Fogel) says we have a budget deficit.”

Many of the other faculty members don’t doubt that the deficit is real, and that cuts are needed. But many of them wonder whether they have all the information needed to judge how much should be cut, and where.

Behind that immediate question is a larger one: Who looks over UVM’s books?

The university itself, of course, as do all universities, and then its findings are examined by one of the “Big Four” accounting firms, in UVM’s case KPMG, from its local office in Colchester, according to university spokesman Jeff  Wakefield.

But it is no secret these days that audits by a “Big Four” firm, while necessary, may not be sufficient. The big accounting firms sometimes don’t question all those “accounting assumptions,” instead accepting the client’s contention that expenses are necessary. Besides, KPMG, no matter how skilled and thorough, does not represent or report to the people of Vermont.

Those nine legislative trustees do, and Chen said he and most of the others “are engaged in the board.”

But another legislator, outgoing Senate Education Committee Chairman Donald Collins of Swanton, said that the legislative trustees “are at a real disadvantage” on the board. “They don’t have the background,” said  Collins, who was once on the board of the State College system, and is a retired educator. “They don’t even know what questions to ask.”

The Legislature itself doesn’t keep close tabs on UVM either, Collins said.

“We’ve had Fogel and the others in to explain their programs,” he said. But Vermont legislative committees have tiny staffs. The lawmakers themselves are citizen-legislators who have day jobs. If a legislative committee wanted to, it probably could not conduct an in-depth examination of the university’s finances. At any rate, it hasn’t. Neither has the Auditor of Accounts.

None of this means that Fogel and his top administrators can do as they please. But they can do much of what they please, and during Fogel’s five years, they have pleased to expand-buying old buildings and putting up new ones, starting new programs (such as the Honors College), adding students, faculty, and administrators.

As a result, UVM is a better university. It’s also  more expensive , and it spends some $250 million a year. Most of that money does not come from Vermont taxpayers. But all of it is spent in the state’s name, without the state paying much attention to what is going on.

That may be changing because the faculty union and the faculty senate want to take a look at the books. From what they’ve said, it’s not clear that many of them know how to read those books; accounting has its own language, easy to misinterpret

But big bucks is big bucks. UVM has been spending some.

And wasting some? Tune in tomorrow.—Jon Margolis

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