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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Tags: Dan Fogel, United Academics, UVM

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 8:24 am and is filed under Schools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.