Cheng scandal suggests that higher education needs scrutiny

By Chris Powell

Apparently the nearly half-million-dollar severance award for the chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System is so outrageous that even Democratic state legislators can acknowledge the scandal. But their acknowledgment is just for show, for none of them will actually do anything about it.

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Members of the Republican minority in the General Assembly called for Cheng’s dismissal soon after his abuse of his expense account was disclosed last year by Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers and then elaborated upon by the state comptroller and the state auditors. It took the severance award, dressed up as a new year-long position for Cheng as “strategic adviser” to the college system’s Board of Regents, to prompt some harsh criticism from the Democratic majority.

State Rep. Gregg Haddad, D-Mansfield, House chairman of the legislature’s Higher Education Committee, said: “That there’s a half million dollars being spent for someone not to work for us on a regular basis is maddening. Everybody should be so lucky to be able to negotiate a separation agreement that pays you your full pay and benefits for a year.”

The committee’s Senate chairman, Derek Slap, D-West Hartford, concurred, remarking, “It stinks. It’s outrageous.” But Slapp noted that the ability of the Board of Regents to fire Cheng outright was probably limited by his contract, which had more than a year to run.

That’s how Governor Lamont summarized the unsatisfactory ending of the scandal, which he first had dismissed as “small ball.” The governor, a Democrat, said of Cheng: “He had a contract. We’re going to finish off that contract.”

Republican senators saw that Cheng’s contract and similar ones now should be pursued for the sake of good government. They proposed legislation to require the college system to get the General Assembly’s approval for any employment contract costing $400,000 or more per year. But Democratic legislators quickly foreclosed the idea, in part because it had not received a public hearing — a failing that never stops them when they really want to do something.

Public higher education is full of highly and probably excessively paid administrators. Indeed, that often seems to be why they call it higher education. 

As co-chairs of the Higher Education Committee, Haddad and Slap should know this only too well. But then additional inquiry could only embarrass the Lamont administration more, and Haddad and Slap both represent districts full of other highly paid public higher educators.

That many other questionable things await discovery in public higher education was indicated last week when the chairman of the Board of Regents, Martin Guay, refused to be interviewed as Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers followed up on the Cheng scandal. The Board of Regents is at the center of it, having appointed Cheng, failed to watch his expenses, and let him violate its instructions.

Apparently Guay’s unaccountability is OK with the governor. But then apparently it’s also OK with the legislature, which this year created a Government Oversight Committee, supposedly to restore something like its old Program Review and Investigations Committee. But the new committee apparently is just for show as well, since it has undertaken no investigations despite state government’s many other fat targets.

Even so, the Democratic majority in the legislature seems to be full of world savers. 

The other day the state House passed another “climate” bill, this one to set a goal of eliminating the state’s carbon emissions in 25 years, safely past the likely tenure of anyone now in office; to establish a Clean Economy Council; and to encourage “carbon sequestration” and urban agriculture, as if all this will offset even a hundredth of 1% of the carbon emitted by one of the many new coal mines planned in China.

Meanwhile Connecticut’s high schools are graduating illiterates and near-illiterates, poverty and homelessness are worsening in the state, the state’s electricity rates are nearly the highest in the country, in part because a billion dollars in state taxes are hidden in electricity bills, and the state’s economy is stagnating.

If only the General Assembly had more Connecticut savers. 

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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