By CHRIS POWELL
As it turns out, the recent mysterious but seemingly forced resignation of the chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, O. John Maduko, on top of the forced relocation of his predecessor, Terrence Cheng, to a year’s vacation at full pay (nearly $500,000), aren’t the only things wrong with the system.
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Two weeks ago the state auditors issued a report about the system that identifies almost comprehensive incompetence in ordinary administration:
Among the audit’s findings:
— The system made improper payments to about 300 employees, including nearly $230,000 in overpayments and $7,900 in underpayments, and delayed reporting the mistakes to the auditors.
— The system paid $25,000 to faculty members for services they failed to provide, issued nearly $9 million in payroll without getting supervisory approval, and improperly executed 16 faculty contracts.
— The system grossly abused administrative leave, which is supposed to be limited to 60 days per leave. But at least five administrators were given excessive leave and it averaged 277 days, with one given leave for 769 days, because the system failed to investigate personnel matters promptly.
— The system issued schedules requiring 355 of its 692 faculty members to handle more courses than allowed by their union contract, with 110 of the schedules requiring a 72-hour work week.
— The system failed to discipline a professor for repeated sexual misconduct, including personal relationships with students.
— Nineteen of the failures identified by the audit had been identified by previous audits but were never corrected.
Unfortunately the audit has received little publicity and when it was published the General Assembly may have been glad to be distracted by the hectic final hours of its regular session for the year. If the audit had been published at a calmer moment and received more publicity, people might have expected the legislature to act on it or at least question the college system’s hapless Board of Regents about it. But the legislature pays little attention to the many failures of ordinary administration in state government, especially now — maybe because Governor Lamont is a Democrat and is seeking re-election this year and the legislature has huge Democratic majorities.
Some recent failures involve outright corruption — not just the patronage grifting in “earmarked” state financial grants to nominally nonprofit groups with close ties to legislators, which has been well publicized, but also the self-assignment of overtime in the state police and the Correction Department’s dogged concealment of video showing prison guards beating a subdued prisoner to death, failures that haven’t been well publicized.
Given its small population and land area and its relative prosperity, Connecticut state government should be much better managed. That it is not better managed may be the consequence of the corruption caused by prosperity: the erosion of civic and political virtue amid the expansion of government, which increasingly assuages complaints by buying people off.
Even the four challengers to the governor’s re-election, three Republicans and one Democrat, have said little if anything about the recent scandals. Do none of them dare to risk alienating the education establishment and the state police and prison guards unions?
Connecticut is not growing much economically or in population — except for the illegal immigration it has been facilitating, the state might have no population growth at all — and is trailing many states once considered benighted.
As it concluded its recent session the legislature congratulated several members who will be retiring, including Sen. Martin Looney, D-New Haven, the Senate president pro tem, who has been in the General Assembly for 46 years and has brought much state financial aid to his city. But are his constituents more prosperous and self-sufficient than they were a half century ago, or poorer and more dependent? Is any city in Connecticut better off?
Now as a half century ago the cities figure in public policy and the public mind mainly for their poverty, the terrible performance of their schools, and their claims for ever more subsidy from state government.
Urban policy needs auditing even more than the college system does.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 