By CHRIS POWELL
Lessons keep pouring out of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System but they have nothing to do with student learning, just the misconduct and negligence of system personnel.
For months the system has been losing executives and board members over various scandals, and last week Marc E. Fitch of Inside Investigator, a project of the Yankee Institute, reported that the CSCU system’s nonprofit foundation, which has more than $700,000 in assets, claims to have helped hundreds of students and thousands of families but hasn’t helped anyone in years.
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The foundation’s tax filings for 11 of the last 12 years are missing from its internet site, along with the foundation’s annual reports, if there were any. The man listed as the foundation’s president says he left more than a year ago.
A spokesman for the CSCU system didn’t dispute the report, saying the system’s management — whatever is left of whatever it had until recently — is “reviewing” its foundations and developing a policy “to strengthen oversight” and “enhance financial controls.”
It’s hard to see how oversight can be “strengthened” when there hasn’t been any for a long time, but the spokesman had to try to give the impression that someone is still home.
Also last week WFSB-TV3’s Cassidy Williams disclosed that one of the CSCU system’s universities, Eastern Connecticut State in Windham, told faculty members in April that the university is investigating financial “irregularities” with its own foundation dating to 2022. (There appears not to have been any announcement to the public about the investigation.)
But a month later faculty members were told that the investigation had been delayed because the system’s general counsel, Karen Buffkin, who was to have been an investigator, had been put on leave because she was being investigated herself for her handling of sexual harassment complaints against the system’s chancellor, who quit when the complaints became public.
So now an outside investigator is to be hired.
There aren’t enough people in state government to investigate the misconduct and negligence in the CSCU system — maybe the system should establish a School of Investigation — and the General Assembly never investigates anything. So it’s good that news organizations are getting interested. Imagine, if it’s not too scary, what additional investigative journalism might find in other state agencies.
In light of how the CSCU system operates, it’s also probably better if its foundations don’t do anything. But the foundation at Eastern still may be doing “irregular” things. So maybe someone in the system who has not yet resigned, been fired, been placed on “paid administrative leave,” or run screaming from the premises with his hair on fire could ask the state treasurer, comptroller, or the state auditors to keep an eye on whatever money may be left in the foundations.
Making their rounds of agencies the state auditors do brave and expert work catching violations of financial and personnel regulations. But they can’t be everywhere at once, and the auditing of compliance with regulations is not the auditing of an agency’s performance with its nominal objectives.
For example, no one audits the state Education Department for an explanation of its long failure to improve student achievement despite constantly increasing spending. No one audits the various state welfare agencies for an explanation of the steady rise in poverty and welfare dependence despite constantly increasing spending there too, or the state Correction Department for its failure to deter most of its wards from returning to crime upon their release.
Of course those matters are more complicated than compliance with regulations; they are matters of broad policy and concept. But like the laughable ineptness of the higher education system, these matters are reminders that state government has grown far too big even as it keeps assigning itself more to do and creating more goodies to distribute.
State government has become far bigger than the civic virtue and journalism available to manage it in the public interest. That is, it has grown beyond control, and it will not stop growing by itself.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
