Sonoma State University has been raided by the FBI, on questions of financial dealings with money obtained from grants from the Federal dept of HHS. Since my position is funded on federal money (from NSF, not HHS), I might wonder if the university has a history of negligence around handling federal grant money it receives. Many on the faculty and staff unions say the top honchos at SSU have shown a pattern of being way too “creative” in their financial dealings. If you follow the sidebar links from the article in the Press Democrat, you can find other articles about SSU and it’s poor public image about its financial dealings. Some have said that SSU is letting the CIHS operation be the fall guy – cooperating wtih the investigators to give the appearance of doing a thorough house-cleaning, while continuing to treat other grant-funded operations the same old way.
Many on the faculty are truly aggrieved at the way money is being siphoned off to build the Green Music Center – which was started before I got here and is still incomplete. I’ve had a chance to talk to some retired professors who have opined about the methods SSU has used to redirect money away from academics and into “enterprise” operations. From some of the talk on campus, you could get the impression that SSU is risking its accreditation because it’s cutting so deeply into academics and bulking up on its residential, food service, convention and other enterprise operations instead to turn them into money-making operations. And, the alleged perpetrators behind all this are now able to use the California budget mess as cover for all the deep cuts in the university’s operations. There is a definite feel that is similar to elsewhere in the US economy nowadays – the “haves” are circling the wagons to protect themselves and to push the “have-nots” further down the economic ladder.
As I may have mentioned before, the professor who has the grant that hires me, has had to struggle with the university over the meaning and purpose of the “indirects” that SSU gets as part of the grant. Early practice had apparently been that the university took their cut, and then continued to charge for services delivered to conduct the work of the grant – services that should come out of the university’s cut of the grant. If you follow the link from the NSF grant page to all SSU grants, you’ll find quite a few.