Arkansas Blog

Heck, give Warwick credit. He knew a good thing when he saw it. No wonder he left The Times. *grin*

Max, we rotate our chair each year. We are fortunate to have currently, and benefited in the past, from very capable women whom have served as chair. Your comments suggest that only men have had the ability to write checks from our discretionary trustee fund. I will suggest to our Board at our meeting later this month, that all expenditures during President Hardin's tenure from this fund be provided to the media and who the Board Chair was at the time they were written.

ARK. BLOG: My apologies for slighting women chairs. And thanks.

Who the hell do those people think they are? The Razorback Foundation?

Maybe public education is different from working in a small, private office? I admit I do not know anything about the law. BUT

Can state employees (even college presidents or boards) "borrow" public money for private use any period of time? Isn't that embezzlement? And then when the public money is replaced with private donated money, isn't that called making restitution?

Please read carefully. This fund has NO STATE APPROPRIATED DOLLARS in it. It is funded by a small percentage of profits from ancillary services like the book store or food sales in the Student Center. It is mandated that it be used for purposes that promote or enhance the goals of the University. It has augmented compensation for faculty. It has sent cheerleaders to camps. Recently, funds were disbursed to supplement a scholorship program for children of staff at the school and to help furnish the new student government offices. Agreed, the use of the money should be transparent but any use, including the retention of a talented, results driven President, is 100% for the benefit of UCA. Every use of every dollar will be revealed and I am so sorry there will be no juicy details to send some of you into a frenzy. The question is, "once those funds make it into school coffers, do they become "state funds" eventhough they are not part of our state appropriated monies." I am confident school officials will be asking that question to the AG's office next week.

"It {The fund} is funded by a small percentage of profits from ancillary services like the book store or food sales in the Student Center." - rfhiii

Sounds like the people who would have right of first refusal to take a look at the listing of expenditures from that fund are THE STUDENTS, FACULTY, and STAFF, since they're the ones most likely shouldering the burden (also, the PARENTS who help pay expenses, when applicable).

The D-G, AT, and others: get thee behind in line.

To paraphrase rfhiii " Please read carefully.."

The Razorback Foundation pisses away more money on coaches than UCA could dream of. Not that I much care but the problem here as I see it is that they just handled all of this badly. Times are hard. Money is tight.

Why would a "talented, results driven President" all of a sudden get such a tin ear to this issue? Nobody is accusing UCA of misappropriating money. That is changing the subject. This was handled completely badly from jump street. A 300,000k bump for someone who is nominally on the state payroll is a matter of public interest and should be treated as such.

I just find it interesting that we don't much blink an eye at the merger of state and private money to retain coaches or to pay them off to get rid of them is no big deal but to do this w/an alleged academic type is scandalous.

What the Board of Sycophants did up there wasn't illegal particularly. It was just stupid. " We need to go into Executive Session to give Lu a perk, bargained for originally or not."

No. That would never come out.

Stupid.

Stupid is a nice new adjective (or did you mean for it to me a noun, as in my new surname?) to add to descriptive words used to characterize me. Once again, the 60,000 a year payment as deferred compensation was put into place three years ago PUBLICLY; it is in the minutes. We simply accelerated the payment, it had been voted on and approved PUBLICLY. It was a liability on the balance sheet of the school. We simply paid the liability off two years early. We should have voted on it seperately in public session instead of with the generic approval of all contracts. Things can always be done better. I have learned yet another lesson from this debacle, thank you for that. But you need to chill just a little, the world is not as evil and full of conspiracy as you seem to think. Have a nice day.

Rush (rfhiii)- you seem, well, a bit over apologetic about the UCA Board's actions in this whole affair.

Let's assume the UCA Board didn't do anything that violates state law in giving Lu Hardin $300,000 from what some folks might reasonably consider state money although private funds were promised. I say reasonably consider state money because if UCA uses state funds, or even state funds co-mingled with tuition dollars, to fund its bookstore then any 'profit' from bookstore sales would be part and parcel derived from those state funds. But if the bookstore was privately owned, say by Rush Harding, LLC, and by contract pays UCA a fixed percentage of sales, that would be another matter. See the difference?

If the $300,000 was promised from private funds, why didn't your Board just send a courier to gather up all those promised donations, deposit them in a special account set up for that sole purpose, then pay Hardin after the pledged private funds were in hand? And if UCA didn't have the entire $300,000 that had been pledged or less than $300,000 had been pledged so far, why not pay Hardin however much of that total UCA could immediately collect from donors?

As a UCA Trustee, you seem to view the world differently than the average person. This all seems fine to you (the way it was handled), and the fact that the media or public would question either the specifics or even the way this was handled is outside your realm of thinking.

Back to breaking the law- if the $300,000 payment violated the law, then you have put your "talented, results driven President" in an awful position.

In hindsight, do you think maybe the UCA Board didn't do its homework before rushing (sorry, no pun intended) to give Hardin his $300,000 check? By the way, that $300,000 is almost 10-years wages for the average Arkansan ($31,266 in 2005, Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Not to get into the legal and ethical part of this issue, but does anyone see anything wrong with the idea of a discretionary account funded by students paying for overpriced books and food. I would think a forward thinking college president would think of ways to get this money back to the students through lowering fees. It is hard to fathom that tuition and fees keep going up where the average kid or adult has to struggle to pay for a public college. If I was an UCA student, I would picket in front of the president's office building. Not to mention, when this same president okay the end of the soccer program a few years back. It seems like $300 thousand could support a soccer program. BTW, how much is in this discretionary account? I'm sure this may be happening at a lot of public universities, but it doesn't make it right.