SUNY's broken foundation

What does the Office for Children and Family Services (OCFS) and Child Welfare in New York State have to do with State University of New York (SUNY) Research Foundation Fraud?  According to OCFS - they are partners.

SUNY's broken foundation

Despite its lofty sounding name, the State University of New York Research Foundation is really just another example of New York's shadow government -- a secretive behemoth that considers itself above public scrutiny, even as it handles nearly $1 billion a year in grants for the public higher education system and pays the checks for some 17,000 public workers and students.

The arrogance of this foundation is gratingly outlined in a consultant's report for SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher and SUNY's board of trustees. It describes an entity that was designed to serve SUNY but often keeps its presumed partner as much at arm's length as it does the public and the press, leading to poor communication and distrust.

I would normally publish the report but it is a secret.

It also leads to a failure of SUNY's research to live up to its potential, the report finds. SUNY lags in things like patents, licenses and royalty income, costing it prestige and money.

None of what's in the report should be a surprise to SUNY. After all, the foundation's board includes Ms. Zimpher as the chair, four SUNY presidents and a dean. Yet the board is -- according to some of its own members -- "a joke" that receives little information, is not asked for its views and is kept in the dark by the foundation's management. The board's control seems to have long ago been either appropriated by or ceded to the foundation's president, John O'Connor, a SUNY vice chancellor who is resigning under the cloud of an ethics investigation.

If this was the gist of the entire report, it would be easy to suggest that the state simply dismantle this travesty. But the consultant, Clifford Stromberg of the Washington, D.C. law firm of Hogan Lovells, stressed that the foundation plays a crucial role in handling SUNY's outside grants. Without a flexible entity that's not subject to many of the state's cumbersome contracting rules and delays, he said, SUNY's research efforts would fall behind those of other major universities.

Clearly, though, this research foundation has to be put back on the track of its original mission, which is, in short, to serve SUNY.

That means, above all else, ending what appears to be almost a legalistic game in which the foundation is forever trying to keep itself from being considered a public entity, to the point of hiding information from SUNY itself.

It should not take a nearly $300,000 consultant's study and, now, a forensics audit by the state comptroller, to find out what's going on at this foundation.

Here's a research project for the great minds at SUNY and in state government: Come up with a framework that preserves the foundation's flexibility while ensuring that it is transparent and accountable.

Be prepared to justify your solution.

THE ISSUE:

A report paints the SUNY Research Foundation as secretive and even hostile to the university it serves.

THE STAKES:

A foundation created for public benefit needs to return to its original purpose.