Earler this week, Inside Higher Ed published an interesting article about the firing of Wheeling Jesuit University President Reverend Julio Giulletti. The article suggests that Giulletti’s ouster may have resulted from a dispute with the Most Reverend Michael J. Bransfield, possibly over Mount de Chantel Visitation Academy property in Wheeling, rather than a Office of Inspector General audit report that I discussed in an earlier blog post. A new blog called Save! Wheeling Jesuit University is devoted to the controversy.
11 September 2009
7 August 2009
The maladies afflicting West Virginia’s research infrastructure moved beyond the dermatalogical (see“Marketing 101: The Subcutaneous World of New Media”) to the porcine this week as Wheeling Jesuit University’s Board of Trustees, which is made up of Jesuit clergy, fired its president Rev. Julio Giuletti after the school’s Board of Directors could not generate the two-thirds vote needed to accomplish the feat. This all was done while Father Giuletti was on vacation.
What’s going on? In part, it relates to a NASA Office of Inspector General’s report alleging that WJU misspent millions of dollars in federal grant funds. As I understand it, the Inspector General accuses WJU of, among other things, double-dipping – charging more than 100% of people’s salaries to a grant. The allegations surround spending for the institution’s Robert C. Byrd National Technology Transfer Center (NTTC).
NTTC was established in 1989 to link federal labs and universities with technologies to industries that might be able to use them. Stop right there and ask yourself a question: Why on earth would a National Technology Transfer Center be located at Wheeling Jesuit University and not at or near a major research university or at the very least at West Virginia University if located in West Virginia?
The first hint is at the beginning of the Center’s name: United States Senator Robert C. Byrd. Senator Byrd, who considers the moniker “King of Pork” a badge of honor, has long had a very close relationship with Father Thomas Acker, one of WJU’s previous presidents (they’ve gone through quite a few lately), and he arranged to have NTTC located at WJU because of that relationship.
While we in West Virginia are proud of our Senior Senator’s ability to bring home the bacon, we should ask ourselves: At what cost? Should a small institution like WJU be put in charge of a National Technology Transfer Center? How will WJU, which was already struggling financially (if a reporter did some digging, he or she might find some interesting correspondence from the United States Department of Education on this subject), survive as it tries to pay NASA back millions of dollars misspent funds?