The professor, Sylvia Nasar, who is the John S. and James L. Knight professor of business journalism at Columbia and the author of the book “A Beautiful Mind,” which inspired the movie of the same name, charges in the suit that the university mishandled funds from a $1.5 million endowment provided by the Knight Foundation to improve the school’s teaching of business journalism.
Elizabeth Fishman, a spokeswoman for the journalism school, said in an e-mail that “we don’t comment on matters in litigation.”
The lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court, comes at a time of transition for Columbia’s journalism school, which on Monday named Steve Coll its new dean. He succeeds Nicholas Lemann, who announced last fall that he would step down by the end of the academic year after a decade as dean.
According to the 27-page complaint, the journalism school created a professorship in 1998 using a $1.5 million grant from the Knight Foundation, a nonprofit organization that seeks to support high quality journalism. Columbia was expected to match the grant.
Terms of the agreement called for Columbia to pay the professorship’s salary on its own, and use foundation funds for additional salary and benefits, like research.
In 2000, the university hired Ms. Nasar, who is a former reporter for The New York Times. According to the lawsuit she was given a base salary, which the university paid for out of Knight Foundation funds, and was asked to pay most of her additional expenses out of her own pocket.
Ms. Nasar said in the suit that over time she spent $174,000 of her own money for research and other expenses. She is asking for punitive damages.
Ms. Nasar said in an interview that in September 2010 she had received an e-mail from the university listing more than $70,000 in what she described as “phantom I.T. charges” — expenses attributed to her that she says she never incurred.
Ms. Nasar said that when she looked into the matter, she learned that the misspending expanded to include “the fruit of the endowment,” meaning that it went beyond the technology charges and included Knight’s $1.5 million gift, Columbia’s $1.5 million match and the income earned on the endowment over the decade.
She said that she had contacted the Knight Foundation about the disparities and that it hired the accounting firm KPMG to audit the endowment. Court papers say that KPMG calculated that Columbia’s “misappropriations and defaults” added up to as much as $4.5 million.
The audit also said that the endowment had not been used for its original purpose: “to supplement the salary and benefits of the holder of the Knight chair and to subsidize her research and service.”
The university and the foundation reached an agreement to forgive Columbia the $4.5 million and release it from its obligation to match the grant. In return, the university promised to spend future income generated by the endowment in ways “consistent with the purpose of the chair.”
In her suit, Ms. Nasar said that after she complained about the misspent funds, Mr. Lemann “intimidated and harassed” her by telling her that the Knight Foundation “was dissatisfied with her performance as Knight chair because Knight objected to her work on books.” He was not immediately available for comment.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/business/media/professor-sues-columbia-alleging-misuse-of-funds.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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