A tenured professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and co-director of that school’s business program filed a lawsuit on Tuesday accusing the university of misdirecting $4.5 million in funds over the last decade.
The professor, Sylvia Nasar, who is the John S. and James L. Knight professor of business journalism at Columbia and author of the book “A Beautiful Mind” that 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 business journalism. The suit, filed in State Supreme Court in New York, also claims that Nicholas Lemann, the dean of the journalism school, “intimidated and harassed” Ms. Nasar for making complaints about the funds.
Elizabeth Fishman, a spokeswoman for the journalism school, said in an email that “we don’t comment on matters in litigation.” Mr. Lemann was not immediately available for comment.
The lawsuit comes at a time of transition for Columbia’s Journalism School, which on Monday named Steve Coll its new dean. He succeeds Mr. Lemann, who led the school through a turbulent decade as journalism underwent fundamental shifts. Mr. Lemann announced last fall that he planned to step down by the end of the academic year.
According to the 27-page complaint, the journalism school created a professorship called the Knight chair in 1998, with a $1.5 million grant from the Knight Foundation, a nonprofit organization that seeks to support 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 Knight 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, without outlining the details of how her position was to be paid for. 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.
According to the suit, when Ms. Nasar asked to reduce her course load to focus on research and a book she was working on, she had to take a pay cut, even though the Knight Foundation grant provided for such circumstances. Ms. Nasar noted 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 September 2010 she 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 contacted the Knight Foundation about the disparities and they 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 revealed 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.”
After the audit, the university and the Knight Foundation reached an agreement to forgive Columbia the $4.5 million and to release the university from its obligation to match the $1.5 million grant. In return, the university promised to spend future income generated by the endowment in ways “consistent with the purpose of the chair.” Ms. Nasar’s reimbursement for research expenses was limited to $20,000 a year.
Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president of the Knight Foundation, said in a statement about the lawsuit, “We have broad guidelines for our endowment grants, for example, they generally aren’t intended to pay core salaries, but we don’t prescribe details.”
In the lawsuit, 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.”
Ms. Nasar said she was filing the suit now because she felt that Columbia had not listened to her complaints or addressed its shortcomings. She is currently doing research and is not receiving pay from the journalism school, even though she remains the Knight chair.
In early January, Ms. Nasar filed a notice of intent to sue which was not as extensive as the lawsuit filed on Tuesday.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/business/media/professor-sues-columbia-alleging-misuse-of-funds.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
