A PASCU Chapter at Each PASSHE University - Part 5

Still More Options for Dealing With Malfeasance

 
In last week’s blog post, we looked at two different State offices with responsibility for ensuring that State agencies, such as PASSHE, obey the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania:  the Office of Inspector General (OIG), and the Office of General Counsel (OGC).
 
Based on declarations prominently displayed on their respective websites, it appears that both offices have roles in preventing before the fact, or correcting after the fact, any malfeasance in Pennsylvania’s state agencies. That would include the instant case we have been discussing regarding the failure of the PASSHE Board of Governors (BOG) to preserve or deliver the Act 188 statutory purpose of public higher education in Pennsylvania: “High quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students.”
 
The two offices have somewhat different missions, however.
 

The Office of Inspector General (OIG)

 
The mission of the Office of Inspector (OIG) is “to prevent, investigate, and eradicate fraud, waste, abuse, and misconduct in the programs, operations, and contracting of executive agencies under the Governor’s jurisdiction.”  The Commonwealth Attorney’s Act identifies PASSHE as one such agency.
 
The data show that the alleged BOG misconduct in the instant case has been happening since 2002, and continues to happen today, with no end in sight.  This means that prevention efforts by OIG are already too late, and that the only options that remain for OIG at this point are ‘investigation’ and ‘eradication.’
 
The complaint to the OIG cited last week, alleging malfeasance by the Board of Governors for failure to preserve or deliver Act 188’s statutory purpose to PASSHE students, was sent earlier today.
 

The Office of General Counsel (OGC)

 
According to its website, the Office of General Counsel (OGC) is “Pennsylvania’s Law Firm,” whose purpose is “…providing the Governor and the Executive Branch with expert, responsive, and cost-effective legal services necessary to support the administration of Pennsylvania’s government for the benefit of the public.”
 
With OGC acting as “Pennsylvania’s Law Firm,” one would expect its attorneys to provide sound legal advice to the Governor and all of Pennsylvania’s executive agencies, including PASSHE.   As part of that expectation, one would assume that the OGC attorneys assigned to advise PASSHE executives would be both competent and successful in ensuring that major policy decisions by the PASSHE BOG would align fully with law, especially Act 188, the law that created PASSHE and statutorily controls the actions of the PASSHE Board of Governors, the Office of the Chancellor, and the operations of the 14 Universities.
 
One would certainly expect that the OGC attorneys working inside PASSHE would be able to prevent misconduct by the PASSHE Board of Governors, before it happens, by speaking up when proposed BOG policy decisions under discussion will clearly violate one or more aspects of Act 188.
 
The complaint to the OGC cited last week, alleging malfeasance by the Board of Governors for failure to preserve or deliver Act 188’s statutory purpose to PASSHE students, was sent earlier today.
 

High Quality Education at the Lowest Possible Cost to the Students

 
Most shocking of all is the fact that between 2002 and 2014, spanning two terms by Gov. Rendell and one term by Gov. Corbett, PASSHE Chief Counsels during that 12-year period apparently remained silent while the PASSHE BOG pursued two policy goals diametrically opposed to the mandate of Act 188: “High quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students.”  Instead, the BOG acted by:  1) Choosing to erode half of the hard-earned educational quality gains of the previous 19 years; and 2)  Choosing to raise the “bottom line” cost to PASSHE’s least affluent students by focusing on the “lowest possible tuition,” instead of on the “lowest possible cost to the students,” i.e., “bottom line,” as per Act 188.
 
Those two decisions, both of which fly in the face of the Act 188 statutory purpose of the PASSHE system, have buried PASSHE students from the least affluent families with crushing student-loan debt, while providing students from the most affluent families with unneeded state subsidies. 

PASSHE’s “low tuition for all” policy, in effect since 2002, is failing on both ends of the financial need spectrum.
 
Not only do these BOG decisions constitute bad policy, they contradict Act 188, the enabling legislation that created the PASSHE system of 14 Universities in 1982.  These policy decisions are illegal on their faces and, one should expect that PASSHE’s Chief Counsel, reporting to the Governor’s General Counsel, would not have remained silent while allowing those patently illegal policies to be enacted.  But if they were silent in the past, one can only hope that they will no longer be silent in the future.   
 

Hope on the Horizon

 
The recent election of Gov. Wolf has resulted in a new Inspector General and a new General Counsel.  One can hope that these new officials will work to remedy a terrible injustice, which can be remedied very quickly—by insisting that the PASSHE Board of Governors simply obey the law, Act 188, as written. 
 
The current appalling situation was not created by Gov. Wolf nor his new Inspector General or General Counsel.  It was created by the administrations of a two-term Democratic Governor, and a one-term Republican Governor.  We can only hope that Gov. Wolf and his new appointees in the OIG and OGC will work to correct a grave injustice for PASSHE’s Majority Stakeholders—the 100,000+ students, the 200,000+ parents/guardians, and the 500,000+ alumni and their families who reside in Pennsylvania.

Nothing more than that is required; and nothing less than that is acceptable.
 
To be continued.