The Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system may be the only in higher education with the motto, in English or Latin, “Shhhhh.”
Secrecy continues to corrode the administration of the four universities and 12 community colleges. Chancellor Terrence Cheng declines to uphold one of the essential attributes of higher education: transparence.
According to documents obtained from CSCU, high ranking employees of the 85,000-student state agency signed employment separation agreements that included non-disparagement clauses. Public agencies should not be permitted to bar candid accounts of their former employees’ experiences.
The Board of Regents raised Cheng from his perch as director of the University of Connecticut’s Stamford campus to CSCU’s president in 2021. He requested the Board of Regents change is title to chancellor last year. Cheng began clearing out the upper ranks of the vast CSCU bureaucracy in 2022, making room for some Cheng favorites.
The people targeted for “non-renewal” (the crimes against language never end in higher education) of their contracts might have some tales to tell under Cheng. The agreement ending their employment included this:
“The parties to this Agreement recognize the sensitive nature of this matter and agree to handle this matter with the highest degree of professionalism and prudence. Nothing herein shall prohibit [the booted employee] from responding to inquiries or comments by third parties relevant to his past employment, any investigation and/or the terms of this Agreement. [The employee], CSCU, and the Board of Regents shall refrain from initiating public or private disparaging remarks about the other, but this provision shall not interfere with any other applicable legal rights or obligations.”
There was no reason to include the Board of Regents in the prohibition of disparagement. Cheng viewed the process of booting executives out of the system as so sensitive that they did not see the agreements. Inquiry was discouraged, as has been Cheng’s way. The public’s interest in knowing how the public higher education runs or stalls or puts students last was blocked in the employment separation agreements.
Some of the people who were let go received one year of severance, “per the terms of the executive management policies at the time of hire.” That explanation comes from an email sent by Vice Chancellor Adam Joseph to The Courant on Tuesday. The message summarizes the terms of departure by seven employees who reported directly to Cheng. One of them was former state budget director Benjamin Barnes. He served in the Malloy administration for nearly all of its eight years of financial turmoil. As the Malloy years approached a merciful end, Barnes was parachuted into CSCU with a raise.
Barnes, who famously declared the state was in a permanent fiscal crisis shortly after Malloy won a second term in 2014, was much better at guarding his own finances than he was the state’s. According to Joseph, Barnes left CSCU in July 2023. Two weeks after Cheng notified Barnes his contract would not be renewed, the Chief Financial Officer of the system resigned with a sweetener. Barnes was entitled to three months of pay, $68,779.75. Joseph notes that Barnes negotiated double that and walked out the door with $137,559.50.
Less than a week after Barnes left CSCU with six months of salary in his pocket, Mayor Caroline Simmons announced Barnes was returning to Stamford as the city’s director of administration. Between 2019, Barnes’s first full year at CSCU, until he left in 2023, his annual salary increased from $212,00 to $289,000 in 2023. Most of that increase occurred in the Cheng years as tuition rose and Cheng complained ceaselessly about inadequate funding.
An executive assistance received $101,669.16 in a lump sum payment in August. The former president of Western Connecticut State University, John Clark, has received $300,000 when his contract was not renewed in 2022. In some instances, employees were allowed to have the notice that they were being let go replaced by a letter of resignation and the agreement that precluded them from “initiating private or public disparaging remarks.”
The former employees likely have much to say about Cheng, and he must know it. It is hard to know if Cheng’s contempt for the public is greater than his determination to cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace employees out of favor. The former English professor has lavished titles and generous raises on his favored few at a time, of course, when he complains about insufficient state funding of the system and has cut back on essentials such as library hours.
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Cheng’s use of his expense account is the subject of several investigations in the aftermath of reporting by CT Insider. Cheng delayed providing documents for months. The extent of his spending system on fellow state officials at expensive restaurants ought to have elicited an apology as a start. Instead, one of his top minions insists in disjointed pronouncement that all will be explained. We are far past that.
Proof that secrecy continues to rule came in an update on press inquiries and one investigation from Vice Chancellor Joseph to the chairman and vice chairman of the Regents. The Regents themselves, however, were not included because “Shhhhh” continues as the CSCU motto.
Kevin F. Rennie can be reached at [email protected]
