Audit of University of Colorado Foundation
Re: “Audit cites travel, gifts; CU Foundation spending called inappropriate,” Nov. 9 news story.
A recent year-long audit of the University of Colorado Foundation should serve as a wake-up call to institutions that employ foundations to aid in fundraising efforts. While the concept of a foundation is a practicable one, the reality is that, too often, conflicts arise between universities and their foundations. Sadly, these avoidable disputes can have negative repercussions for the lifeblood of the university that is increasingly an afterthought: the students. Foundations were established to essentially separate fundraising from the general operations of a university. However, by employing the use of a foundation, universities create a quasi-independent entity only loosely affiliated with institutional goals and values and, technically, yield any claim that the school would benefit from the foundation’s proceeds.
Given the ambiguity of university/foundation relations and the importance of fundraising in today’s highly competitive higher education marketplace, situations like CU’s are increasingly commonplace. Therefore, it is vital that American higher education re- examine the university/foundation paradigm and work to ensure that the necessary steps are taken to ensure avoidable conflicts are skirted and attention is never diverted from what should be the primary goal of both university and foundation: the students.
Robert Steele Jr., Washington, D.C.
The writer is a doctoral candidate for the Graduate School of Education at George Washington University.
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Re: “State audit of foundation defies sense,” Nov. 10 David Harsanyi column.
David Harsanyi’s frustration with legislators’ efforts to squeeze accountability out of the University of Colorado Foundation reflects a confusion that has bedeviled America’s “third sector” since colonial days.
Harsanyi is right that foundations, like all nonprofits, are privately governed. To leap to the conclusion that the public has no interest in their governance is, however, false. Foundations set themselves up as champions of public assets (in this instance, a public university). And they tap the public treasury by exploiting the tax deductibility of donations.
Under the present tax code, all charitable donations are made, in part, by all of us.
Thus it’s not “for some reason,” as Harsanyi writes, that CU president Hank Brown seeks to allay concerns about the CU Foundation. It’s because under Brown’s leadership, his former employer, the Daniels Fund, also was criticized for legal but foul-smelling financial practices. Perhaps Brown wants his reputation for honesty to stop coming under suspicion.
The fact that nonprofits have no formal accountability system to answer to is a topic of debate within the sector itself because it leads to the sort of spasmodic attention we’re seeing now, with nobody quite sure what’s an appropriate avenue of inquiry.
Having unwittingly stumbled across this debate, Harsanyi now owes it to himself – if only as a taxpayer – to educate himself more fully about it.
Eric Hubler, Denver
Down syndrome test
Re: “Early Down disorder detector,” Nov. 10 news story.
Thank you to Denver Post reporters Katy Human and Karen Auge for their balanced treatment of the subject of prenatal testing for Down syndrome. For those of us who are parents of children with Down syndrome, it can be difficult to read about prenatal testing when it is almost always treated in terms of pregnancy termination. This article acknowledges the fact that many people choose to keep their babies with Down syndrome and that early detection can help to identify any related health problems that their babies may face. I would, however, suggest that reporters remember to use “people first” terminology when they are talking about people with disabilities. It is better to say “babies with Down syndrome” rather than “Down syndrome babies.” This further acknowledges that people with Down syndrome are, most important, people.
Sarah Billerbeck, Lakewood
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