‘D’ is for decrepit

Classrooms, libraries and buildings on the University of the District of Columbia campus have fallen into disrepair, and officials say they lack funds to improve them.

A recent tour of the UDC campus conducted by a faculty member revealed stains and tears in carpeting throughout the Department of Accounting, Finance and Economics. In nearly every corridor of the building, wires dangle from uncovered electrical outlets. A large gash mars the wall of a hallway.

Classrooms in most departments are cramped and shabby, with worn-out furniture and outdated equipment.

Ceiling tiles have broken loose and toppled into a bathroom on the first floor of the Liberal Arts and Library building. Water drips into the library through a leaky roof.

Boxes, wooden pallets and a pile of 10-foot-long radio antennas have partially blocked an emergency-exit stairwell in the Liberal Arts building for nearly a year, even after the D.C. Fire Marshal cited the school for the safety violation last year.

In a second-floor hallway outside the new interactive classroom, which supports the distance-learning program, heaps of construction debris have crowded the walkway for about six months.

“It looks like it is going to stay there forever,” said a longtime faculty member who works in the building. “It is a health and safety issue. You can’t have students walking around there.”

The deterioration of UDC’s buildings adds to the long-standing troubles of the District’s only public institution of higher education, which in past years has been plagued by financial mismanagement, poor academic performance and accreditation concerns.

Mike Andrews, the university’s communications director, said UDC doesn’t have adequate funding for all the needed maintenance and repair.

“Hey, get us money appropriated for it,” Mr. Andrews said. “There are repairs that need to be done around here, and we’d love to do them. We would love to have the money to do them.”

The university’s capital budget has declined in recent years, from $14.1 million in fiscal 2002 to $6.9 million in fiscal 2003. The proposed capital budget is $4.8 million for fiscal 2004, according to the D.C. Office of the Chief Financial Officer.

Mr. Andrews said various repairs are under way. Exterior doors are being fixed to make them securable. Restrooms are being renovated. The heater for the swimming pool in the gymnasium is being replaced. And the school is modernizing 12 elevators, some of which have been out of service for years, he said.

Still, faculty members say little has changed on the campus — especially in academics — in the year since William L. Pollard became president of the District’s troubled land-grant university.

“He has had zero impact on this campus in 13 months, as far as academics is concerned,” said UDC information systems professor Carl Friedman, who has been a vocal critic of Mr. Pollard. “And that’s what we are all about. We’re an academic campus.”

Indeed, it is difficult to assess Mr. Pollard’s effect. For two weeks, The Washington Times had repeatedly requested recent data on the university’s graduation rate, grade-point averages of graduates, teacher-student ratio for the fall semester, spending per pupil, and employment and graduate school acceptance rates for recent graduates.

The administration has been unable to provide any of the information. In an e-mail to The Times on Thursday, Mr. Andrews said the person who can provide the information is on vacation and will return to the office tomorrow.

Mr. Pollard declined to be interviewed for this report.

In addition, UDC’s new provost and vice president of academic affairs — former Syracuse University law professor Wilhelmina M. Reuben-Cooke — has repeatedly declined to reveal her plans for improving the school’s academic achievement in interview requests from The Times.

Mrs. Reuben-Cooke, who began her new job last month, oversees academic programs, creates academic policy, prepares academic budgets and leads the faculty.

The publicly funded university, founded in 1974 as an urban land-grant institution with an open-admissions policy, has typically had about half its freshman class drop out before sophomore year, according to previously published reports. High first-year attrition rates are common at schools with open admissions, according to education specialists.

Enrollment at UDC dropped from a high of about 15,000 in the late 1970s to 4,885 in 1997. As of 2002, the university had an enrollment of 5,300 students and staff of 225 teachers, for a nearly 24-to-1 student-teacher ratio.

The school expects about 5,500 students for the fall semester, but the administration could not provide the number of faculty.

Mr. Andrews, the communications director, said it is unrealistic to expect overnight improvements at UDC, which struggled for years to overcome the deep budget cuts of the mid-1990s that nearly cost the school its accreditation.

Charles J. Ogletree Jr., chairman of the UDC board of trustees, which hired the school’s president, says Mr. Pollard has met and exceeded the trustees’ expectations. He credits Mr. Pollard with canceling the school’s credit card purchasing program, forging alliances with city and federal officials and creating a campus homeland security plan.

Mr. Ogletree also cites Mr. Pollard’s success in assembling an executive management team, even though critics among staff and faculty say the new vice presidents and executives are merely friends of Mr. Pollard’s who collect large salaries but add little to the school.

Mr. Ogletree and other Pollard supporters in the administration dismiss the criticism as the grumblings of the school’s long-suffering and demoralized work force, fearful of the reforms Mr. Pollard has promised.

“The things he is proposing are difficult and painful,” Mr. Ogletree said. “It is going to take time and incredible effort on the part of the president, and the board is going to be vigilant as well to make sure the right decisions are made to move the university forward.”

Mr. Pollard has spoken in general terms of forging ties with the community, improving technology, raising money, reallocating resources, and developing the faculty and staff. He has not directly mentioned reducing the staff, even though UDC’s budget will decrease from $90.4 million this fiscal year to $87.8 million next year.

“I will assure you, we will use everything we have to make sure we get the biggest bang for our buck,” Mr. Pollard told The Times in September.

In his testimony to the D.C. Council’s education committee on UDC’s budget in March, Mr. Pollard sought funds for four initiatives:

• Create a school of education, at a cost of $125,000 for the dean, $100,00 for planning and $50,000 for staff.

• Begin an honors program to make UDC a first choice for talented students, at a cost of $250,000 for the director, staff and faculty incentives.

• Start an internship program, at a cost of $125,000 for the director, staff and other expenses.

• Institute a career service and development program, at a cost of $125,000 for the director, staff and recruiting program.

Nonetheless, the campus doesn’t appear to have changed much since Mr. Pollard took charge in July 2002, except for the color-coded directories he had installed to help visitors differentiate the brown concrete buildings.

Also unchanged are the plush accommodations of the executive administration suite on the third floor of Building No. 39 and next door at the David A. Clarke School of Law, which hosts about 130 law students, or about 2.4 percent of the student body.

The law school failed to win full accreditation in June from the American Bar Association, dashing hopes that the school would end 10 years of scrambling to shore up its shaky reputation.

Spending on the law school has long been a sore subject for faculty in other departments.

When Mr. Pollard arrived, faculty and staff were optimistic that his presidency would mark a turning point for the troubled school. He came with good credentials: a doctorate in social administration from the University of Chicago; nine years at Syracuse University, where he was a professor of social work and the founding dean of the College of Human Services and Health Professionals.

The UDC community was confident Mr. Pollard would improve the school’s image and provide stable, long-standing leadership for the first time in the school’s 29-year history. Prior to Mr. Pollard, the university had 10 presidents, none whom served longer than five years.

By June, the confidence seemed to evaporate.

After adding a number of high-paid executives to the payroll this school year, the administration backed a 6.4 percent raise for the executives, law school faculty and other nonunion employees. The raises would have been retroactive to October.

Outrage swept the rest of the faculty and staff members, who haven’t had a cost-of-living adjustment since 1998 and rejected the administrations offer of a 1 percent raise earlier in the year. In support of the faculty, student leaders have threatened a walkout when classes resume in the fall.

After The Times reported that several D.C. Council members vowed to fight the raises for university officials who already earn six-figure salaries, the school’s board of trustees reversed its decision and froze the salaries of all executives earning more than $90,000 a year.

Many on campus remained disenchanted with Mr. Pollard, saying he disregarded academics and poor conditions while spending more than $100,000 to remodel his university residence and more than $700,000 to pay the annual salaries of the new executives.

For example, Mr. Pollard created a position of executive vice president and hired Ernest Jolly for the job at $131,080 a year. He created a position of vice president of public safety and hired Robert Robinson for the job at $128,095 a year. He also created a position of deputy police chief and hired Terri Stewart for the job at $86,524 a year.

“What I see is all these high-paid administrators and nothing happening with academics,” said another longtime professor at the university. “If we are going to have new blood, we should have more faculty blood. … I’m very, very, very disappointed.”

Last month, faculty outrage grew after The Times reported that Mr. Pollard had hired Mrs. Reuben-Cooke, a family friend, as the provost and vice president of academic affairs, even though she apparently does not meet the education and experience requirements for the $137,000-a-year job.

According to UDC’s national advertisement for provost candidates, the job requires as a minimum education achievement of a doctoral degree or its equivalent and an established record as a senior academic administrator.

Mrs. Reuben-Cooke holds a juris doctor degree, or law degree, from the University of Michigan Law School and worked for 18 months as an associate dean for academic affairs at the Syracuse University College of Law. The bulk of her professional experience is as a law professor at Syracuse University.

Faculty and D.C. Council members have criticized the hiring, saying it appears to have been based on cronyism. And the D.C. Office of Campaign Finance is investigating whether Mr. Pollard violated standards of conduct for public officials in hiring Mrs. Reuben-Cooke.

Mrs. Reuben-Cooke is the wife of District-based lawyer Edmund Cooke, who a year ago helped Mr. Pollard secure his UDC job with a $200,000 annual salary, the second-highest in the D.C. government.

The Times reported Wednesday that Mr. Pollard has defended his hiring of Mrs. Reuben-Cooke by saying she meets a Webster’s dictionary definition of an academic “doctor.”

In a July 17 memo to the school’s board of trustees, Mr. Pollard cited Webster’s II New College Dictionary and wrote that “the term ’doctor’ may be defined as ’[a] person who has earned the highest academic degree by a college or university in a specialized discipline,’ or ’the title used to address a person who holds the degree of doctor.’”

“As there is no dispute that Dr. Reuben-Cooke holds a J.D. degree, can there be any legitimate dispute that the J.D. degree is a doctorate degree as required by the published announcement for the position of Provost?” Mr. Pollard asked in the nine-page memo. “Logic and reason require the question to be answered in the negative.”

But according to Black’s Law Dictionary (Seventh Edition), the juris doctor is “the law degree most commonly conferred by an American law school.” Black’s notes two law degrees more advanced than the J.D. — the LLM, or the master of laws degree, and the J.S.D., or the doctor of juridical science degree.

A spokeswoman for the American Bar Association (ABA) said a J.D. degree does not bestow upon a lawyer the title “doctor.” She later retracted the statement, saying the association does not have a position on the matter.

A spokesman for Mrs. Reuben-Cooke’s alma mater said her law degree is not equivalent to a doctorate.

“At Michigan, the juris doctor is not the same as a traditional higher-education doctorate degree, such as a Ph.D.,” said David Baum, assistant dean of students for the University of Michigan Law School. “The juris doctorate is a professional degree,” said Mr. Baum, who holds the degree.

In previous recent articles about UDC, The Times has reported that:

• Mr. Pollard had given Mrs. Reuben-Cooke a $10,000 signing bonus for accepting the $137,000-a-year job. The board of trustees later rescinded the signing bonus.

• Campus police are investigating the theft of financial records that coincided with news media inquiries into Mrs. Reuben-Cooke’s hiring and expenditures on Mr. Pollard’s university house. The records pertain to the school’s payroll and Mr. Pollard’s expenses, including his house, according to a campus staffer familiar with the finance department, where the theft occurred.

Last week, Mr. Pollard released a written statement about the investigation: “While the university is conducting a comprehensive internal investigation to determine how these files apparently disappeared, just as importantly we are seeking an explanation as to why this happened.

“At the present time, we are able to determine that the records reported missing [all financial in nature] were electronically stored on computers at the university, and are easily retrievable,” he said in the statement. “The focus of the investigation has now shifted to answering the ’why.’ Because the investigation continues, it is inappropriate to discuss the content of the files in any greater detail.”

Mr. Pollard said the theft was “an assault on our university” and vowed that he would not tolerate such behavior.

Campus police received a report on July 11 from the office of Accounting Operations Manager Mark Lassiter that files had been stolen. They reported the incident July 15 to Metropolitan Police, who were discouraged by university officials from investigating until an internal probe is completed.