The UB Foundation is an independent entity chartered to support University at Buffalo. It is privately funded: None of its money comes from state sources. It is publicly directed: All of its board members, save one, who serves ex officio (the UB president), are from the community. So far as I know, no charge or accusation of misbehavior, misappropriation, or self-serving action has ever been sustained against it. 

Nonetheless, three UB faculty members have been railing at it for years, and both Artvoice and the Buffalo News have performed unquestioning stenography for them.

The Buffalo News vs. the UB Foundation

The News has now done at least three big pieces attacking the UB Foundation for its reluctance to turn over all its documents about everything it has done to three UB faculty members who want to pore over those documents to satisfy themselves that the UB Foundation is not up to any mischief.

The most recent was a May 24, 2016 article by Jay Tokasz titled, in the print edition of the paper, “Open Books Not In Cards for UB Foundation,” and “UB Foundation fends off efforts to pry open its finances” in the online edition.

The News had previously published “UB Foundation outlays draw faculty scrutiny,” also by Tokasz, in the first page of the City & Region section on February 24, 2016. That was followed the next day by an editorial— “Secrecy surrounding the UB Foundation is a jarring note for a public institution”—based entirely on the Tokasz’s article. 

It might seem, from all this attention—an interior article, an editorial, a page one article—that something nefarious is going on. 

Nothing is going on. It is a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. No new information was in the Buffalo News May 24 article that hadn’t been in Jay Tokasz’s February 24 article. And nothing in either of those articles hadn’t been covered in Buck Quigley’s Artvoice articles having at the UB Foundation six or seven years ago.

Stenography

“Stenography” is a term of scorn reporters use when a newspaper takes a handout from an interested party, then reprints it with someone on the staff’s byline as if it resulted from reporting rather than copying and changing a few words here and there. 

Sometimes stenography is useful: A community organization puts on an event; their PR person puts together a report of that event; someone on the newspaper staff tunes that report, signs it, and it is published. No harm done.

Harm is done when a reporter takes handouts from individuals or groups grinding an axe and, without question or investigation, publishes the handouts as fact. That turns personal miff into apparent fact, because the signature is not the person who is grumpy but the newspaper itself. That can do real damage.

That is what Quigley did at Artvoice, and what Tokasz and the editorial writers did at the Buffalo News: They took innuendo provided them and ran with it as if it were fact. That isn’t journalism; it surely isn’t reporting. 

The sources

So far as I can tell, all the accusations about misbehavior or misalliance at the University at Buffalo Foundation has been generated by three faculty members: James Holstun in English, Martha McClusky in Law, and Stephen Halpern in Political Science. Kenneth Dauber in English frequently pushes their positions in listserv letters, but his name appears on none of their documents.

McClusky and Halpern have constituted themselves as a “chapter” of the American Association of University Professors. Go to their website: There is nothing on it but attacks on the University at Buffalo Foundation. Nothing. One of the main documents is a “report,” signed by Halpern, McClusky, and Holstun, asking questions about things the University at Buffalo Foundation has not made public. The report implies that villainy undergirds that silence. The report alludes to events at other universities around the country, then uses those events to indict the UB Foundation, even though there is no connection between UB and those places and no evidence that the questionable events elsewhere are going on here. The website then cites that report as evidence of the validity of its activities. 

Questions are not evidence; they are not even facts. They are just questions.

There is no avenue on that website for anyone on the faculty to join the ostensible chapter of AAUP. The site names Halpern as president and McClusky as secretary/treasurer, but lists no other members. I wrote Halpern and asked how the election was conducted and who got to vote; he did not reply. 

You can’t join the chapter, but you can sign on to the site’s “Petition for UB Foundation Transparency,” which endorses the report by Halpern, McClusky, and Holstun. There are only 143 signers. Less than half of them are currently members of the UB faculty; many have never been part of the UB faculty; some have no connection with UB at all, past or present. 

The chapter and website have only one function: to attack the University at Buffalo Foundation.

What those articles want

All the articles and the editorial pose the same demands as the three faculty members: They want the UB Foundation to make public all its documents about everything, so the four, and perhaps any other interested parties, can inspect them for mischief.

There is, as I said, no evidence for or indication of mischief. This is just an in-case request. 

Artvoice’s Quigley filed suit for the documents, saying that under New York’s Freedom of Information Law and Open Meetings Law he had the right to see them and to attend all UB Foundation board meetings. New York Supreme Court Judge Patrick H. NeMoyers dismissed his lawsuit on March 2, 2011, saying Quigley had no standing under New York’s FOIL and that the UBF wasn’t a public agency anyway. He pointed out that the UBF board was, with the exception of UB’s president, comprised of private citizens, and all of its funding came from private citizens. It isn’t a public agency and its money isn’t public money. 

Three years after that case was tossed out of court, Dauber drafted a Faculty Senate resolution demanding that UBF open its books “as if it were subject to FOIL.” The measure passed by a vote of 38-17.

Why keep things secret?

Why should UBF not want to make everything public? A lot of possible reasons.

For one, many donors do not want accolades or their names on anything; they just want to give to an institution they want to support, and they do not want to be deluged by other institutions saying, “You gave to them, why not us?” (Diane Christian and I recently provided UB a bequest to set up fellowships and scholarships in the arts, which we think are sorely underfunded at UB. We made our bequest public only because we hoped it would encourage others to make similar bequests. We have since received at least a fivefold increase in requests for donations.)

The UB Honors College, one of the university’s jewels, has benefited hugely from a donor who insisted on remaining anonymous. I have no idea why that donor required anonymity. Would the university be better off if Holstun, Halpern, and McClusky had the phone number? 

Some of the reasons for confidentiality have to do with personnel matters. A lot of personnel information at UB is confidential: Letters to promotion committees are not public, nor are individual votes on promotions; meetings about promotion from the department level on up are not public. Charges against faculty or students that turn out to be unfounded are not public. UBF is a private foundation, operating at a legal remove from all that. It has similar concerns.

The UBF discloses a great deal of information in its annual IRS 990 forms, in its reporting to SUNY and other state agencies. Very little it does is unvetted, and it is audited by several agencies.

The only question is, should this group of three, and the few Buffalo reporters doing stenography for them, have the ability to ferret around complex information and toss bits and pieces of it up with no sense of context or meaning, but (as in the white paper) heaping doses of innuendo?

Villainy or lunacy?

I can understand why the Buffalo News has done such a lousy job on this story. Its newsroom is sorely depleted by buyouts. Its only national news reporter—Jerry Zremski—now spends part of his time writing about a downtown stadium for the Buffalo Bills. There are no foreign bureaus. Its Albany office consists of one person, Tom Precious. Except for sports, columns, and some local news, almost the entire paper now comes from wire services, from the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, McClatchy, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and even the Washington Times.

But what about the UB faculty four, who have maintained this jihad so relentlessly and for so long? UB is a research university, an institution where faculty are expected to engage in teaching, university and community service, and research and publication. Dauber hasn’t published a written book since 1990, Halpern since 1996, Holstun since 2000. Maybe they’re just bored. 

Literature

I’m a literature teacher and I often fall back to literature for analogies for explanations of things that otherwise make no sense to me. With this one, I think of Dostoyevsky’s Bésy, which has appeared in English as The Demons, The Devils, and The Possessed. One critic described it as Dostoyevky’s “greatest onslaught on Nihilism.”

The novel takes place in a provincial city. A character named Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky convinces some of the residents that he represents the central committee of a great revolutionary organization. They believe him. As a result, sore damage is done to the provincial city. A lot of people die. At the end, Verkhovensky dances off, unscathed. 

I haven’t read The Demons for a long time. I remember not being sure both times I read it whether Pyotr Stepanovich was villainous, lunatic, or both. It was clear that the provincials suckered by his pitch suffered grievous harm.

I’m not saying that Holstun, Dauber, Halpern, and McClusky are villainous or lunatic. I have no idea what propels them in this jihad. But I do know that the provincial newspaper in this case, the Buffalo News, has been suckered into doing stenography for them and, in the process, has caused grievous harm to an institution that, by all available evidence, does this community nothing but good.

---

Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture. With David Felder, Birge-Cary Professor in music Composition, he directs UB’s Creative Arts Initiative. He is editor-at-large for The Public.