University oversight a waste of money

Einstein might have been pleased to know Pitt added one more stack of validation to his… Einstein might have been pleased to know Pitt added one more stack of validation to his theory of relativity. It appears that $8,941 is both a lot and a little bit of money.

A bit of chronology:

On Dec. 1, 1998, Pitt failed to register eight on-campus electrical transformers that use the probable carcinogenic fluid polychlorinated biphenyl with the Environmental Protection Agency’s PCB transformer database.

On April 12, 2000, more than 16 months after the deadline, Pitt registered the transformers.

In January 2002, the EPA fined the University $25,300 for the lapse in registration just more than three years later. At the time, Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs Robert Hill, then the University spokesman, claimed the delay was because of a paperwork oversight.

Now it’s October 2002, and after nearly eight months of disputing, the University has settled with the EPA and lowered the fine significantly to $8,941.

It would be unreasonable to assume that mistakes wouldn’t happen in a University with hundreds of departments and thousands of employees. In the hierarchy of paperwork, one registration form must be like car keys or the bachelor sock.

In the Capital Campaign world of billion-dollar fund-raising, $8,941 is chump change beneath couch cushions. The University community should expect Pitt to have a discretionary fund to ensure no group in particular is being charged for the oversight.

The fact of the matter, though, is that to the vast majority of individuals with their names attached to Pitt, $8,941 is an amount that means something.

For students, that amount is $1,000 more than one year’s tuition. For many faculty and staff members, that amount is several months of salary. The laissez-faire attitude of those responsible for this oversight is indicative of a larger problem: the distance between the bottom and the top of Pitt’s food chain. You can flip it every which way, but $8,941 is a lot of money and every Pitt administrator needs to know that.

Certainly everyone appreciates the effort to lower the fine by more than $16,000. However, that doesn’t diminish the fact that this whole oversight is a complete waste of money that didn’t need to happen – not to mention the fact that the money of 2002 is being used to pay for a mistake in 1998 when most tuition-paying undergraduate students were still in high school.

That’s a sad notation of bureaucratic chronology.