MOUNT IDA, LASELL TALKS FOCUS OF PROBE
Lawmakers probing Mount Ida College’s land deal with UMass Amherst are calling on Attorney General Maura Healey to focus on the troubled college’s decision to walk away from talks with nearby Lasell College, citing the move as a breach of the board’s fiduciary duty to the college.
Members of the Committee on Post Audit and Oversight released a report yesterday on the $86.5 million deal and promised additional pressure on Mount Ida College finance chief Jason Potts and President Barry Brown, who both skipped a May hearing on the acquisition. The committee will send a list of questions to Potts and Brown.
Committee Chairwoman Sen. Kathleen O’Connor Ives said if the officials do not respond to their liking, “we will proceed to the next tools in our toolkit, namely subpoenas and additional hearings.”
The report slammed the conflicting testimonies of Mount Ida Board Chairwoman Carmin Reiss and Lasell President Michael Alexander about the blown-up merger talks. Reiss claimed Lasell backed out of some guarantees and called for Mount Ida to take on more debt, while Alexander said the guarantees were still good and the deal didn’t require borrowing.
“It was Lasell College that could have saved Mount Ida, but Mount Ida’s Board of Trustees incomprehensibly rejected that opportunity,” the committee found. “We believe Mount Ida’s rejection of Lasell’s offer to take over and operate Mount Ida College is one of the most important examples of the Board and President Brown breaching their fiduciary duties.”
That about-face by the board — an alleged breach of fiduciary duty — could lead to civil penalties for college officials.
The report asked Healey to investigate why Mount Ida walked away from the deal. Healey in May said her office is investigating whether college officials breached their fiduciary duty to the college’s educational mission in the sale to University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her office yesterday said that work is “active and ongoing.”
Nine other recommendations are included in the report, many calling for additional transparency and oversight of troubled colleges. The committee recommends passage of an amendment to the Senate budget that would require colleges merging, closing, expanding or acquiring to tell the Board of Higher Education 120 days before the deal is done, and it requires critically troubled colleges to tell the higher ed board 14 days after they learn they may have to close.
Another recommendation calls for the Mount Ida campus to be run under the UMass President’s office and not UMass Amherst, so the property can be easily available to students across the system.
“This acquisition is a true opportunity for UMass to demonstrate that it actually operate as a system,” O’Connor Ives said. “The thinking needs to shift. It can’t be the culture that access to this acquisition, the Mount Ida campus, is a favor to the students at the other UMass campuses. It has to be treated as an opportunity.”
Meanwhile, professors at UMass Lowell are protesting their former chancellor, UMass President Martin T. Meehan, for being distracted by the Mount Ida deal he created and ignoring pay disparities and benefits issues at the campus.
“Marty Meehan fought for fairness when he was a member of Congress. When did he stop caring about fairness?” Jerome Stover, a music faculty member at UMass Lowell, said in a statement. “This is an embarrassment for the entire UMass system.”