We deserve to know why we paid a former dean not to work

The people who run the University of Arizona seem to be under the impression that they are spending their own money.

In fiscal 2019, the university paid more than $1 million to a former dean who didn’t work for so much as a minute that year. Or, apparently, the year before. Or the year before that. That’s because he was on what must be the world’s longest paid administrative leave.

J. Lyle Bootman was on leave for fewer than four months in fiscal 2019 before walking away from the “job” with $1,051,626 for the year, according to The Arizona Republic’s Caitlin McGlade and Justin Price.

That is, a little over $253,000 for a year’s salary while he was sitting at home plus another $793,363 for ...

... What exactly?

He’s not a football or basketball coach. He doesn’t run the university.

He apparently hasn’t even been allowed on campus since the fall of 2015 (yet still collected a regular paycheck).

So why did taxpayers shell out more than $1 million before his departure last year?

Couldn’t tell you. Mum’s the word down in Tucson.

The university would not explain the payout to Republic reporters, citing an Arizona Board of Regents policy restricting disclosure of personnel information. Since when, however, are they allowed to hide how they are spending our money?

Bootman caught the eye of the reporters when he popped up on a database of state employee salaries as one of the university’s highest-paid employees last year. Right there, just behind UA’s football and basketball coaches.

So they started questions, as reporters do, to find out why taxpayers were on the hook for $1 million.

Turns out in 2015, Bootman, then the dean of UA’s College of Pharmacy, was charged with drugging, beating and raping a woman. Court records say the woman told police he made her a drink and she later blacked out. She awoke the next morning in his bed beside a naked Bootman, with a sex toy on the table.

She was treated at a hospital for a broken nose, swollen lip and severe bruising in her vaginal area, according to court records.

Bootman denied having sex with her and said in a phone call monitored by police that he didn’t know how the woman wound up in his bed.

Detectives found blood on his sheets and a sex toy hidden behind a false wall in a cabinet — both of them containing the woman’s DNA. Ultimately, the case was tossed out in 2017 after investigators found evidence that the woman previously had gone on a trip with Bootman. She sued him and reached a confidential settlement in 2018. Bootman, meanwhile, was stripped of his job as dean upon his arrest in October 2015 and put on administrative leave from his $253,000-a-year faculty job, where he remained for four years.

According to a February 2018 story in the Arizona Daily Star, UA by that time had been paying this guy to stay home since his arrest.

UA policy says a faculty member may be placed on leave with pay “only if it is determined by the president that the faculty member’s continued presence on the university campus is likely to constitute a substantial interference with the orderly functioning of the university or a department or unit thereof.”

Assuming nothing changed between February 2018 and his departure in October 2018, we paid this guy ... not to work. For four years. Then we paid him another $800,000 to leave.

And that is not even the most outrageous part.

The most outrageous part is that UA doesn’t think it’s any of our business.

We – the people who pay the bills – aren’t entitled to know why the university decided to pay this guy $253,000 a year to do nothing for four years. Not entitled to know why we had to pay him an extra $793,363 shortly before his “departure” from the payroll.

The fact that Bootman never was convicted put UA in a pickle, I suppose.

A big, fat, sour one that we ultimately paid for yet aren’t entitled to know why.

Sorry UA, you owe us an explanation.