Weinhold and Namyet’s pay and expenses go up, scholarships go down

6/8/2012: Diane Dietz of the RG has the story here:

The foundation plowed $14.5 million into student aid, scholarships, loans and student wages in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2011, according to its annual filings with the Internal Revenue Service. Spending in that category was down for a fourth straight year — and down 24 percent from 2007 — because contributions dwindled.

… The foundation reported $715 million in total assets, 49 employees and a payroll of $3.9 million. Weinhold’s total compensation last year was $338,310, including base pay of $274,494 and retirement and other benefits of $63,726. Chief Investment Officer Jay Namyet got $300,744 in total compensation.

My guess is that Weinhold’s scholarship number includes the $9 million or so for athletic scholarships from Duck Athletic Fund ticket payments. They delayed releasing this IRS data for 6 months, and the next solid info will be in September. From an earlier UO Matters post:

2/15/2012: The Council for Aid to Education announced the results of its authoritative Voluntary Support of Education survey today. Chronicle story here.  On average, giving to higher ed is up 8.2%. Giving to the UO Foundation is down from $121 million for the 2009-10 FY to $93 million for 2010-11 FY. (Official total using PV). These amounts include deferred gifts, unrealized bequests, and so on. Not sure how things like the Jock Box get counted.

I’m still parsing the data, but this jumps out: UO Foundation CEO Paul Weinhold and compliance officer Erika Funk have once again refused to complete the section of the survey giving details on donations to athletics. The RHS column shows what a group of our comparator universities report on average. Those Beavers at Oregon State have nothing to hide, but UO does:

I wrote in October about how the Foundation cut contributions to academic scholarships by $1.6 million last year, while increasing their own administrative spending $2 million. And here is the data we do have on where donation money is going. No real growth for academics, more and more goes to athletics:

Data source here. And the academic side has to pay the tab for the skybox seats for these people.

10/22/2011:

The UO Foundation’s job is managing funds from UO donors, investing the UO endowment, and disbursing the funds to UO for scholarships, etc. They’ve just released their 31 page annual report, here. I’m no accounting professor, but people have earned tenure showing the correlation between glossy pictures in annual reports and efforts to hide bad financial news. This report is not an exception.

Last year they actually went to Attorney General Kroger and procured a special opinion exempting them from Oregon’s public records law. Here’s the letter from their lawyer, Frederick Batson, requesting the ruling.

You can get some spending info from the required IRS 990 reports – but not until their “compliance officer”, Erika Funk, runs out every possible extension delaying the release of the info. She sure earns her salary – it will be May of 2012 before we learn what Foundation executives took home in 2010. Still, this year’s official report does have a few bits of actual data, hidden among the glossy photos:

You read these things from the back. Start at page 30:

That’s right. They cut scholarship funding by $1.4 million, while they increased spending on Foundation Administration – that’s themselves – by $2.0 million. I’m guessing Weinhold’s take was $350,000 or so plus expenses, and another $250,000+ for Namyet.

So what did we get out of this crack team of executives? The foundation’s recent investment returns are well below what they’d get by just putting the endowment in the Russell 3,000 etc:

We are paying Jay Namyet to guess on the market, and he’s just not that lucky a guy. Of course he’ll still get a fat paycheck – but too bad for our scholarship students.