UO Foundation cuts scholarships $1.4 million, increases administrative spending $2.0 million.

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.

Curious about what the foundation pays their CEO, Paul Weinhold? Good luck finding that. What sort of bonus did Chief Investment Officer Jay Namyet get? None of your business, professor punk. 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.