In a time when the university is dealing with budget cuts and rising tuition rates, deans of some of the colleges are concerned that they have some endowment accounts with balances that are too large.

President Gregory Geoffroy asked the deans to review endowment funds in their colleges and units after a report Geoffroy received from the Committee to Review Endowment Expenditures suggested improvements were needed in the oversight.

The committee, which looked at 66 accounts, found some of the accounts had large unspent balances.

Several of the deans said they had similar concerns as they were in the process of conducting reviews of the accounts in their respective colleges.

“The only major problem so far has been in reviewing the accounts – we have found some accounts where the money has not been used to the extent it could be,” said Peter Rabideau, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

The accounts which have unspent balances are generally scholarship accounts, said Mark Engelbrecht, dean of the College of Design.

Engelbrecht said a handful of the 50 accounts within the College of Design don’t have a memorandum of agreement that is specific enough.

“I’m most interested in the issue of accounts that have funds that have not been spent,” he said. “Sometimes the wording of the memorandum is too restrictive or the conditions have changed and we don’t have enough students in the program that meet the conditions.”

The Committee to Review the Endowment Expenditures also found several instances of large unspent balances in the 66 endowment accounts it selected to review.

David Hopper, chairman and spokesperson for the committee, was unavailable for comment.

According to the committee’s report, some of the instances of large unspent balances they observed were because “in some cases the funds are retained until a sufficient balance is available for a specific purpose or until a new program in place.”

Other reasons the committee found for funds not being expended were “that university units are unaware that funds are available for use or are uncertain as to the intended purpose for the funds due to memorandum-of-agreement complexity or ambiguity.” The committee also found some instances where the university units were “using outdated [agreement memoranda] whose terms no longer apply to current operations.”

Rabideau said in cases where it is virtually impossible to comply with the restrictions, the agreements must be revisited.

“We’ll try and go back and talk to the donor,” Rabideau said. “We’ve gone back to donors and said, `We can’t find a sufficient number of students for the scholarship – Do you wish to reconsider the guidelines?'”

He said in cases where the donor has passed away, sometimes the memorandum has a clause that allows for alternative uses or else the university will try to contact the family.

“If that can’t be done, sometimes if the donor passed away, we make a very, very good-faith attempt to revisit the guidelines,” Rabideau said. “We absolutely want to follow the donor’s intentions. The key is to write a memorandum that’s very clear.”

“Sometimes it’s a very fine line you walk,” said Labh Hira, interim dean of the College of Business. “Sometimes [the memorandum of agreement] is too specific and other times it’s too ambiguous.

“You have to find the middle ground.”