University of Utah administrators say the April controversy involving the Huntsman Cancer Institute still plagues the school as it searches for a new president, but they have yet to enter into negotiations that may alleviate the problem.
Instead, they are waiting for the completion of a study on the institute’s funding and operations, delaying talks on a new oversight agreement with the Huntsman family until October at the earliest.
The U.’s major concern, officials say, is that they believe they are being asked to pay more than what is stipulated in a memorandum of understanding (MOU), which, for decades, has governed the relationship between the institute, the U., and the Huntsman Cancer Foundation — a fundraising arm of the family that is dedicated to raising money for the institute.
The Huntsman family disagrees and Peter Huntsman, foundation CEO, said he is frustrated by what he considers another stall in negotiations dragging out a dispute that has roiled campus and left the state’s flagship university searching for a new president and a new senior vice president for health sciences.
And Huntsman believes this new study is unnecessary because the U. commissioned a similar one last year.
“It looks to me like the conclusion, they‘ve already come up with and they’re in search of an analysis,” Huntsman said. The institute already has a board of qualified experts ”advising the cancer institute at no expense to Utah taxpayers ... and we‘re supposed to completely ignore them and go with a local consulting firm?”
U. administrators and the school’s board of trustees, along with Sullivan, decided to bring in FTI Consulting, a global business advisory firm, to examine the operations of the institute and the Huntsman Cancer Hospital, said Alan Sullivan, a Salt Lake City attorney hired by the U. to handle negotiations with the family, after the dispute went public with the unexpected April 17 firing of institute CEO Mary Beckerle by Vivian Lee, then senior vice president of the U’s health sciences and U. President David Pershing.
Beckerle’s termination sparked faculty protests and led Jon Huntsman Sr., the institute’s founder and biggest benefactor, to call for Lee to lose her job. Pershing reinstated Beckerle just a week later and, soon after, Lee resigned. Pershing then said he’d leave once a new president was selected, a process that remains in its early stages.
The fight between the U. and the Huntsmans had been going on for at least a year before that. It came to a head as the family sought a new memorandum of understanding that would cut out Lee, allowing Beckerle to report directly to Pershing. The agreement also would have given Beckerle more power to hire staff and cement a revenue-sharing agreement that the U.administrators thought was overly generous to the cancer institute.
And that’s why U. administrators decided a new study was needed, one that would focus on funding of the institute and the cancer hospital, Sulllivan said, as well as how the institute is governed.
The U. denied an open records request for the contract with FTI, saying it was protected by attorney-client privilege. Sullivan said the contract is with him because he “retained them to help the university.” But he added that the U., ultimately, will pay the bill.
Last year’s study, in contrast, looked at the institute’s “sources and uses of funds” and was conducted by CBO Partners, a Virginia-based firm that focuses on higher education executive recruiting, interim management and operations and management consulting, according to an Aug. 29, 2016 document obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune.
CBO’s report said personnel costs, including support staff, and faculty salaries were high, for example, and that the Clinical Trials Office’s expenses exceeded its revenues.
But Scott Lloyd, the institute’s senior director of finance and administration, took offense to these findings and wrote an 11-page letter to David Browdy, a U. health sciences chief financial officer, in November outlining his view that CBO didn’t understand how the institute functioned.
“Please be assured that I am not afraid of, nor adverse to, outside and independent reviews,” Lloyd wrote. “But I do feel that it‘s a huge waste of time and resource to engage consultants who cobble together your work, with disparate pieces of information, to eventually arrive at ’inflated headlines’.”
Sullivan — who has been paid more than $70,000 since the U. hired him in the wake of the controversy — hopes this new study will shed light on how the institute, the U. and the Huntsman family should interact moving forward. FTI is conducting site visits this week and next to the institute and the hospital, Sullivan said, with the hope of having a report ready by the end of September — though it could take longer. The Huntsman Foundation has provided documents, but has otherwise not participated in the study.
Once the report is complete, Sullivan said the U. will jump-start negotiations with the foundation on a new agreement. He said he hopes they can reach a deal by the end of the year.
Huntsman has previously said his ”patience is wearing thin” and complained that he “can‘t imagine what’s going on that they can’t speak to their largest donor.”
Chris Nelson, a U. spokesman has said he’s “confident” the U. and the foundation will find a solution “that provides for the long-term financial and operational health of the clinical and research missions of the university‘s Huntsman Cancer Institute.”
Editor’s note: Paul Huntsman, the son of Jon Huntsman Sr. and brother of Peter Huntsman, is the owner and publisher of The Salt Lake Tribune.
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