Written by Nicholas Vetrisek
Despite the controversy from a few months ago regarding a CSU San Marcos dean spending university money on personal expenses, it has now happened again. Wesley Schultz, the Dean of Graduate Studies, is also a volunteer director for the Connecticut charity “Keep America Beautiful,” which is designed to teach Americans how to beautify their communities. This sounds fine, but there’s a problem.
Naturally, as a volunteer director, there is a lot of travel involved with the charity. For Schultz, however, paying for it is not his job, it’s the responsibility of CSU San Marcos. The money used was that of the university, and this is in spite of the fact that CSU San Marcos and Keep America Beautiful have no connection whatsoever to each other.
In response to the allegations brought against him, Schultz surely has an airtight argument. “Serving on the board of KAB is consistent with the mission of CSUSM, and my travel costs are paid using non-state sources of revenue,” he said. Not if the words of Hana Callaghan of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University are anything to go by.
“Among these are the duty to be good stewards of public resources, the duty of loyalty which means they have a duty to put the public’s interest before their own, and the duty to preserve trust in government which creates a duty to avoid even the appearance of impropriety,” Callaghan said. “If public officials benefit financially as a result of their public position, they arguably have violated these three ethical responsibilities owed to the people they serve.”
Mr. Schultz has blatantly violated these rules by using university money to fund his own private expenditures. The fact that there have now been two deans implicated in money mismanagement shows that CSUSM cares nothing about where its money goes or how it is spent.
Neither the faculty nor the students care about what is going on and this problem will only worsen in the future. An attitude of permissiveness creates a culture of indifference.
