Facing an influx of concerned petitions from parents, staff
and community leaders, UCSD officials maintain that they have no plans to
reopen the contested
audit, which Chancellor Marye Anne Fox continues to call a sound inquiry.
However, other campus insiders — including ex-Principal Doris Alvarez and some
members of the Preuss Board of Directors — are planning to release their own
rebuttals to the audit in the near future, calling the campus’ unified response
into question.
UCSD’s Audit and Management Advisory Services, which
performed the initial six-month investigation after allegations of grade
tampering surfaced last summer, released its findings in December. Since then,
however, the audit has yielded multiple criticisms, including accusations of
improper statistical analysis and biased interviews.
Following the audit, a group of five UCSD professors
appealed to Fox and former Preuss Board of Directors Chair Cecil Lytle to
reopen the investigation with the assistance of qualified statisticians. The
group argued that the transcripts found to have errors were not a random sample
of all grades at the school, and therefore the auditors could not have
adequately determined the scope of the grade changes.
“If the auditors had taken my Intro to Statistics course …
I would have failed them,” said research professor Javier Movellan, one of the
five who questioned the report.
Though he has kept mum over the issue since the audit’s
release, Lytle expressed similar sentiments in a Jan. 19 e-mail obtained by the
Guardian. In the letter, addressed to the group of professors, Fox and Vice
Chancellor of Resource Management and Planning Gary C. Matthews, among others,
Lytle accused campus administrators of disregarding the board’s input when
releasing the audit report.
“A greater concern for me, as board chair, is the campus
disregard for joint governance displayed during the rollout of the report,”
Lytle said in the letter.
He alleged that three Preuss board members were not allowed
to see the report prior to its release, despite Lytle’s scheduling of
multiple appointments for them to do so.
“Consequently, major administrative decisions were made
without benefit of faculty input,” Lytle said.
In the letter, he said the three board members are writing
an article that makes arguments similar to those of the five professors, which
he expects to be published “soon.”
Lytle has since stepped down as chair for medical reasons,
Movellan said. The board’s acting chair, professor emerita of literature Susan
Kirkpatrick, could not be reached for comment.
Though Fox said in a response that she had provided her
“leadership team” with a copy of the professors’ comments, university
spokeswoman Dolores Davies said the administrators have no intentions to resume
the audit.
“The audit process is independent and follows procedures
that are routinely applied across the UC system,” Davies said.
Since the professors’ letter was made public, a group of
eight parents that was involved in the Preuss PTA or parent council submitted
its own petition to Fox and Lytle on Feb. 9.
“I feel very bad and guilty because we did not act before,”
said former parent council President Maru Cham, who organized the petition.
“With all my trust in the system, I felt the audit would [have] an acceptable
result. I personally am just a mother. If these professors question [the
audit], I support them.”
On Feb. 11, a group of local educators known as the
Committee of Concerned Latinos submitted a similar appeal, which criticized the
audit’s statistical analysis and “over-reliance” on the testimony of former
Preuss Registrar Pearline Khavarian, whom Alvarez claimed to have terminated last
April for changing her daughter’s grade on a transcript.
“The current audit is flawed and the negative impact it has
had on Dr. Alvarez is not just and must be addressed in the appropriate
manner,” the letter read.
Alvarez met with the group of five professors last week to
present her tentative rebuttal to the audit, Movellan said, which deconstructs
the evidence against her point by point.
He said Alvarez will ask that her rebuttal be officially
added to the audit, and will make it public in the near future.
Julianne Singer, Khavarian’s former assistant and staunch
advocate of her innocence, has requested that the UCSD Academic Senate charter
its own inquiry into the matter over the last few months.
Academic Senate Chair Jim Posakony said that although he
considers the allegations very serious, all audit-related undertakings fall
outside of the senate’s jurisdiction.
“The senate has neither the authority nor the resources to
conduct such an inquiry,” Posakony said in an e-mail. “Like the extensive
that is within the purview of the campus administration.”
He said the senate’s main role at this point is to inform
the administration of the faculty’s diverse points of view and urge resolution
of outstanding issues.
“The UCSD faculty as a whole have a deep interest in the
integrity and success of the
and the senate will persist in representing and pursuing that interest,”
Posakony said.
As part of the audit’s recommendations, Matthews will
commission an external consulting firm to independently review the school’s
operations. Davies said the selection process is ongoing.
