Rep. Lucy Dathan, D-New Canaan, regarded Connecticut State Colleges and Universities Chancellor Terrence Cheng from across the table in a public hearing room at the Legislative Office Building Tuesday afternoon. Glancing down briefly, she shifted her gaze back to the chancellor and began asking questions that many students, staff, faculty, lawmakers and taxpayers around the state have had on their minds for months.
An audit by the state comptroller’s office in December found that nearly all the campus presidents within the CSCU system had misspent public dollars, including Cheng, who charged at least $27,000 on his state-issued credit card between 2021 and 2024, much of which went toward meals that surpassed a $50 limit, along with alcohol and tips considered “excessive.”
Dathan contrasted the audit’s findings with the struggles of the thousands of young people attending CT State schools. “I’m still kind of concerned about the students who don’t even have access to food pantries at some of the locations,” Dathan said, “and we’re talking about excessive meals here.”
Looking directly at Cheng, she asked: “What sort of message do you think that that gives the student who’s working several jobs and trying to make ends meet and trying to get food from a food pantry and can’t get it? There’s excessive meals happening at the top. What sort of tone do you think that sets?”
Cheng and three other CSCU leaders — the general counsel, chief compliance officer and chief financial officer — were the final guests to go before the legislature’s Higher Education and Government Oversight Committees in a joint informational session Tuesday. It was the first time lawmakers had the chance to ask Cheng directly about the allegations of misspending, first reported by CT Insider in October.
Cheng was contrite. “It looks bad,” he said.
“I’m not sure how else to say it more elegantly than that, and that is certainly something that I have to own as the leader of this system,” Cheng continued. “When I make a mistake, I fess up to that mistake. Those were mistakes. Those were absolutely mistakes in that I did not take into consideration what the public perception of my actions might have been.”
In August 2023, CSCU faculty and staff opened the doors to one of their campuses to illustrate what cuts within the higher education system looked like. On a tour of CT State Capital campus, located in Hartford, the hosts pointed out cafeterias, libraries and career readiness centers that had all been shuttered by budget cuts.
That summer and in the months since, union members have said library access, tutoring and disability services have been reduced across the system’s four regional universities and 12 community college campuses. More schools have shut down cafeterias and limited their food pantries hours.
The revelations of misspending by leadership last October — to the tune of thousands of dollars that went toward food, entertainment and transportation, according to state audits — was particularly frustrating for students, faculty and staff who’d been calling for more funding.
Comptroller Sean Scanlon, who presented his office’s audit findings in December, appeared at Tuesday’s forum before the Higher Education and Employment Advancement and Government Oversight Committees, along with Michael Delaney and Beth Macha, who both work as division directors within his office. State auditors John Geragosian and Craig Miner, who released their own findings in late January, also joined the forum Tuesday.
Lawmakers took the opportunity to ask questions about the state’s investigations and next steps for the CSCU system. They asked about the difference between unauthorized spending and improper coding, whether there’s a “culture issue” in higher education and what appropriate state-funded spending looks like.
State officials told lawmakers that the biggest systemic issue is in how university policy was written rather than the personnel themselves. State law gives the CSCU system “broad autonomy over its purchasing policies and procedures,” Scanlon’s December report said. And under existing university policy, meal expenditures are supposed to be under $50 per person with a written record of guests and itemized receipt. The chancellor, however, is allowed to override the policy at his own discretion.
“The percentage of actual violations of policies were fairly small,” Macha said. “The highest issues we saw were with missing or incomplete documentation, which is critical in determining whether or not a purchase is appropriate. You don’t have the details of the purchase, you can’t determine if it fits in the policy.”
The misspending was not “nefarious,” Scanlon added. “Mostly just because there was a lack of policies and procedures, and then also a lack of training on what policies and procedures were in place.”
Still, lawmakers expressed exasperation with the situation.
Rep. Gregg Haddad, D-Mansfield, who co-chairs the Higher Education Committee, said the findings caught him by surprise. “We work very hard to maintain a system that is putting students first,” he said. “Maybe there’s nothing technically wrong here, no violation of policy or law…but to some extent, that’s besides the point, right? [The CSCU] system faces serious financial challenges, and it should go without saying that some of the expenses and some of the expenditures were eyebrow raising to many of us here.”
CSCU faces deficits of $95 million for each of the next two years. That follows a year when the system worked to address a $140 million deficit by making cutbacks including $35 million in personnel cost reductions.
Haddad, who has been a lawmaker for 14 years, pointed to ongoing issues with CSCU leadership and their budget cycles, including unauthorized pay increases by former university president Robert Kennedy in 2012 and the elimination of an internal audit team in 2017.
“This is a system that has, to my mind, never created the culture that we really want to see here and that is rooted in our state constitution,” he said.
Cheng apologized to lawmakers “who have consistently supported our system and its students,” and he said the system’s leaders “recognize the need for stronger oversight, clearer policies and better training to enhance accountability and transparency.”
Cheng told lawmakers CSCU is developing new systemwide policies that will ensure “stricter controls” for state credit cards and travel. The policies are expected to be presented to the Board of Regents for approval, potentially by the end of this month. They would then go into effect April 1, the chancellor said.
“I can vow that I will not make those mistakes again,” Cheng said. “I will be held accountable.”