Tricky Dick splits City

by Rob Wallace

Late last semester Vice President for Finance and Management Nathan Dickmeyer resigned.
He has taken a similar position at Mercy College where, according to Dickmeyer, he has “a wonderful opportunity to work with a President who has been a business officer, someone I have known for over twenty years.” Mercy is a private liberal arts college based in Dobbs Ferry, Westchester. Barbara Gliwa, Associate Dean of the Sophie Davis Medical School, has replaced Dickmeyer in the interim.

Dickmeyer’s last day at CCNY was December 31, 1999. A review of Dickmeyer’s tenure shows why the Vice President was not quite Y2K compliant.

Administrative Jockeying

Upon his hire under then-president Yolanda Moses, Dickmeyer quickly developed a power base in the administration. As many of the problems Moses faced those first few years were budgetary in nature, with $18 million in cuts to CCNY’s budget alone, the president time and again called upon her VP for Finance and Management. Dickmeyer’s influence on Moses extended beyond finance, probably in part because the rest of her cabinet was comprised of jellyfishes like Provost David Lavallee or repressive ruffians like Vice President for Student Affairs Thomas Morales.

Dickmeyer was able to parlay that influence into greater jurisdiction. For example, Dickmeyer ran Lavallee off the road, folding Academic Computing, which oversees the computerized records system, now SIMS, under Finance and Management. According to Professor Gary Benenson of Mechanical Engineering, Lavallee, “increasingly felt himself to be ‘out of the loop.’” Since Dickmeyer’s departure, Academic Computing has been placed under the provost once more.

That propensity for exercising muscle apparently caught up with Dickmeyer when Stanford Roman took over the presidency. As described in the December Messenger, Dickmeyer attempted to railroad CUNYCard past students, staff, faculty, and even Roman, keeping him in the dark about a scheduled CUNYCard implementation. A reportedly infuriated Roman canceled the implementation.

Asked by The Messenger whether Roman forced his resignation over the CUNYCard debacle, Dickmeyer responded, “President Roman certainly did not want me to resign. [Leaving] was my choice.”

Even so, the days of a campus-based big man may be over for now as CUNY Central has placed City College into a kind of receivership. It seems not even Roman calls the shots now.

Fiscal Death-Dealing

A good fiscal thanatologist, Dickmeyer was adept at accounting and presenting City College’s yearly financial massacres. Dickmeyer printed an informative Finance and Management newsletter and maintained a sharp website. He also promptly answered any e-mail queries from students and faculty, including from the hated Messenger.
Dickmeyer was also cooperative on physical plant issues, including following many of the recommendations provided for in a 1998 report from Student Ombudsman Keeanga Taylor on the NAC Building’s environmental problems. This reporter worked as Taylor’s assistant.

“Dickmeyer was not a barrier to the things I needed to do,” Rafael Dominguez, president of the Undergraduate Student Government, told The Messenger, high praise for a CCNY administrator.

But Dickmeyer, conscious or not, often displayed a tin ear for the budget’s political economy. He refused to connect the perpetual bleeding of City College’s budget to concerted attacks from the Chancellor, the Board of Trustees, the mayor and the governor. When queried by Messenger e-mail whether CCNY was targeted with $18 million in budget cuts because of the racial make-up of its students, Dickmeyer, whitewashing the obvious, replied, “All colleges have the potential for deficits because their aspirations should be larger than their resources. City College was never an exception.”

Still, at times, at least in private, Dickmeyer surprised. Professor Benenson told The Messenger, “Of all the people in the top administration, I felt he was the only one who genuinely disagreed with the direction of the University under Badillo and company.”

“By a slip of the tongue, I once referred to the Schmidt Commission as the ‘Shit Commission’, and Dickmeyer laughed and said, ‘That’s a better name for them,’” recalled Benenson. The Schmidt Commission, convened by Mayor Giuliani, offered a prefabricated, negative report about CUNY last year.

AEC Shenanigans

But Dickmeyer’s faults were not just ideological in nature. As an administrator he often very much acted against student interests.

A good example of the latter is the Auxiliary Enterprise Corporation. Dickmeyer chaired the AEC, a not-for-profit corporation set up by the college to hire vendors like Pepsi (vending machines), Barnes and Noble (bookstore), and Metropolitan Food Services (cafeteria). The AEC Board, comprised of administrators, faculty and student government officials, annually allocates the college’s portion of vendor revenues to campus organizations, typically over $200,000.

AEC is in many ways a scam. Year after year administrators are able to “win” thousands of dollars in AEC grants at the expense of student proposals by engaging in a practice political junkies know as bundling. Administrators ask for AEC grants under different names. For example, in 1998 AEC gave $20,000 to the Goldman Center, $5000 to Dean Fred Kogut for an honors convocation, $2164 for a Citizenship Project, $9000 to the Child Development Center, $4500 to the Student Service Corporation, $3755 for the Office of Disabled Students, $5000 to Dean Paul Bobb for his dreadful “Civil City” project, $4000 to CCNY Safety Service, and $2500 to Athletics for office supplies.

All these projects—good and bad—are projects of the Office of Student Affairs under Vice President Thomas Morales. They totaled $55,919 or 24% of the entire AEC budget that year. Many administrative items, like the Child Development Center and the library, should be funded by hard college lines, not by a discretionary fund for campus activities. Moreover, administrators can survive without the money. In 1996, Kogut’s honors convocation received no AEC funding, but somehow the Dean of Discipline was able to hold the function anyway, meaning he found other pots of money to pay for it—a luxury student groups often do not have.

So, administrators are able to avoid annual budget crunches by voting themselves money out of AEC, passing off the losses to students who can’t get funding for their group activities. Even as administrators are already overrepresented as voting members on the AEC Board—including staff members that report directly to top administrators—this past year Dickmeyer re-interpreted AEC by-laws to further reduce student representation.
Such practices render laughable AEC chair Dickmeyer’s 1998 memo to AEC Board members that they needed to make sure “[we] put our activities above charges of favoritism.”

Here’s another example. In 1997, Metropolitan Food Services, the vendor that operates the cafeteria, provided CCNY a measly $54,000 through AEC from the multi-million dollar revenues it took in that year. Metropolitan, in a standard practice I’ve seen at other colleges, then asked AEC $53,765, almost its entire contribution, for “tables and chairs for the cafeteria”. In other words, not satisfied with stripping students with overpriced food, Metropolitan asked for its entire contribution to the college back. And it did so with administrator help: AEC chair Dickmeyer sponsored the request.

Ostensibly, the college is responsible for the cafeteria’s upkeep. But in 1994, AEC budgeted Metropolitan $40,000 for “new tables and chairs” also. How many chairs do they need? Was this a means Dickmeyer used to funnel a vendor all its money back?

‘Closed to the Public’

The AEC also revealed Dickmeyer’s ignorance, even antipathy, towards civil liberties.
At one AEC meeting in early 1998, a member of the Graduate Student Council called Dean Bobb a “motherfucker,” threatened to fight the then-USG president, and disrupted the meeting to the point the AEC postponed its business. Apparently the GSC member’s proposed trip to Africa was rejected, while the USG president’s proposal for a similar trip was on its way toward approval. “We put our activities above charges of favoritism,” indeed.

Dickmeyer’s solution? Ban the public from attending the next AEC Board meeting. In a memo to AEC members, Dickmeyer wrote, “The meeting will be closed to the public; no project decisions will be made. As a corporation separate from the college, we are not a state agency and not under any open records obligations.”
But meeting minutes show the AEC, after discussing improving the decision process, voted to finish allocating the grants behind closed doors. Though the minutes showed what votes finalist proposals received, who voted how was not recorded—one reason why the public needs to be there in the first place.

Clearly Dickmeyer’s actions were a violation of the state’s Open Meetings law. At the request of this writer, Robert Freeman, executive director of the state’s Committee on Open Government, wrote a letter to Dickmeyer admonishing him for violating sunshine laws. Dickmeyer relented, and these important meetings are open to all, a position now legally established by Smith v. CUNY, a lawsuit successfully brought against LaGuardia College for blocking students out of a similar college association’s meetings.

There are many other examples of Dickmeyer’s poor understanding of what civil rights mean at a college. For The Messenger, Professor Benenson cited the privacy violations of CUNYCard, the proposal to arm security, the surveillance of student activists, and abusive behavior by security guards, including a security-instigated melee at a conference about death row inmate Mumia Abu Jamal.

Dickmeyer’s jurisdiction included supervising Security. And he did a poor job of it. On the 1997 deployment of SAFE Team guards from CUNY Central around the campus, which violated President Moses’s promise not to permit armed guards, Dickmeyer, according to faculty, repeated over and over like a wind-up doll that “There is a crime wave in the surrounding community.”

There are other interesting stories and factoids—like Dickmeyer’s owning stock in Citibank, CUNYCard’s sponsor. Or the time he had Security write students tickets—for exiting the library through fire exit doors—as a way of raising money for the administration. But we’ll stop here and allow Tricky Dicky egress to the helicopter and a trip up to Westchester.