After blowing $26,000,000 on a software system it won’t even use, the executive vice president of the University of Wisconsin system offers a mea culpa. Or the bureaucratic, non mea culpa equivalent:
“We’re very sheepish,” Mash told the state Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities. “We couldn’t make this work. We’ve got to dig ourselves out of this hole.”
Dig themselves out of the hole? What the heck does that mean in the public sector? Oh, yeah, it means you’ll have to get more tax money to cover your mistakes.
In the real world, this fellow and/or one or two of his ill-informed cohorts would be out of jobs. But in the rarefied world of the public sector, no doubt a little sheepishness and an expression of desire to dig one’s self out of a hole will save him.
And maybe even make available another $26,000,000 in budget to spend.
That’s nothing! Back in my days at a public university, the rumor was that UM System had flushed a substantially larger amount on converting to PeopleSoft.
Oh wait, a little Google magic and here it is:
Earlier this year, the University of Missouri announced it had blown a $40 million budget by nearly 20 percent. source.
For the mathematically-challenged, 20% of $40 million is $8 million.