OU President Gallogly: 'It's not fingerpointing, … but some people can read it that way'

“People are reading it that I’m criticizing him, but (I’m being) factual,” Gallogly said Wednesday.

“I can’t ignore those things that continue to lose us money,” he said, referring primarily to two student housing complexes that annually run almost $10 million in the red. “I never said David made a mistake about this and this and this. I said those things lose money, and they do.

“It’s not fingerpointing, … but some people can read it that way. ‘He’s complaining about these things,’ ” Gallogly said.

The issue surfaced this week when the Norman Transcript reported that Gallogly threatened to “destroy” Boren last summer after Boren disputed Gallogly’s assertion that the university was having cash flow problems.

“I don’t recognize those words. I never made statements like that,” Gallogly said.

Meanwhile, the OU Daily reported that Gallogly had ordered an independent investigation into reporting by the university’s development office during Boren’s administration.

On Wednesday, Gallogly and OU General Counsel Anil Gollahalli said the inquiry has been completed and found that the development office had for years overstated to U.S. News and World Report the percentage of alumni contributing to the university.

In September, the university quietly revealed that it had corrected OU’s Voluntary Support of Education survey for fiscal years 2015-17 because in-kind software contributions were improperly listed as cash donations.

In effect, the VSE survey overstated OU’s cash contributions by about $500 million over a three-year period, Gallogly said.

Gallogly and Gollahalli said the misreporting did not involve any criminal violations but did result in the departure of several development department personnel.

To the general public, the misreporting might seem trivial, but Gallogly said it upset him because it appeared to be intentional and, particularly in the case of the VSE survey, misrepresented the university’s financial situation.

“My position is, let’s be honest, and let’s do it right,” Gallogly said.

He said he became aware of the Voluntary Support of Education survey situation after taking over on July 1 and discovered that the university’s endowment was not growing as rapidly as reported rates of giving suggested it should.

Upon investigation, he learned that the university was listing donated software use as cash contributions totaling $150 million.

Gallogly and Gollahalli said this was improper on two counts. Survey instructions clearly say software is not to be included in the report, and in any event the value of the software was greatly overstated according to accepted guidelines.

“We not only reported it; we reported it as cash,” Gollahalli said.

While correcting the VSE survey, Gallogly and Gollahalli said, employees informed them that the alumni giving data also had been altered.

In recent years, Gollahalli said, OU reported that 19 percent to 20 percent of alumni had contributed to the university, when the actual number was 9 percent to 12 percent — still considered fairly high for a public university.

Gallogly said he has not made a public issue of the misreporting and has been upfront about the university’s financial situation because he wants OU employees and the public to understand why there have been layoffs and belt-tightening in some areas.

No doubt contributing to the impression that Gallogly is at odds with Boren’s legacy are his priorities. Where Boren focused on creating an elite undergraduate program, Gallogly says he wants to “build out” the graduate school and double research activity.

He is also less enamored with the generous merit scholar program Boren was so fond of, and he is broadening OU’s financial aid umbrella.

But that does not, Gallogly said, mean he’s trying to denigrate Boren.

“We’re not trying to embarrass anybody,” he said. “That’s bad for the university.”