Sandra Ogren died Tuesday, July 20. She served as the vice president for university advancement for six years before retiring last month.

Cal Poly’s vice president for university advancement and former Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Sandra Gardebring Ogren died after a nine year battle with a rare form of cancer. She died July 20 at the age of 63.

Ogren served in an interim capacity as the university’s vice president for university advancement for two years and was given the permanent position in 2006. She retired from Cal Poly last month, where she was responsible for starting and organizing the Cal Poly Foundation, helped in the advocacy program for the Center for Science and Mathematics and worked closely with each college in organizing fundraising for advancement, President Warren Baker said.

“She was a terrific vice president for advancement,” Baker said. “She was a very articulate spokesperson for the university and assisted me in many areas that had to deal with public relations, raising private funds or community relations.”

Ogren was a very charming, smart and helpful woman that made friends for the university very easily, Baker said. Her depth of knowledge, ability to work well with everyone and positive outlook will make her hard to replace, he said.

“She was an excellent communicator and very engaging. She had impeccable integrity,” Baker said.

Ogren hosted foundation board members that came to campus to get ideas about advancement for Cal Poly, he said.

Chip Visci, associate vice president for strategic communications, knew Ogren very well from work but also was close friends with her in the community.

“She was just so full of life and truly cared about others,” Visci said. “She had good insights into problems and she kept everything in good perspective.”

Visci remembered when Ogren invited him and his wife to a Christmas gathering during his first year living in San Luis Obispo. Ogren and her husband, Paul, suddenly brought out gifts for people, and Visci expected the gifts to be a stocking-stuffer type deal, he said.

“She gave me a book that I had mentioned I was interested in,” he said. “She had remembered it over the course of the year and took the time to wrap it and place it under the tree. She did it for me and about 35 other people.”

Visci said Ogren was generous and very thoughtful and “a lot of fun to be around,” Visci said.

Ogren battled a rare form of cancer for nine years, although Baker and Visci both said she was always well composed.

“You would never know she was having any problems,” Baker said. “She was always very positive and optimistic and had a lot of energy as well.”

The cancer was a private thing for Ogren, Visci said. She was a very strong person.

“Nobody knew it was an ongoing battle until about a year ago when she started chemotherapy,” Visci said.

Ogren was truly a woman of substance, really bright and funny, Visci said.

“She was a very youthful person and snatched away from us way before her time,” he said.

Ogren’s husband told the Minnesota Public Radio news that his wife died surrounded by family.

“She knew that she was dying and at the end was not afraid of it,” Paul Ogren said in the article. “She had a lot of joy in the last month of her life, but she had a lot of pain as well. That allowed her death to be a gift, I think, to her and ultimately to those who loved her.”

In addition to her husband, Ogren is survived by her stepchildren, Shana and Samuel.

A service will be held at Mount Carmel Lutheran Church in San Luis Obispo on Saturday, Aug. 7.

“She was a terrific woman who gave a lot to Cal Poly,” Baker said. “She helped me a great deal in the time she had here; we worked very well together.”

The Academic Senate Budget and Long Range Planning Committee is struggling for greater transparency in Cal Poly’s budget.

While some steps were taken toward achieving this goal, the committee remains dissatisfied with the lack of disclosure in the current budgeting procedures.

Commenting on the existing nature of the Cal Poly budget, committee chair Eric Fisher said, “You can learn a lot about transparency issues by just trying to report on Cal Poly’s budget. Good luck.”

Under Fisher’s leadership, the Budget Committee, a historically unproductive committee which was inactive all last school year, has taken on a new, active role.

The committee is currently crafting a letter to the incoming Cal Poly president, voicing its frustrations and suggestions on budget issues. Recommendations in the letter include: “a public version of Cal Poly’s budget (similar to that of) CSU Fresno” and active “administration (representation) at committee meetings.”

The latter issue of faltering communication between the committee and the administration is a factor inhibiting progress toward greater transparency. While the committee website lists three administrators as members, the letter said, “We have sometimes had (an administration) representative and sometimes not.”

The letter, available on the committee’s Google Group, also highlights the legislative grounds on which the committee calls for increased transparency. As stated in the memo, “Article III of the Constitution of the Faculty and Bylaws of the Academic Senate gives legislative and advisory powers to the Senate … (including) consultation on budget policy.”

Mutual understanding, however, on the committee’s role, as defined by this passage, remains problematic. “The committee is struggling over what it means to have an advisory role,” Senate Chair Rachel Fernflores said.

Over the course of the year, Fernflores has played the role of mediator between the budget committee and the administration. In an attempt to establish better communication, she arranged a meeting between herself, Fisher and Provost Robert Koob.

Fernflores also brought Sandra Ogren, vice president for University Advancement and board staff member of the Cal Poly Foundation, to a Senate Executive Committee meeting. Ogren offered to reveal the Cal Poly Foundation’s books, but Fisher did not have time to take up the offer.

The Cal Poly Foundation is one of the university’s three sources of revenue, the other two being the Cal Poly Corporation and the operational income from student and state funds. According to Fisher, the foundation composes a smaller portion of the budget than the other two sources.

Another achievement for Fernflores is the expansion of access to the Poly Data Dashboard, a link on the Cal Poly Portal charting allocation of funds throughout the university. Previously available only to select faculty, the Poly Data Dashboard is now available to all senate members and by school year’s end will be available to all faculty.

Larry Kelley, Vice President of Administration and Finance, said he was satisfied with such disclosure.

“Information being provided on this campus is more than you would see on other CSU campuses,” he said. “(We have) a decentralized budgeting system at Cal Poly.”

Nonetheless, Fernflores is not content with the existing amount of transparency.

“What we really need help with is interpreting the budget, understanding the budget and understanding all sources of money,” she said.

A revised senate bill that will expand the California Public Records Act, forcing secondary university bodies such as the Cal Poly Foundation and the Cal Poly Corporation to open their books to the public was proposed by Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) Jan. 5.

The senate bill, known as SB 330, calls not only for open books but also the release of donor names if they receive more than $500 in return for their donation or service such as exclusive box seating at sports games, an allegation against Fresno State. If passed, the public will be able to see where the money generated by these non-profits is going as well as if donors or volunteers are receiving special treatment and influencing university curricula.

“These bills are imperative in order to rid the University of California and the California State University of waste, fraud and abuse,” Yee said in a recent statement.

Currently, the California Public Records Act only extends to state and local agencies such as advisory boards and state bureaus, not private non-profit corporations and entities such as the 87 foundations and auxiliaries that exist at California State Universities and Universities of California.

As the “fundraising arm” of the university, the Cal Poly Foundation was created in 2006 with the sole purpose of bringing in donations for the university, making it exempt from the act. Similarly, the Cal Poly Corporation is a private non-profit that oversees businesses such as El Corral Bookstore and Campus Dining. According to Chip Visci, the associate vice president for strategic communication, the money generated from the foundation and from the reserves set up by the corporation go to student scholarships, athletics, professional development grants and capital improvements.

Even though the bill has so far received bipartisan support in the state senate, opposition to the bill is strong among university administrators. Visci said public access to private businesses, such as the bookstore, could create an unfair advantage to competitors who contend for student business and in turn, could affect the university’s finances.

“We do not want to see the creation of an unlevel playing field for campus business,” Visci said. “The bookstore already operates with a great amount of transparency. Nobody else has to disclose to their competitor their records. Why create a disadvantage for the university and for the CSU system?”

Visci said that the administration has no problem offering transparency when it comes to their actions but because the foundation and the corporation are not state operated, they should not have to disclose their books to the public. He said the university has historically been transparent, pointing out that the corporation board meetings are made public.

One point of the bill Visci strongly opposed was the presumption that donators have an influence over Cal Poly’s academics and teaching staff.

When big-time agriculture donor Harris Ranch threatened to withhold money from the university when Michael Pollan was scheduled to speak at the Performing Arts Center in Oct. 2009, the one-man speech was changed to a panel discussion. Following this, Cal Poly drew fire for allegedly bowing down to the demands of alumni and donors. Cal Poly administrators immediately issued statements refuting such claims and their stance has not changed.

Visci said that people should be vigilant and concerned about the impact donors have on programs, but not at Cal Poly.

“I am very comfortable and I know the president is very comfortable and I know the provost is very comfortable saying unequivocally, donors are not allowed to interfere with academic freedom with our faculty or in our classrooms,” Visci said. “Academic freedom was not abridged, has not been abridged, and will not be abridged. Cal Poly’s a terrific place and I’m glad people are concerned what goes on in the university the way they are, but I want people to do their reporting first.”

Nevertheless, the possibility of inappropriate spending on behalf of CSU and UC non-profit foundations and secondary bodies worries members of the California Faculty Association.

“There are just so many opportunities for corruption here,” CFA President Lillian Taiz said.

The CFA, who is a co-sponsor of the bill with the California Newspaper Publishers Association, said they are for the passing of SB 330 because they feel there have already been many examples of “questionable use of foundation funds.” Taiz pointed out a foundation problem that occurred at Sacramento State in which the university purchased a building in downtown Sacramento as an investment. When the school was no longer able to pay for the building, the university received more than $5 million dollars from the foundation. Taiz said donation and tax-payer money that could be going toward students is now going toward an investment in which they had no say in.

“That kind of thing makes it clear that we need to keep an eye on things going on here. Everyone deserves to know what the heck is going on,” Taiz said. “I worry that people make donations to the foundation thinking the money’s going in one direction and suddenly discover that it’s being loaned out to people inappropriately. This is the kind of public scrutiny we need in the public universities.”

A big concern for Cal Poly CFA president and physics professor Richard Saenz is not that foundation and corporation money is being spent inappropriately, but that the money is not being spent on issues of top priority such as classes.

“I’m just more curious about the priorities on its legitimate use,” Saenz said. “What’s more important: a bigger football team or more sections of classes that are being taught? I would guess most of the money is going for reasonable things but I would like to know what their priorities are because then we can work to change these priorities.”

Visci, however, assures that the administration takes academic priorities regarding students into deep consideration when it comes to spending corporation and foundation money.

But if that’s the case, Yee’s Chief of Staff Adam Keigwin wondered why California universities are spending hundreds of thousands of student and tax-payer dollars fighting this bill.

“What’s wrong with transparency? If you’re truly not doing anything wrong, then you should want to open up your books,” Keigwin said. “I find it ironic that administrators says they’re completely separate arms, separate entities and if that’s the case, then why are administrators there lobbying again this bill? Most of the time you don’t get involved in something that doesn’t involve you.”

This isn’t the first time university administrators have opposed a bill authored by Yee.

A similar bill, SB 218, was met with an uproar of opposition last year. The bill was introduced by Yee after learning of public records request denials at two state universities. A college newspaper made a formal request to Sacramento State University in order to determine the amount of book markup at the campus bookstore and the Fresno Bee wanted the names of guests who were sitting in luxury suites at the Save Mart Center arena at Fresno State.

Despite bipartisan support, the bill didn’t make it past the governor’s desk in Oct. 2009.

At the time, the bill called for the release of donor names who wished to remain anonymous. In a statement about his decision, the governor said he feared that the opening of donor names to the public would result in a “chilling effect” of donations to public universities in a time when universities are being particularly hard-hit by the economy.

“Wouldn’t it put a chilling effect on donations to know that you couldn’t really tell where your money is going?” Taiz said, who once called the governor’s outward support of transparency “lip-service.”

Keigwin said the governor’s objections to the previous bill was a “smokescreen” that came about because of the influence university administrators have. As a result, Keigwin said they had to be careful with their language when making amendments to the new bill and he expects this bill to pass the governor’s desk.

“We had overwhelming support from the student organizations, the faculty organizations, the workers on the campus, from every sector on the campus except the administration,” Keigwin said. “The governor is quite close and influenced by those regent and trustees and I think that’s the reality. We need to convince the governor why this is a good idea but his reaction rarely matches his rhetoric.”

Calls to the governor’s press secretary were not returned nor were requests to talk to other Cal Poly administrators.