The New Jersey attorney general, Anne Milgram, recently began a lawsuit involving Stevens Institute of Technology. According to a piece in the New York Times:
charges are swirling over Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. The state attorney general has sued the institute and its president, Harold J. Raveché, accusing him of plundering the endowment and receiving $1.8 million in illegal low-interest loans for vacation homes, with half of them later forgiven.
The accusations are complicated. Parts of the charges involve the institution itself, which in ten years tripled the president’s salary, paying Raveché $1.1 million last year. Parts of the charges involve the president, who allegedly kept two sets of financial records to hide the school’s dire financial situation.
In Raveché’s time at Stevens, a New Jersey technological university founded in 1870, he raised the school’s endowment from $57 million to $155 million. He became president in 1988.
Since the 1990s the presidents of Adelphi, American, Towson, and Texas Southern universities have been removed for excessive compensation. All of these are schools with relatively small endowments.
