An estimated $140 million in public money has been blown on the University of South Carolina’s Innovista “research campus,” a massive big government sinkhole that has produced only $5.1 million in private investment and fewer than 250 jobs – most of them taxpayer-funded academic positions.
Obviously, those figures are well short of the “thousands of high-paying jobs” that were supposed to come to South Carolina as Innovista ostensibly ushered in the “hydrogen economy of the future.”
Of course, it’s not like anybody is being held accountable for this complete and total failure on government’s part to produce what was promised in exchange for such a ridonkulously large taxpayer investment.
In fact, luckily for the politicians who have staked their reputations on this mother-of-all-boondoggles (S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell, Columbia Mayor Bob Coble and USC President Harris Pastides) South Carolina’s largest newspaper has gratuitously extolled Innovista’s mythical virtues while simultaneously keeping unpleasant realities hidden from public view.
Just what an “advocate for the community it serves” is supposed to do, right?
Last week, Innovista suffered another major public humiliation when it was revealed that the school hired a glorified con man with a shady past as its second lead developer on the project. Months earlier, the free-spending Obama administration announced that it wouldn’t fund research on hydrogen fuel cells as the technology wasn’t immediately practicable, a severe blow to Innovista’s primary research thrust.
Sounds like now would be the perfect time for government to stop trying to pick winners and losers in the marketplace, right? Wrong.
“Innovista remains a bedrock strategy for stimulating economic development,” President Pastides told USC’s Board of Trustees last week. “Innovista is about creating knowledge, jobs and investment.”
Except it’s not about any of that.
Innovista is about wasting money and getting absolutely nothing but half-empty government buildings in return for it.
In fact, not since the days of former President Jim Holderman has there been such a pervasive institutional recklessness and general lack of accountability at USC, and the school’s Board of Trustees is obviously either aiding and abetting this nonsense or it has fallen completely asleep at the switch.
Whatever happened to the University’s core mission? You know, educating students?
Seriously, people. At a time when parents are paying through the nose for tuition (which is up 17% over the past three years alone), USC isn’t teaching – its blowing it’s wad on the “pillars and pyramids” nonsense of liberal “groupthinker” Darla Moore and golden parachutist Mack Whittle.
Pastides – who was handed the presidency at USC by these two yokels – now finds himself in a particularly pernicious pickle (yay alliteration!) as Innovista’s prospects continue to crumble all around him.
In addition to being reduced to bragging about Innovista’s friggin’ parking lots (because in his words “without the vital infrastructure of parking, growth could not occur”), Pastides is said to have known all about the shady past of the developer who got the unceremonious ax last week – as did the Trustees.
That’s why Innovista’s top two bureaucrats are refusing to take the fall over the latest scandal – because they had approval from the head honchoes.
So … what’s next in USC’s ongoing “Innovista Soap Opera?”
We don’t know, except to say you can bet your bottom (taxpayer) dollar it’ll be expensive!
By uscjustice August 10, 2009 at 5:51 am
Intersting photo – I see in the foreground the grey heads of the brownnoser-in-chief Ted Moore and deputy brownnoser wannabe Ed Walton. Everyone at USC knows that these two are really responsible for the current USC financial Innovista debacle. Parks and Hardaway are just scapegoats who could expose them as the real culprits if they were forced to resign.
By Sam August 10, 2009 at 7:15 am
Give them all the boot. Ed-thugs can waste more money in a day than a welfare queen in a lifetime.
By duh August 10, 2009 at 7:46 am
The problem is obviously that he is taking advice from Cris angel mind freak, pictured behind him.
By Maria BeLen Chapur August 10, 2009 at 8:15 am
How much money went into pockets?
How much went to Fidelity Management and Research???
By TotalWench August 10, 2009 at 9:53 am
This university, probably like most, has NEVER been about educating students. Unless your idea of educating people is having someone who can barely speak English teach them while the professors hide in their labs/offices doing work to pad their resumes.
By Myles Keogh August 10, 2009 at 10:34 am
It all starts with Carolina’s Board of Trustees. They have been a detriment to Carolina’s development for decades. Many of the same geriatric members who now serve on the board were on the board when Holderman’s corruption ran rampant. They were never held accountable for their criminal negligence with regards to their fiduciary responsibliites as trustees during the Holerman era. They along with Sorenson and Pesticides are now responsible for this disaster. The BOT had an opportunity last year to make a change by bringing Andy Card in. But they refused to do so because they knew their ineptitude and negligence as trustees would be exposed by someone outside their little circle jerk.
Change has been needed in Carolina’s Administration for many many decades. Term and age limits are needed for trustees. Independent oversight and audiiting are needed as well. The current dinosaurs on the BOT all must go.
The State Attorney General needs to conduct an investigation into criminal negligence by the Board of Trustees, Sorensen and Pesticides and other administrators at Carolina.
As a Carolina grad I am sick and tired of the incompetence that continues to retard Carolina as a university and its reputation. Jackasses like these have been the reason Carolina’s perception among universities is so poor. The quicker these tools are removed and the university administered and run by competent people the faster that perception will change.
By Quiet Voice of Reason August 10, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Actually, it all starts with the General Assembly who allows anything and everything to happen with zero accountability. Can anyone name any serious report on higher education in our state? Any serious report on K-12 education? Anything completed with legitimate research methods? Each institution is allowed to do as it wishes with whatever funds it can cajole from the General Assembly. Clemson has McConnell, USC has Harrell, Francis Marion has Leatherman — do I need to go on?
Forbes is right about one thing — the institutions don’t give a damn about serving South Carolina’s young people. Oh, the stories we could tell….
But as long as the privileged get their football tickets that’s all that seems to matter.
By Ron August 11, 2009 at 8:44 am
What is really funny is that folks run around accusing Obama of being a “socialist”. Yet here we have South Carolina, a supposedly Republican red meat stronghold, wasting millions in failed public works programs.
How can Bobby Harrell say with a straight face he is a fiscal conservative when he supports these type of wasteful government programs? When he speaks in public, he should be booed off the stage and ridiculed for his failed socialist policies.
By Reckless Strategy August 12, 2009 at 8:18 pm
This whole situation with Parks and Roscoe may end up being a blessing to USC and the city. They can now blame these two scapegoats and the economy rather than admit that it was a poor strategic choice from the start.
The admin at USC has stated that all you can do is build and hang a sign out to see who comes. This is quite a gamble with our tax money. Perhaps a better approach is doing your homework first.
The New Carolina/Innovista crowd appears to be so inwardly focused on SC that they have failed to account for competition from other states. They do not have an answer for how the Innovista would “win” versus RTP, etc. They have stated that researchers would flock to this new campus because it is urban and RTP is in the suburbs, but offer no data to show that researchers have any interest in moving to SC without increasing their pay to exurbanite levels that no other institution would remotely pay. Is the Innovista really much nicer and more “urban” than Boston, SF, NYC, etc?
The other argument from this crowd is that USC will be spinning off so many new innovations from its renewed research focus that it will require multiple facilities (a campus?) in order to develop and commercialize them. Sounds good right, except that USC has not spun off any substantial new products except for empty buildings and parking garages. A more prudent approach would be to first see if these newly hired, overpaid professors actually invent anything that the market wants before dropping $100M+ on an empty campus.
Innovista is now so far off course that they are basically attempting to rent this “valuable space” to tenants that plan to use the buildings as mere office space.