In 1969, the federal government charged Pennsylvania, as well as nine mostly Southern states, with operating a segregated system of higher education in violation of the Civil Rights Act. Pennsylvania’s state universities had to desegregate and distribute resources equitably. Three decades later, the state, again under federal pressure, agreed to give Cheyney $36.5 million for new building projects and provide support for its academic programs.

After nearly two decades of budget deficits, Cheyney stayed in the black until 2006. But it has run a deficit nearly ever since, with debt exceeding $25 million last year.

The overspending accumulated under three university presidents — Wallace C. Arnold, Michelle Howard-Vital, and Frank G. Pogue.

Asked why deficits were allowed to persist, James Dillon, the state system’s vice chancellor for administration and finance, said presidents repeatedly offered plans for balanced budgets, only to have them collapse.

Cascading troubles

Beginning around 2011, problems at the school escalated.

Student enrollment fell nearly 25 percent in just one year. Cheyney relaxed its admissions standards and the percentage of applicants the school accepted jumped from about a third to almost 90 percent by 2013.

“At one time, I believe Cheyney took students they knew they shouldn’t have taken to ensure the funding source,” said Bogle.

“At one time, I believe Cheyney took students they knew they shouldn't have taken to ensure the funding source.” Robert W. Bogle, board president and chief executive officer of the Philadelphia Tribune

And those students paid a price, according to a former Cheyney financial administrator who asked not to be identified because she did not want to publicly criticize the school.

“In an effort to help, we were actually doing a disservice, because the students didn’t always have the skill set for college, so we had a high dropout rate,” she said. “And the students who were unable to complete their degree also were unable to pay back their loans and debt. It was an extremely vicious cycle.”

Over the next years, records show, dysfunction reigned in Cheyney’s admissions and financial aid offices.

From 2011 through 2014, nearly half of students awarded federal aid at Cheyney were ineligible to receive it, in some cases because they did not enroll, dropped out, or failed to make required academic progress, a state-ordered review later determined.

Meanwhile, staffers allowed the school’s financial-aid records to slide into disarray. Files were stuffed into cabinets, packing boxes, even arrayed on the floor, a state audit later revealed.

Moreover, the school did not have an electronic means of cross-referencing billing records with attendance and athletic records. As a result, administrators had to check records by hand, resulting in what one report called an “absence of data integrity.”

In the athletic department, for example, team members who weren’t enrolled or eligible for scholarships competed nonetheless, records show. The NCAA in a 2014 report said Cheyney had “a lack of institutional control,” wiped out wins for teams and coaches, canceled postseason play and put the Division 2 school on probation until 2019.

Cheyney’s admission records, too, were a staggering mess.

Between 2012 and 2015, as many as 3,000 applications for admission to the school went unopened or unprocessed, and some were later found stuffed in admission staffers’ desks. Hundreds were found at the post office, having never made it to the admissions office.

Deborah Bowles, who joined the office as a consultant in late 2013 and a few months later was hired to oversee it, declined to comment. Bowles, who left the office in November 2015, said by email: "I do not wish to talk about Cheyney."

The university also failed to collect unpaid tuition bills from hundreds of students. In normal practice, students who don’t pay up or obtain loans are not allowed to take classes. At one point, students owed a collective debt of $7 million. Today the debt stands at $2.5 million.

Bogle, who has chaired Cheyney’s council of trustees for 20 years and has served on it for 30, said: “No one should support or can support that kind of an operation. A private company would declare bankruptcy.”

Asked about his responsibility for the shortcomings, Bogle said he and other council members shared in the blame, but stressed that they had limited oversight. Indeed, council meeting minutes going back at least until 2013 show that Bogle decried the school’s growing deficit and called for cuts to realign the troubled finances. “The council spoke about the problems, but we’re not empowered to change the problems,” he said. “We aren’t empowered to fire the CEO.”

TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer Robert W. Bogle, longtime board member at Cheyney University, says blame for the school’s problems falls to “all of us.”

The council recommends candidates for president and participates in interviews, but the system board of governors ultimately has the power to hire. Similarly, the council conducts annual reviews of presidents, but it’s up to the board of governors to dismiss a leader. Both the council and the board of governors approve the university’s budget.

Michelle Howard-Vital ran Cheyney from 2007 to 2014, during which time she allowed its budget deficit to grow to $6.7 million, and the admissions and finance offices were in apparent shambles. Reached at Florida Memorial University, where she serves as interim president, Howard-Vital agreed to a later interview, but never followed through. She did not return subsequent phone calls.

Bogle, who initially supported Howard-Vital, said the council grew wary of her administration within a year, but was powerless to remove her because the board of governors and the chancellor had that authority.

State Sen. Vincent Hughes (D., Phila.), a Cheyney trustee, at that time called for a state investigation into the admissions mess.

“If 10 percent of those 3,000 had wound up being accepted students, then a student population of 700 would now be at 1,000,” Hughes said.

The state did investigate but declined to make it public, saying it was confidential. Hughes said he never got a clear answer on what happened, but was told that the staffers and administrators responsible no longer work for Cheyney.

The state system’s chief counsel, Andrew C. Lehman, blamed the admissions fiasco on a lack of coordination as well as “incompetence and indifference,” according to a 2016 letter he sent to Hughes. Kenn Marshall, a spokesman for the state university system, attributed the lapses in part to a high turnover of staff and a lack of training.

In addition to the chaos in the enrollment office, state officials discovered another debacle. In 2016, an audit found that Cheyney had improperly diverted more than $3 million in scholarship money, research grants and other restricted funds and used it to plug a hole in its budget.