After ascending to the presidency, Mr. Kim announced a deal with the other two organizations under which they would dissolve and fund-raising would be centralized in the alumni association. At that point, the three groups had combined assets of about $2.4 million. By contrast, the endowment funds created by alumni of Stuyvesant’s rivals, the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School, stand at $6 million and $13 million.

Although many alumni agreed that it was important to centralize fund-raising, murkiness about the terms of the deal led some to accuse Mr. Kim of acting without fully informing association members.

Beth Knobel (’80), a former producer for CBS News, is one of those critics. She joined the board of the association in June 2015 to push what she said were needed reforms. She contended that the board’s election procedures were undemocratic, the organization was spending too much on management and the group’s financial reporting needed to be more transparent.

She said other board members were hostile to her proposals.

Once on the board, she said, she discovered it was not following the rules in its bylaws and handbook. In a conference call last November, she asked the board’s governance committee to resolve the conflicts and to consider new bylaws she thought would improve management.

She said that when Mr. Kim told her that was not how the organization wanted to spend its time and energy, she resigned.

Mr. Kim “told me point-blank that the association had more important things to do with its time than to improve its governance,” Ms. Knobel said. “And this shocked me, really, because the way an organization operates is key to everything it does, particularly a fund-raising organization.”



Mr. Kim said in an interview and subsequent email messages that the election procedures were standard for nonprofit organizations. He said he was comfortable with the share of total expenditures spent on management and fund-raising — 33 percent, according to a draft financial filing for the 2016 fiscal year that he provided. That level of overhead is slightly high for a nonprofit, though not significantly so. In 2015, the Brooklyn Tech Alumni Foundation spent 19 percent of its total expenditures on management and fund-raising, while the Bronx High School of Science Endowment Fund spent 29 percent.