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What if Columbia has to mortgage Butler???
Despite being in the middle of wrapping up his summer legal internship, our Arts Editor took the time to look into the latest legal allegations against our great University.
Last Tuesday, a proposed class action lawsuit naming Columbia University was filed in the New York federal district court. In the complaint, the unnamed plaintiff (“Jane Doe”) accused the university of allegedly overcharging administrative fees for participation in its retirement plan. In addition to this allegation, Doe claims that Columbia improperly managed the investment options and selected poorly performing options over alternative investments, thereby reducing the retirement assets of university employees. These actions by the university allegedly caused participants in the university’s retirement plan to lose hundreds of millions of dollars, leading the beneficiaries to ask the court to judge Columbia liable for $100 million in damages.
The complaint against the university seeks class action status, as it represents a proposed class of 27,000+ participants in Columbia’s retirement plans. The suit claims that the university breached its fiduciary responsibility according to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act by allowing participants in the retirement plan to pay unreasonable fees for administrative and investment services in relation to the retirement plan. Because Columbia also allegedly “selected and retained expensive and poor-performing investment options that consistently and historically underperformed their benchmarks and similar funds,” according to the complaint, “Columbia University caused … plans, and hence participants, to suffer hundreds of millions of dollars of staggering losses to retirement savings.”
Columbia has yet to make any official statement regarding the filed lawsuit. Provided that the summary judgement is not reached in favor of either party, the university will ultimately either address its fiduciary responsibility to participants by either settling with the plaintiffs out of court, or face trial.
In addition to Columbia, eight notable universities have been recently named in similar proposed class action lawsuits relating to retirement plan mismanagement and breach of fiduciary duty. These universities include NYU, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT, among others.
For the legal-minded, the initial complaint of the lawsuit filed against Columbia and other related court documents can be accessed online through this site ($5 per document with the 14-day free access trial).
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6 Comments
@Anonymous Columbia University Victim plaintiffs versus Bollinger Administration – Columbia University need to be aware that Bollinger Administration – Columbia University has given at least 1 Supreme NY Federal Court Judge’s wife a no show job of assistant/associate dean for a spot over $100k annual in exchange for the judge ‘sitting on’ cases against Columbia University, i.e., the cases are assigned to this judge but he/the judge doesn’t recuse himself so another judge can review them and he won’t adjudicate them…in one instance he finally submitted letter to court explaining this relationship with Columbia University suggesting that maybe for that reason he ought to recuse himself 10 years after he was 1st assigned the case. the judge was 1st assigned the case the same month and year his wife was given this job And – as he himself explains in letter to court 10 years later – same month and year his daughter was given a spot in engineering graduate school.
When you have a dispute with Bollinger Administration – Columbia University you can’t rely only on the merits of the dispute, you also have to watch out for their like ‘vandalism’ of the court system. It’s a real racket they have going.
@Skeptic Uhh, source?
@Alum “Provided that the summary judgement is not reached in favor of either party, the university will ultimately either address its fiduciary responsibility to participants by either settling with the plaintiffs out of court, or face trial.”
There are many other possible ways the case could go. And the phrasing seems to side with the plaintiffs even though the article gives no reason to believe they should win.
@Old alum It will be interesting to see if corporations are responsible to obtain the lowest fees for benefits of their employees. Next on the hit list will be healthcare benefits.
@Jo This is old news. Every major university with a large fund is in the class action. Columbia has one of the largest retirement plans in the US, larger than Harvard’s and Yale’s.
@Alum Similar class-action suits had already been filed against other universities. But I’m pretty sure each case names only one university, and that there isn’t a single class action against all of them. The one against Columbia was just filed and is not “old news.”