After reporting a deficit at the end of fiscal year 2010 in August, Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine received $45 million from NU, the Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation and Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, the corporate parent of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.
A Sept. 20 Crain’s article termed the money a “bailout,” but Gene Sunshine, NU’s senior vice president for business and finance, rejected that terminology.
“It’s not a bailout,” Sunshine told The Daily. “It’s not a $45 million grant. It’s not a $45 million gift.”
According to an e-mail from Feinberg Dean J. Larry Jameson to the school’s faculty, the money comes from three sources – $10 million each from NU and Northwestern Memorial HealthCare and $25 million from the faculty fund. Of that $25 million, $12 million was money owed to the school, and the remaining $13 million was released from insurance reserves.
Jameson called the deficit “a short-term misalignment in revenue and expenses.” The school has had difficulty paying for expansions to its faculty, facilities and research, he wrote.
“This expansion is critical to our mission but has been accompanied by a growth of expenses that has not been matched by revenues,” Jameson wrote.
Representing 50 to 60 percent of the University’s overall budget, Feinberg’s specific budget amounts to about $600 to $700 million annually, Sunshine said.
He said Northwestern Memorial HealthCare gives money to the school “from time to time” and called the Faculty Foundation the “clinical arm” of Feinberg, which exists for instances like these.
“It sounds a little bit interesting, but it’s perfectly consistent with what the Faculty Foundation does, which is generate monies that ultimately support (the school),” he said.
Sunshine said some of the money Feinberg received from NU was being held for the Faculty Foundation and was normally reserved to pay for medical malpractice suits.
The transfer of that money was “accelerated,” according to Sunshine, after a plan to get the school out of deficit was complete. Feinberg is likely no longer operating at a deficit, but numbers from the end of the fiscal year are not yet complete, Sunshine said.
