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Cambridge College trustees plan to decide Friday whether to fire the school's president or allow him to resign after he allegedly tried to use school funds for his nephew's college tuition and hired an administrator whose company had a consulting contract with the school.
The trustees placed Mahesh Sharma on a six-week paid leave Dec. 13, pending a more extensive investigation of his management of the nontraditional college. Trustees shortened the timetable on a resolution as other problems surfaced, said Eileen Brown, the school's chancellor, founder, and acting chief executive officer. The college is also investigating whether Sharma and another administrator set up a satellite campus in India after trustees rejected the idea.
Besides deciding how to sever ties with Sharma, trustees plan to approve a search for a new president. The school caters to adults seeking college degrees to advance in the workplace.
"I want closure for the college," said Brown, who founded the college in 1971. "I want both internally and externally to say we are moving on to the future."
Sharma has worked at Cambridge College for about 30 years and became president in 2003. He denies any wrongdoing, said his Framingham-based lawyer, Jack Merrill.
"He thinks it's an unfortunate position he's been put in," Merrill said. "Mahesh Sharma loves that institution. He worked his whole professional life for it."
The college has roughly 2,000 students at three sites in Cambridge, and another 6,000 at campuses across the nation. Sharma earns roughly $320,000 a year, according to 2006 tax data.
During the summer, Sharma prompted trustees' questions about his management practices after he named Nishikant Sonwalkar a college vice president. Sonwalkar remained chairman of iDL Systems, a distance learning company that had at least a $170,000 contract with the college. Trustees saw the appointment as a potential conflict of interest and asked Sonwalkar to leave his college post in mid-December.
Sonwalkar fully informed both Sharma and the trustees of his role at iDL and as a college employee, said Joseph Laferrera, a Boston attorney representing Sonwalkar.
"He feels very comfortable with his position in this whole thing," Laferrera said.
After a Globe inquiry, college trustees last month began investigating whether Sharma tried to use college funds inappropriately. Documents provided anonymously to the Globe included a copy of an $1,850 check for first-semester tuition to a college in India and a letter by Sharma to that college's director that he was sponsoring his nephew as a first-year student.
The check, - from a Cambridge College account - was not cashed because Sharma's nephew never enrolled, the school found. Cambridge College officials also later uncovered a notation indicating the check was for a conference in India, an explanation written by a lower-level college official apparently at Sharma's request.
"Mr. Sharma again doesn't believe there was anything inappropriate, and did not at any time intend to deprive the college of any funds," Merrill said.
But more issues came to light after trustee chairman Jonathan Z. Larsen asked college staff in a Dec. 19 letter to come forward with concerns about ethics, integrity, or any potentially illegal conduct or transactions at the college. One letter, which was unsigned and sent to Larsen and the Globe, cited several concerns, including whether both Sharma and Sonwalkar were setting up a satellite campus in Mumbai, India.
The letter also included a January 2007 article published in the Waltham-based India New England, which quoted Sonwalkar saying Cambridge College planned to start an educational center in Mumbai. The article noted that Sonwalkar and Sharma had traveled to India to lay the groundwork for the project.
The problem, Brown said, was that trustees never approved creating a campus in India. Cambridge College, she said, wants to "make certain there isn't something in the college's name operating in India."
Merrill and Laferrera said both of their clients heeded the board's wishes not to proceed in India.
Larsen, the board's chair, echoed Brown's goal for Friday's meeting: "We hope to come to closure," he said.
Linda Wertheimer can be reached at wertheimer@globe.com.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
