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Hunter and I met with Jeff and Alan from UD on Wednesday. Here are the main points from the meeting along with some action items.

1) Kent Way will be unoccupied beginning Sept. 1st. If we need to move anyone in on Sept. 1st there are 3 offices downstairs that can be used. No renovations are needed on the first floor. The people working on the first floor however, would have to work through the renovations going on on the 2nd and 3rd floors.

2) They gave us a template that we need to fill out that would form the basis of a draft MOU. In order to do so we need to really narrow down the focus of the “Purpose and Mission of the Center”. Among the potential activities the Center could offer as suggested by UD are:
Periodic Panels and Roundtable Discussions
Classroom Education of Students, Student Engagement, Classroom Lectures and Guest Lectures
Co-sponsored Programs and Conferences
Academic Research Projects
Academic Symposia
Speaker Series
3) The Center can have an “Advisory Board” - this is unpaid but can function as a Board of Directors.

4) They reiterated (and Hunter can correct me if he heard differently) that the University has committed $2.5m/year for 5 years to the salary and support of the Center. In addition, the Biden School would have a budget of $6.4m/year. The focus of our staffing questions should be with the Center. The Biden School budget is for faculty that is already there but they envision the fact that we may want to “create” some sort of Academic study within the school and suggest a faculty member.

5) We suggested that there would be 3-4 people that we would want to bring on board starting in the Fall to get the Center up and running. Because these positions would have to be advertised, there was some talk of having UD sign a consulting contract with a separate LLC that would pay for the initial 3-4 staff on a short term (4-6 month) basis. UD is looking into whether that is feasible but they liked the idea. The 3-4 people could include Valerie, a interim Director, a Program Director and an Administrative Assistant.

6) We talked about putting off a meeting between Dr. Assanis and the VP for a little while until we can make some more progress on the above.

Action Items for Us:

Work on refining Mission and Purpose of the Center
Work on inserting language into UD’s MOU Template (Alex and I are going to start taking a whack at this.)

Action Item for UD:

Give us feedback on feasibility of hiring an LLC to provide short term consulting advice on the Center

We will have our next call on Wednesday at 10am. Let me know if you have any questions.


Eric D. Schwerin
Rosemont Seneca Advisors, LLC
1010 Wisconsin Ave., NW
Suite 705
Washington, DC 20007
(202) 333-1880
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com <x-msg://59/eschwerin@obblaw.com>
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