The Contract Says Segal Delivers an Editable Model. CSU Says It Has No Further Records.

A Public Records Act request, a $1.1 million contract amendment, and the gap between what the CSU bought and what it says it holds.

By Thomas J. Norman, Ph.D., Professor of Management, California State University, Dominguez Hills. Views are the author's own.

On April 8, 2026, the California State University amended its contract with The Segal Group. The amendment raised the ceiling on Contract C-CSUCO-00007756 from $175,000 to $1,105,000 and attached an eight-page scope of work for a compensation study of represented faculty and staff. The scope is specific about what the CSU was buying. It says: "All data files, including the interactive Excel model, will be delivered in fully editable format with formulas unlocked. Segal will provide documentation explaining calculation logic and assumptions embedded in the Excel model."

On September 8, 2026, responding to my August 11 request under the California Public Records Act for that study's underlying deliverables, the CSU wrote: "The Segal Group retains their proprietary records regarding the study. At this time, CSU does not have further records available for disclosure beyond the records shared below." The records shared were two links to the public report and the public webpage.

Both statements can be true at once only if something happened in between: the models were not delivered, or were delivered and not kept, or were delivered and are being withheld under an exemption the response does not name. The response does not say which.

What the contract shows

The document shows that the amendment's indicative schedule called for "Draft Excel Models to the CSU" by May 15, 2026, "Final Excel Models and Board Draft Presentation to the CSU" by June 12, 2026, "Updated Excel models to the CSU" by September 18, and "Final Interactive Excel Models" by November 30, 2026. It ties a $100,000 milestone payment to the June models and the Board presentation "upon CSU written acceptance," and states that "Payments will be in arrears, at the completion of each deliverable based upon CSU acceptance." The schedule is described as indicative and subject to adjustment.

The same amendment added a trade-secrets section to the CSU's terms. Section 10.1 requires Segal to "clearly mark or otherwise identify in writing any information it contends constitutes Contractor's Trade Secrets at the time of disclosure to CSU." Section 10.3 acknowledges that the CSU "may be required to disclose records that Contractor has identified as constituting or containing Contractor's Trade Secrets" under the Public Records Act, and that "Nothing herein shall be construed to require CSU to withhold records where disclosure is required by law, nor to limit CSU's obligations under the California Public Records Act."

In other words, the contract anticipated exactly this request. It set up a procedure: Segal marks what it considers secret at delivery, the CSU holds the deliverables, and when a request arrives the CSU decides what the law requires, after notifying Segal. The September 8 response does not describe that procedure being followed. It describes the records as Segal's.

What the CSU did produce

Fairness requires saying what the response contained. For the presidents' and vice chancellors' studies, the CSU attached the executed contract, the April 2026 amendment, a January 2025 list of proposed comparison institutions, the full November 2025 presidents' market analysis deck, the vice chancellor market analysis as of January 27, 2026, and a March 2026 vice chancellor methodology document. Those are real records, and the comparator list in particular answers a question the public report never did. The gap is specific to the faculty and staff study, the one that reached a reassuring conclusion about 45,000 employees, and to two other items: the "more detailed summary" the Chancellor's Office gave Capital Public Radio in December 2025, and the CSU's own communications with Segal about comparator selection, the 15 percent system premium, aging factors, and the competitive range. The response does not mention either.

What happened next

I observed: the CSU's August 21 letter said a further response would come "on or before September 25, 2026." On September 14 I wrote back asking for an item-by-item disposition, asking whether the CSU had received the contractual deliverables and, if not, whether it had requested them, asking which materials Segal had designated as trade secrets under Section 10.1, and asking for the written justification and responsible officials that Government Code section 7922.540 requires for any withholding. As of October 31, 2026, no reply to that letter and no September 25 response has reached my inbox. The record does not yet establish whether the CSU sent one elsewhere, is still searching, or considers September 8 its final determination.

Why this is a system question

The evidence suggests a familiar failure. A public agency buys an analysis, the consultant's report becomes the public document, and the work papers that would let anyone check the report sit in a place the agency's records office does not think of as its own. "Proprietary" then does the work that a written determination is supposed to do. The Public Records Act does not permit that substitution. It requires the agency to say what it has, what it is withholding, and why, and to release the parts that can be separated from any genuine secret.

The remedy is not complicated. The CSU should state, for each of the six categories in the request, which records it produced, which it is withholding and under what exemption, which do not exist, and which are outside its possession. It should say whether the May, June, and September Excel deliverables were received and accepted, since payment depends on acceptance. It should identify what Segal marked as a trade secret and when. And it should release the comparator institutions, job-matching rules, aging assumptions, and its own communications about them, none of which belong to Segal.

The faculty and staff study is the only one of the three Segal studies the CSU has characterized as reassuring. It is also the only one for which the CSU says it holds nothing beyond the report. That is the contradiction this site exists to name.

Disclosure. I teach compensation, am developing a compensation textbook, and serve on the executive board of the Dominguez Hills chapter of the California Faculty Association, which has an interest in the study's conclusions. I filed the records request as an individual and write here as an individual.