UCI Business Development Center to Shut

The nationally acclaimed Accelerate Technology business development center at UC Irvine is being closed and its director has been fired after losing a war of wills with the university’s new business school dean.

David Blake, dean of the UCI Graduate School of Management, said Thursday that Accelerate’s program director, Tiffany Haugen, and two of her four paid staff members were dismissed as part of a normal “winding down” of the program after state and federal officials told him continued funding was uncertain.

But sources say Blake told state officials he intended to replace Haugen’s program, triggering the funding problem. The dean said he wants a broader program developed with other university officials.

Accelerate, which receives $350,000 in state and federal funding, will close its doors Dec. 31. Blake said clients would continue to receive assistance.

Blake and Haugen, said one source, have been butting heads over control of the popular business development center since the dean took office Oct. 1.

Blake told Accelerate’s stunned staff of the decision in a meeting in his office late Wednesday as locksmiths changed the locks at the center’s office in a business complex next to the campus.

An irate Haugen on Thursday said that Blake ended the program without giving staff members a reason and without regard for the center’s dozens of clients.

Haugen, who began the program in 1990 and recently accepted on its behalf a federal Small Business Administration award for outstanding assistance to developing technology businesses, called the closure a “disservice to the small-business community in Southern California.”

She said the center has been instrumental in obtaining about $75 million a year in private investment funds that have helped dozens of businesses get started.