Published: August 11, 2026
MONROVIA — The University of Liberia has received about US$900,000 of the US$6.3 million appropriated to renovate its campuses, its president said Monday, five days after the Executive Mansion announced that the Ministry of Finance had processed the funding and that President Joseph Boakai was dissatisfied with the lack of physical work on the ground.
Layli Maparyan, in her first extended public interview since taking office, said the balance is sitting in escrow and cannot be drawn down until procurement is complete. “That money has been allocated, but only a small portion of it has actually been handed over at this point,” she said on OK FM’s Morning Rush.
She said the university has now selected a bidder for a 25-classroom building, its first major project, and will use the money already released on what she called low-hanging fruit: leaking roofs at Capitol Hill and the A.M. Dogliotti College of Medicine, bathroom repairs, water sources, and classroom lighting. She said part of the released funds is dedicated to the law school.
Maparyan attributed much of the delay to the Public Procurement and Concessions Commission’s rollout of an electronic procurement system this year, which she said replaced an in person process and required training for everyone using it. She said the system is better because it builds in safeguards, and that it has been slow going.
The Aug. 5 Executive Mansion statement directing the university to accelerate the work followed the start of a joint investigative series by The Liberian Investigator and Kool FM on conditions across UL’s campuses.
The university will reopen on Aug. 25, Maparyan said, answering a caller directly. It will reopen while the faculty and staff associations remain on a work stoppage, and while their July 17 resolution stands. The associations informed members on Sunday that no conversation on resolving their demands has taken place.
Dr. Maparyan did not dispute that. She said she has never sat down with them. Their first scheduled encounter was at a board of trustees meeting, and she said that when the associations arrived they told the board they did not feel they could be in the room with her, so she left and waited elsewhere. A neutral mediator later invited both sides to meet informally on three occasions, she said, and the associations did not appear at any of them.
“I don’t want to say that, you know, I’ve been avoiding dialogue. I actually would like to talk with them,” she said. “My door remains open.”
She said the stoppage is already costing money the university does not have. A donor told UL in a communication last week that it had been preparing to move on a commitment and had seen that the university was on work stoppage, she said. The donor agreed to wait. She declined to identify the donor or the amount.
UL has been audited only for 2022 and 2023, an exercise that was already underway when Dr. Maparyan arrived and whose report reached her in March. No audit covers any part of her tenure. She said donors that advance UL through a screening process routinely ask for three years of audits at the final stage, and that the university cannot produce them.
She estimated UL’s total budget for the year at just over US$46 million, including infrastructure, with about US$40 million allocated for personnel and operations. She mentioned that personnel costs, which were nearly 90 percent of the budget last year, are now closer to 75 to 80 percent. When asked about the number of employees, she said the university had about 3,200 before payroll cleanup, and the current figure is above 2,000 but below 3,500. Regarding the nearly 300 part-time lecturers, she stated that the actual number is higher, somewhere between 600 and 800.
She said she has removed ghost employees and used the vacancies created within a payroll ceiling set by the Ministry of Finance to make new hires, including appointments serving her own administration and conversions of faculty returning from study leave. Salary adjustments for faculty and staff were included in her proposed 2026 budget, she said, and the government asked her to hold the 2025 legacy budget because it was about to release infrastructure funds and could not do both. She said she will resubmit the adjustments for 2027.
On her own spending, she said she personally donated 1 million Liberian dollars to the UL Credit Union to be used as emergency grants rather than loans for staff whose salaries cannot cover emergencies.
She said a solar-powered project adding 26 bathrooms and a small student center at Fendell is near groundbreaking, having been delayed when a ship carrying solar supplies from China was slowed by the conflict in the Middle East.
Asked whether anything would make her give up the presidency, she said no. “I love this job. I’m in my dream job. I will not give up.”
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