The man who until recently managed Wesleyan’s investments wrote this to his wife in an email when he still worked at Wesleyan.
He was excited about the extra money he was about to make (Wesleyan paid him $500,000 or so, sickeningly low when you consider that his peers at Harvard until recently got thirty million dollars a year) from — just like Phyllis Wise and Mark Emmert at board-seat-crazy University of Washington — sitting on a bunch of corporate boards.
This guy, Tom Kannam, also opened up tons of new businesses while working for Wesleyan (he billed Wesleyan, according to a lawsuit the college has filed against him, for travel and other stuff associated with these ventures), and generally seems to have regarded his Wesleyan job as a kind of stupid side gig he held onto because it gave him access to information and connections that moved his real money-making activities along.
The Kannam family emails Wesleyan’s gotten hold of and presented in its suit are wondrous to behold. When Kannan tells his wife that Wesleyan has just updated its conflict of interest policy and that the policy looks really serious, she responds: Oucheroo.
January 7th, 2010 at 8:22AM
My favorite (presumably apocryphal) answer to conflict-of-interest charges is “It doesn’t conflict with any of my interests!”
January 7th, 2010 at 10:42AM
My poor alma mater.
April 23rd, 2010 at 8:58AM
[…] Simmons and Mark Emmert and Phyllis Wise enrich themselves as corporate stooges. But make their universities pay a price for […]