As Stanford’s Class of 2016 Graduates, An Unresolved Conflict Lingers

3) The provost and university failed to remedy the problem.

For almost two years, I tried to work with the university to secure a reasonable accommodation to the situation that the dean’s actions created. I simply wanted to remain in my house on campus with my children. If the provost had corrected Saloner’s attempt to force me to repay the GSB-controlled mortgage and offered a satisfactory supervisory solution so I would not have to report to Saloner or one of his deputies, I could have returned to the GSB faculty with some confidence I would be safe from bias or further retaliation. Alternatively, if the provost really didn’t want me to come back (as the dean and my wife clearly wished), he could have granted me an early retirement without benefits. I would have accepted such an offer because it would have allowed me, and my children, to remain in our house on campus with no financial cost to Stanford. Rather than remedy Saloner’s discriminatory actions or settle my grievances, the provost simply demanded I return to an un-remediated, and hostile, work environment.

Faced with the university’s refusal to compromise, I filed a lawsuit in April 2014, and was fired the next day. Since then, I believe Stanford has defended itself by impugning my character and my academic accomplishments, interfering in my divorce, and launching a malicious and disingenuous countersuit alleging that I somehow “stole” my own teaching and research materials. This claim clearly flies in the face of Stanford’s faculty handbook, which says, “In accord with academic tradition, except to the extent set forth in this policy, Stanford does not claim ownership to pedagogical, scholarly, or artistic works, regardless of their form of expression.”

MORE THAN A MILLION IN LEGAL FEES

Stanford is probably spending millions of dollars litigating a case with no end in sight, to protect a supervisor who slept with a subordinate, lied about it, and abused his supervisory authority to attack her husband. I do not know if the dean’s motivation was jealousy, racism (I am African American), or something else. However, he referred to me as an “elephant seal” and a “tarantula,” and spoke of putting me in a “cage.” In one unseemly diatribe, he and my wife shared an elaborate fantasy about castrating me in the public square of the GSB campus — and laughed about it.

Dean Saloner also disparaged women of color, making repeated references to “sleeping with brown women.” He demeaned his own students by joking about using his puerile sex chats with my wife as an assignment for his course on Critical Analytical Thinking. And on June 1, 2014 (long after Saloner’s offensive and demeaning exchanges with my wife), responding to another scandal over misogynistic emails sent by Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel when he was at Stanford, Saloner sent an email to the entire GSB community lecturing us about “respect for others.” In what I see as a mind-boggling display of hypocrisy and sanctimony, he declared that sexual harassment would “… not be tolerated at the GSB,” and highlighted the importance of his own role in upholding this value:

It is of course my responsibility to safeguard our reputation and our brand. … While one always runs the risk that there will be individual behavior that none of us likes, are we doing everything we can to build a culture of mutual respect? A culture in which we behave in private in such a way that we will not be ashamed if our actions come into the public eye?

This is the man whom Stanford has spared no expense to protect. It is Stanford’s — not the dean’s — impunity that I find most troubling. The real scandal is the university’s apparent complicity in enabling the dean’s conduct and protecting him by any means necessary without regard for truth or fairness.

What explains this disappointing institutional behavior?  I would argue that it is the erosion of accountability that comes with a $22 billion endowment — an ever-growing war chest that insulates the institution’s leaders from market and non-market forces alike. Furthermore, Stanford is tied to a governance structure that conflates oversight and fundraising. Indeed, when Dean Saloner resigned, Stanford showered him with praise, expressing gratitude for his “leadership” — that is, his prolific fundraising. Moreover, the university allowed him to remain in office until September 2016. Not only will Saloner preside over graduation this Saturday, but even after stepping down as dean he will remain a well-compensated tenured faculty member at the erstwhile No. 1 business school in the world, where he will continue to teach MBAs and executives.

What are the implications of these decisions for Stanford, and especially the GSB’s students and alumni? I think they are dire. The dean’s misconduct and Stanford’s apparent complicity send a chilling message to these future leaders about accountability, transparency, civility, and respect for women and minorities. The GSB claims “to develop innovative, principled, and insightful leaders who change the world.” What lessons will the class of 2018 learn about leadership from Professor Garth Saloner?

Author James A. Phills Jr. earned his BA, MA, and PhD at Harvard, where he taught in the Psychology Department. He was on the faculty at the Yale School of Management, where he won the Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching. From 2000 to 2015 he was a faculty member at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was Professor of Organizational Behavior (Teaching) and the Claude N. Rosenberg Director of the Center for Social Innovation, and Academic Editor of the award-winning Stanford Social Innovation Review. He also developed and directed a number of leadership programs for senior executives.