Anatomy Of A Rebellion: Inside The Revolt Against Stanford GSB Dean Garth Saloner

Stanford Graduate School of Business

Saloner, when he started as dean in 2009, led a senior team composed equally of women and men, but he changed that very quickly, Hoffman says. “He got it down to one woman and seven men. When he made senior hires he was hiring men.

“He changed the composition of the staff to fill it with people who were not going to question him. He wouldn’t hesitate to yell and embarrass you in meetings . . . move you. . . retaliate. A grownup doesn’t surround him or herself with yes men. That shows such tremendous insecurity. He is a tremendously insecure guy, and all of this is overcompensation for that.”

Neither Hoffman nor Benjamin could point to an underlying basis for what they believe is Saloner’s bias against women.

“I don’t know,” Hoffman says. “Why does anyone have trouble with strong women?”

Benjamin speculates that Saloner’s issues around females may be unconscious, but in any case, “I don’t think he likes it when women disagree with him.”

ALUMNI ‘SHOCKED’ AND ‘OUTRAGED’

Hoffman says she is in regular contact with many prominent alumni, and she says the former GSBers are vigorously discussing, analyzing, and critiquing Saloner’s leadership in the wake of revelations from the lawsuit and the divorce case between Phills and Gruenfeld, and Saloner’s announcement that he’ll leave the deanship next year. “There is a certain amount of outrage and an awful lot of disappointment,” Hoffman says. “They’re surprised and shocked. There’s a lot of disappointment that he’s still working there, that he’s going to stay the year, and there’s a fair amount of outrage that Stanford’s letting him stay a whole year, because it seems so much in variance with the values that we espouse and claim to hold dear, we at the GSB for sure, and I’m sure Stanford as well.”

Hoffman, a ’91 GSB MBA, believes Saloner’s behavior has sent a message that also flies in the face of GSB values, and countermands the lessons that are traditionally instilled in students.

“We don’t backstab. We don’t speak ill of other people. We respect the individual and we respect the group,” she says. “We’re not a sharp elbows kind of place. Everyone is super-competitive within themselves and they want make a great impact on the world (but) it’s not ‘win at any costs.’

“It certainly feels that the message he’s sending is that the ‘I’ is greater than the ‘we’ and that rules don’t apply to those in power, and if you can do something without getting caught that’s fine – all of which is so, so not the Stanford way of doing things. All of us who’ve worked there, who’ve gone to school there, have nothing but love and affection for the place.”

STANFORD SAYS ALL CONCERNS PROBED

Stanford administration is handling all media requests directed to the GSB, as well as responding to requests to the university. Poets&Quants asked Stanford to comment on the claims made in the testimonials, and the university responded that it wouldn’t add to its previous comments on the situation. Stanford spokesperson Lisa Lapin had earlier said the goal of the investigation into the Group of 46 claims was “to obtain a careful and independent evaluation of all the concerns presented and to look for any patterns.” Lapin added that GSB staff surveys show high job satisfaction. The Group of 46 letter, however, alleges that previous breaches of confidentiality in the surveys have led people to avoid providing negative feedback in them.

Saloner, meantime, has hired the world’s biggest private PR firm, Edelman, to represent him. Edelman declined to make Saloner available for an interview regarding the claims against him.

The Group of 46 weren’t successful in persuading Etchemendy to nix a second term for Saloner, but publicity around the Phills lawsuit and the group’s letter has had nearly the same effect, though in a delayed fashion. Saloner will be leaving the deanship at the end of the academic year, with four years left in his second term. On Sept. 14, the first day of Stanford’s academic year, Saloner had announced his resignation in an email sent to the GSB community. He said he was stepping down because the lawsuit, and publicity, were a distraction for the GSB community, and threatened the school’s reputation. At the time the email was sent, first-year GSB students were attending an information session – on Stanford’s Code of Conduct.

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