Sex! Race! Lawsuit! Scandal! - Stanford B-School Soap Opera

Vanity Fair is running a long piece on the Stanford Business School affair that led the School's dean to resign. It's better than anything you could find on daytime TV. Just a sample below:

...Sometime that summer, Phills’s younger daughter, now eight, told her father how “Garth” had just visited with her mother, and how friendly he had been. That fall, in the ongoing pre-divorce mediation, Gruenfeld seemed to be digging in. Phills, suspecting that Saloner was doing some coaching, and that his wife was bad-mouthing him to his boss (and that some of his colleagues had become standoffish), began his surveillance. Technically it was easy, Phills says—Gruenfeld’s passwords were stored in his computer and iPad—but morally it was more dicey, and he sought out advice from both the university “ombuds” and its dean for religious life. As relevant tidbits turned up, and he grew more alarmed, the frequency of his reconnaissance increased. Though Saloner and Gruenfeld vowed to each other to delete their conversations immediately, in some instances Phills was too quick for them, capturing the exchanges with screen shots. In mid-to-late October, Saloner and Gruenfeld saw each other several times. What ensued would normally be of only voyeuristic interest but for the issue of recusal, which became obligatory at Stanford once a “consensual sexual or romantic” relationship begins. So it matters that, in the space of 10 days or so, the two scuttled dinner plans upon spotting some G.S.B. colleagues in a Palo Alto restaurant, and ended up at Saloner’s house; that Saloner proposed going to a movie in another county, where they could hold hands undetected; that Saloner grew “dizzy” while embracing Gruenfeld in his kitchen; that, before reluctantly parting ways on another evening, they groped each other at her house. (Despite all these facts, contained in intercepted chats, Stanford continues to insist they had yet to kiss—that, defying the rules of both flirtation and baseball, the dean had somehow approached second base without ever touching first.) ...

Full affair at http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/10/stanford-business-school-sex-scandal

(Bette Billet - the winner of our recent contest - passed this link to yours truly.)

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