What happens when a trustee also has a business relationship with the college? Is the primary loyalty to the college or to the trustee’s own business? A Chronicle investigation of 618 private colleges found that one in four had financial ties with trustee-affiliated businesses — banks, law firms, construction companies — ranging up to multimillion-dollar contracts. Most of the governing boards had conflict-of-interest policies, but they, too, varied — from a 56-page primer at Washington and Lee University to boilerplate language that amounted to “trust us.” If nothing else, said one former board chairman, there can be “an optics problem.”
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