By Shawn Boburg and Patricia Alex, Staff Writers. The Record.
As he leads the transformation of the state’s flagship university into a medical research hub with national aspirations, Rutgers University President Robert Barchi is also collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars for privately advising two firms that do millions of dollars of business with Rutgers related to scientific research.
Barchi got clearance from the university’s overseers to sit on advisory boards of both firms — pushing his total yearly compensation to over $1 million — when he was hired in September. And he said he stays out of university decisions involving the companies.
Related: The value of Barchi’ s relationships (pdf)
But some ethics experts called the arrangement troubling because of the potential for the businesses — one a distributor of lab supplies and the other a pharmaceutical research firm — to get an upper hand while vying for more contracts as the university ramps up its biomedical research efforts.
“It smells to high hell quite frankly,” said Jay W. Lorsch, a professor at Harvard Business School who focuses on corporate governance. “It just puts him in a very difficult position.”
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