STILLMAN WEATHERS POKED at his tuna tartare and looked out the cabin window. With a cruising altitude of forty-two thousand feet, his company’s brand-new Gulfstream G650 didn’t offer much to see. Even the clouds looked far below. He rubbed the soft Spanish leather on his armrest. It smelled as if it had been tanned yesterday. The G650 seated eight, had a crew of four, and a top speed just shy of Mach 1.
He liked saying that. Mach 1. The speed of sound. The G650 waiting list was long, but Stillman’s company had always been a good Gulfstream customer, so they got the fourth one off the line. He noticed it was the only one parked at Davos last month.
With its final configuration, the tab to his company came to $72 million. This had given Stillman some pause, but he worked hard, and it wouldn’t do to waste half his days in commercial airports, not with what his time was worth. It wouldn’t do at all. And besides, his company, Broadreach Industries, made $3.2 billion last quarter. The shareholders wouldn’t squawk, that’s for sure. Not with numbers like those.
“Will that be all, Mr. Weathers?” asked Jenny, the plane’s flight attendant.
“Yes, thank you, Jenny. You can knock off for a bit.”
Today, Stillman was the only passenger. As the chairman of Devon’s Board of Governors, he was heading to Havenport for an emergency meeting of the Steering Committee, which was basically the small subset of the board that actually got things done. The board had forty-five members, a size that maximized financial gifts but rendered productive meetings impossible. When you got right down to it, the broader board didn’t do much, not that anyone on the outside had to know.
The unscheduled trip was an inconvenience, but Stillman was quietly pleased to think he was riding to the rescue. Being chair of Devon’s board pleased Stillman almost as much as being CEO of Broadreach. No, that wasn’t right—it pleased him more. For better or worse, the corporate world was tainted. They were moneymen, strivers, never completely respected in the corridors of media and political power. He’d given over $100 million of his shareholders’ money away last year to various charities to wash himself of the stain, and naturally he signaled his disdain for the current administration in Washington at every opportunity, but still … the stain remained. He felt it.
Academia, on the other hand, was still the province of an intellectual nobility, people who toiled in the pursuit of pure truth, not mammon. While Stillman projected an image of serene authority, he was secretly as thrilled as a little boy about his ascendency to the Devon chair. It conferred, in the circles he cared about, a legitimacy that could not be bought. And heck, he still loved the place, having spent his undergraduate years as a history major and heavyweight rower. In many ways, those were the best four years of his life.
The situation with the black students would have to be handled with tact. When he was a student back in the early seventies, there were minority students on campus, but nothing like today, what with outreach being such a priority. At his last reunion, a classmate of his—whose son had recently been rejected—quipped that back in their day, if you saw a black student, you’d whisper the person was likely a football or basketball player. Now, the joke went, if you saw a preppie blond kid, you might mutter, “Probably a lacrosse player.” Like most successful jokes, it had the air of truth. Times had changed, and part of Stillman’s job was to help the school navigate that change. He couldn’t allow anything to undermine Devon’s reputation and, not unimportantly, his own. In Stillman’s world, a well-maintained order was the most virtuous state of affairs.
But he wondered about Milton. What kind of show was he running? Events were spinning beyond his control. Stillman would bottom-line this thing and put it in the rearview mirror. That’s what he did. If some knuckles had to be rapped, so be it.
Since this was his first trip to Devon in his new iron, his people had had to call to make sure Havenport Airport’s lone runway had the necessary length. It did, if just barely.
Iron. It’s what CEOs called their planes when they were in one another’s company. He loved that word.
The G650 started its descent.