Big Man on Campus: A C.E.O. Returns to School

After being walloped in the corporate world, Gary Forsee, former C.E.O. of Sprint-Nextel Corp., has found comfort in the arms of academia.

Forsee was appointed president of the four-campus University of Missouri today, following 35 years in the telecommunications industry. His presidency will begin Feb. 18, 2007.

As the chief of Sprint-Nextel, Forsee was the mastermind behind the $35 billion Sprint-Nextel merger in 2005, after which the company lost subscribers—700,000 this year alone—and the stock price fell 21 percent, the Washington Post reported.

In October, he was asked to leave after one shareholder, Ralph Witworth, publicly complained in the Wall Street Journal that he had "lost confidence in Gary Forsee."

Portfolio.com columnist Jack Flack wrote at the time that "the public correspondence triggered an avalanche that effectively buries Forsee."

Forsee's contract with the Univ. of Missouri is set for three years, for which he will take a significant pay cut from his days in big business: $400,000 every year, along with an annual bonus of $100,000, which will be deferred until the end of the 3-year tenure.

At Sprint-Nextel, he made $21.3 million last year and received a severance of more than $54 million, the Washington Post reported. That's a 98 percent decrease.

If not money, what could have spurred Forsee to seek refuge in academe?

According to the St. Louis-Dispatch, Forsee departure "apparently left him shaken."

"In an Oct. 31 e-mail to Chancellor [John F. ] Carney obtained through an open records request, Forsee said he was decompressing for several weeks at his house in Charleston, S.C.," the newspaper reported.

"Letting dust settle a bit," he wrote. "Still pretty discombobulated from my 'exit,' but doing OK."

After the official announcement, the Post-Dispatch reports this utterance from Forsee: "I need to go back to school, if you will. But I'm eager to learn."

The ivory towers may sound lovelier than the C-suite, but Forsee should not be too eager. Academia has its own headaches.

by Jennifer Lai