Top administrators in the UB School of Management have expressed confidence in a member of the SOM dean's advisory council and former Enron senior director of investor relations, Elizabeth N. Ivers, despite the energy company's swelling notoriety.
Enron's questionable auditing practices and clandestine bleeding of employee retirement funds have dominated the media in recent months, and have left reporters, stockholders, and investigators for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with as many questions as they have found answers.
"I left the company Aug. 15 of this year and I don't think that there's any comment that I have at all," Ivers said Sunday of her involvement with Enron. She is now employed by EOG Resources Inc., a Houston-based oil and natural gas company that split from Enron Corp. in 1999.
Ivers is one of more than 30 prominent business figures, many of them UB alumni, who convene semi-annually to counsel the SOM dean regarding the school's operation and direction. Council members are appointed by the dean, often at the recommendation of other advisors and members of the school's development staff.
"She's a person of very great integrity ... [who] probably knew as much about Enron as we did two years ago," said professor and former SOM Dean Lewis Mandell, who appointed Ivers to the council.
Mandell called Ivers "a really wonderful person" who he was "really proud of" when describing her contributions to the council and the university's MBA students.
"She was very significant because we unfortunately didn't have any women on our advisory council, and here was an alumna of the school who had done extremely well in a field ordinarily dominated by men," he said.
Jerry Newman, SOM interim dean, also backed Ivers, who he has never met. Ivers did not attend the fall 2001 meeting of the advisory council, the only one held since Newman was appointed last August.
Newman said that even if Ivers' connection to Enron did affect the school's reputation, "I'm willing to take the hit because it's someone who's been an important part of our past and should be an important part of our future."
Enron's image as a vigorous economic engine choked in mid-October of last year, when executives of the company reduced shareholder equity by $1.2 billion and temporarily froze its 401(k) employee retirement fund, which nearly dissolved before employees were again allowed access to it.
Since then, the company has seen its trade value drop to less than a dollar per share, from a 52-week high of $83, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and severed its relationship with the Arthur Andersen auditing firm amid allegations of massive document shredding and an unethical entanglement with the firm.
In the past week, Enron received two major blows to its public face, the resignation of former Enron Chairman and CEO Kenneth L. Lay and the suicide of J. Clifford Baxter, who resigned as the company's vice chairman in May 2001.
Ivers described her involvement with UB's school of management since she graduated with a master's in business administration in 1984 as limited. She said she has attended only one council meeting due to the difficulty of traveling from her home in Houston, although she visited UB in August 1999 to speak to the SOM's incoming MBA students.
"It was great to try to share some of my thoughts," said Ivers, which "hopefully they would be able to take with them as they pursued their MBA."
The experience Ivers described is in tight alignment with both Newman's and Mandell's descriptions of what they envision the advisory council's role in the SOM to be.
"[Council members] are often seen as a development means. You often appoint people who have done very well; they're high up in management, they're well paid. The expectation is that they'll come and speak to some of the students, help students get jobs ... and [we are] hopeful that if they're doing well in life they're going to be generous to their alma mater," said Newman.
"I certainly look forward to participating in the advisory council and aiding them in any way I can," said Ivers, who foresees herself "working with students directly as far as curriculum ... to be sure they're in sync with what the business world needs."
Photo: Meredith Forrest Kulwicki
