Edelman this week sued Harvard Business School after failing to get tenure and being forced to leave his position as an associate professor in 2017. The decision by the school not to grant a lifetime guarantee of a job to Edelman occurred after a highly publicized spat over a $4 overcharge on a takeout order for spicy chicken from a local Chinese restaurant in 2014.
Those emails went public, fueling widespread media coverage and a global outpouring of scorn. When his silly feud went viral, it not only embarrassed Edelman, who was charging $800 as a consultant and earning on the order of $167,000 a year as an HBS professor; it also embarrassed the Harvard Business School, confirming every stereotype of the institution, its students and alumni. HBS students, in fact, launched a campaign to ask members of the public to donate $4 to the Greater Boston Food Bank and in a few days raised more than $5,000.
In his lawsuit, Edelman claims Harvard harmed his “career, livelihood, and reputation” by failing to follow its internal policies. That is a laughable claim given the own harm Edelman has obviously done to his career, his livelihood, and his reputation. After all, it’s not as if he is starving. Edelman is earning a very good living, most likely with lucrative stock options, as the chief economist for web experiences, strategy, and policy at Microsoft. The average total cash compensation of a chief economist at Microsoft is estimated at more than $400,000.
Votes on tenure are highly confidential and the process is often secretive and mysterious. But it goes without saying that the embarrassing incident in Edelman’s past was certainly considered by his faculty colleagues in denying him tenure. But that is only the start. It now turns out that there were 12 other anonymous complaints about his character from HBS employees, including possibly other faculty, according to his suit.
Those complaints brought up apparent disputes Edelman had with HBS support staff over the size of classroom projectors, with the school’s IT staff over technology issues, and with the school’s travel planners over travel policies, according to messages in his tenure review file. In another spat, Edelman got into it with an HBS staffer over his business cards. You can’t make this stuff up. He insisted on putting the URL of his personal website on his Harvard Business School business card.
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