8:00 and spend a full day working on Capitol Hill. We’ll be back at National Airport at 5:00 in the afternoon and back in Lafayette at 6:00. We’ll usually have some kind of evening business ongoing at the university, work or receptions or something with the student or alumni organizations and occasionally with the Board of Trustees. I usually get home at about
9:30. In a normal week, it’s not unusual for me to put in 65 hours for a great university.”
Does the pace of this guy’s life sound familiar?
Meet Gary Isom, a neurotoxicolo-gist who works as Purdue University’s vice president for research and as dean of the Graduate School. No moss growing here, Isom has spent the past 20 years at Purdue as a researcher, teacher, administrator, grant solicitor and government affairs representative. That means lots of travel, often several times a week. Millions in research funding – from government, corporate and private sources – is best garnered face to face.
“We have the same travel needs as any business, even though we’re an educational organization and a foundation. We’re a $1.2 billion plus company with 18,000 employees with-in the Purdue University system. This is a big operation,” he says.
Although Isom typically flies with several Purdue staffers, in many cases he is the key employee aboard. If he unexpectedly comes down with the flu, the flight often would be postponed, a decision common to key employee flights at many companies.
“We spend a great deal of time in Washington. My office essentially is both here in Indiana and in Washington, almost on a daily basis, so we have a lot of travel to Washington as well as all around the country. If you consider student financial aid, research grants and contracts – we have a lot of contracts with the Federal government – they probably are in excess of $160 million a year. I need to actively manage those contracts. In addition, a lot of the Federal government agency functions are decentralized, so for instance you’ll have the Department of Energy’s laboratory business all over the coun-try – all over the world – so that entails travel, just like any business, wherever it’s needed,” he says.
“Our aviation department has allowed Purdue to become more efficient in a business sense,” Isom continues. “If I want to take a com-mercial flight to Washington, it’s not impossible to do it in one day, but I end up spending my day in airports rather than meeting with people. I don’t see how we could do what we do without this operation. It makes us more efficient. Time is valuable to everyone at Purdue, and everybody appreciates the efficiency of aircraft and what they contribute to the university.”
But can the use of business aircraft ever be justifiable for just one person?
“Of course,” says a CEO unaffiliated with Purdue. “It depends on the busi-ness circumstances. It depends not only on the value of the trip, but the business demands on that person on either side of the trip. Yes, there are times when it is entirely appropriate to do that. It obviously is an expensive way to travel but it may be that the benefits outweigh the costs. That’s where business judgment comes in.”
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