Alum’s $10 million gift to Goucher comes with a clouded connection

Jean Marbella, Baltimore Sun
·9 min read

At $10 million, it is Goucher College’s largest-ever gift from a living alumna, designated for a new science center with state-of-the-art labs and learning spaces for everything from biochemistry to a new program in public health.

The donor is Judy C. Lewent, a 1970 graduate who went on to a groundbreaking career in the pharmaceutical industry — but also several years on the board of directors of Purdue Pharma, the company that helped spawn the devastating public health crisis of opioid addiction.

From 2009 to 2014, Lewent was a director of the company, which has been penalized billions of dollars for aggressively and misleadingly marketing OxyContin, blamed for triggering an opioid epidemic that has killed more than 700,000 Americans since 1999.

Lewent, who retired in 2007 as chief financial officer of the pharmaceutical giant Merck, was not available to comment for this article, according to a Goucher spokeswoman. Attempts to reach her directly were unsuccessful.

Goucher President Kent Devereaux said Lewent’s role with Purdue was limited as “an independent, outside, non-executive director.”

Devereaux said Lewent was brought on the board of the company, which is privately owned and controlled by members of the Sackler family, along with several other outside directors for her expertise in governance and strategic planning, and eventually resigned.

“She did not own stock in the company. She did not work for Purdue Pharma,” Devereaux said.

Lewent, who in 1990 became the first female CFO not just of Merck but of any major corporation, was considered among the most powerful women in corporate America. She served on numerous boards, including Dell, GlaxoSmithKline and Quaker Oats, and is a lifetime trustee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she received a master’s degree from its Sloan School of Business.

She is a longtime donor to Goucher and a former member of the Towson college’s board of trustees, which unanimously approved accepting the gift from Lewent and her husband, Mark Shapiro, Devereaux said.

“They’ve known Judy for 30 years,” he said. “They know her as a woman who has just impeccable integrity.”

Lewent’s official biographies tend to leave off her years on the Purdue Pharma board. But along with other directors, she is a named defendant in some — but far from all — of the thousands of lawsuits that have been filed against Purdue and the Sacklers by families of fatal overdose victims and nearly every state and thousands of cities and counties seeking to recoup the heavy costs of dealing with the opioid crisis.

A 2018 suit filed by Massachusetts, for example, charged that while members of the owning family always comprised a majority on the board, Lewent and the other outside directors “knowingly advanced the Sacklers’ scheme.”

The suit said Lewent and other directors were each paid more than $600,000 for serving on the board and voted with the Sacklers “on every single one of the hundreds of votes that came before them” during their tenures.

“They continued to direct sales and marketing conduct aimed at increasing opioid prescribing and sales, despite knowing that that conduct was contributing to the epidemic of addiction, overdose and death,” according to the suit.

But Lewent and other directors responded that there was no basis for the state to have “dragged them” into the litigation, according to an April 2019 court filing. None of the directors have “ever been employed by or had a direct or indirect ownership interest” in the company, their attorneys wrote.

Purdue filed for bankruptcy in 2019, and agreed to a plan that included paying $6 billion to resolve thousands of suits. But, after the Biden administration challenged the plan for protecting members of the Sackler family from future opioid litigation, it is being reviewed by the Supreme Court, which seemed torn over the matter during oral arguments Monday.

While not everyone in the Goucher community is aware of Lewent’s connection to Purdue, the donation to the small liberal arts college raises questions that for some have been been asked and resolved to their satisfaction, and for others remain open.

One longtime faculty member, Flo Martin, a professor of French, said the connection to the controversial company should have been discussed more broadly, particularly by Lewent herself, before the donation was accepted.

“Either we look at science as a way to better our lives in the long run, or we look at science as a way to make money and kill all sorts of people doing it,” said Martin, who has taught at Goucher since 1989.

Two students in leadership positions on campus said they were unaware of Lewent’s link to Purdue.

“It should have been discussed or contextualized,” said Dom McKinney, 22, editor of the student newspaper, the Quindecim. “Students like to know where donations are coming from. It’s an issue of ethics and morality.”

Emma Kistner, 20, who was recently elected student government president, said she hasn’t heard much talk about the donation on campus, perhaps because like her, many don’t know Lewent served on the Purdue board.

“It’s a lot of money,” she said.

Devereaux said Lewent raised the issue of her time on the Purdue Pharma board when they discussed the donation, and the college did its “due diligence” to understand her role with the company. In June, he met with science faculty about the donation and Lewent’s background, including her service on the Purdue board. Goucher publicly announced the donation in September.

Jenny Lenkowski, an associate professor of biological sciences, said she believes Lewent was “forthcoming” with Goucher officials about her tenure on the Purdue board, and made the donation openly rather than anonymously.

“No one is hiding behind anything,” she said. “I’m pretty excited about the donation.”

Lenkowski called the donation “meaningful,” especially coming from a successful alumna who represents a time when Goucher was all women, as it was for its first 100 years before going coed in 1986.

The donation is a fourth of the cost of a $40 million expansion of the aging Hoffberger Science Center, which Devereaux said is the oldest unrenovated building on campus, and will be named the Judy C. Lewent ‘70 Science Innovation Center.

Assessing culpability can be particularly difficult in a crisis as vast and complex as the opioid epidemic, experts said. There is much blame to spread around, they said, from agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration, which a federal commission found had failed in its oversight responsibilities, to the individual doctors who over-prescribed painkillers to vulnerable patients.

Purdue Pharma is not the only entity to be taken to court for its role in the crisis, with suits against other pharmaceutical companies and distributors and retailers up and down the supply chain continuing to make their way through the courts.

The overdose epidemic has shifted in the years since Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin in 1996, heavily and successfully marketing it not just for surgical and cancer-related pain but for chronic conditions such as back pain and arthritis, and downplaying its addictive properties.

The subsequent addiction and abuse that resulted from OxyContin and other prescription painkillers became the first wave of the opioid epidemic. Driven by high costs, some pill users turned to heroin, and overdose deaths attributed to the street drug began spiking in 2010. Now, the crisis is in its third wave, with the extremely powerful drug fentanyl and other synthetic opioids being added to heroin, and responsible for more than 150 overdose deaths a day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“When we’ve identified a wrong, what’s the degree of association with that wrong that tars a person?” said Amanda Pustilnik, a University of Maryland Law School professor whose work focuses on law and neuroscience, particularly addiction.

There is a “zeitgeist” of seeking accountability on many college campuses these days, and scrutiny of how funds that have built or continue to benefit universities are tainted by association, she said.

“There are so many problematic university contributions,” she said. “Think of all the universities built on oil money, or slave-owning.”

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Pustilnik, who has written about the legal response to the opioid epidemic, said she has “mixed feelings” on the issue of Lewent’s donation, given that the pharmaceutical executive “did so much in her life” before “a late, relatively short term relationship” with Purdue.

Lewent’s contribution also raises the issue of the role boards play, particularly when their companies land in criminal or legal trouble.

Gideon Mark, associate professor of business law at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, said that while board members are not responsible for a company’s day-to-day operations, “they have ultimate oversight over the company.”

“The buck’s got to stop somewhere,” Mark said, “and it stops with the board.”

Charles Elson, the founding director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, said board members, particularly those of a privately held company controlled by a single family, can have “limited” power.

Elson, executive editor-at-large of Directors & Boards, which publishes news and analysis about corporate governance, said that while board members meet regularly and are given reports and presentations about company operations, “no one is going to say, we’re going to be doing something illegal,” he said. “Your culpability only goes so far.”

But directors should be independent, invested in the company, and not just take their fee and rubber-stamp what is brought before them, said Elson, an attorney who has previously taught at several law schools including the University of Maryland’s.

“They have to be pleasant skeptics,” Elson said, “and fully courageous. If something looks wrong, you have to do something.”

Even, he said, if that has consequences. “If something does go wrong, you can either resign or make noise and be replaced.”

By the time Lewent joined the Purdue board in 2009, the company and three of its executives already had pleaded guilty to criminal charges for concealing the risk of addiction and abuse posed by OxyContin. As part of the May 2007 plea, the company agreed to pay $600 million in fines.

Purdue reformulated OxyContin in 2010 to make it harder to abuse by crushing and inhaling or injecting it. That, though, prompted some users to turn to heroin; one study found 4 out of 5 heroin users had first used prescription opioids.

In Maryland, fatal overdoses have declined since 2021, according to the state health department, but opioids still were responsible for more than 2,200 deaths last year.

For Goucher, Devereaux said Lewent’s “transformative gift” advances a tradition that began when it was among the first colleges to first offer science courses to women.

“We’re going to finally have the science facilities we need, and Judy’s been a major part of that story,” he said. “So we’re just very grateful for that.”