The Board of Trustees approved three new members and honored a retiring 11-year veteran of the group with trustee emeritus status in their meeting May 13.
The board voted unanimously in favor of Gary Granoff’s nomination as a trustee emeritus. The alumnus said he hopes to organize the emeritus trustees and to “reactivate them and involve them” in the University.
Only select trustees are granted emeritus status after retirement. Emeritus trustees are asked to continue being engaged in the University and to attend board meetings and functions after retirement, although they do not have the power to vote.
“Gary has been the ultimate trustee prototype for GW. He gives of his time and his energy and his intellect,” the board’s vice chair, Nelson Carbonell, said. “He supports us philanthropically, and Gary has always had GW as a high priority in his life.”
Granoff earned both his undergraduate and law degrees at GW in 1969 and 1973, respectively. He served on the board from 1998 through 2003, joining again in 2005. He founded Ameritrans Capital Corporation and serves as the company’s chief investment officer and the managing director of its board of directors.
New members voted onto the board include owner, current president and CEO of Amyx, Inc., W. Scott Amey, along with chairman and CEO of Fensterstock Associates, Lee Fensterstock and senior financial writer for The New York Times, Diana Henriques. Amey and Henriques are also alumni.
Amey received the GW Alumni Award in 2007 for establishing and managing the School of Engineering and Applied Science Career Services Office at GW, which focuses on full-time jobs and internship opportunities for engineering and computer science students. He earned his master’s degree in computer science at GW.
Amey said he hopes his position on the board will give him an even better opportunity to help GW achieve its goal of becoming a “preeminent research University.”
He co-founded and served as chief operating officer of RS Information Systems, which became the 40th largest Federal Government IT Services provider in the U.S. under his direction.
Fensterstock has two daughters who attend GW, and although he is “happy to participate in any way that the University leadership feels would be additive,” he said he is most interested in career services and assisting in the process of getting jobs for GW grads.
“Enabling young people to go out into the world prepared to contribute is, in my opinion, key to our?collective future,” Fensterstock said in an e-mail. “GW plays a critical role in this process, and as a trustee, I would have the opportunity to add value as well.
Fensterstock was the founding chairman of the board, CEO of Broadpoint Securities Group and CEO of Broadpoint Gleacher. He also founded Bonds Direct Securities LLC and served as chairman and co-CEO until its sale. Additionally, he served as president and chief operating officer of Gruntal & Co., a regional broker dealer.
In 2005, Henriques was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and won a George Polk Award, the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Reporting and Harvard’s Goldsmith Prize for her 2004 series that exposed insurance and investment rip-offs of young military consumers.
She characterized GW as the “bedrock” upon which the most important areas of her life were built.
Henriques has worked for The New York Times since 1989. She was a reporter for The Hatchet during her time at GW before graduating in 1969. Since then, she has written for Barron’s magazine and was a Wall Street correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer and an investigative reporter for The Trenton Times. She recently published a book about the Bernard Madoff scandal.
“[GW’s] acceptance, generous financial aid and excellent campus journalism environment – at The Hatchet, in fact – gave me the education and training that launched my professional career,” she said.
