HMS Annual Meeting and Fundraiser
Come for a Dinner, Socialization & Great Talks
Speakers:
Gretchen Morgenson and Toni Boucher
authors of:
These Are The Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs - and Wrecks America
The Huskey Effect: How UCONN is creating the Entrepreneurs of the Future
- Date: September 18th
- Time: 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Toni Boucher, who is serving her first four-year term as Wilton’s first selectman, is most known for her time serving as state representative and senator (1997-2019) and chair of the Wilton Board of Education. In the past four years, she has spent a great deal of time as a philanthropist as she cements her and her husband’s legacy in Connecticut.
Toni Boucher, who earned an MBA from UConn in 2002, donated $11 million marked by a lead gift to establish the Boucher Management & Entrepreneurship Department. Toni also created the Henry “Bud” Boucher Faculty Fellowship and added to the Toni Boucher Scholarship Fund, which she established in 2004.
Toni has served on some of the nation’s top hospital and foundation boards. Locally, her positions have included board of education chairman, selectman, state board of education commissioner, state Vo-Tech Board of Education member, advisory board member of the Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate.
In March, Boucher added author to her many titles as her book “The Husky Effect: How UConn is Creating the Entrepreneurs of the Future,” came out during the NCAA’s March Madness. The timing was impeccable as the UConn Women’s Basketball Team were on their 12th national title under Coach Geno Auriemma. The book was co-written by New York Times best-selling author Josh Young.
For Toni, the book represents a lesson for all entrepreneurs and small business owners looking to make it in today’s volatile world. It started out as part of a memoir about her Italian roots and the many stories that have shaped her life as the Iannuzzi family acclimated to life in America. “The Husky Effect” is a spinoff of that memoir that focuses on the business tales of her husband and how in his death an era was borne that is taking shape in the University of Connecticut School of Business.
This basketball success has created what we call the “UConn Husky Effect.” After the men’s team won their fifth NCAA Championship in 2023, applications for the 2024 fall semester hit a record high with more than 56,700 applicants, up from 48,000 in 2023 and 43,000 in 2022.
Entering 2024, UConn had risen to forty-sixth overall in the Wall Street Journal rankings and ninth among public universities. The business school tied with UMass for the top public undergraduate business education in New England.
“These Are The Plunderers: How Private Equity runs—and Wrecks—America.” assumed in Dec. 2019. Her stories appear as tv segments on NBC News network, cable and streaming shows and on NBCNews.com.
Previously, Ms. Morgenson spent two years as Senior Special Writer in the Investigations unit at The Wall Street Journal, and almost 20 years as assistant business and financial editor and a columnist at The New York Times. She began covering world financial markets for The Times in May 1998 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her “trenchant and incisive” coverage of Wall Street in which she revealed deep conflicts of interest among powerful and respected brokerage firm analysts.
A graduate of Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, Ms. Morgenson worked as a stockbroker in New York City in the early 1980s, was a writer at Money Magazine later that decade and an assistant managing editor at Forbes Magazine in the 1990s. She is co-author, with Joshua Rosner, of “Reckless Endangerment,” a 2011 New York Times bestseller about the origins of the mortgage crisis. She is also co-author, with Rosner, of “These are the Plunderers,” a Wall Street Journal bestseller scrutinizing the private equity industry published in April 2023.
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Ms. Morgenson has won three Gerald Loeb Awards--one in 2002 for excellence in financial commentary, another in 2009 for her coverage of Wall Street and a third with a group of New York Times reporters in 2009. The following year, she received the Elliott V. Bell Award from the New York financial Writers’ Association for her “significant long-term contribution to the profession of financial journalism.” In 2018, she received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers for her “outstanding contribution to business journalism.”
Ms. Morgenson has also served on two Pulitzer Prize juries, evaluating investigative reporting entries in 2009 and 2010, and was a Loeb Award final judge for several years.