Beware the dreaded Gopher Jacket!

François Sainfort is the head of the University of Minnesota's Division of Health Policy and Management. Julie Jacko, his wife, serves as director of Minnesota's Institute for Health Informatics and holds double appointments in that university's schools of nursing and public health. Though they pull down annual salaries in the neighborhood of $500,000, Sainfort and Jacko are accused of continuing to pull only slightly lower pay from their former employer, the Georgia Institute of Technology. In other words, they allegedly took jobs at Minnesota without actually leaving Georgia Tech. According to Georgia Tech, Sainfort and Jacko have also billed travel expenses — quite improperly, in Tech's view — to Tech and even placed Dr. Jacko's brother on the Tech payroll.

Bill Gleason has provided extensive coverage, including links to newspapers in Minnesota and Georgia, of this power couple and the financial mess that now entangles two research universities. He says more about Sainfort, Jacko, and this heavily recruited and highly paid couple's contribution to the University of Minnesota's declared plan to become one of the three top public research universities in the galaxy — by 2010, no less. See The Periodic Table (stories 1, 2, and 3) and The Periodic Table, Too (stories 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6).