Governance
Since founding Sage in 1965, Sara Miller-McCune focused on keeping the company independent of shareholders and corporate behemoths, charting a course that allowed the company to do the best for higher education and society instead of obsessing over the bottom line. She has vigorously maintained the independence provided by being privately owned. To ensure that legacy endures after her death, in 2021 Miller McCune signed her voting rights to a trust that makes it impossible to sell Sage now or in the future. This had been the plan for more than four decades—that the company would pass to the community that Sage had built its success on—but the transfer during her lifetime made that wish immediate and irrevocable.
After Sara’s passing, the trust will run the company for the financial benefit of a select group of educational institutions. The trust’s board of directors, drawn from the world of higher education, will ensure that Sage stays true to our mission of ‘building bridges to knowledge’ by staying on top of the currents of academia, technology and the educational publishing and information dissemination marketplace.
It is our core belief that this independence leaves Sage uniquely free to champion ideas that advance both education and academic innovation while ensuring that our vital relationships with librarians, scholars and students endure to the benefit of the entire learning enterprise. It is this enterprise, we further believe, that ensures the health of the world as a whole.
Blaise Simqu, Sage’s CEO, talks to Sara about transferring her shares of the company to the trust—guaranteeing Sage’s independence indefinitely. Sara reflects on the decision, and how it will keep Sage’s mission, vision, and values intact.