Leadership Through Giving

Diane and Chris Wightman ’99 ramp up their involvement

Diane Wightman and Christopher A. Wightman ’99.

Christopher A. Wightman ’99 and his wife Diane.

“We’ve always believed in the importance of education, and particularly public education, for helping people to get a good start without incurring a mountain of student loan debt."

SUNY Buffalo Law School was a great fit for me,” says Christopher A. Wightman ’99. “I had some very influential professors. I spent a good amount of time talking with them, and they really helped guide me in a way that gave me substantive advice on how to succeed. I found it to be a great environment where I could grow and thrive.”

And so he did. He followed his interests in business, corporate and tax law, and continues a lifelong interest in learning. As he says, “Buffalo Law taught me how to read critically and analytically in ways that I didn’t get as an English major,” which he was as a UB undergraduate. He also made the Law Review and was awarded a fellowship to research and develop joint law and business school courses.

Wightman and his wife, Diane, have deep roots in Western New York, and they thought they’d stay local. Indeed, he started out as an associate with the Buffalo firm Damon & Morey. But an interesting offer occasioned a change in geography and in career, and the couple moved to Pennsylvania, where Wightman joined the mutual fund company Vanguard, doing securities regulation work. He went on to assume responsibility for Vanguard’s global corporate governance and portfolio compliance oversight programs, and oversaw governance and proxy voting matters for more than 180 fund portfolios.

Now, a new opportunity has taken the Wightmans to San Francisco, where he has become a principal at CamberView Partners, a new firm that advises the management teams and boards of public companies about how to interact effectively with their investors. That includes man- aging shareholder votes and crafting proxy materials as companies cope with a recent trend toward investor activism on such issues as executive compensation and social responsibility.

He’s not practicing law, but he’s using all his people skills and political savvy in this 2-year-old start-up. And boy, does he travel – in one recent trip, a dozen cities in 18 days, meeting with clients and helping to grow CamberView’s business. He’ll also spend some of his time in the firm’s newly opened New York City office.

The lessons of Buffalo Law still come into play, including, Wightman says, “the fundamentals of law, the fundamentals of business and corporate life, critical thinking and writing, all of the basic skills you learn in a good law school pro- gram. And I keep in touch with the network of people I met at Buffalo.”

Now Chris and Diane Wightman have made a $100,000 gift to support student scholarship aid, especially for students from traditionally underrepresented groups. It’s a commitment that builds on their continuing engagement with the Law School, including his service on the Dean’s Advisory Council and a deliberate choice on their part to participate in the school’s alumni events in Buffalo, New York City and San Francisco.

“We didn’t want to wait until we retired. If we could do it now, we should do it now,” Diane Wightman says. “It’s important to show UB students that graduating from a public school or a public law school is a wonderful opportunity to do anything you want.”

Adds her husband: “We’ve always believed in the importance of education, and particularly public education, for helping people to get a good start without incurring a mountain of student loan debt. We hope others will join us in supporting the out- standing students at SUNY Buffalo Law School.”