The leader of the most selective business school is stepping down.

SF Gate reports.

Stanford Business School dean resigns amid affair scandal

The dean of the respected Stanford University Graduate School of Business announced his resignation amid a scandal that he was romantically involved with the estranged wife of a professor whom is suing the university for wrongful termination.

Garth Saloner, who has led the nation’s most selective business school for six years, will step down next summer. He is accused in the lawsuit by James Phills of creating a hostile working environment for him. Phills was on the business school faculty for 12 years until losing the job this year and is divorcing Deborah Gruenfeld, a tenured member of the business school faculty. Saloner, a widower, began a relationship with Phills’ wife after the couple separated in 2012, the university said in a statement on Monday, noting that “the dean informed Stanford leadership at the very beginning of the relationship.”

“I have decided that it is in the best interests of Stanford and the (Graduate School of Business), two institutions that I love, that I step down,” Saloner wrote in an e-mail to the business school’s faculty and students, saying that the lawsuit had become a distraction.

Saloner said that he and Stanford have been “vigorously defending a baseless and protracted lawsuit related to a contentious divorce between a current and former member of our faculty.”