McGraw-Hill Education Chief Financial Officer, Mike Evans, has resigned, according to a company statement Tuesday.
Evans’ last day as CFO was on June 30, 2019, and his last day with the company will be July 5, 2019. No reason was given for his resignation.
The departure comes as McGraw-Hill and Cengage are undergoing the regulatory approval process for an all-stock merger, first announced in May. In its latest investor update, Cengage said the process was “proceeding as expected” and on schedule.
If approved, the deal would create the second-biggest textbook publisher in the U.S. In a joint interview with EdSurge, executives from both companies said the merger could mean further investment in their online education offerings, and a business model where students pay a flat fee to access to all the digital content from both parties.
It proved to be a short tenure for Evans, who assumed the CFO role on Jan. 1, 2019 and reported directly to McGraw-Hill President and CEO Nana Banerjee.
Evans held similar titles at other large education companies, having previously served as CFO and chief operating officer of Renaissance Learning, a provider of instructional and assessment software, and as CFO of Ruffalo Noel Levitz, which develops tools to help colleges with fundraising and student enrollment.
He also worked at Pearson, overseeing the publisher’s K-12 businesses in literacy, math and student information systems. (The company has since divested almost all of those product lines.)
Succeeding Evans is Garet Gutherie, who was McGraw-Hill’s senior vice president of financial planning and analysis, a role in which he reported financial performance to the board and investors and oversaw corporate costs. Guthrie previously worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers, focusing on global private equity and multinational corporate transactions.
