Fleischmann ’86 eschewed Wall Street

Now, Fleischmann is serving his seventh term in the Connecticut General Assembly, where he chairs the Education Committee and the Appropriations Subcommittee for Elementary and Secondary Education and is a member of the Joint Committee on Government Administration & Elections.

“I was always very interested in questions of how government can most effectively help lift people out of poverty ... and help ensure everyone has good access to quality healthcare,” he said.

Fleischmann graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University. A Wilson School major, he wrote his senior thesis on the impact of community action agencies on African Americans.

“The single most common career choice people made when I was graduating was to go to Wall Street,” Fleischmann said. “From folks at Princeton, there’s often a focus on status and prestige ... [which] often leads people toward institutions that have a lot of money.”

Though Fleischmann said he did not necessarily think that he would become a public official, his friends from Princeton recognized his passion for public affairs.

“This was kind of the first era when people rushed off to Wall Street ... lots of students going to law school and medical school,” Fleischmann’s friend Jonathan Sobel ’86 said. “I believe he was pre-med and did extremely well [so] I was impressed that he went” into a more uncommon field.

His decision to enter public service, though, was not surprising. “He was always very thoughtful about social issues,” Sobel said. “I remember even as a freshman appreciating that he cared about [them], which at the time was not as common as it had been at other times,” he added.

Esther Hou ’86, who dated Fleischmann at Princeton, said she imagined that he would go into public service. “He cared a lot about issues ... it wasn’t a surprise to me,” Hou said.

Fleischmann was a member of Quadrangle Club, served as the vice president of his class and was on the budget committee of the Princeton University Council. Fleischmann said his experience on the council was “tremendous” because it taught him to be an appropriator.

After graduating from Princeton, Fleischmann went on to Stanford, where he studied modern American public policy and earned a masters degree in history. In November 1994, Fleischmann was elected by Connecticut’s 18th District.

In 2005, Fleischmann assisted in the collection of more than $40 million in state support for school systems. He helped increase state support of special needs education and pushed for the passage of a school nutrition bill, according his website.

In 2007, he developed legislation to bolster after-school programs and early-childhood education and helped pass one of Connecticut’s largest increases in financial support for education, according to the site.

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Fleischmann noted that one of the biggest drawbacks of going “the other way” is that he doesn’t get paid much. “If you’re serving the way you ought to, you don’t get wealthy in public service,” he said.

Another challenge of his job is finding time to spend with his family, Fleischmann said. A part of his everyday ritual is coming home in time for dinner and putting his daughter to bed, he added.

Fleischmann’s attempt to balance his personal life with the demands of the public sector is further complicated by his involvement in SpeedReading People, a communications training system. Fleischmann serves as chief operating officer of the company, which is designed to teach people how to quickly understand personality types to modify their tactics in dealing with them.

“[He is a] great guy to work with because he’s such a team player,” said Polly Maglio, vice president of international accounts and master trainer at SpeedReading People. “[He has] always taken time to help you if you need him.”

Maglio also noted Fleischmann’s sense of humor, a quality that his friends from the University reiterated.

As a sophomore at Princeton, Fleischmann decided to try stand-up comedy, Sobel recalled. Though the audience was mostly rowdy college students, Fleischmann handled the hecklers and turned out to be a fantastic stand-up comedian, Sobel added.

Fleischmann explained that he loved being at Princeton because of all the different classes he got to sample. Some of his favorite professors included his thesis adviser and former history professor Gary Gerstle, former economics professor Rebecca Blank and politics professor emeritus Stanley Kelley.