Time to close the business schools.

Knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Hi everyone,

In the “To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail” department, a little ranting about the failure of people with hammers to hammer the right things.

Right now I’m reeling in amazement at the degree to which self-described “business” people don’t really understand “business.”¹ Okay okay, it’s not all of them, but more than I’d ever imagined. A recent, and still raw, example comes from a crowd of “business savvy” business types who thought they could “save the taxpayers” money by closing the little, out of the way campus, where I spent most of my academic career.

The herd mentality in America is now locked into a free-market-cult-business-paradigm that allows them to, as Oscar Wilde trenchantly observed, work out the price of everything while avoiding difficult questions about the value of anything.

It turns out they aren’t all that good at the price part either.

Here’s the story: we were the poor country cousins in a shot-gun marriage² arranged, ostensibly, to “save” our constellation of the University of Wiscowsin’s smaller, feeder campuses, linking them up with the local comprehensive universities. My campus was joined to the University of Wiscowsin - Moowaukee. Now, enrollments in the Upper Midwest have begun to fade over the past 10 years as the number of high school graduates declined so merging resources like this looked like a good idea — at the time.

The consolidation was, theoretically, designed to keep these smaller, popular and cost effective campuses available to the local tax payers: tuition was significantly lower, the faculty and staff were paid significantly less and, most importantly, students who began their careers with us had a much better chance of completing a bachelor’s degree than students who started at the flagship university over in Madison.

Looked like a no brainer.

Turns out, we’re now the victims of a bunch of no-brainers.

The relationship went south right away. Once married off to the bigger campus at Moowaukee, they pulled funding for student recruitment. This seemed nuts at the time but, when challenged, their “experts” retorted “don’t worry, we know what we’re doing.”

They didn’t. Their decision undid decades of relationships with the local school districts and so, enrollments fell further. And then Covid happened.

Ironically, our online classes flourished during the pandemic which should’ve told someone something.

It didn’t.

Once the epidemic subsided and we went back to the classroom, enrollments did not improve and while at some point the main campus half-heartedly reestablished recruitment, enrollments continued to decline. We weren’t dead yet and recovery might have been possible, had anyone thought about recruiting and retaining students ahead of time. But they didn’t.

And that’s when the “business savvy” crowd showed up.

A committee of business experts was formed. Meetings were held. Listening sessions were conducted (without inviting any of the people employed at the campus and who might know how things worked). A number of untenable options were recommended, none of them politically possible… but the winning and sufficient suggestion was to “close the campus to take it off the county tax bill”. (The campus infrastructure was maintained by local funding going back to a covenant from the late 1960s.)

“It’ll save the tax payers money,” said the county executive planning to run for governor as a Republican.

And so, let me cut to the chase: none of these “business-savvy” people bothered to look at the economic impact study that had been conducted a few years earlier demonstrating that the campus brought about $8 million a year into the county.

You can see where this is going.

The county threw away $8,000,000 in order to save the tax payers a few $100,000.

— because that’s just “good business sense.”

When questioned, these folks looked condescendingly down their noses at me and my fellow employees and reminded us that, we “don’t understand anything about business” and that we “don’t have to live in the real world.”

Well, as for the “real world” part, I might get back to that in a later Motley Cow but frankly, ugly things happen when “business” people try to argue about what they think the real world is. In this case, they thought the “real world” was the one in which it made “business” sense to throw away $8 million dollars to save a few $100 thousand.

[I have left out the managerial incompetence of the managers at UW-Moowaukee who kicked this down the road and deliberately starved the place — but they’ll get their own analysis down the road.]

Anyway, that’s a long way to go to get to the punch line:

The Herd now supports a “business” man presidential candidate who does math exactly the same way, who has been convicted of rape, massive real estate fraud, and led an insurrection to make sure he’d never have to be held accountable — someone who clearly knows the value of nothing and, on reflection, isn’t very good about the price of anything either.

And a large minority of Herd members love him. “He’ll cut my taxes!”

Thank you for indulging this bit of catharsis.

And now, here are some adults discussing the same general issues.

Robert Reich’s Zombie Economics youtube.

And Dr. David Suzuki on Economics as a kind of brain damage.

And here we are.

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1. “Business” came into existence as a word in English around the same time as the word “boredom.” Something for a later episode.

2. In retrospect, it would be more accurate to say that we were Harry Potter and UW Milwaukee, the Dursley’s.