B4023-4 Education: Field's Law (2)

Education: Field’s Law (2):  A university campus expands in a concentric manner.  Additional buildings are added, along with their supporting infrastructure (parking lots, sidewalks, etc.), beyond the “core” or original campus.  Many universities have an identifiable older building that was the first classroom building on the campus.  Usually, that building has an architectural distinction that might be called “Venerable, Ivy-Covered Brickwork.”  The newer buildings almost always fail to replicate the look of the original building.

 
    As the university campus expands, important things happen to that older building.  If the older building is WWII vintage or older, it probably had a stand-alone boiler house, with coal-fired boilers used at one time in its history.  Later, those coal-fired boilers were retrofitted with natural gas-fired burners, and the building was heated for a number of years using that technology.  But as the university expands, a central heating plant is constructed to supply steam to various buildings on the campus.  In time, that stand-alone boiler house, next to the Oldest Classroom Building, is torn down because “it is no longer needed.”  It is at that point that Part Two of Field’s Law kicks in.

    Field’s Law, as you might remember, states that the longer the steam lines, the higher the fixed costs.  As the university campus expands - and becomes less dense - whole armies of support staff are needed to keep the place tidy and in good repair.  And while a campus might expand arithmetically, the fixed costs expand logarithmically.  This is true of every concentric expansion: the bigger the “footprint,” the higher the fixed costs.”
 

    Fast food restaurants, on the other hand, expand by incremental expansion.  New restaurants are built in new locations that have no organic connection to older buildings (other than corporate advertizing and corporate “ware” - cups, packaging, etc. - that give a consistent look to each franchise).  In times of economic distress, corporate-owned restaurants can be closed on the basis of profitability alone.  The least profitable locations can be closed, and the corporate enterprise as a whole is strengthened by doing so.
 

    The same is not true with concentric expansion.  It is not a simple matter to shutter university campus buildings.  Because of the interconnected utilities, it is often impossible.  Even thought it might be desirable to shut down the central heating plant because of the enormous costs of operating such a facility, usually there are no “back-up” heating systems (boilers, etc.) for all those separate buildings.  Field’s Law states that “the longer the steam lines, the higher the fixed costs.”  But it also states that you cannot get back home again if those steam lines are too long.  The university is stuck with running everything - with those high fixed costs - or shutting down the entire campus.
 

    And they thought they were making a wise move when they bulldozed the boiler house next to that ivy-covered classroom building.  Instead, they may have taken their first steps to the “Point of No Return.”