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.”

B4023-2 Education: Field's Law (1)

     Today, boys and girls, let’s talk about Field’s Law.  There are several ways to state that law.  Field’s Law says you’re in deep financial trouble if you cannot see the end of your steam lines.  Or - to state the law in a slightly different way - as the density of a university’s physical plant decreases, the fixed costs to maintain that physical plant increase.

     Now, what do I mean by that?  Let me give you a little example.  I recently visited a small, tenth-rate university (about 10,000 students) that occupies a fairly large “footprint” or amount of land.  The campus itself was spread over perhaps five square miles, with a jumble of buildings that seemed to have been erected without any apparent visionary plan for orderly development.  To me, it seemed as if those buildings were added to the campus without much thought just because state monies or benefactor donations had suddenly become available.  There didn’t seem to be any compelling reasons why the performing arts center, to cite one case, was crammed into a spooky swale at the edge of the campus.  The entire physical plant of the university had an ad hoc feel to it.  It looked like something my brother-in-law had designed.

     One day I stood near a museum at the edge of the university campus, and I looked across a parking lot half-filled with cars.  At the far end of the parking lot there was a steam generation building for the heating and cooling of the buildings on the campus.  The building was near nothing worth speaking about; it was probably another “just put it over there” capital improvement project.  The building was a very large plant and its steam pressure lines and steam condensate lines stretched for miles underground around the campus. During the Winter months escaping steam could be seen everywhere - a veritable Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, much like the fuming fumaroles in Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska in the early 1900s.

     I thought about the crews of people it took to maintain all of that equipment, the armies of maintenance workers and steam specialists who would have to be employed for the simple task of keeping the buildings heated or cooled. I'm not sure about the numbers, but I would have to estimate that there would be several hundred people involved in just that aspect of the school's operation. The thought occurred to me that there was a direct correlation between the length of steam lines on that campus and the fixed costs of maintaining the campus. Field's Law: The longer the steam lines, the higher the fixed costs.  If you cannot see the end of your steam lines, you’re in deep trouble.

     And it also occurred to me that a school whose main business should be the education of students was engaged in something that had no relation to that core mission at all. Because of the sheer size of the campus, many people were engaged in grass cutting, groundskeeping, snowplowing (at the appropriate time of year), food service,  custodial and janitorial services, plant and equipment maintenance, and security services - all of which activities have nothing to do with education. Anyone might ask why one of the largest employers in the city has the bulk of its employees engaged in activities that do nothing to advance the university's core mission of educating students.  Why is that?

     At a time when state budgets in the U.S.A. are in deep deficit - like everything else here - and there is talk about cutting educational grants to universities, the local university and its trustees are preparing a capital spending package to present to the state.  They want to erect another building.  I told my friend that doing so would just exacerbate the university's fixed cost problems.  He nodded his head thoughtfully.  "Not only that," he said, "but it will make things worse, too."

There is corollary to Field’s Law: when you’re in a hole, stop digging.