Letter: How to gauge UNC customer satisfaction

TO THE EDITOR:

After almost four years in Chapel Hill, I look back often on my experience with a beaming smile.

Still, I wonder: How will UNC gauge my “customer” satisfaction? How will the Kenan-Flagler Business School train future leaders to make smart investments? How will a Board of Governors so enamored with a “performance-oriented culture” value the money they appropriate to UNC-Chapel Hill?

Margaret Spellings’ use of the word “customer” to The Daily Tar Heel, describing those who require a “sound value proposition at an affordable price,” prompts my question to be answered in the commodifying terms she prefers. How will I know if I am a satisfied customer? In the classroom, should I train my eyes to close out everything but money, valuing my contributions to the world merely as a function of profit? The answer from a Kenan-Flagler strategy professor would sound something like this: “We are not concerned with what should be, only with maximizing profits within the system that exists.”

A homework submission inadvertently forwarded to me over the weekend sheds light on how irresponsible this thinking is. A group of MBA finance students were asked to decide what fictional business to acquire and base their solution solely on the bottom line.

The answer was fracking.

The unnecessarily politicized nature of the assignment almost seems like a joke. It reads like a condescending slap in the face to the small cadre of professors in the business school whose research revolves around that funky buzzword “sustainability.”

If professors of finance at the Kenan-Flagler Business School know anything of the concerns surrounding fracking and yet still teach that strict bottom-line math can and should dictate major operational choices surrounding the practice, they are doing our students a disservice and are encouraging dangerous and unethical management behaviors.

The Board of Governors have set the precedent for years that public higher education should run like a profit-maximizing enterprise. The board believes that shunning long-term investments in favor of short-term profit-seeking is what our vaunted higher education system must reform in order to be competitive.

The recent selection of Spellings as the president-elect of this board is but one indication of their greedy preoccupation. An anonymous donor’s choice to fund a $1.1 million Boston Consulting Group project to study the system is yet another. A significant feature of the report’s preliminary findings was overlooked in The Daily Tar Heel coverage on Feb. 14. At the outset of the report, the executive summary highlights that stakeholders agree upon the need for our public school system to run in a “performance-oriented culture.” Whether or not this is a palatable synonym for “profitable,” UNC Chapel Hill students, staff and faculty alike should react with concern at this misdirection. Forces in our state — and now a powerful firm from Boston — are attempting to radically shift the motivations, metrics of success, and core values of this great university system.

In a world as complicated as ours, few decisions should be made with a simple profit calculation. Top-ranked business schools should surely not encourage this viewpoint in the classroom and should also not deceive the community with marketing materials that suggest a heartfelt dedication to “the bottom line and the greater good.”

But the Kenan-Flagler Business School and our Board of Governors are not interested in what should be. They are interested in how to make the most money from what is, at the continued expense of students, employees and the environment.

Max Levin

Senior

Comparative literature 

Business minor