For all of John Fry’s passion for F & M and Lancaster, he has been seriously lacking in compassion for the people of Lancaster.
Undoubtedly that’s one of the reasons that Drexel thought John Fry would be a good man to recruit – they were looking for a capable individual who put the wants and needs of his employer first. There’s nothing wrong with that. If an honest man is going to accept a paycheck, he will want to earn it.
The problem is in the nature of the corporation.
In the late 1800s, mass production brought us wealth, because it turned inexpensive materials and energy into goods and services with a minimum input of expensive labor. In order to mass produce something, expensive equipment was used which performed only one operation – and it took a lot of different machines to produce a complete product. In order to justify all that expensive equipment, most of it all had to be kept running full-out most of the time – and to buy all that equipment and keep the necessary inventory of feedstocks, it took a mammoth amount of capital. Capital was the limiting factor to creating wealth, and capitalism was not, as Marx and Engels wrote, but was greatly beneficial to mankind.
In the 1970s, technicians upgraded the IBM 370 computer to have more memory by snipping a wire and running a computer program. The company found it cheaper to produce one model of computer than several, selling the same computer at different price points according to the buyer’s needs. As customers became increasingly dependent on the computer’s capabilities, IBM unlocked the functionality of the computers in exchange for additional payments. What a waste, and yet that was the cheapest way to do things – at the time.
Today’s computer-controlled manufacturing doesn’t just make it possible to build smaller factories, it puts mammoth factories at a competitive disadvantage. Over the years, the cost of a Model T dropped from $850 in 1908 to $258 a decade later, despite the fact that this was a period of inflation, when most prices were going up, and yet continuing to produce the Model T almost bankrupted Henry Ford. People wanted nicer cars, and Ford rescued itself at the last moment by introducing the Model A – and then started to introduce improved models more frequently, until there were annual model changes in the late 1930s.
In 1953, Charlie Wilson proclaimed that “for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa” and at the time, he was right, but capitalism is dead, and the shortcoming of the corporate organization have become more obvious as the benefits of corporate structure have disappeared. Unless you’re making a generic commodity, it’s not the large that eats the small, but the fast and agile that kills off the slow and lumbering. The huge steel mills have all gone out of business, but mini-mills are highly profitable. Anheuser-Busch became the last of the big beer makers to fall to foreign ownership, as domestic investors realized that the profits were not in generic beers like Budweiser, but in craft beers like Lancaster Brewing’s Strawberry Wheat beer.
The same is true of colleges as factories. The Mayo Clinic is a lot smaller than it appears; when you go to Rochester, Minnesota for medical services, you primarily deal with many small organizations that coordinate with each other to diagnose and treat your illness, rather than one large organization. The college of 20 years from now could easily consist of a small central organization that coordinates activities, with instruction, housing, student health, etc., each handled by a variety of smaller organizations.
The difference between F& M and an individual is that F& M focuses on one thing – education – while an individual has a life. While one might question whether the Convention Center was a good idea, I’ve heard no such complaints about the Lancaster Newspaper’s “Newseum”, and it’s worth noting that daily newspapers controlled by one family tends to get more involved in community life than corporate chains, because the owner’s family lives in the community it serves. Of the 49 trustees controlling F& M, only Fry and 4 others have Lancaster addresses. There are 12 with New York City addresses. Why should F&M trustees care about the rest of Lancaster?
One of the advantages of the corporation, textbooks say, is that a corporation can theoretically live forever, while an individual’s lifetime is finite, but in practice, publicly-held corporations and institutions change presidents every 7 years on average, while an individual family can theoretically live forever. It’s the constant emphasis on quarterly and annual financial performance, and the short life of generations of leadership that keeps institutional management focused narrowly.
We need more regulation of corporations and other institutions in order to ensure that they have a healthy community in which to thrive, and less regulation of sole proprietors in order to give them the flexibility to match their responsibilities. As long as our law fails to recognize the very different nature of corporate entities and humans, we will suffer accordingly.
The percentage of trustees residing in Lancaster County was considerably reduced during John Fry’s eight years as president of F&M. Possibly the reason for this was that, if there was opposition to decisions made by the board or by college officials, that opposition usually came from trustees who lived within Lancaster County.
Lancaster Newspaper’s “Newseum” was created completely with private funds, turning what would have otherwise been a blank industrial wall into an inviting streetscape. The ONLY thing that the convention center structure and the “Newseum” have in common is Queen Street (with the exception of some questionable involvement by the owner of the “Newseum”).