Underneath the nicest building on campus and boatloads of cash, there is a foul core to KU’s favorite school.
In early 2025, KU announced that Schedule Builder, the beloved tool that allowed us to view our prospective courses for the upcoming semester in a convenient calendar format, would soon be replaced with KU Planner from Stellic – a tool which, as I understand it, serves essentially the same function as Schedule Builder. I would check for myself, but I still can’t access it. During this replacement process, KU did not allow us to continue using the old tool until the new one was integrated, making this past semester’s class schedule building particularly tedious for myself and many other students. For some students, however, the process was comparatively less inconvenient.
There is an understood hierarchy of departments and schools at most every large university, KU included. At the bottom are the fine arts, then the humanities, then the theoretical and social sciences, then the applied and natural sciences, then engineering, and at the top, business. When KU released their rollout plan for KU Planner, they inadvertently provided one of the clearest and simplest pieces of evidence of this bias. With only marginal and arguable exceptions, the three-phase plan to roll out KU Planner followed this hierarchy to a tee. Students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, like myself, didn’t gain access to the tool until April 1st. Given that KU Honors priority enrollment opened March 27th, I didn’t get the chance to use the tool when I was scouting classes for the fall. The business students, on the other hand, could access it as early as February 3rd.
If the business school’s place atop the hierarchy was limited to something as petty as this, I would have little to write about here. But it doesn’t stop there. Not even close. The most well-funded school on campus in the nicest building on campus is the embodiment of the neoliberal multiversity and its moral failings, serving as a factory of ideology and reification of capitalist logics.
Put simply, I really don’t like the B-School.
Named after the bank of the same name, Capitol Federal Hall, often referred to simply as CapFed, is home to KU’s Business School. It was opened in June of 2016 on the site of former tennis courts, adjacent to the Ambler Student Recreation Center and across the street from Allen Fieldhouse. The building is four stories tall, 166,500 ft² in area, and contains 20 classrooms, 2 auditoriums, 205 offices, labs, flex spaces, an independently-run coffee bar, a large front courtyard, and a 7,400 ft² LiveRoof® green roof – accessible only through the Dean’s suite. The award-winning space was designed by Gensler in collaboration with local contractors. The project cost a total of $65.7 million dollars, all fundraised privately, $20 million of which was provided by a lead gift from The Capitol Federal Foundation of Topeka. The project was ultimately under budget.
It’s hard to say the building itself is bad. Sure, it’s somewhat spacially-inefficient compared to other, denser buildings, but it’s probably the outright nicest building on campus. The modern architecture outside and vast quantities of contemporary art inside might not fit everyone’s preferences, but compared to other, older buildings around campus, the aesthetic profile of CapFed has them beat. Prior to this new home, the B-School had outgrown Summerfield Hall and needed a new space for its 3000+ undergrad and 600+ grad students, who make up over 17% of the student population of the Lawrence campus, and this state-of-the-art building has done the job and then some thus far. What’s there to complain about?
The answer starts with the fact that this was an entirely privately-funded project. Raising over $45 million dollars, $65 million if you count the lead gift, is no easy task, yet the KU Business School did so with ease. KU Endowment facilitated these private donation efforts. It certainly helps that John Dicus, Capitol Federal’s CEO, graduated from the KU Business School and also happens to sit on the Kansas Board of Regents. It’s also not a hard sell to fund the place where future business leaders are made. After all, maybe it’s in the interest of the business community to sink some money into this school in exchange for a more reliable, more skilled workforce down the line. Put a pin in that for now.
What this philanthropic logic cannot account for is the separate $50 million dollar contribution the KU Business School unexpectedly received from an anonymous donor in 2023 – years after CapFed had opened. The largest single gift in the school’s history, it was donated to KU Endowment with the express purpose of supporting undergraduate students and faculty research in the Business School through the school’s strategic planning process. While the President of KU Endowment and the Dean of the Business School were very pleased, I am left in agonizing awe of that number.
Imagine what could be done here with $50 million. You could pay for, roughly and on average, a quarter of every in-state student’s tuition, a quarter of the tuition of every student who has applied for financial aid, and over a third of the tuition of every student who receives federal loans on the Lawrence campus. You could pay for every available bed in student housing for a year. You could buy a meal plan for every Lawrence campus undergrad for a year or for just freshmen for the next four years. You could tear down and build nearly two dorm buildings on Daisy Hill. You could fund Student Senate’s fees for two years. Even without taking from the principal of the endowed fund, it could generate millions annually that could be put towards essential infrastructure repairs, reducing the cost of student living, and/or serving underserved students for years to come. Instead, it went to a school that already has clear interest from private donors and a building they’ll use for many decades to come.
What’s more, after much discussion about what ought to be done with the old McClain’s location on Crescent Road by the Chi O Fountain, KU Endowment bought the building using part of the $50 million donation with plans to demolish the historic building and build a new “Entrepreneurship Hub” in its place. As if that wasn’t enough, the anonymous donor then contributed an additional $10 million, cementing the fate of the former just-off-campus cafe. Same as with the initial donation, the big wigs at KU had plenty of praise for the project, including the big cheese himself Chancellor Doug Girod, who claimed that “this gift creates a greater KU for all students, with the hub expanding entrepreneurship’s reach and impact.” The demolition began in mid-July.
Imagine what else could be done with that space and money. You could open an affordable or free meal spot to address food insecurity on campus and more broadly in the Lawrence Community. You could turn it into a museum with rotating, student-led exhibits. You could transform it into an office space for student groups outgrowing their space at the union. Hell, you could finance reopening McClain’s! Instead, it will serve to transform the next generation of self-hating proletarians into the avaristic capitalist shills Doug knows they can be.
With all of this investment, construction, and attention, you’d think KU would have an exceptional business program. However, KU only ranks 72nd among business schools according to US News and World Report. Granted, these types of rankings are overly simplistic and can be misleading, but to have received nine figures in donations over the last decade and still have so little to show for it compared to your peer institutions shows that this investment, construction, and attention could have been better spent elsewhere.
Instead, KU’s priorities are clear: The B-School comes first. If this were exclusive to KU, that would be bad enough, but this is a much wider-scale trend – one which is the product of the deliberate efforts of capital.
One of the staunchest and most vocal critics of business schools is Martin Parker, a lifelong Business professor with experience in American and UK universities. In his 2018 article, titled “Why we should bulldoze the business school,” Parker offers an impassioned account of his experience with business schools and their terminal flaws. While I feel compelled to quote half the article here, alas, I will only highlight a few important excerpts, though I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
Parker observes that, on “the average university campus,” the business school is likely the “newest and most ostentatious building.” While those who teach in business schools rarely call for them to be outright closed, there is nonetheless a vocal minority which critiques them from within, with some insiders calling it “a cancerous machine spewing out sick and irrelevant detritus.” For Parker, though, “calls for more ethical teaching fail because ‘the business school only teaches one form of organising – market managerialism,’” and so he has concluded “that the best solution… is to shut down business schools altogether.”
Parker laments how students are funneled through this academy of ideology and capital. Business schools “assume that degree courses in business should only teach one form of organisation – capitalism”; that “capitalism, corporations and managers [are] the default form of organisation, and everything else [is] history, anomaly, exception, alternative.” Even as the world collapses around them, business students are taught to see things as the business-owning class does, even though “most business-school graduates won’t become high-level managers anyway, just precarious cubicle drones in anonymous office blocks.”
More than teaching capitalism as a desirable system, then, business schools teach capitalism as the only system that could possibly be. Parker puts it thusly:
If we educate our graduates in the inevitability of tooth-and-claw capitalism, it is hardly surprising that we end up with justifications for massive salary payments to people who take huge risks with other people’s money. If we teach that there is nothing else below the bottom line, then ideas about sustainability, diversity, responsibility and so on become mere decoration. The message that management research and teaching often provides is that capitalism is inevitable, and that the financial and legal techniques for running capitalism are a form of science. This combination of ideology and technocracy is what has made the business school into such an effective, and dangerous, institution.
In the business school, “the things taught and the way that they are taught generally mean that the virtues of capitalist market managerialism are told and sold as if there were no other ways of seeing the world.” Ultimately, then, a business school wants to be “a clean machine for turning income from students into profits” and ensuring they have no means to envision an alternative to the current order – which makes it the perfect target for investment from the ruling class. It doesn’t matter if business schools are “widely regarded to be intellectually fraudulent places, fostering a culture of short-termism and greed” if they are doing the job they are being bankrolled to do. Now you can take that pin from earlier out.
Here, the massive private donations and gifts to the KU Business School begin to make more sense. More than a place that trains future capitalists, the B-School turns students into the future facilitators of capital – be they the ruthless owners and bosses, petty middle-managers, or exploited workers. Indeed, “the business school has the best building because it makes the biggest profits (or, euphemistically, “contribution” or “surplus”) – as you might expect, from a form of knowledge that teaches people how to make profits,” regardless of the ‘externalities.’
Ideology is pervasive and epidemic, in that it spreads and reproduces itself in a given space. In the business school, ideology is not deconstructed; rather, it is reified as being inevitable and permanent.
It’s a played-out joke that business school classes are easy. Beyond there being no class on Fridays and business majors being stereotyped as lazy and slow-witted, business is consistently ranked among the easiest college majors. While there are likely other curricula-based reasons for this, part of the reason is also that much of what it teaches is intuitive. Beyond the simple math, for many, base concepts like the profit motive and aspiring towards wealth are simply more intuitive than Gram staining or calculus; you are more likely to have background knowledge on the topics presented at a corporate conference, which you are probably attending to earn special little brownie points, than you are about urban planning or critical theory. Capitalist ideology is so embedded in our psyches that the business school’s skewed teachings feel intuitive, which attracts students who have no incentive to question its logics and assumptions."
To be clear, I don’t think the problem here is the business students as individuals. Of course, at some point, you cross a line from being an unwitting part of capitalist exploitation, expropriation, and oppression, to an active facilitator of it, and while most business students are far from that threshold, most all of them are being pushed in that direction by design. Students are sold a vision of changing the world from the private equity office or small business storefront. These ostensibly good intentions are assimilated into the only allowable vision for a decidedly capitalist future, as is the tendency of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the prospective environmental activist goes into corporate greenwashing, the feminist becomes a girlboss who sees female representation among CEOs as liberation, the bleeding heart type becomes an accountant for a corporation’s charitable deductions department, and so on. In other words, people with good intentions become those taking bad actions, often without ever perceiving that shift. These students are taught to feel that you must be a part of the system to change the system, losing sight of how the system changes them. Ultimately, though, what matters is not an abstract sense of right and wrong, nor what a person thinks of themselves as or “who they are”; rather, it matters what they do. Looking into the funhouse mirror of ideology offered by the business school, its future hedge fund managers and rental unit administrators may see themselves as change-makers. This is a perversion of the truth at best.
Practically, I would like to see the money going into the business school being invested elsewhere, but there is a reason that money is going to where it is. After all, some upstart tryhard in the American Studies department who writes for an independent leftist newspaper isn’t as likely to become a loyal peon dedicated to improving shareholder value as a directionless new fraternity pledge or a wide-eyed marketing major. The modern multiversity sees itself as a knowledge factory, and so investment from private firms and interest in its students – functionally, its product – is welcomed with open arms by administrators.
CapFed is a facade beyond its modular facade; it is a shell over an institution that exists to reproduce the logics it teaches and the capitalists it relies on – no matter the ‘external’ costs. It understands its role in the community, it knows it will always have support from private actors and University administration, and doesn’t care that it eliminates contingent possibilities, both practical and theoretical.
We must never forget that capitalism is not inevitable. Despite what it may seem, this order is not all that there can be. No matter how nice it is to have Fridays off, or to get to use the nicest building on campus, or to have early access to the schedule builder, we cannot lose sight of the truth that a better world is possible.
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