Tod Treat

Editors Note: This blog was first published in 2017 and is republished as my current college wrestles with an ever-changing funding landscape. Slight edits have been made to the original.

In my formative years, we lived in a tri-level my dad had built on ground adjacent to two large existing warehouses that happened to be owned by the company he would eventually inherent from his dad. Throughout my adolescence, I recall entering those buildings and playing all variety of games and imaginings – tag, hide and seek, war – in and around huge stacks of drywall, metal studs, insulation, lathe and heavy equipment. Even before I worked on job sites, and after I had many wounds and scrapes, I developed a familiarity with the infrastructure of commercial construction and the hardscrabble blue-collar ethic that accompanies it. As the guys would pull up each day – painters and carpenters and laborers – they’d sit on the tailgates of their trucks, drinking coffee and smoking, and I’d wander over and chat with them while waiting for the school bus. My dad took over the company when my grandpa died, but I never got the sense that the guys were nice to me because they had to be. They were nice to me because I was a curious kid who respected what they did. Even when I later entered job sites to deliver material, scrap out, or sand, they tolerated my lack of expertise with good-natured prodding and in later years held my kids and laughed at company parties at how ‘unhandy’ I was trying to hang drywall.

Meanwhile, in the basement of our house, around the corner from my bedroom, sat the laundry room…complete with a fully furnished ‘chair setup’ for doing hair. I would come home from school to a driveway full of cars, the awful chemical smell of permanent solution and the loud banter of ‘the ladies,’ their kids and blow dryers. Anyone who goes to a hair stylist or barber knows that my mom’s beauty shop was part technique, part community gathering, and part human relations. Obviously, it was critical that mom be adept at cuts and layers, foils and frosts, dyes and curls. But a great stylist can also carry on one heck of a conversation, remember the mundane details of their clients’ lives, disclose stuff about themselves, keep secrets…and keep the peace. Stylists also note every alteration of a person’s hair, a trait I appear to have obtained through osmosis, and compliment whenever they can. (And, world, Trish in Tacoma is one great stylist!)

As family businesses, I also saw the underbelly of making them work. I recall staying over at my grandfather’s house and getting up at 4 am to find my grandpa already at his large living room desk doing takeoffs to bid a job. Before dawn, my dad would doff his all-weather gear and be loading the boom truck with drywall so he could ensure he was ahead of the guys and didn’t slow their progress on the job. These companies demanded hard work and they had to be grown from the ground up. My parents were both employee and employer. Even to the end, dad worked the job sites, and mom was cutting hair. Mom did not take a salary for many, many years, but shrewdly utilized reinvestment, tax write-offs, and hard work to grow her shop from the laundry room to the corner office in one of the warehouses to a cute little house on Oak Street in Mahomet, Illinois with four chairs and stylists, tanning and massage – all of which is now owned by one of her former stylists. The foremen and journeymen, good union folk, on dad’s payroll were with the company for decades in some cases and the sense of shared commitment was ultimately the company’s undoing as dad and his brother tried to keep people on payroll too long during the economic downturn. 

A person close to me had parents who were steel workers in corporate settings. They are quick to note the differences between employee and employer. There are differences between employee and employer, just as there are differences between white collar/blue collar, service/technical sectors, corporations and small businesses, for-profit and non-profit. In a college, there are distinctions between exempt, classified, and faculty employees and to the level of service different areas supply directly to students, or to each other. Each has a different relationship to tangible work, to social compacts within the company, and to the goal.  

These early memories profoundly shape my sense as to how to run a college. In today’s environment there remains a debate about whether colleges are businesses or not. Faculty, in particular, don’t like the application of business language to a college. I think I understand why, and not just because I have been faculty and appreciate the perspective. I have lived in and around family businesses.

Business is not just business. There are important distinctions between corporate business, nonprofit business, and family business. The values, aims, product, customers, and bottom line all vary.

Despite the differences, business attributes do overlap, and there are many similarities. All businesses are regulated at some level by government agencies, even if just the tax code. All businesses rely upon revenue and bear real costs. At a minimum, all businesses must balance the two. All businesses seek to be effective at what they would like to deliver, and most try to do so efficiently. Some businesses try to address issues like equity and sustainability. A few even dream to make the world a better place.

The question is not whether a college is a business, but what kind. And, if one is in a position of responsibility, what kind of business are you running?

Consider the values, aims, product, customers, and bottom line for a great family business. A great family business is built on love for the place, the people, and the product. The employer/employee line is blurred. Work and life isn’t balanced, it’s integrated. The bottom line is intergenerational, and the aim is to produce the best quality product, not to serve stockholders, but to serve family, friends, and the community one has chosen as home.

My parents grew companies they were proud of. Mom relished the compliments as people left feeling good about themselves. Dad loved to point out buildings they had built: hospitals, libraries, schools, and office buildings. Their business bottom lines went well beyond the balance sheet, even as they looked to support their family. In similar fashion, colleges are in the business of transforming lives and communities, creating greater equity and sustainability, and, yes, making the world a better place.

Postscript: In March 2026, a major technology company abruptly laid off 30,000 employees due to a strategic shift toward artificial intelligence. The nature of the lay off and its communication was a shock to many. It reminded us that, increasingly, humans are expendable, even in sectors where we are serving what we have believed are inherently human things (like learning, health, or relationship….). Because of my upbringing, I had a pollyannish view of the relationship between administration and staff, and I long for cultures in which everyone is bought in around a common purpose and pulling together. Such cultures were rare and now appear to moving to extinction except in cases where leaders, workers, and clientele are all engaged in preserving and celebrating quintessentially human things…a topic I’ll likely take up in a future blog.