Reality missing from writer’s viewpoint

To the editor:

Brian Campbell's obsequious paean to the private sector is laughable. Campbell lauds incoming Iowa President Bruce Harreld as an example of the modern-day superhero, Businessman, who having been forged and tested in the 'real world” of corporate America, knows rewards are performance based, bad decisions lead to immediate firing and problems are solved by action rather than thinking ('Reader applauds regents for UI hire,” Sept. 18).

Totally lost on Campbell is the fact that it was corporate America that invented and perfected the golden parachute, whereby executives who run their companies into ruin leave with multimillion dollar severance packages that make Sally Mason's pension look like pocket change.

Campbell should explore what happened to Boston Chicken, the company Harreld ran from 1992-95. By 1998, it was bankrupt in what one business analyst called 'one of the decade's great disasters” as a result of a growth plan that 'never made financial sense.” I suspect Harreld was well compensated for executing that strategy.

And in perhaps the crowning irony, Campbell excoriates the university for hiring 'expensive consultants,” while missing the fact that Harreld's most recent job was being one of those consultants. Apparently it was dumb to hire him as a consultant, but great to hire him as president.

I am not some knee-jerk anti-corporatist. I teach in the Tippie College of Business and I have a healthy appreciation for what the market system does well - and poorly. Campbell's fawning view of the business world and the executives that inhabit it has little basis in reality.

John Solow

Iowa City