Rest in peace, Bob Tollison

The crisis at Ole Miss is almost too unbelievable for most people not on the ground to credit. A new business school dean had been hired—a mrketing professor from a then-Big-12 school—whose number 1 priority was to transfer the Department of Economics to the College of Liberal Arts. Aided and abetted by an ignorant provost (an attorney with no publications other than a couple of law review articles) and a university Chancellor, also trained in the law, but at least holding a master’s degree, the dean’s Exhibit A for why economics did not belong in the business school was an article published by the “three Bobs” (see below) in a 2002 issue of the Journal of Political Economy, titled “An Economic Analysis of the Protestant Reformation”. What in the world, the dean asked, does that event have to do with business education? Of course, Martin Luther had triggered competitive entry against the Catholic Church, the world’s first multinational corporation, by, among other things, bypassing priestly middlemen between God and the Christian faithful, eliminating auricular confession (and the accompanying price discriminatory forgiveness of sins), along with the sale of indulgences, and removing purgatory as a barrier on the pathway to salvation for unbaptized souls, for which money could be extracted from surviving family members in payment for the eventual transition of deceased loved ones to the Pearly Gates. If such analyses don’t apply to business decision-making, neither I nor Bob Tollison and his coauthors know what does.