It was with some awe that I recently re-read Graham Spanier's State of the-University address. The complexity of our knowledge industry today is staggering and Spanier's commentary is progressive, yet firm: there really is no going back.

The university, however, is an amalgamation of oft-conflicting tendencies from which no one person can really take a God's eye view. Much has escaped or been omitted from his vision of our present. I don't fault Spanier in this respect.

As far as I know, the last perfect guy died about 2000 years ago. Nonetheless, the scrupulous documentation of Penn State's productivity elided perhaps the single most significant output of its vast system: waste.

Spanier's insistent recounting of the millions upon millions of dollars coming into our system, and the extraordinary transformation of capital into information commodities, fails entirely to note how an extraordinary percentage of these grants, endowments, donations, etc. are put to the function of waste.

How much and who pays? As scrupulous as the documentation of capital is in this university, there is no reliable accounting for the costs of waste.

Based on such accounting done for a single building projected campus-wide, these almost certainly exceed the 7.76% tuition increase.

Spanier is right that Information Technology is super-cool, but the fact that rooms on campus are both heated and air-conditioned at the same time is not (unless the air-conditioning unit is winning that day).

How do we account for such manifest stupidity alongside the voluminous and well-documented displays of human intelligence? Or rather, how do we face it?