Stanford to Save Midwest with Heroic Army of MBAs

This morning we Minnesotans emerged from our sod house, embedded in a windswept field, fended off feral gophers with a handful of rocks, and blessed our good fortune.

Word had arrived that pioneers from a California business school might deign to settle in our cursed state for two (!) years, during which we will surely learn about the ways of sophisticated commerce.

The Stanford Graduate School of Business has announced its USA MBA Fellowship, which will focus in its first year on the Midwest and will pay tuition and fees (about $160,000) for those who commit to working for two years in one of the following states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

According to Stanford, the program is “committed to economic development in underserved regions of the United States.”

It makes one think of the noble work of Doctors Without Borders, or student-loan forgiveness for new-minted attorneys and physicians willing to endure a stretch in the blighted hinterlands.

Our reaction from the North: Thank God.

Over at the Target Corporation, they’ll be able to abandon their paper ledgers. At 3M, no more need for pneumatic tubes to transport inter-office communications. At Cargill, plow horses and manual harvests will be a thing of the past.

And our woeful, terribly inadequate Carlson School of Management will no longer have to labor in darkness and ignorance.

It’s not just us grizzled Northerners who stand to benefit. There’s the hamlet of Chicago — utterly lacking in commerce and financial influence. Detroit, St. Louis, Columbus, Indianapolis — all cities who have never seen the likes of a business-school grad from one of the coasts, and have never been exposed to hifalutin concepts in business.

We’ll give back, though. We will send emissaries well versed in the delicate arts of social geography and general awareness. And we shall offer our finest copywriters, who are capable of finessing even the most appalling coastal provincialism masquerading as benevolent largesse.