Edgewood College’s beautiful wooded campus is situated on Lake Wingra in Madison, Wisconsin, in a mixed-use neighborhood not far from the western edge of the University of Wisconsin engineering campus. The college’s neighbors include middle-income homeowners, university students and other renters, and small businesses and restaurants.
“Madison is a more progressive city, so environmental issues are important to the neighbors,” says Denis Collins, a business professor at Edgewood who teaches business and management ethics.
The very first house I bought was a condominium, and the purchase price included 10 hours of service by an electrician. The idea was that each owner would want to customize the unit with special lighting fixtures and built-in appliances, and covering the cost of the electrician was intended to be a selling point. I was just starting out as a college professor and far too strapped for cash to afford luxuries like special fixtures and appliances, so my 10 hours of included service lasted me for several years. Each time one of my unit’s floodlights would burn out, rather than climbing up on a ladder myself, I’d call the manager’s office and have the electrician come do it for me. After having done so four or five times, I heard the manager sigh and say, “You know, an electrician is certainly capable of changing lightbulbs; it just seems to me that you’re wasting a perfectly fine electrician by having him do so.”
