The Tartan

By William Curvan

Last week, David A. Tepper was watching his football team, the Carolina Panthers, play very badly against the Jacksonville Jaguars. From the stands, a Jaguars fan stood up and heckled Tepper in his luxury box. In response, Tepper tossed his drink on the fan. He now has to pay a $300,000 fine to the NFL for this behavior. 

This is, in fact, the David A. Tepper that our business school is named after. You may not have known that Tepper is named after somebody who is alive, and that he also owns an NFL team (and does a rather bad job managing it).

The Carnegie Mellon alum made his fortune as a hedge fund manager The Carnegie Mellon alum made his fortune as a hedge fund manager is now trying his hand at sports management. A lovely Slate article titled “The NFL has a New Worst Owner” points out that Tepper’s team is the worst in the league. Their 2023 regular season stood at 2-15. 

It’s jarring, for me, to think of David A. Tepper as an actual human being with flaws. When I hear “Tepper,” I often think of the building, with its high glass ceiling and towering indoor atrium, and the students collectively referred to by his name. Think about how odd that is. We usually don’t call them “business majors,” do we? No, we refer to them as though they are pupils of the man himself: “Tepper Students.” The David A. Tepper School of Business is certainly not the only school at our university named after a rich man, but do we talk about “Mellon” students or “Carnegie” students? (I know we talk about “Dietrich” students, but for rhetorical purposes, forget about that. Also the college is named after Marianna Dietrich, the mother of the financier, so like, it’s different.)  

Consider the similar situation with the word Gates. Bill Gates, by way of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, provided an extraordinary sum of money to construct an extraordinary building for the School of Computer Science. And while “Gates” as a location is part of our lexicon, it never refers to anything but the building. The school housed within Gates is still that of “Computer Science,” and the students are still “CS Majors.”

David A. Tepper, to us, exists beyond his physical self. His name has become so ingrained in our campus vocabulary that it has acquired meanings that would likely be entirely alien to Tepper himself. When this happens to someone’s name, the person becomes an idea. This is exactly what has happened to Andrew Carnegie’s name, which has been attached to so many institutions that for many, it invokes anything but the Scotsman himself. Maybe it invokes thoughts of your local library, or of a museum, or of a once-modest but now enormously profitable restaurant and cultural staple of New York City. “Carnegie” isn’t a person anymore, it’s a set of concepts.

So what is the “idea” invoked by the name Tepper?

I’m going to make a bit of a sharp turn in this argument, but don’t worry, we’re still gonna make it. There is, I argue, an underlying respect and jealousy for CS majors at Carnegie Mellon. The selectiveness of that school’s admissions and the prominence of its rankings imply that CS majors are, on average, smarter and better at their discipline than you are at yours. It’s kind of an inevitable conclusion that we all may intuitively grasp on some level.

A non-CS student who has realized this may find themselves grappling with a strange insecurity. Their field of study implies they are not as smart as their peers, or that they have failed to achieve as much as others. This student must hold in their mind two conflicting ideas:

1. They are smart because they got into a selective university that is good according to widely accepted metrics.
2. There is a subset of people at this university who, by those same criteria, are smarter than you. 

Does that lead them to question the criteria? Do they interrogate the very nature of such a flimsy and arbitrary system of quantifying intelligence? Many do neither. Many instead choose to look one rung below them on this ladder of intelligence. 

Compared to the CS student, little respect is had for the business student. Their major is one some ridicule for its perceived lack of rigor and for its self-serving goals. To be absolutely clear, I don’t believe that this is true. I’m merely repeating the sentiments which we have all definitely heard. 

Students of other disciplines, through their comments, jokes, and stereotypes, seem to hold a near disdain for business majors. Tepper students are only in it for the money, they say. Tepper students have forsaken the pursuit of scientific, artistic, or humanitarian knowledge — pursuits we have decided are inherently virtuous — to pursue a career where they’re gonna make a boatload of money.

Take a moment to reflect on the fact that this is the major onto which David A. Tepper’s name is affixed.

Thus, we are presented with a tension regarding the meaning of David A. Tepper’s name. Many students assign it to a host of negative connotations, making it a symbol of capitalist greed and of academic unworthiness. The university, in contrast, uses its business model and branding goals to associate David A. Tepper’s name with the idea of a grand and benevolent figure, a captain of industry who has extended his generous and vast sums of money so that thousands of young people may pursue their own success and fortunes as he did.

Carnegie Mellon needs Tepper to become a myth. It needs to turn the man into a story, a symbol, and a set of values – a figure of folklore, perhaps. They need him to be someone whose accomplishments and acquisition of wealth have been so successful that his very name ought to be synonymous with the idea. We must attach his name to a large and beautiful structure, and we uphold him as a paragon of entrepreneurship and magnanimity because his life must be one worth studying and emulating. He, like Andrew Carnegie, must be understood to be a sort of perfect capitalist in order to justify naming a school after him. It’s a precarious situation because if his name began to mean anything else, the absurdity of it all would immediately unravel.

The university cannot mythologize David A. Tepper because he is still alive. He is still able to make bad decisions. David A. Tepper threw a drink at someone because his team played badly during a football game and now has to pay a $300,000 fee, and I think that’s just the funniest thing ever.