Biography|Greg Hayes — The Krannert Building Where He Finished an Economics Degree

People treat Purdue as an engineering factory that happens to mint a few executives.

Greg Hayes finished here as an economics student in a management school that opened in 1964.

The Krannert Building sits on the southeast side of the West Lafayette campus, now addressed as 403 Mitch Daniels Boulevard.

Hayes arrived after one year of pre-law at Cornell.

He later told the school's magazine that Cornell had convinced him the legal profession was not for him.

He took an economics major and a history minor, worked as a teaching assistant in an introductory economics course, and graduated in May 1982 with a Bachelor of Science in management.

Purdue's own commencement notice later recorded the same degree when it awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2021.

The labor market that spring was not kind.

National unemployment sat near 12 percent, and a first job was the actual assignment.

The San Francisco office of Arthur Andersen offered him accounting work on the condition that he sit intermediate accounting and take the CPA exam.

He did both.

A UTC filing in 2003 later dated his move from Arthur Andersen into Sundstrand to 1989.

The building on this pin is still the undergraduate home of the school, even after the college took a new name.

A visitor finds lecture halls and a quad, not a corner office.

The useful fact is narrower than a CEO biography usually allows: the person who later ran United Technologies and RTX learned to stand in front of a room here, teaching other people's first economics class.

Photo: Amerique, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons