A Medieval Proverb, a Space Shuttle, and Your Budget
November 7, 2026
Read Time - 6 minutes
“A little Neglect may breed great Mischief.”
~Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth (1758)
Around 1230, a German poet named Freidank wrote down a proverb: “A nail keeps a shoe, a shoe a horse, a horse a man, and a man a castle.” It was a lesson about upkeep.
Even a castle depends on a nail.
It’s the medieval version of “don’t skip the small stuff.”
Over the next five centuries, the saying spread across Europe, and later versions retold it as a warning. French soldiers put it bluntly: “The losse of a nayle, the losse of an army.” By the time Benjamin Franklin printed it in his almanac, it was on its way to the form we know today:
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. Without the horse, the rider was lost, and the losses kept climbing until the battle and the whole kingdom were gone.
Engineers have a name for this pattern. They call it a failure cascade. It works like a chain reaction of dominoes: the first domino is small, but it knocks over the next, and the next, until the whole row comes crashing down.
The nails on our campuses look different, but they do the same job. They’re the small things: a recruiting plan someone keeps current, enrollment numbers that actually shape decisions, and a hard conversation that creates accountability for a struggling course. On their own, none of them look significant or draw much attention. But added up across a campus, they decide the battle, and sometimes the kingdom.
I once watched a new provost arrive on campus and quickly reallocate each college’s budget based on program enrollment, and it upended the long-held assumption that last year’s budget would be this year’s budget. Some programs were ready for that moment, because they’d been proactive about keeping their curriculum relevant and their recruitment active. Other programs had been running on tradition and goodwill for years, and suddenly they were held accountable on someone else’s terms. The programs that fared well were living Freidank’s version of the proverb. Someone had been paying attention to them long before anyone asked.
A more public example is Southern Oregon University, which has been in the news recently. Oregon funds its public universities at among the lowest levels in the country, and SOU’s full-time enrollment has fallen almost 9 percent since 2020. In the spring, with the university projected to run out of cash by June 2027, the state offered $15 million in emergency funding on the condition that SOU balance its budget. In June, the board approved a plan to cut more than $20 million (about a fifth of the budget) and eliminate three majors. Within weeks, two of those majors were reinstated.
Many of SOU’s pressures came from outside the university, and nobody there could have fixed state funding or demographics alone. What the story does show is what happens at the end of a long chain: the decisions get made fast, by a few people, under a deadline.
The time to make the case for a program is long before anyone goes looking for cuts.
How We Learn to Live With Small Problems
Why do so many smart, conscientious leaders let small problems ride? Some of the best answers come from a study of NASA.
In January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch. The cause was a rubber seal in one of the rocket boosters, called an O-ring, that failed in the cold. What sociologist Diane Vaughan found when she studied the decision to launch is more unsettling than the failure itself: NASA had known about problems with those seals for years.
Engineers first found erosion on an O-ring in November 1981, after the shuttle’s second flight. Over the next four years, erosion or hot-gas damage showed up on 14 flights, sometimes worse than before. Each time, engineers analyzed the damage, documented it, and concluded the risk was acceptable. Thiokol, the company that built the boosters, kept reaching the same verdict: “the condition is not desirable but is acceptable.” And every flight came home safely, which seemed to prove them right.
Vaughan found no villains. Every safe landing became evidence that the problem wasn’t really a problem, until damage that once would have caused alarm looked routine. What changed was the definition of acceptable. She called this the normalization of deviance.
The night before the launch, when engineers warned that the cold could make the seals fail, the burden of proof had flipped. As engineer Roger Boisjoly later testified, “we were being put in a position to prove that we should not launch.” One of Thiokol’s senior executives asked the company’s vice president of engineering to “take off his engineering hat and put on his management hat.” The launch went ahead the next morning.
The people involved were smart and experienced, and they were following NASA procedures. That’s what makes Vaughan’s research so useful for the rest of us. Normalization creeps in precisely because a small problem can go years without causing any harm.
In academic units, accepting a small problem because nothing bad has happened yet can look like this:
An exception to the minimum-enrollment rule that’s granted every semester, because the course has always run and no one wants to be the person who ends it
Adjunct spending that grows every year to cover sections full-time faculty could teach, because nobody has looked at workloads in years and the budget has absorbed it so far
A curriculum that’s slowly drifted out of step with what students and the field need, because enrollment has held steady so far
None of these feel like problems, which is exactly how a nail goes missing.
Try This Before Friday
Many units have at least one problem everyone knows isn’t ideal but has quietly agreed to live with. If one already comes to mind, start there. If nothing does, ask someone newer to your unit what surprised them when they arrived. New colleagues haven’t learned yet what counts as normal, and they often see what the rest of us have stopped noticing.
Then trace it like a cascade. If this problem gets worse, what’s the next thing it knocks over? And if every unit on campus handled it the same way, what would that add up to? If the answers make you uncomfortable, you’ve found a missing nail. Bring the whole chain, not just the nail, to your next conversation with your dean or supervisor.
Bottom Line
Read Freidank’s line one more time: a nail keeps a shoe, a shoe a horse, a horse a man, and a man a castle. Eight hundred years later, it still works as a job description for anyone leading in the middle of a campus.
Those leadership roles have limits. Many campuses right now are dealing with pressures nobody in the middle controls, from state funding to enrollment to policy shifts. A unit that has dealt with its “not desirable but acceptable” problems before that pressure arrives often has more say in what happens next. It can make its case with real numbers, protect what’s working, and fix what isn’t on its own terms.
That’s why the people closest to those small problems need the authority and support to fix them. For those of us in the middle, that means treating the “acceptable” problem as ours to fix, or at least ours to raise. For those of us who supervise people in the middle, it means training them, encouraging them when they bring us a small problem, and giving them time to solve it.
The small problems we fix now are the choices we get to keep later.
Thanks for reading. I hope this issue serves you well.
Put this to work on your campus.
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