Absurdity, Allegory and China

Two stories rolled through my feed reader in the last few hours, both of which are well worth a look.  The first is from the Times Online by Philip Delve Broughton: Harvard’s masters of the apocalypse: If his fellow Harvard MBAs are all so clever, how come so many are now in disgrace?

If Robespierre were to ascend from hell and seek out today’s guillotine fodder, he might start with a list of those with three incriminating initials beside their names: MBA. The Masters of Business Administration, that swollen class of jargon-spewing, value-destroying financiers and consultants have done more than any other group of people to create the economic misery we find ourselves in.

The other is a piece by Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic, Washington Diarist: The Tolstoy Bailout

In tough times, of all times, the worth of the humanities needs no justifying. The reason is that it will take many kinds of sustenance to help people through these troubles. Many people will now have to fall back more on inner resources than on outer ones. They are in need of loans, but they are also in need of meanings. The external world is no longer a source of strength.

It’s funny how things have a way of coming back to you, especially when you’ve written them down and your memory hasn’t totally slipped off the rails. Back in the 2000 I wrote the following piece to a small group of writers I have been involved with for the last fifteen years. The conversation had to do with higher education.
________

My highest degree is a high school diploma, and even that was in jeopardy right up to, and even after, the graduation ceremony; the actual diploma was withheld by my high school for a wanton display of “attitude” at the graduation ceremony. It was finally delivered to my mother by a neighborhood kid who’d been asked by one of the Roman-collared keepers of the school to deliver it to her after I’d refused to pick it up the week following graduation. I was already gone. There was hardly any need for it at the time. It was 1968, and since I was one of eight kids and the oldest son of a father who worked far too hard for less than 10K a year, college and my name were never used in the same sentence, neither at home nor at school.

In the mid-to-late sixties, the era of the selective service draft and the “coincidental” golden age of deferment-based college enrollment escalation, institutions of higher education were very hip to the profitability of providing safe houses for the sons of the middle-class, a less dangerous environment than the southeast Asian dumping zone that the “Wash dot boys” – even back then they were dots – had provided for lower class and minority males who were moderately healthy and could more or less follow instructions – “Turn your head and cough.” After nailing a bachelor’s degree in relatively good standing, one could scoot on to grad school, providing one could work out the deferment details with the local draft board. Higher education was on a roll, and it hasn’t stopped since.

So, I started college late, when I was 24 yrs. old. I managed to sit through 90 hours of coursework at the Univ. of KY, where it was very possible to get a good education if you chose your teachers wisely. What was finally too difficult to bear was having to sit in the required hame-head classes – the 100-level required-for-graduation dull rooms – with the sons and daughters of JoeBobs whose only reason for “bein’ hit kahlij” was to get student passes to basketball games, kill time and brain cells, and discover the finer points of pre-AIDS STD meds until they got their degrees and could return to Possum Dick or HumpferCertain and take over Dad’s insurance biz. After all, you need a degree to be taken seriously at the 401K/Term-Life conventions when you hose down a quart of Jack while trying to hump the leg of the waitress who doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree. “Why the hell ya think she’s waiting tables, pard. She ain’t got no daddy with an insurance biz in Possum Dick. Yee-haa!”

These were the same folks who were, no doubt, required to read one Sophocles play at some point during their college education, but who will die insisting that Tiresias was a football player who played for a team from, “I think, Louisiana.” And all their kids with their bachelor’s degrees will roll their eyes toward the Big Blue sky when they hear Dad talk about Tiresias the tailback. They’ll remember him as a sweeper for some South American soccer team, or possibly the capital of New Jersey. Poor Dad, too many conventions.

Jump ahead to the 90′s. Shenandoah Conservatory, a small, private Methodist school in Winchester, VA, was, I am told, a decent enough music school until the VA state system expanded James Madison University, seventy miles south on I-81, to include a music school with a dramatically lower tuition than the Shenandoah fare. Knowing a good deal when they see one, the Methodist musicians took their sheet music down the valley, and the Conservatory, to save itself, morphed into a “university” which, according to a friend who landed a job teaching graduate level math classes to students who couldn’t understand a single word of English, is as much a university as a toll booth is a whore house. But they’re making money, and their president, an accomplished fundraiser, has successfully sold the idea that, “Yes, we really are a university,” to people looking to dump funds to lighten their tax loads. They even have an MBA program.

Someday someone will devise a scale to measure a society’s level of development by what stage of MBA frenzy the subject society happened to have been in at any given time:

Pre-MBA Cowrie-Shelled Primitive (Paleo/Neolithic)
Early MBA Transitional (Bronze through the Atomic Ages)
MBA Efflorescence: The Reagan Equivalency (1980 -200?)
The Crisis of MBA Fading Fuzzy Glow (200? – …..)
Post-MBA Lights Out: Oh Shit, It Didn’t Work (……..)

Right now many American universities, like pirates on a sinking ship, are trying their best to tap into the large Chinese savings pool by offering MBA courses to people who are looking for an edge in their dramatically changing and overly competitive world. People who can ill-afford it are being sold on the idea that having an MBA will make them successful in the foggy WTO’d future. Sounds like the 80′s in America. That’s what’s so good about being developmentally in the lead: you can sell your tired, worn out shit to developing countries.

My take on education in general is that there has been a qualitative cheapening of it by a society that is not so much interested in learning as it is in demanding that their young spend time in “learning environments,” in hope, I can only guess, that something more than just the wall paint will rub off. In the business of education, actual learning has become secondary to actually paying the bucks, and, at the tertiary level, grabbing a degree on your way out the door, which makes the saying “I paid my dues,” less figurative than it once was.

Cynical? Maybe.
Hopeless? Well, I hope not.
________

That was nearly 10 years ago. There seems to be some very good reasons to require college grads to have more than a minimal dusting of humanities courses, since we have finally gotten to the place where the all-business without humane checks and balances path has invariably led us.

Is it hopeless? Well, I now can say with a lot more certainty than I could ten years ago that, “No it’s not!”  That’s what I’ve learned by continuing to read Sophocles and a lot of others along the way.