The Organization Man Page 11
But not so very much. The bureaucrat as hero is new to America, and older, conventional dreams of glory do linger on—the lawyer brilliantly turning the tables in cross-examination, the young scientist discovering the secret in the microscope late at night. Even in corporations’ institutional advertising there is some cultural lag—many an ad still shows us the young man dreaming by himself of new frontiers as he looks up at a star or a rainbow or a beautiful hunk of alto-cumulus clouds. But slowly the young man at the microscope is being joined by other young men at microscopes; instead of one lone man dreaming, there are three or four young men. Year by year, our folklore is catching up with the needs of organization man.
In Executive Suite we catch a glimpse of the hero in mid-passage. In clean-cut Don Walling, the hitherto junior executive, what senior could not feel that there, with the grace of God, would go he? In Walling have been resolved all the conflicts of organization life; he puts everything he has into his work and plays baseball with his boy; he cares little about money and his ranch house is beautiful; he is a loyal subordinate and gets to be president. He is not fully the new model—he is too pushy, he plays too rough in the clinches for that —but he could almost be the class valedictorian as he electrifies his elders with his ringing, if somewhat hazy, statement of belief. Management man does not work to make money for himself and the company. Business is people, and when you help people to rise to their fullest you make them fulfill themselves, you create more and better goods for more people, you make happiness.
While the trust in organization is very strong among the majority group of college seniors headed for a business career, it is less so with a smaller group who say, at least, that they prefer a small firm. In the course of sessions during the past few years I have had with different undergraduate groups, to get the discussion rolling I have asked the students to answer several hypothetical questions on the “ideal” relationship between an individual and the demands of organization. I attach no great statistical significance to the actual figures, but I have kept the terms the same with each group, and I have noticed that consistently there is a difference between the answers of those headed for big organization and those not. As is brought out more forcefully by the kind of questions that the students themselves later asked, the big-corporation men are more inclined to the group way than the others.
Here is how a total of 127 men answered the two chief questions: on the question of whether research scientists should be predominantly the team player type, 56 per cent of the men headed for a big corporation said yes, versus 46 per cent of the small-business men. On the question of whether the key executive should be basically an “administrator” or a “bold leader,” 54 per cent of the big-corporation men voted for the administrator, versus only 45 per cent of the small-business men. Needless to say, the weightings varied from college to college, and often the influence of a particular teacher was manifest—in one class the students complained that they probably seemed so chary of big business because they had been “brainwashed” by a liberal instructor. Whatever the absolute figures, however, there was generally the same relative difference between the big-business and the small-business men.
These differences raise an interesting question. It is possible that the majority group might be less significant than the minority—that is to say, the more venturesome may become the dominant members of our society by virtue of their very disinclination to the group way. As a frankly rapacious young salesman put it to me, the more contented his run-of-the-mill contemporaries, the freer the field for the likes of him.
While this can only be a matter of opinion at this date, I doubt that our society, as it is now evolving, will suffer such a double standard. The corporation-bound man may be an exaggeration of his generation’s tendencies but only in degree, not in character. Other occupations call for different emphases, but on the central problem of collective versus individual work, young men going into other fields, such as teaching or law or journalism, show the same basic outlook.
Seniors do not deny that the lone researcher or the entrepreneur can also serve others. But neither do they think much about it. Their impulses, their training, the whole climate of the times, incline them to work that is tangibly social. Whether as a member of a corporation, a group medicine clinic, or a law factory, they see the collective as the best vehicle for service.
To a degree, of course, this is a self-ennobling apologia for seeking the comfortable life—and were they thoroughly consistent they would more actively recognize that public service is social too. But it is not mere rationalization; the senior is quite genuine in believing that while all collective effort may be worth while, some kinds are more so. The organization-bound senior can argue that he is going to the main tent, the place where each foot pound of his energy will go the farthest in helping people. Like the young man of the Middle Ages who went off to join holy orders, he is off for the center of society.
* Similar tendencies have been noticed among German youth. In Del Junge Arbeiter von Heute, Karl Bednarik, a former leader in the socialist youth movement, has commented on the “bourgeoisification” of younger workers as a response to the postwar situation.
* One reason why seniors prefer big business is that the big companies go after them and the small ones don’t. Of the 450,000 incorporated firms in the U.S., only about 1,000 actually recruit on the campuses, and it is these active 1,000 firms—generally the biggest—that get the cream. Sometimes college placement directors do line up the small company position, but even then they find the students apathetic. “Frankly,” says one placement director, echoing many another, “the only kind I can interest in the small company job is the dynamic sort—the one type that is least likely to get lost in a big company. I would sooner interest the other kind; I point out to the shy, diffident fellows that in a small outfit they’d be something of a jack-of-all-trades, that they’d get a better chance to express themselves, to grow out of their shell. They still don’t want it.”
* A Youth Institute Survey of 4,660 young men indicated that only 20 per cent felt they could not achieve all their economic desires by working for someone else.
* The figures depend a great deal on the college. In the study done by the Youth Research Institute on a cross section of college seniors the median figure is about $8,000. At Princeton and Williams, by contrast, the figure is almost double.
* This faith in the beneficence of the corporate salary is fairly universal. In the Youth Research Institute study previously mentioned this question was put to 4,660 high-school seniors, college seniors, recent graduates and veterans: “Do you feel that you will be able to achieve all of your economic desires by working for someone else?” 61.1 per cent said yes; 20.4 per cent said no; and 18.5 per cent couldn’t make up their minds. There were no significant differences in optimism among any of the four groups.
CHAPTER 7 The Practical Curriculum
How did he get that way? His elders taught him to be that way. In this chapter I am going to take up the content of his education and argue that a large part of the U.S. educational system is preparing people badly for the organization society—precisely because it is trying so very hard to do it. My charge rests on the premise that what the organization man needs most from education is the intellectual armor of the fundamental disciplines. It is indeed an age of group action, of specialization, but this is all the more reason the organization man does not need the emphases of a training “geared for modern man.” The pressures of organization life will teach him that. But they will not teach him what the schools and colleges can—some kind of foundation, some sense of where we came from, so that he can judge where he is, and where he is going and why.
But what he has been getting is more and more a training in the minutiae of the organization skills, and while it is hardly news that the U.S. inclines to the vocational, the magnitude of the swing has been much greater than is generally recognized. Only three out of every ten college graduates are now ma
joring in anything that could be called a fundamental discipline—in the liberal arts or in the sciences. Figures also indicate that this trend has been gathering force for a long time and that it is not to be explained away as a freak of current supply and demand or a hang-over from the disruptions of World War II.
There are signs of a countermovement. Spokesmen for the liberal arts have been making a strong case to the interested public. The foundations have been stimulating studies designed to reinvigorate the humanities. Friends of the liberal arts have been organizing more conferences to get the message across. Even businessmen seem to have become alarmed; executives of many of our best-known corporations have been arguing in print and speech that for the corporation’s own good, the value of fundamental education needs to be restressed. Looking at all these signs, some people hopefully conclude that at last we are now on the verge of a great resurgence in the humanities.
I do not believe any such thing is going to happen. All these agitations for fundamental education are welcome and necessary, but they are minute, I submit, to the forces working in the other direction. Each June since the war, commencement speakers have been announcing that at last the humanities are coming back, and each fall more and more students enroll in something else. This increase in vocationalism, furthermore, carries with it the seeds of a further multiplication. The leaders of today’s organizations graduated while the straight A.B. was still the fashion, and many have at least a sentimental attachment to the humanities.* But they will be replaced, and each year more and more of those who will replace them will be vocational graduates. If the climate for the humanities is poor now, what will it be when the current, vocationally trained majority comes of age? The present situation is only a harbinger of what is yet to come.
Let me first face up to two comforting hypotheses, one is the rose-by-any-other-name theory that much of the seeming specialization is only a refreshening of the old disciplines—that Business English, for example, can convey just as many fundamentals as English, and that a change in labels need not worry us. The other hypothesis is to the effect that the decline of the humanities is only a statistical illusion. The number of degrees for vocational study, according to this view, is not a subtraction from fundamental education but an addition to it. It is simply that more people are going to college now, and thus the relative decline of the humanities is a necessary price to pay for the democratization of our culture. And not a very steep one, these people hold; just as the sale of comic books has not stifled the sale of first-rate paperbacks, so in education the increase in vocational training has accommodated those who previously would not have gone to college, and done it without denaturing the education of those who would have.
But this is not what has happened. Because of the way statistics have been gathered, precise comparisons with former years are not possible, but it is obvious that there has been a long and steady decline in the proportion of students majoring in the humanities, and the rate of decline has been so steep that it has not been offset by the increase in the numbers of people going to college. In actual numbers as well as proportion, only a small minority of students is now majoring in a basic subject.
In 1954-55, 183,602 men were graduated. Let’s take all of the men majoring in mathematics, all of the men majoring in the physical sciences, all of the men majoring in the biological sciences, all of the men majoring in the liberal arts, all of the men majoring in the basic social sciences. Together they come to 48,999—26.6 per cent of the total.
The rest? Most were studying to be technicians: 22,527 were in engineering (12.3 per cent); 7,052 (3.8 per cent) were in agriculture; 14,871 (8.1 per cent) were in education. The largest single group of all: the 35,564 (19.4 per cent) in business and commerce—more than all of the men in the basic sciences and the liberal arts put together. (And more than all the men in law and medicine and religion: 26,412.)
These figures bring out a very important point. The conflict is not, as some embattled humanists believe, between the sciences and the liberal arts. The conflict is between the fundamental and the applied. Quite clearly, the increase in vocational students is not just an overlayer—it is a subtraction, and one that has affected the liberal arts and the sciences in the same degree.
The changing fashions in Ph.D. degrees also shows how closely united are the fortunes of the basic sciences and the humanities. Both have declined at about the same rate of speed. In the years between 1939 and 1946 the physical sciences accounted for 25 per cent of the doctorates; by 1955 the figure was down to 20 per cent. During the same period the humanities also dropped 5 percentage points, going from 12 per cent to 7 per cent.
What went up? As in the Bachelors, so in the Ph.D/s, the increase was in the number of men majoring in agriculture, engineering, and education. All three had proportionately the same rate of increase: in 1939-46 they together furnished 15 per cent of the total; by 1955 they were 29 per cent.
The social sciences seem to be the pivot point. Straddling, as they have, both camps, they lost in some subjects, gained in others, and, on the whole, advanced only 1.3 per cent—going from 17.7 per cent in 1939-46 to 19 per cent in 1954-55. An analysis of just where the gains and losses were registered indicates how fruitless is the usual quibbling over what should be included in the humanities and what in the social sciences. It can properly be argued that history and economics should be included under the heading of the humanities rather than the social sciences, but even if this were done it would not affect the rate of decline. While the other social sciences, notably psychology, were gaining, history and economics were losing—in almost exactly the same proportion as English, philosophy, and languages. The conflict, to repeat, is between the fundamental and the applied.*
TREND IN PH.D. DEGREES
Let me now turn to the rose-by-any-other-name argument. Ironically enough, it is the schools of education that illustrate most clearly how real is the schism between fundamentals and the new dominant fields. Theoretically, a degree in education and a basic education are not antithetical; people go to teachers college not necessarily because they are seeking a vocational training for teaching—in many states it is one of the principal vehicles for a higher education.
But it doesn’t make too much difference whether the student seeks the degree for a general education or for teacher preparation; in either event, the curriculum he will take is just about as far removed from fundamental education as it is possible to get. Nor is it likely to change for the better in the foreseeable future. There has been much criticism recently of the fact that teachers colleges are far more interested in technique of pedagogy, personality adjustment, audio-visual expertise, and the like than the content of what is supposed to be taught, but the criticism has had little tangible effect. Teachers-college people are baffled and hurt by it, but a fairly exhaustive reading of current literature in the field fails to reveal any disposition to constructive self-criticism on this score. Quite the contrary, some leaders in teacher education have been saying that there still is too much content. Looking at the scene, Professor Percival M. Symonds, teacher of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, recently announced that there should be a change of emphasis in teacher education. The change? “… from purely intellectual courses to experiences for the better personal adjustment of teachers.” (The New York Times, Sunday, June 26, 1955.)
There are no grounds for optimism discernible in this matter. If the level of the curriculum is low so is the level of the students, and the interaction of these two facts bodes no reform from within. No one likes to make invidious remarks about people who have entered a field that calls for so much work for so little pay, but the facts are too critical for euphemism. It is now well evident that a large proportion of the younger people who will one day be in charge of our secondary-school system are precisely those with the least aptitude for education of all Americans attending college.
In connection with its draft deferment program, the Army has had the Educati
onal Testing Service administer a series of nationwide scholastic aptitude tests to undergraduates, and the by-product of this has been the brutally objective index of the caliber of students in different fields and in different institutions. Of students majoring in a particular field, students majoring in education have been scoring at the very bottom of the heap—no more than about 27 per cent have been able to make a passing grade. Another study furnishes corroboration. In checking IQ scores of a wide cross section of students, the Commission on Human Resources and Advanced Training found that in the field of graduate work, here also students majoring in education score the lowest.*
Close on the heels of education majors for the cellar was another group, and in numbers it takes precedence as the principal diversionary movement. Which brings us to the schools of business administration. In the last thirty years the number of men majoring in business has swelled almost in direct ratio as those in the humanities majors have declined, and since 1940 the rate of increase has been growing steeper. Between 1940 and 1950 the number of business students doubled. By 1955, they had become the largest single undergraduate group—more than the majors in mathematics, all the natural sciences, all the physical sciences, all the biological sciences, and English put together.
Something has had to give and it has been fundamental education. The great increase in business education has not been channeled into graduate schools of business administration which, like those of Harvard and the University of Chicago, require a basic education as a prerequisite. The increase has been in the undergraduate “schools of commerce,” and the students who are enrolling in them include many who ten years ago would very likely have majored in economics or politics or history.