The Organization Man Page 12
Not only have the business schools been diverting more and more men away from basic studies, they have been subtly changing the climate of the whole campus. It is often the business school of the college that sets the dominant tone, and those students who major in the humanities are on the defensive, not to mention their professors. In a remarkably frank appraisal of the situation at the University of Pennsylvania, The Daily Pennsylvanian (January 14, 1955) had this to say about the effect of the business school on the rest of the campus.
The first and most important destructive influence at Pennsylvania of the atmosphere important for the nourishment of the humane arts is the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. Justly famed for the excellent business training which it offers, and for which it grants an academic degree, the Wharton School by the sheer force of its reputation and undergraduate appeal has given to undergraduate social and extracurricular life an atmosphere which, while it is seldom anti-intellectual, is usually nonintellectual, and which tends to discourage the popularity of those interests which ordinarily occupy the time of the students of other universities where the school of liberal arts is the main impetus for student activity.
An undergraduate body where half the members have definite educational interests of a material, nonacademic nature is bound to create an atmosphere that reflects something less than enthusiasm for the theoretical sciences and the liberal arts. This is especially so when those members are frequently people of particular intelligence who are adept at pointing out to their fellow students the apparent flaws of an education seemingly for “nothing at all,” and whose idea of what they are in the philistine habit of calling “culture” is an elementary course in fine arts or history, judiciously chosen for its adaptability to the not inconsiderable demands of a thorough business school.
Theoretically, a man could major in business and still learn a lot about the humanities. But it would take some doing. To be accredited by the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business, a college must make the student take 40 per cent of his work in nonbusiness courses, and as a consequence there is a smattering of liberal arts courses, but as soon as these are dispensed with—and the wording of college catalogues these days suggests that “dispensed with” is the appropriate phrase—there remains only a vestigial trace of anything connected with the humanities. The University of Denver’s College of Business Administration, to cite one of the more flagrant examples, suggests a variety of specialized curriculum for the student who “does not wish to specialize.” Translated, this means that in his junior year he will take one nonbusiness course. It is called “Literature and the Other Arts.” In his senior year he will take “The Philosophy of Life.”
This might well be a rich offering compared to what will be served in the future. All signs point to a further specialization within the business schools, and in the name of “Professionalization” one school after another is beginning to spawn sub-schools. The momentum is irresistible; let a single course in one technical aspect of business become popular and before long a whole program of studies is built around it—instead of a single course offering in, say, air-line stewardess training, we now have, as at the University of Georgia, a whole program built on this rock.
Once a specialty is made into a program, the next step is to go on and design a degree around it, or, as is sometimes the case, a whole new school complete with buildings and separate new faculty. Not so many years ago, for example, the subject of public relations was generally considered a by-product of regular courses in personnel and publicity; today the subject is being constructed into programs, and in one institution, Boston University, a school has been set up that awards a Master’s degree in the subject. Just how quick this cycle from course to program to school can be is illustrated by New York University. In the fall of 1953 it announced that the following year it would offer its first public-relations course. The ink still wet on the release, it went on to add that as soon as other courses were added it would offer a major in public relations.
Advertising is coming up fast, too. “The clamor is growing for advertising schools with college degrees available for the students,” Printer’s Ink announced in 1953. “Last month a resolution on the subject was passed at the Advertising Association of the West’s convention in San Francisco. Now the American Newspaper Guild is urging ‘all liberal arts colleges and universities to enlarge schools of advertising and establish a degree in advertising for those who complete the curriculum/ Only a slight progress has been made in this direction so far. Three liberal arts colleges give degrees in advertising (Denver University, Whitworth College in Spokane, and San José State College). And the University of Oregon has recently expanded its school of advertising and expects to cap it with a degree in advertising by next year. It is significant that in the East, center of the ad business, there are no degrees in advertising given by any college.”
But the stumbling block is only temporary. In a cruel irony, the advertising professors have recognized that business was under the impression they were too much up in the clouds. Heatedly, the professors have been replying that this just isn’t so, and they certainly are right to say so. In a more recent Printer’s Ink article (May 27, 1955), titled “Advertising Education Has Come of Age—but Advertising Men Don’t Know It,” Philip Burton, chairman of the advertising department in the business school at Syracuse University, gives business a run-down. “Right on the campus students work in fully equipped radio and television studios or learn typography in a production lab with the latest equipment. For advertising photography there are cameras, developing equipment, and skilled men to teach all the tricks.” There is a picture of students at the University of Texas doing “lab” work in the writing and production of radio commercials in an elaborate studio constructed for the purpose. This practical kind of training, Burton argues, is “cutting out guesswork for employers. An advertising student who has had some facts beaten into him in school is going to be a better employee risk for the employer. He has been pre-conditioned.”
What debate there is in the business schools on the subject of specialization has now reached the level where the issue is how much you should specialize within a specialty. “Students might tend to specialize too much,” an official of Miami University says, “but our school of business doesn’t permit overspecialization. Here, all business-school graduates must have one or more courses in all of the basic business fields, including management, finance, marketing, business law, business statistics, economics, accounting, and business English.” Many other business schools hold the redoubt against overspecialization in the same fashion.
They say this specialization is practical. In one sense it is; when a school enshrines a particular vocational specialty in its curriculum, it provokes grants and support from the grateful toilers in the commercial field thus legitimatized. The practicality for the student, however, is another matter. Even if he followed the specialty he studied at the business school, employers can find him lacking; he didn’t learn what business can’t teach him because he was too busy learning what business could teach him, and teach him better. In the majority of cases, furthermore, the business school graduate doesn’t even get what benefits specialization does provide, for he is likely to end up in a different field. Professor William T. Kelley, of the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, questioned alumni of the Wharton School as to the majors they took in school and the work they did in business afterward. Between the two he found a low correlation.
There are some first-rate men to be found on business school faculties, but there are not too many of them, and their chances of withstanding the pressures to further vocationalization are poor. It is not entirely facetious to suggest that the only way any reform could be effected would be through a subversive movement by the humanists. In what would be poetic justice to the vocationalists, humanists in disguise could appropriate their terminology and smuggle education into the curriculum by pretending to specializ
e it further. Who would dare cavil at the humanities were they presented as “Mercantile Influence in the Renaissance,” “Market Patterns in Pre-Industrial England,” or “Communication Techniques in Elizabethan Drama”?
When we turn to the influence of engineering, we come upon what seems an anomaly. On the face of it, one would gather that engineering was being put to rout by the victorious forces of medievalism. With great concern, spokesmen for engineers point to a decline in engineering graduates since 1950 as evidence that the country has turned its back on the technical and is being led hell bent back to the Middle Ages by the academicians. With little debate from the other side, engineers have gotten across the case that enrollment at engineering schools must soar if a balance is to be achieved. Indeed, they go on to add, it must soar if we are to survive; with Russia turning out fifty thousand engineers a year in contrast to our twenty-five to thirty thousand, not only good sense but patriotism demands a reversal of the tide.
It is not my intention to dispute that we need more engineers. When engineering enrollment swelled so greatly after the war, the government mistakenly warned that there would soon be more engineers than jobs, and in time this warning kept many—too many —people from enrolling in engineering schools. What I am disputing is the way people have accepted as established fact the idea that the shortage of engineers is our most pressing shortage and that an over-renaissance of the humanities is the cause. This is wrong. There has indeed been a shortage of engineers—but so has there been a shortage of almost every other kind of trained person too. It happened that in the Depression years of the early thirties people didn’t raise as many mouths to feed, and those that were raised are coming of age at the very time when there are more jobs of every kind to be filled. When the great baby crop of the forties comes of age, supply and demand may come into better balance, but, even then, there will be shortages of trained people—shortages of doctors, of lawyers, of psychologists, of certified public accountants, of market researchers, and of chemists—and then as today each group will cry at the folly of the country for not honoring it more.
Engineers are right in assuming that if there are to be more engineers, something has to give somewhere, but it is curious that they should demand that the humanities be the place. As we have seen, the most cursory check of enrollment figures would reveal that it is to the business schools, not the ivory towers, that the extra young men are going—i.e., if there are less engineers, one strong reason is that more young men want to grow up to be people who boss engineers—and given the way business uses its technical people, to get ahead of our story, the impulse isn’t entirely misguided.
That engineers should seize on the humanities as the villain of their piece reveals something more deep-seated than current exigency. While it is another subdivision of technocratic education that is currently the actual rival, engineers are right in sensing that the humanities are the core of the opposing tradition. The conflict has always been there, but so long as shortages of men weren’t pressing, few people felt impelled to say anything mean about the humanities. But the live and let live era is over, and some seem to sense that the climate is now propitious for coming right out and naming the humanities as enemy. Let me cite Mr. George Tichenor, writing in M.I.T.’s The Technology Review (March 1955). He calls his essay “Interrupting the Great Conversation,” and he says with such admirable ferocity what many others believe privately that he is worth quoting at some length.
After saying that he had a liberal arts education himself, Tichenor charges that they are useless, and though the pungency of his style belies the assertion, he goes on to venture that they may be even worse than useless. “A liberal arts education … is a relatively harmless adornment to a solid education if one has the time and the money for it in normal times. But these are not normal times.” Warming to the needs-of-modern-man theme, he pictures a mass return to medievalism led by such as Nathan Pusey, Harvard (“probably the best example of this Renaissance warmed over”), and, inevitably, Robert Hutchins, who, as is usual in such strictures, is viewed as unquestioned commander of a monolithic army of academicians. “He is worth a full division in the onslaught on technical education. He is witty, he has a flair for making the news … and worst of all, he is eminently fair-minded and liberal, so that the weight of his authority can be disastrous when he plunges into areas where his blind spots are total.”
It is not the humanists’ own groves that concern Tichenor, vulnerable to the criticism though they may be. What he fears is that the humanists will successfully infiltrate the engineering schools and insinuate their message in these last fortresses of practicality. “In these trying times,” he complains, “the humanists among our educators seem to intensify their efforts to crowd their elegancies into technical schools, at the expense, probably, of professional subjects crowded out of the curriculum, so that engineers are graduated with watered-down training.” He flatly recommends that technical schools make any courses in the humanities optional. There is no proof, he irrelevantly adds, that the humanities ever made men more democratic. (“I am quite sure that Davy Crockett was every whit as patriotic as Thomas Jefferson—and a better shot.”)
In the battle for men’s minds, we are told, Russia has us hands down. No silly humanities crowd their engineering curriculums; the state, furthermore, sees to it that there is no shortage. “In Russia, very serious efforts are made to find technological talent; engineering students are exempt from military service, since in Russia engineering is military service, and the nation offers cash subsidies to students of technology.” The moral for us? “Our government might put engineering and scientific training on the same footing as West Point and Annapolis; selected students would be enrolled in any of the fine technical schools we have and given cash allowances, with the proviso that upon graduation they will serve an allotted time in government service. The method of awarding scholarships in our colleges should be revised as far as possible. Less emphasis should be on brilliance, more on financial need.”
Just why anyone should be so alarmed at the dangers of the curriculum’s being liberalized is hard to understand. There has, it is true, been much talk lately about how engineering schools are recognizing the dangers of overspecialization and are liberalizing their curriculums, but the facts indicate that the reform remains more or less talk. With the exception of a few places like Case, Cal. Tech, Carnegie Tech and M.I.T., there has been practically no change in this respect in the last fifty years. Let me document. Back in 1903 the average time devoted to straight technical courses in the engineering schools was 84.1 per cent of the total curriculum hours. By 1944, four decades later, it was about the same. After a study of the situation, the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education recommended that more time be given the “humanistic-social” division of the curriculum: “we believe that it can be achieved only through a designed sequence of courses extending throughout the four undergraduate years and requiring a minimum of approximately 20 per cent of the student’s educational time.” What has happened since? In 1953, the time for straight technical courses was 82 per cent. Even the slight increase in nontechnical hours is more in name than in fact. In its study of engineering curriculums, the Office of Education has pointed out that some of the presumably liberal courses are highly specialized courses much closer to engineering than to English or similar fundamentals. “The oft-expressed ideal of better balance …,” it reported, with hard-won restraint, “has been only imperfectly realized.”
It is again relevant to pose the distinction between the fundamental and the applied. Those who cry the loudest against the humanities to justify the need for more engineers make their point in the name of science. But they have no more right to this association than those in the humanities—and, as a matter of fact, a good bit less. It may be correct to say that we need more engineers; it is not correct, however, to say that we need them because we need more scientists.
The training of the two is anything but syno
nymous, and there is no evidence that engineering schools have produced any appreciable number of fundamental scientists. In their study, Origins of American Scientists (Chicago, 1952), R. H. Knapp and H. B. Goodrich found “production of scientists is inversely related to size and to vocationalism of curricular emphasis. We found the most productive class of institutions to be small liberal arts colleges with a strong commitment to general education, whereas universities, even after the most charitable adjustments had been made, were seen to be less productive. Engineering institutions were conspicuously unproductive…. The inferiority of engineering institutions to both universities and liberal arts colleges is perhaps not surprising, considering that such institutions are primarily dedicated to limited vocational training.”
Let’s turn to the small number of students who do major in the humanities. The number is dismal enough as it is, but the actual decline is more than the figures alone would indicate. For when we look at the supposedly fundamental courses, we find on closer look that many of them have been made almost as narrow as the frankly vocational disciplines.
Let’s take the subject of psychology as an illustration. In some universities, psychology is taught as one of the humanities, but in more of them it is a catch-all phrase applied to a weird assortment of utilitarian courses. The sheer number of the courses tells the story; instead of demanding the discipline of a hard core of basic courses, psychology departments tempt the student with as many as forty to eighty separate offerings which, like a conglomeration of ever-decreasing circles, pull the student further and further into particulars.
It is as if high-school driver-training courses were split into courses in Chrysler Driving or Ford Driving. A course in personnel counseling, for example, could be considered already pretty far down the line of specialization. But this is not enough for some departments; going a step further, they break the subject down into personnel counseling in specific kinds of situations—at Ohio State we have University Personnel Psychology, in other institutions we have Corporation Personnel Psychology or Civil Service Psychology.