Reset Password
Reset Link Sent
| Blogs > PacificEros > BeyondConfession |
What is the real world? Is it what we see on AFF? Is it what we learn about in college? Yes!
|
What is the real world? Is it what we see on AFF? Is it what we learn about in college? Yes! For a previous post on the university and Adult Dating zone as cities of words (with people seeking connection), I cited some words from a talk I gave to freshmen entering college. I love the conversation and comments it provoked, and I want to give some new spur to our thoughts in this post where I cite more from this address and ask questions about what is the real world. Is it the world denominated by such terms as GDP and GPA and read about in the Wall Street Journal or talked about by truck drivers? Or is it the world of the imagination and heart, of dreams and desires, of fantasy and romance and eros, or the world of logos, of connection and communion through the word?  From City of Words: a University and Liberal Arts Education Here at the University you will learn, for the most part, however, to think clearly and logically, and that is a valuable goal. But let me also remind you that much in life, including especially the affairs of our hearts and minds, has little to do with clarity and logic. In these realms, ambiguity and paradox, multiplicity and richness hold court. Our society, our economic systems, and our university favor the processes of reasoning, analytic skills, taking complex phenomena and, breaking them down them to their basic components. Ever since the age of Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, we have espoused this practice of breaking things down. But some of the courses you will take at this university, and especially the courses in the Humanities, will confront you with ambiguity as well as clarity. Indeed, the best novels, the most interesting art, teaches us to be suspicious of simplistic formulas, to respect darkness as well as light, to see past our slogans and blinders and received notions, and to search for the wholeness of comprehension in the midst of chaos and fragmentation. Trust me, professors will try to complicate rather than simplify your view of the world: we hold in great suspicion all the rabble-soothers who seek to simplify the past, to assuage our anxieties and resolve all too easily the complexities and contradictions of a culture. And speaking of complexity, I hope that the courses you take at this university will remind you that the real world is not just the world studied in business and science classes, but the world of the imagination and the heart, the world created by our dreams and metaphors and fictions. Indeed, too often, it seems, while in school, the focus of our concerns, the so-called real world, is reduced to a world denominated by a set of acronyms and statistics: there is the SAT, then the GPA, and next the LSAT, the GRE, the MCAT, or the GNP. The world summoned up by these acronyms is world whose pressure and tedium must be relieved by the pleasures or the entertainment of NBC, MTV, Delta Gamma Epsilon, or, in the old days, LSD. But compare those acronyms and what they signify to the riches, the multiplicity, the ambiguity, of such concepts represented by the words the good, the true, the beautiful; the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness; justice, equality, promote the general welfare, a more perfect union; faith, hope and charity. You have now been going to school for the past 12 years; many of you will be going to school for three or four more years after you graduate from college; the challenge is to make these four years different than what came before and different than what lies ahead of you. Don’t let the university become factory turning you out as a product for the marketplace. Don’t let this place cut you up like a pig, separating out your heart, and stuffing you like a sausage merely with what you think you need to know to get your first job. Use this university as place to prepare yourself for your last job and your life as a lover, a parent, a good neighbor, a citizen of the world. Let our courses remind you that the real world—and what is at the core of ourselves as humans—is governed by words and the imagination, by love and fantasy, by desire and dreams. p.s. The image is of the library used for a scene in "Back to School" with Rodney Dangerfield |
|||
5/5/2010 7:39 pm |
Excellent encouragement  Imagined cities. Cities of words. Paths so unforseenable making journeys worth a chance. From the stone which paves the road to the hand that draws the sky. Let me tell you about the dreams and passions. Let me tell you about the risk of joining hands. I know in your heart, through your own deep embrace of literature and education and scholarship, that you share this vision of the university, and that you take festive joy in these cities of words. As Thomas Jefferson expressed in his love letter, where he conducted a dialogue between the head and the heart, there is, yes, risk in connecting, in the joining of hands. Our connections can hook and snag us rather than free us and nurture and empower us. I love your lines about "paths so unforseeable making journeys worth a chance."
| ||
5/3/2010 2:05 pm |
I love it when you advocate for the devil, and I am hoping you will remain on the side of the devil in future encounters of the virtual kind. But as someone who teaches in Los Angeles, the city of angels, and who has witnessed how a sociopathic approach to the future by businessman (as represented for instance by Noah Cross in “Chinatown” has and pillaged this city, I will speak out for the better angels of our nature and insist, as I do in the classroom, that to be a leader of the 21st century in this region, given its babel of tongues, the skill most necessary for success as a leader is the ability to make sense of this babel of tongues with something of a Pentecostal spirit or frame of mind: a capacity to translate and interpret the rich mix of voices that composes this region and to be able to get into the hearts and mind of people different from oneself: the stranger, the foreigner, the other, or, more specifically, the entrepreneur or businessman from, say, China or India.But, of course, this sounds naïve, very Ivory Towerish, befitting the perspective of a liberal academic whose only experience in the real world came from three years working for a major law street law firm, where he got involved in several cases where “sociopathic” or “cut-throat” businessmen ruined their companies (e.g., Michele Sindona of Franklin National Bank and the executives of Equity Funding, both of whom drove their companies into bankruptcy out of greed and blindness). (The law firm also defended corporations such as Rockwell for illegal foreign bribery payments.) Or maybe, I’ve just watched too many movies (e.g., “Wall Street” and read too many books (e.g., Budd Schulberg’s “What Makes Sammy Run” to be convinced that Gordeon Gecko and Sammy Glick are the exemplars of how to screw friends and bamboozle stockholders in order to succeed.Trust me, I can have sympathy for the devil (and horniness and love for the devil’s advocates), but I must make here a further case for the importance of empathy and sympathy and telling and understanding stories as key qualities to be possessed by the business leader of the 21st century. Daniel Pink, for instance, argues, with “visionary flare” (according to a review on Amazon ) in his book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future, “that business and everyday life will soon be dominated by right-brain thinkers.” According to Pink, “the keys to success are in developing and cultivating six senses: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning.” (Note: I consider right-brain thinking to be a form of thinking taught in the classrooms of arts and humanities courses.) But Pink, even to my ear, sounds, well, pink, or not red-blooded enough to know how the business leader of today can get his company into the black and keep it there. In support of your argument regarding the significance of a “predatory” character, Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker argues in an essay entitled “The Sure Thing: The Myth of the Daredevil Entrepreneur” cites a recent study “From Predators to Icons,” by the French scholars Michel Villette and Chatherine Vuillermot that sets out to uncover what successful entrepreneurs have in common. They present case histories of businessmen who built their own empires, and they conclude that “the truly successful businessman, is anything but a risk-taker. He is a predator, and predators seek to incur the least risk possible while hunting.” But what I love–and here I think we can reach some common ground–is that part of the predatory instinct of these entrepreneurs takes its form in them doing more research than anyone else to gain a competitive advantage. The predator, in effect, is an obsessive scholar, studying harder, longer and better than anyone else to do something original: the very skills exemplified for students by the best professors at a university. What a college education does or should do, in other words, is take the predatory instinct of the students–his or her desire to achieve the highest grade in order to get the top job of their choice or get into the top professional school of their choice–and turn it into learning more and more how to research, how to study, how to come out on top. Ideally, a college education also tames or channels the predatory instinct into an aspiration to be of service to the community and the world, and thus we can find a Ted Turner or a Bill Gates becoming exemplars of philanthropy along the lines of Carnegie and Rockefeller in the past. A college education, in my view, should help teach students the best measure of happiness and success is not the size of one’s bank account or yacht but can be measured by who we have loved and who has loved us and by how we have loved and how we have been loved. I don’t think a college education teaches this either. But I hope it teaches students to follow their passions and helps them figure out how to fulfill their passions…and to do so by causing the least amount of harm and creating the most amount of good. Finally, it strikes me that your own education has helped teach you how to argue for the predatory instinct in business and how to advocate for the devil. Like you, the snake in the garden was a creative and persuasive word-user extraordinaire. p.s. I love a woman who questions authority, writes with irreverence, and is willing to strip the fig leaf off of professors and pretentious sentiments about the university.
| ||
5/3/2010 9:33 am |
To be cynical or honest, you are right. A liberal arts college education, understood as what is learned in the classroom, may not have much practical application for success in the business world. 70% of entering college students list "getting a good job" as their number one objective for their education. As a result, it is not surprising that the number one major in college right now is business (20% of students) while majors in the Humanities have declined from 8% to 4% over the past 20 years. But the #2 objective students list for their college education is self-discovery, self-fulfillment. Here, I would say, a college education, if done right (especially if students select the best teachers to study with at their college), has its enriching personal benefits beyond preparing students for the marketplace. My parents worked very hard at two jobs he did not like very much (and my Mom worked as well) to pay for an excellent private high school and college education for me. One result: I have a job where I look forward to going to work every day. My hope is that a good college education enables the same for every student who graduates. But so much of a college education is about "branding." College confers a measure of status on students, with the more prestigious colleges offering more cache, more status (and thus their higher tuition). Alas, the cost of a college tuition (combined with room and board) is very high, even outrageous, especially when one recognizes that at many colleges, especially research universities as opposed to smaller liberal arts schools, undergraduate tuition funds so much that is unrelated to the education of undergraduates. I also agree with what you suggest about the most significant aspect of a college education taking place outside the classroom, the library, the lab: it's the communal experience of living intimately or in close proximity with a rich mix of fellow students and living on one's own, in relative independence, free from family and free from a boss. But the humanities professor in me also must cry out in defense of a liberal arts education as significant for success in business and in life. Steven Covey in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People includes an appreciation for diversity and a capacity for empathy as two habits of highly effective people, and I believe each of these habits can be developed or matured by a humanistic education, which should be focused on teaching us how to read not just books but people with empathy and insight, and with an understanding of their "hearts and minds" as shaped or affected by their time and place. A capacity for empathy and an ability to listen with care and insight to a voice unlike one's own, like the capacity to make an argument or defend a thesis or critique the argument of someone else, can be learned in many ways. But I do feel an education in the best that has been thought and written and felt in cultural history can aid in this education....as can falling in love or even hooking up a lot in college. I'd also add that a capacity for being an effective leader of a corporation, like the capacity for being an excellent teacher, can be nurtured and developed through education as well as through experience, but much of this capacity, I'd say, is almost natural, a function of personality or character and not of training in a school. I think the best predictor of success in college and in business is in part the depth or strength of aspiration, dedication, persistence, drive: in a word, the desire to do excel, and that desire--that fire in the belly--can't be taught or learned in the classroom any more than the desire for sex. But I do believe that through study and listening and curiosity and imagination, we can help shape our desire for sex into a desire for the erotic, just as a good education can help shape the desire to excel into a desire to serve the good, the true, and the beautiful.
| ||
|
Excellent encouragement Imagined cities. Cities of words. Paths so unforseenable making journeys worth a chance. From the stone which paves the road to the hand that draws the sky. Let me tell you about the dreams and passions. Let me tell you about the risk of joining hands.
|
Become a member to create a blog
