Freeing the Slaves of the Market

Vigen Guroian

Why (and how) we should teach literature to business students

American society is business oriented and has been so for some time. This has its benefits. The vast majority of American citizens enjoy material comforts unimagined even by the very wealthiest in former ages. At the same time, we may lament the hedonism of American life—and many have written in this vein, including myself. Nonetheless, no one expects the basic structure of the American economy to change any time soon.

In the not-so-distant past, we founded and built land-grant and agricultural colleges to service the needs of an agricultural economy, and some of our great state colleges and universities carry that legacy. For the past fifty years, however, and especially over the last quarter century, colleges and universities have responded to the manpower needs of America’s businesses by establishing or expanding business schools. It is this phenomenon in higher education that I address here.

I do not deny or disparage the need for business training in our post-agricultural and post-industrial society. Nonetheless, this form of training, as it has emerged in its present form, suffers serious limitations. More important, the unreflective outpouring of resources and energy into business programs at many colleges and universities has undercut the very ethos of liberal learning. Yet our institutions of higher education were built upon a foundation of liberal learning, and whether they stand or fall as institutions of true higher education depends on the health of the liberal arts and sciences.

Liberal learning and the place of literature

By liberal learning I mean, in the broadest sense, the exercise of human intelligence to grasp the meaning, purpose, and essence of human existence. Liberal learning is the acquisition of knowledge, not merely as information but as the accumulated wisdom and reflection of countless generations about the human condition. It is inquiry into the nature of things, the distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, and truth and error.

Liberal learning is the sort of exercise in which human civilizations have trusted for millennia to ensure the development and continuance of the vast array of activities and endeavors that constitute high culture. These activities have been articulated as arts and sciences, such as rhetoric, literature, theology, philosophy, history, music and the fine arts, arithmetic, and the physical sciences. Liberal learning teaches that above and beyond personal comfort, survival, and material success, goodness, truth, and beauty count in a common world. It teaches that character and personal excellence are to be valued far and above cleverness or social utility.

I am a theologian, but I want to talk here about imaginative literature because literature can, even in our day, play a special role in the humanization of life and in personal liberation from the extreme rationalization and bureaucratization of modern life, of which much business education is enamored and to which it lends support. In The Voice of Liberal Learning (1989), philosopher Michael Oakeshott writes that literature explores “beliefs, emotions, human characteristics, and relationships in imagined situations, liberated from the confused, cliché-ridden, generalized conditions of commonplace life.” Literature thus constructs an ideal world “of human expressions” and behaviors that invites “neither approval or disapproval” so much as the construal of meaning and purpose for our lives through the refurbishment of the moral imagination. Great literature invites us to examine and measure the moral worth of our lives through the reservoir of images, characters, and narratives it bequeaths to the imagination.

Thus, it is to a defense of the reading of great literature (which I here also use metonymically to represent the whole of liberal learning) that I turn as remedy for the crippling effects upon the spirit of so much of business education today. I begin with a story about my college, Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, that exemplifies the problem that moves me to write this defense of the teaching of great literature, even in the business classroom.

Loyola in Maryland: A case study

From the 1980s through the early ’90s Loyola College hurried to build up its business program and get it accredited. At the end of that period, the college’s share of students majoring in business-related subjects reached nearly fifty percent. Since then the percentage of business students has dropped to just under thirty percent today.

Over the decades, I have observed the damage this move has done to the liberal ethos at Loyola College. A fundamental change occurred in the heart, mind, and soul of the college. Loyola went from being an institution committed fundamentally to higher liberal learning to one that is in the business of “higher” vocational training.

Loyola retains a so-called liberal arts core curriculum that every student is required to take. Nevertheless, college-wide understanding of and appreciation for what constitutes a liberal arts education has lapsed into confusion and, in some sectors, outright disdain. In any case, Loyola no longer describes itself as a liberal arts college, though it persists in holding up the core curriculum as evidence that it continues to educate in the liberal arts. Meanwhile older disciplines, like psychology, and newer ones, like communications, media studies, and computer science—all strongly allied with what Philip Rieff and Alasdair MacIntyre have identified as the therapeutic and managerial ethos—dominate over the humanities. Together with the business school, they claim the lion’s share of student majors.

Loyola College has become a deadly place for the liberal arts, despite the fact that they still dominate the core curriculum. I compare the disciplines of traditional liberal learning at Loyola to goldfish in a bowl from which the water has been emptied—or into which toxic fluids have been poured. By a perverse turn, which I cannot fully explain here, it is precisely because the liberal arts comprise the core that many students—especially business majors (and their parents)—now regard them (and the core itself), as inconvenient obstacles to, rather than the heart of, education at Loyola College.

Let me illustrate what I mean by describing what I faced just this past semester in two sections of a course I teach regularly on Theology and Literature. It is one of a dozen or so courses that students may take to fulfill their second core theology course requirement. My classes met back-to-back from late in the afternoon until early in the evening, time slots that suit the schedule of business majors looking to fulfill core requirements.

Almost half of the sixty students in the two sections were business majors. That is an astonishingly high percentage, and it moved me to inquire at our first class meeting how many chose the course because they were especially interested in literature. Less than a dozen students raised their hands. I could account for another seven or eight who, though they hadn’t raised their hands, enrolled in the course because I was teaching it. But that left about two thirds of the students who, by all appearances, were present because the course section fit their schedule. The vast majority of these were business majors.

An opening salvo

Given my experience of teaching this course, I decided to try something of an experiment. I shared my thoughts about these demographics with my students. I told the young men and women before me that whether or not they enrolled because they were interested in literature, I offered this course to them confident that the literature and poetry they were about to read would make them better and more interesting human beings. I also warned them that the kinds of study habits that suited business instruction might not serve them so well in a course that included the short stories of Henry James, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Raymond Carver, and Flannery O’Connor; novels by Walker Percy, John Updike, and Evelyn Waugh; and the poetry of T. S. Eliot.

I went ahead and explained to them that when Loyola College decided to go into the business of business education it gave little or no thought to the vastly different teaching methods and habits of learning that belong respectively to the liberal arts and business training. To illustrate, I told the students a story about when the new business school building was completed several years ago. Some colleagues and I were assigned classrooms in the new facility, and we discovered that there were no lecterns in the rooms—though they were jam-packed with the latest PowerPoint technology. This is emblematic, I said, of a momentous pedagogical chasm that divides the college, and of which they were given neither warning nor instruction when they entered Loyola College. I added that I was certain they had experienced this chasm and that many among them no doubt negotiated it daily, some more successfully than others.

I said that I am not averse to using PowerPoint technology. I take advantage of it to introduce religious art and iconography in some of my courses, but they would not find me making use of it in this class to project bulleted lecture outlines on a screen. I said that there was no textbook for the course. I endeavored to explain to the students that the point of reading a great novel is not to reduce it to an outline or summary and that, furthermore, they would probably be better off not taking notes in their spiral binder—that they should instead underline and write copiously in their books. This idea was shocking to more than a few who expected to sell their books back at top rate to the campus bookstore when the semester ended. I saw it in their faces, and we joked about that.

I also reminded my charges that they needed to bring the books and novels to class on the assigned days. I took the time to explain to them why this was needful. In my lectures, I said, I will refer to what is written in these books. A novel is not a textbook, I said. The main points are not highlighted with titles and introduced in topic paragraphs.

Reading a great novel, I continued, is vastly different from studying a textbook. One needn’t have read chapter ten in a textbook to understand chapter four. But the great writers unfold narratives in which the complete meaning and significance of an event that took place in chapter four might not be revealed until chapter ten. I added that the novel form is truer to life than a textbook. Our experience of time is not merely linear in the way that textbooks set down information. Rather, our conscious and imaginative lives are also lived out elliptically. We often circle back in memory to things we did or that happened to us in the past to cast light on the present or reassess our past on the basis of what we have learned since.

This also is why, I explained, that on the syllabus I did not list page or chapter assignments for the days on which a novel was to be discussed in class. Someone might ask how much of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer should be read for the first class meeting. The answer, I said, is as much as possible. I told my students that by abiding by this “rule” we respect the integrality of the novel. I encouraged them to read a novel in the way we inhale and exhale—not in consciously controlled and counted breaths, but with a natural rhythm and flow. Think of it this way, I concluded: While we are living, we are not afforded the opportunity of knowing and reflecting upon the whole course of our life. But the great literary works, whether Homer’s Iliad, Dante’s Divine Comedy, or Dickens’s Great Expectations, do grant a picture of the whole and invite us to apply the wisdom they communicate to our own lives. In the words of Dr. Johnson, “I have often thought that there has rarely been a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful.”

Is it surprising that this vision of education was difficult for many of the young men and women in my class to understand, assimilate, and embrace; that to them these thoughts were new, even startling? Most of the students who arrive in my classroom have been schooled primarily with textbooks. They have not learned to live inside of the great works to which I introduce them. Most assume that formal education is about receiving information that they must then record and retrieve to answer questions at the back of a chapter or on a final examination. Business schooling mightily reinforces this attitude, and it grows into a habit that is hard to unlearn. Business majors are led to believe that to be educated is be filled with data or to learn how to do a job and make a living. Reading for them is like raking leaves. You build piles of stuff you are supposed to know in order to succeed.

Vocational training is for slaves

In an article titled “Why Literature: The Premature Obituary of the Book,” Mario Vargas Llosa muses that “a humanity without reading, untouched by literature, would resemble a community of deaf mutes and aphasics, afflicted by tremendous problems of communication to its crude and rudimentary language.” I submit that even at Loyola College, which boasts a so-called core liberal arts curriculum, each year we graduate a host of young men and women who never learned the love and value of reading as a humanizing activity and who, in all likelihood, will not read in the future—not in the sense that Vargas Llosa means or that I encourage in my classroom. If this is so, then my college is complicit in producing so-called educated people who are deaf to wisdom, blind to beauty, and incapable of mounting an argument for goodness and truth against evil and falsehood. These are, in C. S. Lewis’s famous turn of phrase, women and men “without chests.”

Elsewhere, in a remarkable little essay called “Our English Syllabus” (in Rehabilitations and Other Essays, Oxford 1939), Lewis draws upon an important traditional distinction between education and training. “By steeping the pupil in literature both sacred and profane on which the culture . . . is based,” Lewis explains, we pursue the proper end of education. We produce the correct sentiments that support conscience and right reason and help to make a person a good man or a good woman. These sentiments “are to the passions what right habits are to the body.” Here, according to Lewis, is the heart of true education in contrast to “vocational training” (my emphasis) that “prepares the pupil not for leisure”—that sets him free—“but for work, [which] aims at making not a good man but a good banker, a good electrician, a good scavenger, or a good surgeon.” In his essay “The Loss of the University,” Wendell Berry wisely warns that the “idea of education as ‘career track’ diminishes everything it touches: education, teaching, childhood, the future. And such a thing could not be contemplated for the sixth-graders, obviously, if it had not already been instituted in the undergraduate programs of colleges and universities.”

In my experience, the distinction Lewis and Berry make between liberal arts education and career training is one that ordinary people increasingly fail to comprehend. That distinction, however, is supported by the great tradition of Western thought. Aristotle distinguishes between the artes liberalis and the artes servilis. And Lewis echoes Aristotle when he writes that “education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves.” Human beings are distinguished from the rest of God’s creatures not by the capacity for work—all animals are workers and professionals at what they do—but because they may be amateurs in an infinite variety of activities at leisure. Lewis explains:

You have noticed, I hope, that man is the only amateur animal; all the others are professionals. They have no leisure and do not desire it. When the cow has finished eating she chews the cud; when she has finished chewing she sleeps; when she has finished sleeping she eats again. She is a machine for turning grass into calves and milk—in other words, for producing more cows. The lion cannot stop hunting, nor the beaver building dams, nor the bee making honey. When God made the beasts dumb he saved the world from infinite boredom, for if they could speak they would all of them, all day, talk nothing but shop.

This difference between man and beast does not mean that human beings do not need to work, should not be trained for work, or that they are doomed to meaningless labor. In a modern democratic and technological society we will be wise to provide the vast majority of persons with both a true education and also a training that equips them with the skills to make a living. “Our ideal,” Lewis wisely and rightly maintains, “must be to find time for both education and training: our danger”—a danger much more acute a half-century after Lewis wrote these words—is that the egalitarian and thoroughly utilitarian spirit of our time may impose “training for all and education for none.” This, he warns, brings dire consequences, for “if education is beaten by training, civilization dies.”

At present in many if not most of our colleges and universities we are training young men and young women to be mules of the marketplace, deprived of a moral imagination because they read little. We are forming persons who view themselves narrowly as producers and consumers because we put a yoke around their minds and corral their spirits early in life.

The rebirth of culture in a business setting

In my book Rallying the Really Human Things, I tell the story of an evening my son Rafi spent several years ago with three of his old high school classmates at a singles’ establishment in Baltimore. My son works in the brave new world of computer and information technologies. I did not ask what kind of work his friends were doing at the time. What is of no small interest, however, is that all of them majored in English in college, so that when given this opportunity to spend some leisure time together they had something to share and talk about other than shop or the season finale of Sex and the City or Desperate Housewives. They talked about the great authors that in college they had read and learned to love—in this instance, especially, Charles Dickens. This real-life scene, more real than any “reality” television show, is a microcosm of the birth and rebirth of genuine culture. This is where leisure lends meaning to all the rest of one’s life, including work; as it should for that one creature that God made to be an amateur (the word is from Latin: amare, amator) rather than an expert—principally a lover, not a laborer.

I am persuaded that our colleges and universities are training far too many people in the artes servilis and educating far to few in the artes liberalis. But even laying aside my desire that we graduate more students in the disciplines of liberal learning, the present situation still begs for a thoughtful integration of education and training, wherein the artes liberalis are dominant and literature is routinely included in professional training.

It is worth emphasizing that the increasingly popular courses in business and professional ethics do not accomplish what I am looking for. They may even do more harm than good. Far too often, in far too many locations, this sort of course amounts to not much more than the presentation of a lexicon of ethics combined with scholastic exercises that apply definitions to case studies in a formulaic manner. This approach has little transformative power. Exercises and case studies neither demand nor produce good character. Instead they teach people that moral behavior is nothing more than the skillful application and manipulation of formal rules and principles.

The great twentieth century Jewish philosopher Martin Buber delivered a speech almost seventy years ago that makes this point in a devastating way. In “The Education of Character” Buber points out that there is a difference between an education of character and formal presentation of ethics in a classroom. He writes:

I try to explain to my pupils that envy is despicable and at once I feel the secret resistance of those who are poorer than their comrades. I try to explain that it is wicked to bully the weak, and at once I see the suppressed smile on the lips of the strong. I try to explain that lying destroys life, and something frightful happens: the worst liar of the class produces a brilliant essay on the destructive power of lying.

The lesson is this: mere instruction in morality and the elements of ethical thought do not suffice to make the virtues live in the human breast. The teacher has to set the example and open for examination the lives of characters in great literature. I do this in the ethics courses that I also teach at Loyola College.

We could humanize the student who wants to enter business far more effectively if we integrated great literature into even the most routine and introductory courses in business. In management courses, Dostoevsky’s story of “The Grand Inquisitor” and Leo Tolstoy’s short tale Master and Man ought to be read. In marketing and advertising courses there belong Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman and John Cheever’s short story “The Death of Justina.” Such courses ought also to include biographies and autobiographies of great civic and business leaders.

Another way of stating the matter is that great works of literature should not be confined to English departments. Plutarch’s Lives, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Robert Penn Warren’s All the Kings Men, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, and Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow belong in business courses. We would see room for them in these settings were we not so obsessed with skills training, which more often than not is better achieved in the workplace, where there should be greater emphasis and energy spent on what was once called apprenticeship.

A different kind of friendship

Fifteen years ago, as I drove the renowned child psychiatrist and author Robert Coles from the airport to the Loyola College campus, he discussed with me the importance of literature for the formation of the medical students he taught at Harvard University. Coles described to me a course that he taught in the Medical School comprised entirely of literature. With a grin, he reported how his colleagues looked upon this course. Professors of English watched suspiciously on a trespass into texts and subjects only they were qualified to teach. His medical colleagues wondered anxiously whether it wasn’t a reckless waste of students’ precious time.

But in his book The Call of Stories, Coles argues passionately that we ought to be teaching literature to those whom we train to become doctors and lawyers, bank managers and CEOs. At the close of that book, Coles recounts some conversations with an undergraduate student named Gordon. Gordon started out in college thinking that he would major in economics or business, but he got “bored with numbers and theories.” Instead he majored in English. He soon realized, however, that his professors were myopically insistent on “zeroing in on ‘the text,’ raking and raking, sifting and sifting it through narrower and narrower filters.” They seemed not the least interested in exploring the broader meaning of the “text” and its relevance to our lives. With apologies, Gordon told Coles: “I don’t have an abstract interest in literature. I love to read stories and get lost in them, and some of their characters—they become buddies of mine, friends, people I think of as real.”

So Gordon dropped English as a major and returned to an early interest in computer science. Yet he didn’t stop reading; and he shared this reading with classmates and friends, some of whom got hooked on the same stuff. Gordon explained to Coles that the more he read, the more he began to relate to his favorite literary characters and refer to them in his mind when struggling with circumstances in his own life. “I don’t know how to put it,” said Gordon, “but they’re voices, and they help me make choices.”

Gordon kept repeating how he counted these literary characters as his “friends,” like real people. One day he brought up Holden Caulfield, the adolescent protagonist in Catcher in the Rye. He asked Coles, “‘Why don’t you guys [college professors] teach that way?’ What way, I wanted to know? ‘As if Holden was—I mean is—as real as you or me.’” Coles confesses that his response to Gordon’s challenge was shamefully defensive and self-serving. “Gordon was not in the least interested in an ad hominem discussion or in an argument,” he writes. Rather, Coles concludes, Gordon “was reminding me, really, of the wonderful mimetic power a novel or a story can have—its capacity to work its way well into one’s thinking life, yes, but also one’s reveries or idle thoughts, even one’s moods and dreams.”

A common world

I responded to Gordon’s plea in my Theology and Literature course this past spring. I did what he pleaded people like me should do. I dedicated my energy and thought to reading and discussing the texts with my students as if we shared a common world with the characters we met in them. I emphasized the roles of memory, imagination, and empathy when we read. This all fit very well with one main theme of the course, namely the failure of love in the modern world and so also the loss of our power to imagine and build up that common world.

The main characters in many of the stories we read—John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, for example—are my students’ age. They struggle to find meaning in their work and their relationships. I used this correspondence to a purpose. I encouraged my students to imaginatively enter into these characters’ situations and draw from this exercise analogies with their own lives, their own hopes, disappointments, and aspirations.

I stayed as honest and direct through the whole of the semester as on the first day we met. And I quickly learned that, as the saying goes among faculty who teach core curriculum courses, the luck of the draw was in my favor. Despite the ominous demographics, both sections included a substantial number of bright young men and women who enthusiastically read and engaged with the novels and poetry. They grabbed at the opportunity, which is sometimes even denied them in English courses. They turned in some astonishingly insightful papers. Even among the students whose performance was average on the grade scale, the interest was there. They responded to my exhortation to spread their wings and give the texts a chance to speak to them. Conversations after class and in my office supported the classroom experience. And the results of those notorious student evaluations—upon which today’s deans and administrators depend much too heavily to “measure” the teaching effectiveness of faculty—revealed the same. In fact, I have never received such “high marks” on evaluations.

Now mere satisfaction or pleasure gained from a course is no sure proof of its intellectual worth or lasting influence. But I do believe that the experiment worked. A few students told me it changed their lives. Among them were business students who told me I had shown them an oasis in the desert, or who simply thanked me for adding a dimension to their intellectual lives they had not known they yearned for. It was a joy to see some of those young men and women, who entered the classroom in the midst of a transformation into beasts of burden, depart it with a skip in their step and a great work of literature tucked under their arms as lasting company.  

Vigen Guroian is Professor of Theology at Loyola College, Baltimore, Maryland and author, among others, of Rallying the Really Human Things: The Moral Imagination in Politics Literature & Everyday Life (ISI 2005).

3 Responses (comments are closed) • Features, Business, Character and Ethics, Leadership, Spiritual Growth, Fri 08 Sep 2006