Do Business Programs Produce Slaves to the Market?

Vigen Guroian

American society is business oriented and has been so for some time, with obvious benefits. The vast majority of American citizens enjoy material comforts unimagined even by the very wealthiest in former ages. While some people lament the hedonism of American life—no one expects the basic structure or influence of the American economy to change any time soon. How does education fit into this scenario?

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 and programs. Are such programs threatening the business culture and enslaving business leaders?

The need for business training in our post-agricultural and post-industrial society is apparent. Nonetheless, this kind of education, in its present form, suffers serious limitations. The unreflective outpouring of resources and energy into business programs at many colleges and universities has undercut the very ethos of liberal arts learning. Because our institutions of higher education were rooted in the humanities or liberal arts, their future as institutions of true higher education depends on the health of the liberal arts and sciences. Why is that so?

Consider the famous Oxford don, C. S. Lewis, who echoes Aristotle when he writes in “Our English Syllabus” that “education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves.” He argues that human beings are distinguished from the rest of God’s creatures not by their 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.

Are we in many if not most of our colleges and universities training young men and young women to be mules of the marketplace, deprived of a moral imagination? Are we 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? Could Enron, MCI WorldCom, and Arthur Andersen be examples of this failure?

Unless we introduce students, our future leaders, to the rich heritage of Western civilization, steeped in the humanities and its great literature, how can they continue the conversation? More importantly, how will they identify and perpetuate what is essential to it?  

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). This article is adapted from a longer essay, posted on Implications in September.

5 Responses (comments are closed) • Provocations, Business, Meaning and Calling, Society, Mon 21 Aug 2006