Clouds are Closer than Stars

The American Dream can quite easily be seen as a reverie of financial prosperity hidden behind the attractive façade of ideals like liberty and freedom. Now that everyone is aware of the ‘difficult economy’, the question of how to achieve success is in need of a reassessment.

Receiving a bachelor’s degree requires running a tab of about $85,000 at an in-state public university. This well-known fact of investment demands that parents and students take seriously the kind of returns they can expect. Career prospects better not be too far off in the distance or else it becomes difficult to justify such a large commitment of time and money. For this reason we see bachelor’s degrees in business as the dominant path being taken: 21% of all bachelor’s degrees granted in the U.S. are business degrees. The American Dream perpetuates in the hopes of our youth, but is the pursuit of happiness a gold-lined pathway?

It is nothing new to critique the eternal chase for money - many of us will immediately hear the polemic voice of Marx echoing ‘commodity fetishism’ in our ears. The more poignant attack on the college mindset is Steinbeck’s quote about the failure of socialism in America stating “the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Our matter is not one of bourgeois and proletariat, but rather, how we are taught to identify ourselves as ‘Americans’. Despite the volatile economy, The Dream of American Monetary Success is still at the forefront of our consciousness.

With the countless opportunities available for a college student, why are we still convinced that we should ‘get rich or die trying’? Business degrees appear to have the glimmer of ‘marketability’ that brings the crowds running, and besides, there is no pressure to complete all those tiresome courses in the humanities and the hard sciences. But why is it that even Money Watch – CBS’s money-centered news division – is putting out articles like ‘8 Reasons Not to Get a Business Degree’? They drive home the obvious statistical points about salary (lower expected salaries than even philosophers), MBA acceptance rates, and the over-saturated job market. What strikes resonance with me is the observation that, even if you are successful, “your quality of life could suck”.

At the end of the day, The American Dream is about happiness, and if there is one aspect of education lacking in business, it is the ability to find joy in something beyond dividends, paychecks, and solid interest rates. If students are going to enter a tough economy, we might as well help them find solace in some of the non-tangible passions. How many business classes teach you about the intricate beauty of nature, the complexities of one’s identity, or the ethical considerations that come from being woven into an international community of commerce? These preoccupations have life-long value, and involve thinking skills that transpose well into industry.

Consider this basic list of skills needed to be successful in business: good with numbers, a clear communicator, understands and can work with others, and knows the history of mistakes made in business. These skills each have their own places within the university – mathematics/statistics, education/communication/writing, sociology/anthropology, and history/economics, respectively. Even if it is possible to teach this conglomeration of skills in the course of one degree, what sense of cultivation or maturity are harbored in the honing of these skills in relation to business transactions?

This brings up what is truly worrying: the unique drive of a business degree moves along a single dimension - profit. Taking a bunch of 18-year-olds with stars in their eyes and training them to become profiteers – masters of niche economics and ‘the bottom line’ – only moves them one step further toward a life enamored with materiality and financial success. Many of us call such an attitude ‘the entrepreneur’s spirit’, but again, we find the linguistic mistake of garbing money worship in the language of ingenuity. It is not as if without business degrees, we would worsen our unemployment rate or plummet further into debt. We may just end up with less people believing they can make a quick million off of some market speculation or exploitative scheme, and bring more creative ideas into the business world that come from a non-monetary impetus.

A college education is a place for The American Dream to come to fruition, but as we further orient academics toward careers and job security, we lose a grip on why these things are important to us in the first place. It is so we can do what we love, take care of those we are close to, and live a fulfilling life. Confusing these two things – monetary success and life success – is inscribed in the way we talk about ‘unemployment’, ‘job marketability’, and ‘college opportunity’. Find me college students with the zeal for an idea and I am willing to bet vocational statistics are the last thoughts on their minds.

Child Sex and the Media

After the Great Penn State Scandal of early November, we see another example of what our culture deems the ultimate no-no: prurience in relation to children. Of course, this seems like a reasonable thing to hate - what parent, brother, sister, etc could imagine their innocent little loved one involved in a sexual relationship with a full-grown adult? Let's be honest, most parents don't even want to know their kids are involved in sexual relationships with their peers. Moreover, emotive discomfort aside, there is an obvious moral disfunction involved in exploitation. Taking a child's puerile affection and naiveté and manipulating it into a complicated sex game that takes advantage of and seriously hinders a child is a mark of an individual lacking ethics, empathy, and inhibition. It seems most everyone is going to be able to agree with this point - regardless of whether or not you've read Lolita - psychologically challenging or not, it is a societal maxim that is too ubiquitous and obvious to challenge.

Why I gathered the interest in the sex scandal at Penn State more than any of the Catholic alter boy testimonies or countless teacher-student scandals (cf. badbadteacher.com for a perspective on enormity of this issue) is due of the proximity it had to our media culture. Sports coverage is one of the most pervasive interests shared by the denizens of nearly every city and suburb. Despite the cultural love for sports, most people would agree its for fun and entertainment - it brings people together and makes them happy. Now, with our Penn State folks in the spotlight, we see a new sort of conflict of judgment: some people actually love Joe Pa and the Nittany Lions enough to exculpate those involved (in particular JP), not on lawful terms, but simply because he's a loved icon to many. Doubters of the Catholic sex abuse cases didn't riot in the streets at the idea of their priest being put on trial or moved to a different parish.

What's the point of highlighting this? It seems to me that the most guilty offender of pushing gratuitous sexual idolization and sexualizing youth is the media itself. Look at any women's or men's magazine and its a 50/50 shot that any page you open up to will involve sex tips, a sexualized scene, or a way to appear more sexy. Then, go into any high school, or even middle school, and find the popular girls - the desirables of these teenage hormone chambers - and you'll more than likely get pointed to girls dressing as if they're in their twenties. They don't come up with these fashion styles themselves, its sold to them in store windows, magazine advertisements, online fashion reviews, and through entertainment. This should come as no surprise; however, something that the Penn State Scandal has taught me is that we're more numb to the media's influence on us that we could have ever imagined. When what generally appears as our most culturally stigmatized taboo - child sex scandals - is brushed off by PSU lovers due to the clout carried by those involved, we can realize we are not only a culture identifying and obsessed with entertainment, but a culture that has no grasp of ourselves as separate to its influence.

What we can learn from the Penn State Scandal is that even our deepest ethical and moral concerns are no match for the influence of the mainstream. It seems its time for those who see the stranglehold that media has on culture to speak up and provide critical voices that disabuse our daily complacency with the power being granted to public imagery that is crushing whatever virtues are left in our American culture.