Avarice, the Virtue

By Daniel F. Linsalata | Thursday, October 5, 2006

Last week, Dartmouth’s Career Services office hosted its annual two-day Career Fair. Students stepped away from pong tables in droves just long enough to shower, don ill-fitting business attire, and march to Alumni Hall to affix their lips to the rear end of every recruiting representative who would give them the time of day (and, hopefully, an opportunity to spend the next two years working ninety hours a week in a cubicle farm churning out PowerPoint slides for exorbitant salaries). The same students then sequestered themselves in the library for the weekend, trying in vain to produce cover letters explaining how majoring in French and serving as fraternity social chair qualifies them for the aforementioned slave labor at McKinsey & Co. or Goldman Sachs—the respective top prizes in consulting and investment banking—despite their general inability to articulate exactly what “investment banking” entails.

In fairness, “recruiting representatives” may be a misnomer; most companies simply sent recent Dartmouth alumni, former fratty sweet dudes who used to hang out all the time but now transformed beyond recognition into corporate cogs, to tout the values of their respective firms and reassure juniors and seniors that frattiness and hanging out pervade even the “real world.” This annual ritual of selling one’s soul for the right price has become as much a part of a part of the Dartmouth experience as elderly leaf-peepers, Homecoming, and pelting Princeton’s goalie with tennis balls.

I myself attended the event, not with the intention of soliciting a job offer (undeterred by the liberal scepter of “moral bankruptcy,” I got a jump start on the process and have already secured gainful employment), but to cruelly remind the alumni that I still have a year left to enjoy the wonders of Dartmouth, and they... well, don’t. After getting my jollies for twenty minutes or so, I was circling back towards the exit when I made a crucial error in judgment: I allowed the guy from the Peace Corps to engage me in conversation. He remained unfazed when I tried to stave off his advances by pointedly stating that altruism isn’t my bag. Rather then sending me on a moral guilt trip—presumably to a war-torn state in central Africa—he immediately delved headlong into his pitch for the Corps’ business development consultation program. The fundamental notion of consulting—“pay me to tell you what you’re doing wrong”—has always amused me, and I took the bait. Minutes later, I dutifully added my name to the email list. I’m still waiting to hear from them.

Dartmouth makes much of the importance of “giving back,” in any way we can. “From those to whom much is given, much is expected,” and all that jazz. A liberal arts education, by definition, does not provide training for a career in consulting or banking. Rather, it focuses upon creating well-rounded men and women who understand the forces, be they economic, political, sociological, psychological, or women-and-gender-studies-ical, that make the world go ‘round. Former Dartmouth Philosophy professor Eugene Rossenstock-Hussey famously stated, “The purpose of education is to form the Citizen. And the Citizen is the man who, if need be, could refound Civilization.” I can assure you that Professor Rossenstock-Hussey was speaking of a ‘Citizen of the World,’ with all its succeeding implications, and certainly not a citizen of cube-ville on Wall Street.

So, what then is the point of a liberal arts education if most of us have already resigned ourselves to a life of corporate whoredom? The clich� answer is that any course of liberal arts study teaches skills critical to business, such as teamwork, critical thinking, creative problem solving, qualitative and quantitative analysis, and the ability to still produce quality work after forty sleepless hours (those preparing for interviews in the coming weeks are advised to learn this list by heart). All well and good, but skills that anybody will actually need to succeed on Wall Street are taught during eight-week training sessions at the beginning of employment.

For all his faults, outgoing Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg (see page six), got one thing right: he picked up on the trend of admitting a well-rounded class, rather than simply well-round individuals. Athletes, math nerds, Dartmouth Review writers, and even James Freedman’s creative loners all have a place at Dartmouth, and each bring with them their own set of skills and talents. It is fostering these talents, rarely the ones on display inside the classroom, which is truly the important part of a liberal arts education. Classroom learning merely supplements what is learned outside the walls of Dartmouth Hall and Fairchild Tower; skills developed in the classroom are put into practice in the arts, in the Greek system, and in every corner of the girdled earth. Jeffery Immelt ’78, CEO of General Electric, has said that the most important things he knows about motivating others and leading a large organization he learned while serving as president of Phi Delta Alpha fraternity. One can presume that in the classroom, he learned all he knows about refounding civilization, should the need arise.

There is nothing wrong, then, with taking a degree from the New Hampshire wilderness and venturing into the corporate wilderness. Students do not come to Dartmouth as well-rounded citizens, but rather with their own unique skills and ideas. They do, however, use their liberal arts education to nurture these skills and transform into well-rounded leaders by the time they leave the Hanover Plain. The “giving back” that commencement speakers hit upon year after year by no means has to occur in a mud hut with the Peace Corps or in an inner-city classroom with Teach for America. The sheer number of jobs that corporate America creates for people of all classes is just as good. Ultimately, employing untold thousands of workers, donating millions of dollars—Dartmouth alumni are among the most generous of any institution—and keeping America at the economic, scientific, and intellectual forefronts “gives back” on a far greater, though perhaps less tangible, scale than the conventional means we consider in this context. Greed and the Boardroom are not as intimately connected as critics would hope.

In this light, serving as social chair is not as useless as one would believe. Taking a job in banking or consulting is not selling your soul; instead, it positions a man or a woman to achieve tremendous things for the greater good. Classroom learning is a good first step, but it’s not enough. Ya gotta get involved.

Avarice, the Virtue

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