François Furstenberg did a great job this past week of skewering the hollow vision that recently departed Temple president Jason Wingard set out for higher education in his book.
Furstenberg notes that Wingard’s vision purports to fix a perceived problem with “return on investment” in higher education, which is supposedly a “misalignment” between what higher education offers and what business actually needs. But as Furstenberg observes, there isn’t really a “skills gap” that waits to be filled by universities that opt to follow Wingard’s empty slogans. Instead, business leaders still end up seeming to want to hire graduates who are good at critical thought, good at expressive self-presentation, generalists with a broad range of knowledge and skill. E.g., what liberal education already excels at—at least until people like Wingard set to work on it.
Furstenberg makes clear what Wingard’s real vision is about: outsourcing, austerity, and a transference of public goods to Big Tech, a familiar and depressing recipe that has already laid waste to American life.
My minor additional contribution to Furstenberg’s analysis would be to ask first what the business leaders, consultants, “thought leaders” and politicians who warm to this analysis actually want to hire for when they look around the room of the people they work with most closely. And then I want to probe at what the difference is between what they want and the people their companies and or organizations actually hire for most roles—the difference, Furstenberg notes, between the board room of a Big Tech company (whether start-up or established) and the “human-resources technocrat” charged with getting the next tier down of managers the staff that they need (or when the gears are shifted in the opposite direction, shedding the staff they don’t need).
A side note at the outset: I am not talking here about small businesses and early-phase start-ups, where I think people actually have to have good ideas, seriously concrete skills, discipline and commitment, and where I think people can succeed both from having had liberal education and from a lot of other kinds of training and background.
I’m thinking here about big companies or companies becoming big whose leaders think of themselves as the pinnacle of success—and who often have the personal wealth to go with that thought. The leaders of Big Tech companies (whether small companies growing past the start-up phase or big established ones), the top consultancies, the top investment firms and hedge-funds, the c-suite of the rest of the Fortune 500.
What they’re looking for is what liberal education in highly selective universities and colleges has reliably supplied all the way back to the 19th Century: markers of social class. Those markers shift over time. When the current leaders are looking for the next guy to join the c-suite, they’re often looking for someone who who is literate in and friendly to their markers but who also brings cultural capital from the next generational turn. Sort of the contestant on Jeopardy! who is as quick on the buzzer for a clue about Jerry Lee Lewis as about Lizzo. None of that absolute shit that Wingard wants higher education to be supplies any of those markers except in a negative sense: what it does is turn all but a handful of universities into what Tressie McMillan Cottom has called “lower ed”.
The c-suite of the upper riches of the present American pyramid has two things it looks for out of college, really, and class markers are the first necessary attribute of both. The next sorting is between the guys who are going to work for the c-suite but proximate enough to it that they’re socially knowable and can be evaluated through direct observation and the guys who are going to join the c-suite eventually if they don’t fuck up.
What does the c-suite look for in the people who will eventually replace them? I suppose you could think of the total package as “skills” but it’s more like affect and ideology.
Among those who have the right class markers and thus move ahead in the competition, they look for people who have overwhelming self-regard—who grab hold of every potentially valuable resource or situation they encounter and lay claim to whatever isn’t nailed down because they’re sure that they can do a better job with it and that it rightfully belongs to them. Who always act like they’re in charge or about to be in charge. Who walk into a room and immediately sift it between “people of possible use to me” and “people I should never be seen talking to” and whose intuitive sifting on those lines is generally accurate. They look for someone who regards equality in personal and professional life the way most people think after accidentally grabbing dog poop while cleaning up after the puppy, with visceral and immediate disgust.
They look for people like that who are strategic and calculating enough to defer gratification when encountering valuable resources that are nailed down—who are not mindlessly aggressive when they sense it’s not their time or that they’re in the presence of someone whose power is unchallengeable at the moment.
They look for people who have a reliable capacity for treachery but who also form weak social bonds with great facility—someone with many acquaintances but perhaps no real friends, at least not of the kind that you might selflessly sacrifice some part of your own ambitions to protect or assist. They look for people whose deepest spiritual credo is quid pro quo.
They look for someone who breaks rules, who consciously avoids learning about rules in the first place, but who is discreet enough not to flaunt that they’ve done so in front of witnesses outside the c-suite. They look for someone who sounds compliant when talking to the hired help but is a naughty little boy or girl when it’s just the powerful at the table. They look for someone who knows how to puff up the resume just enough and turn away from anyone who goes too far, who turns everything they’ve ever done into a spectacular example of leadership. They look for someone who can fake humility if it’s tactically useful and redirect the blame for a coming disaster with a well-timed joke or with prophylactic self-deprecation. They look for someone who can handle grift but isn’t going to pig out or lose self-control.
They look for someone who can spot trends early, who finds original reference points in the wider culture that sound great and mean little, who never seems to be parroting the jargon but who also never has a dangerous idea or believes in something too much. Someone who throws new ingredients into the Aspen/Davos stone soup rather than sups greedily on whatever is served to them. There is nothing more likely to stop you short of the c-suite than sincere over-use of whatever ghostwritten business jargon featured in TED Talk or a CEO interview on CNBC yesterday.
They look for people who adroitly rewrite their own experiences and lives to make everything they’ve done seem deliberate and conscious. It’s also helpful to be able to lie fluidly but selectively, and to disclose prophylactically, to divert attention and suspicion where necessary.
Does liberal education train up this package of skills, affect and values?
Not intentionally or consciously—we couldn’t claim it as a deliberate consequence of our practices. But we don’t stand in the way, either. We provide the class markers, starting with selectivity (even in flagship public R1s) and building from there. We don’t stand in the way of someone building this composite persona and skills—we provide them a big sandbox to practice on. There are people to cultivate, people to shun. Professors’ lectures and courses to work into conversations, names to drop, old concepts that can be given a fresh coat of paint and claimed as new insights. Whereas something like Wingard’s massified, scaled-up, outsourced-out university, staffed by low-paid facilitators, is not a good sandbox. The c-suite will not be looking there and it is not what they want. They mostly just want to be sure that not too many people get to play in the sandboxes, because then it creates too many people with sharp elbows fighting for a place at the top. So sure, degrade public higher education, it will keep too many people from thinking they might be leaders.
What about the next tier down, the mesopelagic tier of the company or organization? The people who work directly for the c-suite, where the c-suite and the c-support suite are socially visible to one another?
(I’m aware, by the way, that the ocean-layer metaphor doesn’t work in one major sense: the “food” that fuels a large corporation actually travels upward in some ways.)
The high-end executive assistants, the technically-proficient head of a major technical department, the specialist financial analyst, the guy who gets sent to represent the c-suite to important buyers or second-tier conventions and meetings? The valued creative whose visual sensibility and design skills makes for amazing presentation slides for important meetings and who also collates for the VP of Marketing the best ideas from the advertising division? The discreet and emotionally intelligent person who reports to the Chief Information Officer who gets sent to tell people the bad news directly but is also great at covering up the awkward situations. The first-rate speechwriter and idea person who feeds the c-suite the concepts, words and reference points that they no longer have the time to cultivate for themselves? The Renaissance man or woman who only lacks fire-in-the-belly and is therefore a trustworthy second banana who will squire assertively for their boss and compliantly agreed to be fed to the wolves should it become necessary? The quant who is fantastic at finding new ways to pull another billion pennies in fees out of the transaction stream but can barely handle a conversation without drenching themselves in flop sweat?
Is liberal education training those people? Yes, absolutely, and perhaps more on purpose as well as by osmosis in this case. Many of those people have real skills built up through education while also often having had or acquired the right class markers; many of them have real content expertise in one or more areas that the company or organization functionally needs. Are there enough of these people? Here, perhaps, maybe not. When the c-suite complains that no one knows how to write any more, or why is that pie-chart so ugly, that’s what they’re thinking. It’s the difference between the Harvard grad who is heading for the c-suite who whips out their phone in a meeting in a fully self-aware way to communicate to everybody else that they’re not very important and the Gen Z research biologist who is working on the company’s new approach to drug design who whips out their phone because they never learned that older people find it rude when you text someone in the middle of a meeting. There are, the c-suite thinks, not enough of the people with the skills to hold up the c-suite without trying to rival it. People who know their place but who also have to be really good at several things and generally good at most things.
Below that point, the c-suite no longer directly knows anything about who they’re hiring or what those employees need to know. That’s where the HR director takes over. Suddenly liberal education becomes an enemy even if liberally educated people perform incredibly well in the job, because the HR director doesn’t want to evaluate people for soft skills or class markers (they might even be using some form of algorithmic black box designed to erase those signals). They want a credential that fits the job in name, and thus a job that names a credential. You don’t want a tier two levels below the c-suite that mimics the recruitment logic of the c-suite and its supporting personnel, because you’ll have people who are either trying to move up the hierarchy from a position that is meant to disallow mobility and thus keeping everything unstable or you’ll have people whose soft skills are so well-developed that they can readily cover for not actually knowing how to do what they were hired to do until such time as they can actually do it. (Once upon a time, I’m told, American companies actually believed in on-the-job training, but no longer.)
The things that you need to recruit for as you traverse into the bathypelagic zone of a substantial company, where the light of the c-suite only dimly shines, are an acceptance of hierarchy, a skill-credential match, a embrace of compliance, and an awareness of how to provide proof-of-life evidence that you are doing your job. It is not enough that the job gets done, you need to know how to create and curate deliverables, events, hard data, that can float up to the c-suite’s support tier. You stuff valuable ideas and reports into bottles that you cast upon the currents, for the delectation of the c-support tier—the ideas they can recast, the information they can renarrate, the signals of triumph or trouble that they have to call attention to.
Is liberal education training the workers of the bathypelagic? Yes, even if liberal education annoys the HR office with a lack of credential specificity. But restlessly, subversively, perhaps—liberal education might train people to push against hierarchy and grumble about compliance, it might make those workers wonder why there isn’t a pathway to the tier above. But this is not what the c-suite is thinking about when it tries to thought-lead us to a different system of higher education, because it doesn’t even know that this tier of work exists except as something to be ennumerated and as something to be fired. What people in the bathypelagic layers of the company do exactly is something the c-suite only learns about if they go on a reality show and have to spend a day with these folks. They don’t know if there’s a skills gap that affects their operations there for real: that’s just a story to tell at the shareholder meeting or the Aspen Institute and only when they’re trying to account for something else that’s failing or struggling in their organization. (Meaning, it’s the c-support tier that’s fed them the data and the explanatory narrative.)
The c-suite does, by the way, know about the abyssopelagic tier of the organization because they see them too: the people who clean and repair and guard and lift. They view them as inexhaustibly available, where the only imperative is to keep their compensation as low as possible. Whether they’re educated at all, or where they might get the specific education they need to do the work, is not very important to them.
All in all, the kind of people who Wingard’s message resonates with who are not just cynically using it as an alibi for austerity and transfer-seeking, the kind of business leaders and thought-leaders who harken to that rhetoric? I can’t help but escape the sense that most of them are c-suiters—or aspirant c-suiters stuck in its waiting rooms—who are seeking first and foremost validation by talking about skills gaps and better ROI and market-ready credentials. Precisely because they are of and in the social class that liberal education nurtures, they want what every other member of a social class wants: to feel loved by the institutions that make and own the culture of that class. They find themselves cast as Mr. Potter but they want to be George Bailey. (Or perhaps more precisely, they want to be Potter but they want people to see them as Bailey.) So they want to imagine that liberal education is or should be about making them. But this requires that they misrecognize themselves as tangibly skilled persons who have risen through merit and drive out of the herds of their fellow well-educated class peers—and perhaps through recognizing an opportunity by filling a “skills gap” and seeking training where few others were. In some sense, they want higher education to collaborate in rewriting the biography of their ascension to conform to that vision, and in so doing, to show its love for them by promising to make more of them as they imagine themselves, more deliberately. Even if they don’t actually want us to really do that for real.
Image credit: "Deep Sea Fishing Training Centre in Pusan, Korea" by United Nations Photo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
I would offer a different (but in some ways compatible) vision of jobs that explains what Winograd is thinking. In particular, I think that kind of vision is responding to two related problems. One is that people who attend an institution like Temple, major in eg history, do well, and then go on the job market are at a big disadvantage compared to people with the same educational trajectory at Swarthmore or Penn. The other is that many students come in to college without a clear sense of what learning is going to look like, or how to construct a plausible self for their career around a liberal arts education. Those people might well have succeeded better in a program based more explicitly around specific skills and particular jobs. (My favorite book about higher ed, Paying for the Party, is helpful for thinking about both of these, especially the second.)