For the first time, I had the privilege to be in the audience for a Commencement ceremony, proudly watching a child get a degree, rather than attending as faculty, which I have now done many times.
Seen from that side, one thing that shines through just as much as when I see it elsewise is that the faculty are genuinely happy for the students. For all of them, not just the students with honors—and at a small college, almost all the students who walk across the stage are known by some professor, some coach, some administrator, and are well-loved for who they are. It’s a fuzzy kind of affection—much of the whole life of the student as it has been for four years isn’t seen by any of us—but it’s real. It’s one of the many reasons that I’m so nauseated by the cruel disregard that state governments, especially in Florida, are showing towards the connections that have developed in the institutions that they are the stewards of. It’s that moment where we watch with hope and kindness as students move into their futures that makes me reject a colder, more transactional version of higher education where we just download some skills into students we know only as numbers and then hand them a credential that authorizes them to practice in some highly defined field of labor.
Another thing I’ve seen before that I saw even more at this end was the sociocultural world of families as they appear in these ceremonies. Keeping in mind that the families of students at small selective colleges are already a small social fraction of the wider world of university and college students, it’s still an interesting glimpse both of how different families can be in ways that are both fairly structural and highly particular. There are families that proudly announce their national or community identities through dress and comportment—the exuberant extended families who yell with passion as their graduate walks the stage, the restrained families that clap a bit harder, the families dressed in national and community finery, the families in shorts and T-shirts. You see little generational packs of women or men swirling around town together—grandmothers and great-aunts leading the way into the coffee shop, mothers and daughters and the daughters of daughters trailing behind. You see big emotional families laughing and crying and exuberantly tallying one young person’s path to adulthood; you see serenely quiet but plainly happy little clans just spending time in one another’s company. There are families wound tight about some unspoken and fraught event fresh on their minds, and others who have put whatever normally divides them aside for a good few days of future dreaming.
When I read occasionally of proposals for universal national service, one of the best small virtues of such an idea is that perhaps everyone deserves at the same rough time of year to walk across a stage where they really traverse into full adulthood, carrying whatever they might bring with them at the moment. (At least one student at this ceremony walked across the stage holding a baby, I presume his own.) Most of the religious ceremonies that claim to mark that adulthood feel out of synchronization with modern life, coming far too early for what they mark; even high school graduation doesn’t feel well-aligned with the reality of presumptive adulthood for those who don’t go on to college or university. But then a ceremony is perhaps the least of what we should be giving the generations that come after us, and we are not as a society giving any of what we owe at the moment.
Quite accurately, more than a few obituaries for and analyses of the career of Silvio Berlusconi today remark on the resemblances between Berlusconi and Donald Trump. It’s not merely the stylistics nor just the cultural content of their political messaging that is connected. The more ominous parallel underneath, where Berlusconi appears to have been a pioneer in post-1950 Western politics, was the exuberant use of political institutions and mass mobilization to defer, foil or frustrate attempts at holding Berlusconi legally accountable for a wide range of illegal and unethical conduct.
I also think, however, that Berlusconi’s successes in Italy’s “culture wars” offer some useful comparative insights for Americans on the left vis-a-vis Trumpism. On one hand, Berlusconi had something of the same advantage that Trump has had, which is effective control (or literal control, in Berlusconi’s case) over a major proportion of mass media and journalism. In fact, it’s worth recalling that as a fourth network, Fox began with the same kind of Page-3 smuttiness and lurid moral panic about criminality that Berlusconi took from his own media operations into his political messaging—that the takeover of ‘news’ followed rather than preceded that. But on the other hand, though the American (and Italian) right have their own hyper-exaggerated or outright fraudulent ways of labelling and narrating the history of progressive influence over cultural and social institutions in the years between 1970 and 2000, I do think that looking at Berlusconi’s rise is an instructive alternate window into why that influence was paradoxically both weaker and stronger than we ourselves tended to imagine. Weaker in that attempts to change the way we spoke and represented and ritualized social life were far less transformative than we hoped, especially as we focused on smaller and smaller proportions of the whole society; stronger in that the countering resentments we provoked took very little time to coalesce into a fiercely dialectical push-back. I think it’s pretty fair to say that it took many of us too long to understand how strong that reaction was, and to re-calculate our own relative weakness in relationship to it—which is what made the confidence of our scolding remonstrations come off so badly. Progressives in both countries simultaneously acted as if the bad old days were done and dusted and yet also as if they had powerful enemies all around them. Both were—and are—true but often we have managed to tactically assume exactly the wrong one of those two contradictory assessments at exactly the wrong moment, acting with confidence when we should have been careful, acting hesitantly when we should have gone forth in all our strength.
I’m still digesting some of what I learned at the early June conference on The Future of Work that I attended, but one thing I know I really liked was the interdisciplinary minor in Business, Ethics and Society that the philosopher Kendy Hess helped to create at the College of the Holy Cross several years ago. I say that as someone who is skeptical about “typical” business majors for undergraduates, whether at small colleges or otherwise. Hess made a move in her presentation about the minor that I really appreciated, which is to point out that business isn’t a profession or a career as much as it is an institution like the church, the state or the family, one that she loosely defined as built around “the impersonal delivery of goods and services” (and thus is the youngest of those major Western institutions, as a replacement for the wider practice of trade).
What Hess suggested about that definitional move is that seeing business as an institution means that academia—especially the humanities—has a great deal of already-produced knowledge about business that can, should and does have value for specific businesses. That’s not just a practical move that makes it easier to mount a new program of study using existing courses and already-hired faculty, it’s a shift in the kind of subordinating, supplicating position that many academic leaders (and enemies of academia) are trying to force humanists to accept in relationship to business. Just in a purely personal sense, this point kind of hit me like a ton of bricks—I came to this workshop thinking of myself as largely an outsider whose interest in the subject lay well outside the core framing, and then realized with a start that I wrote a book that is substantially about business history. More than that, I recalled that the most unexpected part of my research was interviewing professionals in the advertising business and realizing they were avidly interested in the substantive knowledge I was producing—that the theoretical or ideological dimensions of my interpretation was no obstacle to their ability to apply what I was thinking about to their own work. So why should I or anyone like me take myself out of a conversation about “business”? Or reduce myself in my own imagination to a teacher of useful skills for those who might be employed by businesses?
Great love expressed in first part, great insight in the last. I recall the ways you took marketing seriously in your dissertation in showing how marketers tried to produce good research in Zimbabwe... but