Once, a student told me that he couldn’t present his final assignment for my public speaking class because he had to take the CPA exam. It was understood that the exam would take precedence as a kind of gateway to gainful employment, but I was still a little surprised at how compelled I felt to step aside. As an adjunct, I’ve been made aware of the connection between public speaking and employment for Baruch students. Several teachers work in public relations firms or as corporate consultants outside the college, and students seem to respect and learn from they way they both model and teach the conventions of business professional comportment and conventions.
I’ve told my students that public speaking assignments should prepare them for the corporate world in terms of how to coherently present their work, and how to be poised, authoritative, and collegial doing it. I’d like to have more to say than this, but less to say than the broad justification of humanities that I’ve heard before (and largely believe). While I haven’t had any interest in the business world before, after teaching at Baruch for a few years, I’ve become more and more aware of how much I don’t know about it. I feel kind of hampered in my ability to figure out how what I am trying to offer (my own work research is in democracy and culture) might connect to their lives outside college. And hampered from connecting what I’m doing to what I guess makes up the majority of their classtime. I looked up ‘what can the humanities do for business’ and found a Stanford webpage from early this year, in which several people respond to Stanley Fish’s (he’s like academia’s Joe Liberman!). John Bender says, “Not too long ago, the New York Times reported interviews with a number of CEOs who connected their ability as managers to their long-term engagement with books of all kinds, including fiction and poetry.” Bryan Wolf responds that Fish is “trying to save the humanities from instrumentalization.” But I’m actually curious about what, in terms of business, that instrumentalization might be.
The Robert Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity has hosted some interesting panels, one on corporate failures that may have led to the current crisis called, “Did we get what we deserve?” And another one I wish I’d seen that featured alumni Edward Zinbarg, who wrote a book called Faith, Morals, and Money. So, I vow in 2010 to go to this center’s events, and meanwhile I’m working on a list of my favorite novels and plays, and the different ways they address money. So far, I’ve got: Aristophanes, The Acharnians, which stars a merchant who argues against an idealistic warmonger; anything by Charles Dickens; Easter, a play about debt and Christianity by Strindberg; Jerry McGuire (money and success is love); and Slumdog Millionaire. The more I read, the more leftward I seem to drift. And, while I refuse to read anymore Ayn Rand, I’m interested in literature that views neoliberalism and capitalism critically as well as positively. So far, Jerry McGuire is all I can think of. I’d like to find some writing on connection between literature and economics. So far, all I can think of is the passage in Capital when Marx talks about the lace-maker’s death notice, and how much it reminded me of Dickens. I’d like to read some fiction over winter break, even though I should be working and working. And I would like a booklist of fiction on money.
That is quite an order. I tried to think of a book that I had read recently that would fit into the category that you are specifically looking for, but came up without an answer. However, I recently finished
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which is perhaps more politically driven, but all politics must deal with money, so you may like that book. In looking for books that may be appealing to you, I ran across this site. http://www.jasonzweig.com/moneylit.html hope it helps.
Linell,
Along the lines of your thoughts on training in the humanities contributing to success in the corporate world, I am providing the link for a recent New York Times article posted on the English Department mail server at the Graduate Center by my colleague, David Bahr:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/business/10mba.html?em
Opening excerpt:
> Mr. Martin began advocating what was then a radical idea in business
> education: that students needed to learn how to think critically and
> creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting.
> More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many
> perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions.
> In 1999, few others in the business-school world shared Mr. Martin’s view.
> But a decade and a seismic economic downturn later, things have changed. “I
> think there’s a feeling that people need to sharpen their thinking skills,
> whether it’s questioning assumptions, or looking at problems from multiple
> points of view,” says David A. Garvin, a Harvard Business School professor
> who is co-author with Srikant M. Datar and Patrick G. Cullen of an upcoming
> book, “Rethinking the M.B.A.: Business Education at a Crossroads.”
> Learning how to think critically — how to imaginatively frame questions and
> consider multiple perspectives — has historically been associated with a
> liberal arts education, not a business school curriculum, so this change
> represents something of a tectonic shift for business school leaders. Mr.
> Martin even describes his goal as a kind of “liberal arts M.B.A.”
>
On a side note, I know it needs emphasis that reading and critical thinking skills lead to better business, though, to me, it is stating the obvious. I mean, don’t we all appreciate an articulate professional in any field, after all?