The Wizard of Oz and the Business School

Much has been made about fraud in industry, but there is as much fraud in education.  An example is the enrollment of unqualified students who are told that they will find jobs appropriate to college graduates but never will because they lack the writing skills.  Often, colleges will tell applicants  that if they matriculate, they will get high-paying jobs. The students do the necessary work, and of course make the necessary payments, but in the end they do not get a job equal to the one promised.  This is especially true of business schools, which use statistical manipulation of data on graduates' salaries to trick students into attending.

The film The Wizard of Oz adumbrates the academic scam.  The Wizard tells the Scarecrow that he doesn't need a brain--all he needs is a diploma.  As William Leach points out in his Land of Desire, which is about consumerism, The Wizard of Oz is about consumerism, for its author, Frank L. Baum, was one of the first modern advertising men. He created the window displays at Wanamaker's.  The Wizard, the man behind the curtain, is the same old snake oil salesman whom Dorothy knew in Kansas, but he uses new imagery:  the medal for the Cowardly Lion, the testimonial for the Tin Man, and the diploma for the Scarecrow.  Coinciding with the development of commercialism and marketing is the development of the university degree, a replacement for intellect and education.  This point is captured by Robert M. Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago in the 1940s, who decries the advent of the anti-intellectual university in his Higher Learning in America.  

But the illiteracy-producing university?  This is a topic that deserves more scrutiny. How many of America's college grads cannot write and are literally illiterate?
 
I moved to Manhattan after a small college on Long Island canned me. One of the doormen in the building had attended the same college. The college produced doormen.  Like Dante's admonition to abandon all hope,  they should have said as much above the doorway to the administration building, perhaps employing one of their own alums to open and close the door for prospective students. 

What is the role of standards-setting bodies in limiting the modern university's fraudulent production of illiteracy?  From what I can tell, the current standards-setting bodies in American universities are indifferent to whether college graduates can read, write, or do basic arithmetic.  Admittedly, I have not studied the question, but recently I heard a former chair of the board of trustees of a public university state that his students were at the national norm. But I know first-hand that a large share of his students are illiterate.  This suggests that the problem is pandemic.

Is the production of illiterate college grads a form of fraud?  If the college admits openly that it is graduating illiterate students, and it tells the students that if they cannot write, then they cannot find jobs, then it is not committing fraud.  The board of trustees chair did no such thing.  He insisted that his illiterate students are literate.  The students pay for an education, so if they are paying thinking that they are being educated, and they are not, then the university is committing fraud.  Fraud is lying for money.  Colleges like to claim that their graduates will all get great jobs.  I suspect that a large share of colleges, including top business schools, routinely commit fraud.  Many, but of course not all, higher education institutions have ethical characteristics much like Enron's.

United Conformists of America

The defining feature of American life is neither freedom nor democracy. It is conformity. Rather than create an economic and political system devoted to rights and democracy,  Americans have created one based on conformity-to-power. American democracy is not just the tyranny of the majority--it is the banality of the $250 prostitute who conforms to the desires of her john.  The  john is the boss who makes demands on those who work for him.  Political correctness in universities, groupthink in corporations, and obedience to military orders are fundamental to the large-scale organizations on which American life is based; one cannot flourish in America without making the fictitious pleasure moans of a prostituted yes-man.  The chief source of independence from the American whore house is accumulated wealth, but the media madams and pimps, and the government and corporate  racketeers who control them, impose high marginal tax rates that, prophylactically, prevent release.

America's Political and Economic Systems Have Failed, and They Should be Dismantled

The average American earns no more than he earned in 1970.  Yet, the supposed promise of American life is economic growth and opportunity. There has been no, zero, zip economic growth in 40 years.  What has occurred is that more Americans do more unproductive work on behalf of more  government and more social parasites.  The devil in the story is the government, of course, which has misdirected the economy and created income inequality, economic stagnation, lack of opportunity, and job flight.  In doing so, it has murdered millions of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of others around the world. America's great error has been assumption of an imperial crown; like Rome, America was a republic that became an empire in centuries-long decline.

The solution is not an even greater empire. The United Nations, whose land was donated by the Rockefeller family and developed by Progressive Robert Moses, is no solution, nor is socialism.  They are the problems.

America's empire building arises from narcissism.  The nation was successful not because of Hamilton and Lincoln but because of the anti-Federalist spirit, which imbued the individual with ambition, achievement orientation, and confidence to work in a spirit inherited from Americans' Calvinist faith.   The federalist--as opposed to Federalist--mindset limited central power and so permitted creativity and innovation.  State-oriented economic interests, including the slave interest as reflected in the writings of George Fitzhugh and, earlier, in Hamilton's reports to Congress, were from the beginning narcissistic.

Jefferson's legacy was powerful enough to restrain Hamilton's and Lincoln's narcissism for a century, until the 1890s; in the 1890s belief in the power of an elite to guide society--as opposed to the ideal of a spontaneous order created through the innovative capacity of all human beings--became the nation's bylaw.  From there, it was a simple matter to extend the narcissistic, rationalistic fantasy from Washington to the League of Nations. 

Like all human delusions, the rationalist, Progressive fantasy will fail.  The Roman system was based on rational self-interest and economic exploitation; so is the Progressive system.  The reason the economy has not grown, that the average American is not better off, is that the Progressive model cannot innovate. Planners' expectations limit progress no matter how smart the planners are.  The result is stagnation and then collapse as events outside the ken of rationalistic thought overtake the planners' mental models.  The process took four centuries with respect to the western Roman Empire, and 14 centuries with respect to the eastern one.  I give America a century.  The decline will be more rapid because advances in transportation and communication (that occurred in libertarian Britain and America) have hastened the historical pace of change.

The solution is, of course, decentralization--the dismantling of the federal government and the abolition of the United Nations.  Doing so would restructure the process of special interest extraction, creating a new, level playing field.  The costs of the United Nations have quickly exceeded its benefits (if there are any benefits), and the UN should be transformed into a global treaty organization like the World Trade Organization. Washington should be merged into Virginia, and the federal government should be closed.  The remnant of the federal government should also be a treaty organization similar to NATO.  In fact, the federal government could be replaced by NATO, with the states individually joining the World Trade Organization. 

Bliss Is Better Than Ignorance

A friend has been up in arms about slanted, pro-Obama coverage.  It is not that the media is liberal, corporatist, or mainstream.  The media is a dumb wasteland.  I advised her to avoid making herself ignorant and turn off the TV or close the newspaper forever.

M, why watch the bozos on television?  You know that they are propagandists, and often ignorant ones.  Why waste your time with the likes of the guy you’re writing to (whom I’ve never heard of, incidentally, and I am happy about it).  You know that the television, radio, and print sources are, with few exceptions, sources of lies, propaganda, ignorance, and stupidity—usually all of them combined—so why help their ratings by watching them?    I haven’t watched television or read a Wall Street-linked newspaper in years, and I am better informed for it.