School is for Learning How to Live and Work

June 16, 2013 By David Griesing 2 Comments

Fewer students are pursuing humanities degrees today because of concern about their value in the marketplace. Indeed, the issue has become a political football, with North Carolina’s governor, Pat McCrory, among others, arguing that states should stop subsidizing certain humanities programs at pubic institutions because they don’t lead to jobs.

Colleges & universities are reacting to this kind of cost-benefit analysis with sharper arguments about the ways their offerings contribute to post-graduate life and work. Unfortunately, beyond all the arguments, the basic changes that are needed will only come when the custodians of higher education acknowledge how they’ve helped to make a liberal arts education irrelevant for most students. There are glimmers of hope, but there is little to suggest that these basic changes will be happening anytime soon.

For example, Harvard published a report last week that attempted to respond to concerns about fewer humanities majors and their poor prospects in the job market. The report said that its English and other humanities departments should “market themselves better” to undergraduates before they declare their majors while “improving their internship networks.” A Wall Street Journal article tried to bolster these modest proposals by noting that Harvard has been “for centuries a standard bearer of American letters” while, in a sidebar, identifying humanities graduates who went on to successful careers, including media magnate Sumner Redstone (Classics & Government) and Goldman Sack’s chair Lloyd Blankfein (Social Studies).

Proponents have also been more vocal about how the ideal humanities degree prepares you for the working world. One classics professor highlighted the core career competencies identified in the 2013 Job Outlook Survey from the National Association of Colleges & Employers, noting that they “correspond very strongly with the content and skills acquired through a liberal arts education,” namely: communication, teamwork, problem solving, critical thinking and organization.

University of Chicago’s president Robert Zimmer responded to students dropping out of college and going directly into business by noting that “[a]t their best, colleges and universities are themselves hothouses of innovation, a natural site and climate for translating ideas into application.” (In prior posts, I’ve also talked about when experience is the better teacher and the university as innovation hothouse.)

Wesleyan’s Michael Roth further bolsters the case by seeing higher education as “a catalytic resource that continues to energize and shape your life.”

Many seem to think that by narrowing our focus to just science and engineering, we will become more competitive. This is a serious mistake…

[I]nnovation in technology companies, automobile design, medicine or food production will not come only from isolated work in technical disciplines. Effective vaccine delivery programs, for example, require technical expertise, but they also require cultural understanding, economic planning and ethical reasoning. . .The growing field of animal studies, for example, brings together interpretative and analytic skills along with contemporary scientific research.

We should look at education not as a specific training program for a limited range of mental muscles but as a process through which one will generate some of the most important features in one’s life. It makes no sense to train people as narrowly as possible in a world going through cataclysmic changes, for you are building specific strengths that leave you merely muscle-bound, not stronger and more flexible.

We should think of education as a kind of intellectual cross-training that leads to many more things than at any one moment you could possibly know would be useful.

OK, so it’s not only skills but also qualities of mind like imagination, flexibility and the ability to grow that are the hoped-for byproducts of a liberal arts education. But is this what a humanities degree really provides today?

The same article announcing Harvard’s new report barely mentioned Wake Forest (in Governor McCrory’s most interesting state) and its integration of “personal and career development” into its curriculum. For several years now, I’ve been eavesdropping on what Wake and its champion on the issue, Andy Chan, have been up to. As it turns out, they seem to be getting at least half of it right.

Andy Chan, Personal & Career Development at Wake Forest

At Wake, what they’re aiming for in terms of personal & career (life & work) development isn’t a service department, like a guidance counselor you have to sit down with just before you leave, but what they call an “ecosystem.”

Individual career services departments cannot shoulder the burden of educating, advising and supporting students on their own. It is crucial that other constituents (faculty, staff, parents, alumni) are trained, encouraged and motivated to help students in a variety of ways – as advisors, connectors, influencers, and mentors.

In class, in one-on-one meetings, in internships, and other interactions, these constituents are encouraged to help students to grapple with a sequence of 4 questions: “Who am I?” “What shall I do?” “How will I get there?” and “Once there, how will I be successful?”

So far, so good. It’s about the entire college or university community helping their individual students to think about, so that they can connect in an effective manner with, the post-graduate world. It’s a different focus than having faculty off on celebrity book tours or alumni looking to have buildings or basketball courts named after them. In an ecosystem like this, “constituent payback” is assisting rising generations to successfully launch.

But community isn’t enough without the right course of study.

Most humanities departments have thrown out a core curriculum based on Western thought in favor of a smorgasbord of victim studies, self-directed projects, exercises in political correctness, and field trips. Job qualities like imagination and flexibility are more likely to spring from a more comprehensive knowledge base than this, and 40 years ago a liberal arts education provided it—along with some of the raw materials for living a life with meaning and purpose.

In the cafeteria plan of higher education today, most students don’t know enough to pick what will ultimately be “good” for them. So the issue is whether the ecosystem is also willing to provide a menu “with healthier choices” that includes comprehensive exposure to our civilization’s greatest ideas and stories. It’s precisely what Anthony Kronman urges in Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.

Artes liberals or liberal arts means “the skills of free person.” It’s a course of study that can be the ticket to a satisfying job and a fulfilling life. It’s what those in the forefront, like Andy Chan and Anthony Kronman, are proposing. Unfortunately, most of higher education is not even close to providing it.

How “Everyday Low Prices” Hurt Us All

June 4, 2013 By David Griesing 2 Comments

Our expectation that we’ll always pay less for consumer products has an impact on the people in the supply chain who bring us those products—and it’s not a good one.

I’m talking about those who mine the metals in your cell phone, pick the cotton in your socks, process the rubber in your running shoes. It’s the workers in places like Indonesia or Peru who put your toaster together, stick the pins in your dress shirt so it looks good in its package, or pack the parts you’ll assemble into an IKEA bookcase. Finally, it’s the American sales clerks, service managers, stock boys and checkout girls who get the final product into your hands.

To bring you “everyday low prices,” the people in these supply chains are paid “as little as their labor markets will bear” so that the factory owners, shippers and ultimately the stores you shop in can make a profit when you open up your wallet. With fewer dollars to go around and cutthroat competition between the on-line and bricks&mortar stores, every link in the consumer product supply chain is squeezed. This includes workers along the arc of production—including those in America.

How is our addiction to cheap stuff making the work that many of our neighbors do everyday a losing proposition—and why should we care?

At one level, this is how capitalism is supposed to operate. Workers trade their labor for wages, and the owners figure out how to make a profit after the labor and other costs of doing business are covered. In competitive markets, this means that there is constant pressure to produce as cheaply as possible. Manufacturers flee the US for cheaper labor in Mexico or Bangladesh, and as wages rise in those places, to even poorer countries with “surplus workers” for hire. American factories close because it costs so much less to make your shirt or toaster somewhere else.

But millions of Americans still staff the big box stores where you’ll likely buy that shirt or toaster this year. Over the years, we have grown accustomed to “the cheap foreign labor dividend” that enables us to pay less and less when we go shopping for consumer products. But there are only so many savings to be realized from cheap labor abroad. At some point, full-time American workers in this supply chain also get squeezed, often to the point where they can no longer live on the money they earn.

There are “acceptable” and “unacceptable” efficiencies in capitalism.

For example, you can’t make shoddy merchandise because it won’t sell in most markets. Child labor, sweatshops, safety and health risks, damage to the environment are also unacceptable (at least when it comes to making something in the U.S.). But what happens when all of the “acceptable” efficiencies have been obtained, and only “unacceptable” ones remain?

When it comes to many of our consumer products, we have already crossed that divide today—and our expectations as consumers have a lot to do with it.

Wal-Mart was a revolutionary company because it mastered the art of selling products to consumers more efficiently than they had ever been sold before. As discussed in a recent Atlantic article by Jordan Weissmann, it paid its workers so little that they had no alternative but to shop at discount stores. . . like Wal-Mart. However, it didn’t end there. Many full-time jobs at Wal-Mart and other big box stores barely take a family of three over the federal poverty line. These retailers are simply not paying most of their workers enough to live on, what we call “a living wage.”

Ultimately, this all comes back to consumers. We are the ones who choose where to take our business. And for the most part, Americans have chosen cheap.

It’s hard to blame middle class families for making that decision—not a lot of people have the extra cash to make a political statement out of where they buy paper towels and diapers. But it’s led to cycle of [worker] impoverishment….

Economists have considered what it would cost to break this cycle, and it turns out that the cost to us would come pretty cheap. Weissmann cites a study by UC-Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education suggesting that it would cost the average shopper only $12.49 more a year if Wal-Mart paid its workers a living wage.

So the questions remain: what’s to be done about the human cost of everyday low prices? And why should any of us care?

Most of us will voice our opposition to merchants paying full-time American workers less than a living wage, but our abstract moral concerns are trumped—almost every single time—by the consumer product we want and the low price we want to pay for it. So even if a wave of the wand could make it happen, would our behavior change if the trade offs were more explicit to us as consumers?

Such as a sign you see before entering the big box store that says: “Be willing to pay a little more so that the workers here can get a paycheck they can live on.”
The checkout girl wearing a badge that says: “Your addiction to everyday low prices means I can’t support my family.”
Would realizing that the person harmed is standing in front of you be enough to get you to shop at the mom & pop store that charges more so it can pay its employees fairly?
Would coming face-to-face with the social cost of consumer economics lead you to add a few bucks to your checkout bill, like a “tip,” for the “Big Box Employee Living Wage Fund”?

At the very least, the realities of our addiction to low prices and its human costs need to become more personal as close to the point of purchase as possible. That said, while there is always hope that the situation could change someday, there’s hardly cause for optimism if the consciousness raising goes no further than this.

What’s also needed is an understanding of why changing this value proposition in our consumer driven economy is important to you and the value of your work?

When some workers in your community are treated like property, it is easier for your employer to treat you that way—an economic instead of a human resource, little more than a cog in a wheel. As more and more full time, middle class jobs are lost to “the knowledge economy,” and more work is assigned on a part-time, piecemeal basis, it will become harder for any of us to make a living wage. Self-interest may lead us to start demanding that every single full time worker in America is making enough to live on.

It is also about community. The consumer product workforce is comprised of your family members and neighbors and people you see all the time. They don’t or can’t “move on” to better jobs, because increasingly those “better” jobs are unavailable. As an increasingly permanent part of our way of life, they are connected to you and to me, and have a face.

As we put our economy back together, there is an opportunity to rebuild our communities around the work that each and every person in it does. But communities where every worker is appropriately valued will never be possible until we confront our addiction to consumer prices that are lower than they have to be.

A version of this post also appeared on Marc Gunther’s Business & Sustainability Blog, where it provoked a range of comments.

The Pause That Refreshes

May 26, 2013 By David Griesing 3 Comments

Energy and work have a complicated relationship. When we’re firing on all cylinders, we’re burning energy but creating it too—with no net waste in a productive cycle. But sustaining a focused hum also requires giving your mind a break and letting it drift for a few precious minutes or hours. Concentration can be recharged by allowing yourself to get lost in a different rhythm.

Close your eyes to pick out the sounds or smells: how composer John Cage found the music in New York City, how you can catch a whiff of perfume or of the clean from someone’s morning shower. You also let the wave float you back to shore by opening your eyes really wide and drinking in the natural world.

My neighbor, Leigh Marsh, has been a veterinarian for almost 60 years, still working until ten or eleven most nights, although a concession of sorts is his setting out a bit later than he used to most mornings. Leigh’s veterinary practice began in a prosperous part of town, and stayed when all the money got up and went. He’s there for the dogs, cats and people who keep them, and thrives on the community that he helps to preserve. Whenever I ask Leigh “How are you?” he says: “Great, as long as I can keep working.”

He wouldn’t call it hard work, but it is.

He’d tell you he doesn’t have a secret, but he does.

I was in my front yard yesterday when I noticed Leigh and Jane (his daughter in for a visit) scanning the ribbon of grass between the street and the sidewalk in front of his house. They walked back & forth, fully engaged, with heads bowed. Maybe a lost earring, I thought. They went inside eventually, but Leigh was out again soon, scouring that strip of ground. “Do you need another pair of eyes?” I called, walking over. Barely looking up he said: “There are four and even five and six-leaf clovers here,” giving those he’d already found a quick wave to demonstrate the truth of it. “And this here is a particularly good patch.”

Psychologists have known for over a century that there are two kinds of attention: the directed attention we use when we’re concentrating, and the involuntary attention that requires no mental effort at all. A recent article in the Atlantic traces the distinction to William James, who said it is “[s]trange things, moving things, wild animals, bright things, pretty things, words, blows, blood, etc., etc., etc.” that attract our attention involuntarily.

It’s attraction that comes with a slew of salutary benefits.

In a recent study, portable EKGs traced the brainwaves of people walking in heavily trafficked urban areas, in parks and in the spaces in-between to see if there were discernible differences. In an interview after the study, lead researcher Jenny Roe noted that the walkers became “mentally quieter” in more natural places. “Natural environments still engage” the brain, she said, but the attention demanded “is effortless.” Environments like these “hold our attention while at the same time allowing scope for reflection.” They elevate our abilities to sense and to wander while putting our minds at ease.

Of course, psychologists also couldn’t resist naming “the replenishing part” of involuntary attention. According to Adam Alter in the Atlantic piece, they gave it the appropriately poetic acronym ART, for attention restoration theory. Here it is in a nutshell:

[U]rban environments are draining because they force us to direct our attention to specific tasks (e.g., avoiding the onslaught of traffic) and grab our attention dynamically, compelling us to “look here!” before telling us to instead “look over there!” These demands are draining — and they’re also absent in natural environments. Forests, streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans demand very little from us, though they’re still engaging, ever changing, and attention-grabbing. The difference between natural and urban landscapes is how they command our attention. While man-made landscapes bombard us with stimulation, their natural counterparts give us the chance to think as much or as little as we’d like, and the opportunity to replenish exhausted mental resources.

In this, the man-made, urban environment is synonymous with the workplace.

Getting lost in nature for a few moments relieves the workplace stresses too. The harder we work the more we need to get lost in it, and all the other strange and moving, bright and pretty things that can take us away for awhile and return us to the tasks at hand refreshed.

In other words, it’s knowing when to stop and pick the clover.

At Work I’m a Dancing Machine

May 19, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We hear a lot about work, how it’s wearing us down, or covering the bills, or how much it lets us “contribute to the economy as consumers.”

Less attention is paid to looking at our bodies at work: the rhythm of routine, the mesh of collaboration and the reach of accomplishment. It’s how we’re sometimes reduced to a fist by what others think of the work we’re doing, or elevated to a higher state by the sense of purpose it gives us. It’s man as Icarus but also as machine.

The Jobs Project, playing in Philadelphia through today, is a bold, imaginative, and sharply executed dialogue in words and movement that captures familiar and unfamiliar truths about the work we all do.

We say it with paint or poetry or sculptural forms because they open up levels of meaning that are simply not available any other way. This is true of dance too, but The Jobs Project from a company called RealLivePeople(in)Motion, gets its singular edge by also being a hybrid. It pairs the cadence of one to six dancers with recorded comments from men and women about their work, and mid-dance interviews with the performers themselves about what they do when they’re not dancing—or do so that they can dance—all to an hypnotic score by Ilan Isakov.

This inspired mash-up of inputs provides take-aways about the workplace that add both layers and textures to what we think we know about what happens there every day.

The Jobs Project is the brainchild of Gina Hoch-Stall, its richly gifted choreographer and director. Gina dances too, with the precision clockwork of a troupe that includes Molly Jackson, David Konyk, Sara Nye, Mason Rosenthal and Hedy Wyland.

Ingredients essential to the whole were provided by others too, like Andrea Calderise (artist), Megan Quinn (dramaturg), Patricia Dominguez (costume design), Maria Shaplion (lighting) and those joining Ilya on the sound score (Four Tet, Garth Stevenson, Michael Wall, Nathan Fake and The Books). Grassroots support for a performance that’s been building for more than a year was given a welcomed assist by the Puffin Foundation (“continuing the dialogue between art and the lives of ordinary people”), the Latvian Society (by hosting) and Yards Brewing Company (by wetting the whistle).

Like a start-up company, almost as breathtaking as anything here was the ability of this dedicated core to make something this wondrous come to life.

You can see a bit of the magic for yourself in the rehearsal footage here (with some or all of the piece to be posted later). While you’re watching, I invite you to imagine an element in the performance that made one of the most important points of all.

The Jobs Project was crisp and precise, but improvised and spontaneous too, like the best work. It is one of the dancers, Mason Rosenthal, who interviews the other dancers as they crisscross the space. The fun he had throughout, and how his seemingly off-the-cuff comments both relieve and accentuate the rigor of the forms around him, said something essential about the work we all do.

That it can and should provide a measure of fun while you’re doing it.

Hats off to all!

A Good Boy is One of Life’s Great Rewards

April 27, 2013 By David Griesing 7 Comments

RUDY December 11, 1998-April 25, 2013 — RUDY
(December 12, 1997 – April 25, 2013)

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers & Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Buy a pup and your money will buy
Love unflinching that cannot lie--
Perfect passion and worship fed
By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.
Nevertheless it is hardly fair
To risk your heart for a dog to tear.

When the fourteen years which Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, tumours & fits,
And the vet's unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
Then you will find--it's your own affair--
But...you've given your heart to a dog to tear.

When the body that lived at your single will,
With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still)
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone--wherever it goes--for good,
You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart to a dog to tear.

We've sorrow enough in the natural way,
When it comes to burying Christian clay.
Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent.
Though it is not always the case, I believe,
That the longer we've kept'em, the more do we grieve;

For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,
A short-time loan is as bad as a long--
So why in--Heaven (before we are there)
Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?

Rudyard Kipling, The Power of the Dog