The man who gave us Dilbert, that irascible cubicle-dweller, his tie perpetually upturned, whose daily?panel-by-panel ordeals presented a particularly pointed satire of the modern workplace with its indigestible euphemistic business-speak and mawkish sign-the-card rituals, has written a piece for the Wall Street Journal in which he makes a case for teaching college students less about art history (who needs it?) and more about "entrepreneurship." For the way of the entrepreneur, Scott Adams writes, is the way to success. He calls his own life to the stand to provide evidence for his claim.
While some of his friends were wasting time in college learning history, reading great books, memorizing facts, Adams was designing his own course of study in practicality. He managed the finances at his campus's student-run bar and was able to turn the place from a ?money-losing mess? into a profitable juggernaut. He also had the cojones to vote to fire his good friend, a lousy bartender, but also the foresight and creativity to persuade his fellow managers to rehire that very friend as the bar's leader, a task for which friend was supremely suited. ?That,? Adams writes, ?was the year I learned everything I needed to know about management.?
Other evidentiary examples involve the plans of Adams and his college crew to take over management of their dormitory and get paid to do so. The dean responded to the offer with one of his own: if a majority of students who planned to live in the dorm the next year liked Adams's idea, the college would like it, too. ?It was a high hurdle,? Adams writes,
but a loophole made it easier to clear. We only needed a majority of students who said they planned to live in the dorm next year. And we had plenty of friends who were happy to plan just about anything so long as they could later change their minds. That's the year I learned that if there's a loophole, someone's going to drive a truck through it, and the people in the truck will get paid better than the people under it.
The dean required that Adams and friends draw up a new constitution for the dormitory and then go about getting the thing ratified. Adams wrote the governing document over the summer and then, come fall, held a convention at which all students were invited to submit their ideas. A week later he passed out copies of the constitution he had written months earlier but claimed it was, in fact, not his own summertime work but a compendium of all the suggestions made at the convention: ?That was the year I learned everything I know about getting buy-in.? The cartoonist proffers advice for the college-bound, college-arrived, and college-departing: Combine skills, he says, and attract luck. Fail forward. Find the action. Conquer fear. Et cetera. General ideas, all. Bad idea, none.
But why must such lessons replace those on Titian, or aluminum, or derivatives, or Mozart? Adams's stories are humorous, and one is sure that he did learn much practical knowledge from his undergraduate hijinks, but for most intelligent people a worthy life is not one fixated on scrutinizing and resolving how best to manipulate others for personal gain, or how to superficially position oneself to preeminently capitalize on others' desires for personal gain. The argument Adams makes?most students will never be great at chemistry so why teach it to them??is doubly flawed. First, he bizarrely assumes that the sole reason to learn a subject is to be among the best at it (he also assumes that all subjects are amenable to having best practitioners). And second, by his own criteria there would be no reason to teach the very ?entrepreneurship? skills he so advocates, because obviously not every pupil will ken to them.
Adams could have made a more convincing case had he restructured and moderated his argument. And perhaps his original submission to the Wall Street Journal was more restrained. That paper, however, has lately shown a penchant for publishing sensational pieces and for, perhaps, sensationalizing those more staid.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow