Jeffrey I. Kaplan, Phi Beta Kappa Speaker
The Solution to the Economic Crisis
This will come as a shock to most of you, but despite the title of this speech, I don’t have a solution to the entire economic crisis. But fellow graduates, here is a plan for how can can all get jobs despite the current circumstances.
Rather than applying for these jobs as individuals and letting employers assess our qualifications, we apply as a group by gathering all of our resumes and job applications together into a big package, or bundle, or what we could otherwise call a ... sub-prime job-application-backed security.
You see, by doing this we combine, say, a really desirable “Peter-Nurnberg-application,” with the somewhat less marketable “Jeff-Kaplan-Philosophy-major-didn’t-get-into-a-single-Ph.D.-program-application.” Then employers can hire a share of the security, and that just means that they have hired 1/512th of each of us to work for their company. Then we get bundled, split-up, sold, re-bundled, re-sold to somebody else; bada-bing bada-boom these employers aren't going to know who the hell they are hiring.
Classmates, in order to make this happen I need full cooperation. So for those of you who already have plans for next year, I am sorry, but you are going to have to drop them. Kate Ireland, if you are willing to give up your high-salary banking job in London, then we can all have high-salary jobs. Jeremy Goldstein, I think it is really nice that you are going to be giving up a few years to teach at a failing school in the Bronx, but there is great service to be done right here, helping us. Oh and this really makes me feel the worst, but Aroop Mukharji you are going to even further delay your plans to sit on your parents couch in your underwear watching The Price is Right while waiting for Dr. Phil to come on. These are real sacrifices, I recognize that, but we can do this.
You know what’s the craziest thing of all? We are actually trained to do this. Our liberal arts education allows us to do one-fifth of one percent of a few hundred jobs. We are not trained to perform one operation, but instead, we can do many. The job-application security reveals a particular interpretation of what the liberal arts means. I am going to call it the Swiss Army knife conception. You don’t buy a Swiss Army knife with a particular job in mind. The point of a Swiss Army knife is that rather than do just one job, it can do many. And that's the liberal arts, right?
Well, no. The job-application security reveals what is a very common-sense conception of the liberal arts: the Swiss Army knife conception. And in the next two minutes what I want to do is debunk that conception. We are not Swiss Army knives, nor can we be interchangeably sliced and diced to meet a Collateralized Employment Obligation. But although liberal artists don’t come with a corkscrew attachment, we are nevertheless prepared to meet difficult challenges.
Here we go. So if we are not getting a Swiss Army knife education, then what kind of education are we getting? To answer that question, I need to tell the following story, which took place my sophomore year.
There were four students, myself included — strangers — working quietly and separately in the 2nd-floor computer lab in Sawyer library when all-of-a-sudden a bird flew in through an open window. At great speed the bird slammed into the back of a girls computer, knocking the monitor onto her lap. Right away the bird is up and flying again, and we all stand up from our computers, terrified, as the bird darts around slamming into everything. Then the girl, who really showed a lot of quick thinking, started opening more windows and so I started doing the same. The bird flew directly into a whiteboard, but kept flying. Then someone else ran across the room and shut the door so that the bird wouldn’t escape into the library. Just then the bird banged into the ceiling. I screamed at the guy across the room to put down the shade on a big un-openable window. Then someone shut the lights and we all instinctively dropped to the floor. As soon as the only source of light was coming from the
open windows the bird flew directly at them, as fast as he could, slammed into a computer chair and then out the window into the safety of the open air.
Okay, here is my interpretation of this traumatic bird encounter. It seems to me that there are two ways to solve a problem. The first is for solving anticipated problems, in which case your training kicks in, like autopilot, to deal with the problem. This is the type of solution that a Swiss Army knife can provide. The Swiss Army knife has a great, but finite, number of tools and when you find yourself in a bind, you take out the appropriate tool. The other way to solve a problem applies when you have not anticipated the situation. Here, if you are going to solve the problem, then you need to rely on fundamental problem solving skills from which you can build a wholly novel solution right on-the-spot. This second type of problem solving is what I think we demonstrated in the face of our unexpected airborne visitor and it is the type of problem solving that a liberal arts education gives us.
When we look, very simply, at our education we see that it is not the type of education that would be recommended by the Swiss Army knife conception of the liberal arts. We are not given training for specific scenarios. It is not that we have a little bit of training in accounting, and a little bit of training in medicine, and a little bit of training in law. Rather, what we are given are those fundamental skills.
The idea is a simple one: because of our liberal arts training, we can deal with the unexpected. In that way, we are not Swiss Army knives.
We are better problem-solvers than Swiss Army knives because we can deal with the unexpected. And it is for that reason, classmates, and not in order to land cushy jobs, that I look forward, in the years to come, to working with 1/512th of each of you.
Thank you and Congratulations.
June 7, 2009