WPE: GENERAL

Giving Students a Liberal Dose of Art and Business

Many parents attending college commencements this spring might be surprised by a modest jeering directed at business-school graduates. The jeers will come from liberal-arts students who regard business students as money-grubbers insensitive to the finer aspects of philosophy and life. Business students, in turn, argue that most liberal-arts students are premed, prelaw or hopelessly idealistic dilettantes.

But the distinction between arts on the one hand and management education on the other is spurious. The challenges confronting society today are such that we can afford neither narrowly focused practical managers nor diffuse idealists.

When Benjamin Franklin founded the University of Pennsylvania in 1740, he admonished the fledging college to teach the "useful" and the "ornamental." Useful doesn't mean just business or preprofessional. I tell my students that through stints as a naval officer, an industrial engineer, a management professor and a university vice president, the college courses I have had the most opportunity to use were in art. Why? Because no other subject has so facilitated conversation and personal pleasure.

If the study and amateur practice of painting have been the most useful elements of my college education, statistics has been the most personally liberating. Understanding probability theory helped me escape from a naively mechanistic and moralistic view of the world. Grasping the meaning of randomness can provide protection from anger and guilt, especially when the good, the bad and the ugly seem to occur without reference to the character of the people involved.

It's time to discard outmoded value judgments about liberal and applied courses. Understanding managerial accounting is every bit as educationally liberating as studying Greek drama is useful in understanding the motivation of merger-and-acquisition specialists on Wall Street.

At a minimum, undergraduates should be able to pursue dual majors or a major and a minor -- in English and marketing, management and history, or music and accounting. We need liberal-arts and business students grounded in the history from which they have emerged, the technological realities of the world they inhabit, the social forces to which they are subject, the aesthetic heights to which they can aspire and the managerial tools that will enable them to lead.

Reference:

Prof. Ross Webber, Wharton School of the University of
Pennsylvania. U.S. News and World Report, June 6, 1988

Essay Prompt:

Write a persuasive essay in which you show why all college students should take "ornamental" courses such as literature, art, or music. Be sure to use specific examples to support your position.

- OR -

Defend your position not to take courses like those Franklin calls "ornamenta.l" Be sure to use specific examples to support your position.