I was recently forwarded this libertarian diatribe by Bill Bonner, who used the occasion of his son’s graduation from UVA to proclaim, in the name of Thomas Jefferson, Rabbi Hillel, and efficient markets, the worthlessness of an undergraduate education.  I fired off this indignant response, which I have slightly reworked for State of Formation since it touches on issues of religious ethics.  (You may need to wade through his essay to understand mine).

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Too many undergraduates are piling up mountains of debt to acquire an education that often leaves them unable even to write a simple essay or to analyze prose, libertarian Bill Bonner rightly points out in a reflection on his son’s recent UVA graduation.  His strident essay argues that most undergraduate education is worthless, giving students ‘pseudo-knowledge’ that leaves them out of touch with ‘the real world.’  Bonner also snipes at undergraduates for their inability to perform basic tasks like ‘declining Latin verbs‘ — I presume he means conjugating.

His essay also demonstrates the same lazy habits of thinking and writing that I try to drill out of my first year undergraduates at UVA.

Since Bonner appeals to Jefferson’s legacy, perhaps it is worth beginning with what Jefferson actually said about the purposes of a university education:

To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing; To improve by reading, his morals and faculties; To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either; To know his rights; to exercise with order and justice those he retains; to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor and judgement; And, in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed.

Jefferson thought preparation for the real world of business was important, but he also insisted that a university should form the morals, character, and social interactions of its students.  Whether or not Bonner is right that Jefferson would ‘roll his eyes’ at the moral platitudes of graduation speakers, he would certainly be rolling in his grave at the thought that, as Bonner asserts, only ‘science and engineering’ were worth our time and our money as objects of study, that working in government makes one a ‘parasite’ (like those parasites working at the public university he founded), or that the Golden Rule constitutes sufficient ethical formation.

Bonner quotes ‘the Jewish philosopher Hillel’ to show that the ‘core idea’ of the Torah, the Bible, the Sermon on the Mount, and business ethics, is the Golden Rule: ‘If you wouldn’t want someone to do it to you, don’t do it to someone else.’  He pours his scorn on the idea that UVA would offer a business ethics class: this only ‘retards your education,’ he says, because real life is so ‘complex’ and ‘nuanced.’

The story to which Bonner alludes comes from that most complex of texts, the Babylonian Talmud:

On another occasion it happened that a certain Gentile came before Shammai and said to him, ‘Make me a proselyte, on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.’ Thereupon he drove him away with a stick.  When he asked the same question to Hillel, he answered, ‘What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah, and the rest is its commentary.  Go and study it’ (b. Sabbath 31a).

My undergraduates would begin analyzing this passage by noticing things.  For example, this Gentile is insulting these rabbis by asking the question in this way — and one very respected rabbi (Shammai) refuses to answer on these terms.  Probably asking to be taught ‘on condition that’ also evinces exceptional foolishness — and indeed the immediately preceding story in the Talmud explicitly makes the point that a student should not put conditions on what or how their teacher shall teach them.  In this context, Hillel’s reply is not that of a philosopher abstracting the ‘core idea’ of Torah — let alone ‘business ethics’! — but an introductory summary given as a gracious concession to an obstinate and insulting student.  Nor is it the last word, for Hillel adds, ‘the rest is its commentary.  Go and study it.’ It is not enough, as Bonner supposes, to go into the world armed with this one principle: one must use this principle as a key to one’s further study of the text of Torah (a task that is so difficult to accomplish while pursuing business that the rabbis prohibit any work or business one day a week, so that Sabbath may be solely devoted to prayer and study.)

Even if we were simply to apply Hillel’s principle as the ‘core idea’ of business ethics, matters are not as simple as Bonner implies.  To be sure, many ethical theories actually agree with Bonner that real ethical situations are inevitably more complex than those one imagines in the classroom.  Does it follow, then, that ‘the time you spend on campus actually prevents and delays you coming to grips with the real problems you will face in real life?’  Not in the least: a principle like ‘If you wouldn’t want someone to do it to you, don’t do it to someone else’ is trickier than Bonner lets on.  Notice that the antecedent is in the subjunctive: ‘if you wouldn’t . . .’  In other words, it asks you to put yourself ‘in another man’s shoes.’  But you are not really in his shoes — so even for Bonner, to think ethically requires that you think beyond your actual situation to a possible (and unreal) one, the imagined situation in which you and your neighbor switched places.  Before one can decide what to do, one must therefore have enough imagination, empathy, and insight to be able to genuinely step out of one’s own situation and into another one. This is made even more difficult by the fact that, as most ethical theorists have realized, we are inclined to favor ourselves, judging ourselves in the best possible light and our neighbor in the worst possible.

In the rough and tumble of the ‘real’ business world, surrounded by like-minded peers and a culture that may have very little interest in this Golden Rule, it is not a simple matter to imagine oneself into the shoes of others.  In a classroom, it’s easier — not only does one have some distance from the particular pressures and interests of a real situation, but one must also discuss ethical questions with classmates who think and feel differently from oneself, and who who will often give voice to what one’s neighbor would say much more vividly than one’s own imagination could. The ability to see empathetically beyond one’s own narrow horizon is also a virtue which literature, history, and philosophy help form, no doubt one reason that, unlike Bonner, UVA sees value in offering classes like ‘Black Woman Authors’ or ‘Creole Narratives.’

In short, the abstractions of the classroom have both costs and benefits — but Bonner, like too many of my undergraduates, leaps dogmatically from seeing its limitations to asserting its worthlessness.

I doubt, though, that Bonner truly has much interest in ethics — his final ‘mind your own business’ seems to be closer to his ethical creed.  The primary value he seems to know is money and physical comforts: a ‘better world,’ he says, is one that is ‘richer and more prosperous . . . and better organized . . . safer and healthier.’  In past generations, students learned foreign languages not to flaunt them like Bonner (that is true ‘pseudo-knowledge’) but to open up authors who forced them to think outside this narrow horizon.  Aristotle and Kant make quick work of someone who imagines money or comfort could be ultimately or intrinsically valuable (which is not to deny its usefulness or importance).  The Bible, to which Bonner appeals, is even harsher in its judgment about the perils of wealth.  So if not money, what makes a life worthwhile?  If not the efficient production of consumer goods, what makes a society truly great? A society whose citizens no longer ask or care about such questions may be prosperous, but it is not a society I should care to live in.

Most of my students come in thinking with Bonner’s dogmatism and parroting his ideologies.  I hope they leave a little more capable of analyzing, of thinking, and of questioning, capacities which Bonner extols and claims for himself, but does not exhibit.  I think Jefferson would be proud of my work and that of my colleagues.