A friend of mine forwarded a letter he received this week that really made me take stock of who has been responsible for the economic catastrophe we are living through.
My friend does some really important work; he teaches middle school kids in rural Mississippi. He originally is from the east coast, but he and his wife have taken to becoming good progressive Southerners. I knew he had gotten an undergraduate degree from a small liberal arts college, though I didn't know where.
I do now, and I won't forget it.
The letter my friend forwarded was from the President of that university, Earlham College. His name is Dr. Douglas C. Bennett. The letter is directed to alumni, and is an incredibly compelling discussion on "the values that guide those of us who live and work at Earlham College and who form its campus community." But it's the way he starts the letter that really lays our situation in the United States completely bare:
September 1, 2009
Dear Friends:
As we reflect on the financial mess of the past eighteen months, the foreclosures and bank failures, the stock market values that melted away in a matter of months, and now, especially, the cruel and likely persistent levels of unemployment that are ravaging communities around the globe, I think we have to acknowledge that this mess did not arise from ignorance and stupidity. It arose, instead, from intelligence and intellectual sophistication. Any sober reckoning will have to accord (and not for the first time) a primary role to the best and the brightest.
I am not meaning to mount a political argument here. I am not trying to lay the blame on some smart people as opposed to other smart people (though there may be a place elsewhere for such apportionment). I only want to note that those who did the most to precipitate this mess are people with very high apportionments of intelligence and education — much higher apportionments than those who will suffer the worst consequences. And thus I want to acknowledge that we who work in institutions of higher education need, again, to take stock. [emphasis added]
There are so many terribly bright people here on dKos, that I just want to repeat it, because it needs to sink in to all of us: those who did the most to precipitate this mess are people with very high apportionments of intelligence and education — much higher apportionments than those who will suffer the worst consequences.
Dr. Bennett says something that very few people have talked about lately. The people who sunk the world economy---the bankers, the Wall Street mavens, the government regulators, the politicians, the lobbyists, the corporate honchos who benefited so handsomely---they are the smartest people in the room; they have enjoyed the best and brightest educations. They are graduates of our most esteemed and illustrious universities, and have learned from some of the most important thinkers in the country. They are the beneficiaries of every higher and noble aspiration our democracy has placed on"intelligence and education."
And yet, look what they did to the rest of us . . .
That human beings were greedy and looked to make a quick buck where they could is not surprising. That smart, well-educated people, exposed to the best educations that our society can offer would do this? That should be more than a surprise. It should be shocking. And it is to me today, in a way that I didn't consider before.
The rot that the Great Recession has exposed in the pattern of politics and economics of the last 30 years is not just a function of greedy Republican me-me-me ideology. Dr. Bennett tells us that it is also a function of a system of higher education that hasn't succeeded in its societal responsibilities. As those of us in the academy know, the data we witness all around us right now should be considered awfully compelling.
I'm glad to hear that Dr. Bennett is having this conversation at Earlham, and I'm happy to see liberal art colleges as a whole taking up leadership on what is perhaps among the most serious responsibilities of higher education. But like so many other caustic effects of our decades of political conservatism---the interconnected tragedies of global climate change, peak oil, increasing economic inequity, devolving public discourse---I think it's reasonable to wonder if we've got the capacity to do it.
Thankfully, Dr. Bennett and Earlham don't seem to doubt that we can.