Bandit, Tony B. and I are finally taking stock of all our notes and insights and are making another push with writing the book.  We are now calling the book NotanMBA, because we can!

One of those insights is that, unlike the educational and economic environment in which Bandit and I went to college (in the 1980s), squishy subjects like philosophy, anthropology, sociology, comparative literature, history etc., are in a rapid state of decline in American colleges and universities in terms of enrollment numbers.  Instead, kids now want to study business- operations, finance, accounting…Please, put a staple in my forehead!

Even engineering, once thought of as a field of study that was a gateway to a career of discovery and problem solving, is failing American businesses in that we simply don’t have enough engineering graduates to fill positions that companies need filled.  Thus our addiction to engineers from different parts of the world.  Sprinkle in Bush’s post-911 style of Cold War Xenophobia (which dramatically limits the number of immigrant visas granted each year), and the engineering shortage is very real indeed.  Crawford, Texas has never looked as appealing as it does today!

At least 3 times during our research for this book, we were told flat out by someone we were talking with: I don’t read books.  At first glance, this is horrifying.  At closer glance, the picture is much more complicated.  What these guys are really saying is that they don’t read the books that are conventionally assigned in college courses.  Of course they read, they read a load of stuff, they are just reading material that is not approved by the American Academic Approval Association of America!

What Now?

So, on the one hand, writing as an anthropologist, this is a time to lament the loss of the liberal arts (and engineering) as part of the mainstream educational fabric at the college level.  But, this begs a large question: What, specifically, are colleges and universities doing to adapt to a (post-Google) world where all of that sacred information that was formally bottled up by the immanent Professor Dr. Crusty is now available to 4th graders for free right now?

Sadly: They’ve done hardly anything!  Universities and university administrators continue to enable aloof, disconnected and selfish academics to self-adulate via a narrow tenure process to such a degree that, at the end of the day much of what they talk about becomes more and more like acid-induced dribble than anything meaningful or useful.  Sad, really, but that’s the way it is.

Back at the Ranch

Meanwhile, in the small tribes of coworking communities that we have come to know, many of the mavericks (some of whom said, somewhere along the line- Fuck College!) are absolutely brilliant, read a ton of shit, and have huge moral compasses and intellectual curiosities.  They have, that is, all of those things the a liberal arts education is supposed to impart.  The difference is, they got these things on their own, through self-motivated learning, through learning communities of their own choosing. 

I’m not suggesting that this approach is necessarily better, nor that I will advise my kids to skip college.  What I am saying is that there are different places to learn important things, and college is just one of those places. 

To boil it down: In the past 9 months of research and hanging out with independent entrepreneurs, I’ve met 3 or 4 of the smartest people I’ve ever met in my whole life! (And this includes going through grad school, getting a PhD, teaching at the unversity level for many years, and all of the supposedly smart people that that life exposes one to.)  Point: None of these particular individuals finished or really even bothered with college!  In some respects, they were simply too smart to put up with it.

Thus, they end up “unable” to get through the generic job interview (where did you go to college and what was your GPA blah blah blah).  So, what do they do?  They start their own firms, succeed, become successful, and read a lot…

I just wish I had dropped out of college when I had the chance, then I might have made something of myself!

The Butcher