David W. Green ‘71
Tripod Editor, 1969
My personal response to the news that construction of the Entrepreneurial Center is now underway is a combination of distaste and embarrassment. Distaste over the commitment of resources to such an institution; embarrassment over the banality of the justification. Trinity, we are told, will teach its students to “think like entrepreneurs” — equipping them to “problem solve, adapt and take smart risks.” These skills, the announcement assures us, “can belong to anyone, not just the people who want to start a company.”
The Entrepreneurial Center arrives at a moment of staggering inequality, when a new oligarchy is creating a fascistic dictatorship and launching wars of extermination whose purpose is to plunder the world for their personal enrichment.
God knows that America has never had a problem creating entrepreneurs. From the days of P.T. Barnum, they grow like fungus on the soil of American society, and the “entrepreneurial spirit” is as American as the snake oil salesman and a card deck with six kings and two aces of spades. The country has produced generations of hustlers, fraudsters and outright criminals, and the line separating these categories has always been thinner than the business schools care to admit.
In fact, the greatest works of American literature have been devoted to a bitter and angry critique of American capitalism and its cult of entrepreneurialism (the works of Twain, Norris, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth to name just a few).
The grotesque reality of American entrepreneurialism over the past 40 years has surpassed anything described in more innocent times. The honor roll includes Michael Milken, convicted of securities fraud and racketeering; the savings and loan operators who cost taxpayers $130 billion; Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, whose Enron was an elaborate accounting fiction that wiped out the retirement savings of thousands; and the architects of the 2008 financial crisis, whose ingenious instruments destroyed $11 trillion in household wealth while not a single senior Wall Street executive went to prison. More recently: Martin Shkreli, Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried, who lost $8 billion of his customers’ money and described it as a “risk miscalculation.” And the entrepreneurial swashbucklers still in good standing: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos. And, of course, President Donald Trump, the grotesque felon whose career is the purest expression of the entrepreneurial ideal: six corporate bankruptcies that somehow enriched only himself, a decades-long record of fraud settlements, dissolved foundations and companies that existed primarily as vehicles for extracting cash from others before their inevitable collapse.
The pattern — privatize the gains, socialize the losses — has become the defining formula of American financial innovation. This is what “smart risk-taking” looks like at the highest levels of the profession.
I was especially offended by the announcement’s promise that Trinity graduates who think entrepreneurially will “rise above.” What does this mean other than making more money? That is all it means. The college is devoting itself to the production of future mega-millionaires. It is a strategy directed at producing donors to the college’s endowment.
I was a student at Trinity from 1967 to 1971. What made the college were not its buildings but its teachers — George Cooper, Phil Bankwitz, Drew Hyland, Ted Sloan and others of genuine intellectual seriousness, who shaped how one thought, permanently. Two of Hyland’s philosophy students — Bob Pippin ‘70 and Ken Winkler ’71 — went on to become world-recognized scholars, making lasting contributions to logic, abstract thought, and the “Phänomenologie des Geistes.” That is what a liberal arts education, at its best, produces: not “entrepreneurs,” but people who extend the reach of human knowledge in the humanities, sciences, arts, and pass it on to the next generation. There will be students who choose to go into business and finance (which is not the same as becoming “entrepreneurs”). But the skills they require and the ideals that inspire them will not be found in the Entrepreneurial Center. The old-fashioned economics department of my years, led by people like Professors Scheuch and Battis, did a very good job preparing Trinity students for business careers.
An institution declares its values by what it celebrates, and Trinity has chosen to celebrate the art of the deal, the pitch, and the smart risk.
“What doth it profit a man, to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
With sincere regret,
David W. Green ‘71
Tripod Editor, 1969
+ There are no comments
Add yours