Opinion in response to Thursday, March 22, 2007, Harvard Crimson announcement: 
Gates Will Address Grads: World’s richest man will get Harvard degree at last—32 years after dropping out

In a climate of cultural indifference, and worse, continuous assault on the value of liberal arts education—deemed useless for survival—I was reminded that the original Harvard “core” was about moral reasoning, social analysis, and humanistic understanding—not about money, wealth, or notoriety.

Nobody doubts that William Henry Gates III is a very smart and business savvy person. However, when Harvard, touted by Americans as the most prestigious college in the world, selects a Bill Gates as an honorary degree recipient from an amazingly long list of possibilities, then the university underestimates the negative media impact on how Americans will see the value of an academic liberal arts education. Bill Gates’s paying little attention to classes, furiously prepping before exams, and uselessly sitting around, philosophically depressed, trying to figure out his life, and then dropping out to become the most successful dropout, bears out the axiom for the culturally disinterested that “liberal arts” education is useless.

One of the truly fascinating facts about US history is that, sooner or later, the renegades, the Robin Hoods like Cornelius Vanderbilt or Bill Gates, are magically transformed from robber baron status to honorable businessmen and industrialists celebrated for their dominance over industries and their amassing of huge personal fortunes, hailing them as patrons of the most prestigious educational institutions.

Forgotten are the “de jure monopolies” protected by law from competition, the negative qualities of persons like Jason Gould, who would always boast and simultaneously threaten that he had the ability and capability “to hire one half of the working class to kill off the other half.” Forgotten are the political machinations of a Boss Tweed, and in the new light of philanthropy they emerge—James J. Hill, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Bill Gates, alike—as industrialists who gained their wealth through legitimate economic means of hard work, integrity, and invention within a free market society. So in Bill Gates’s case, we will not hear about intellectual and industrial espionage at Xerox PARC or the attempt to culturally undermine the wealth of the Irish language-traditions by providing an inferior on-line dictionary for that culture, but most likely there will be a description of character as one of greatest humanitarians and the greatest benefactors of humankind.

For decades, as educator, I thought that the following statement by one of the world’s true educators is the only true “Leitmotif” for that purpose:

“If the present aspirations of young people do not go any further than to be important, or be well published or financed, then schools could give in to that narrow demand or they could rise to the occasion and give them something which lets them aspire to something more far reaching.”
—Paulo Freire, Brazilian educator

Unfortunately, I am afraid, in “Money is my God” America, true intellect, discovery, and invention can only be linked to business and technology.

What a shame. Is it automatically negative if “String Theory” turns out to be a philosophy rather than a science that leads directly to applicable technologies, out-sourced production, and quick wealth? Is “String Theory” useless as a new way of understanding the machinations of the total universe because it cannot be easily attached to business and commerce?

Is that why the expression of American creativity linked to commerce as MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte, one of Bill Gates’s technological soul-mates, would like it to be, has produced these “most amazing inventions,” as annually reported in Time and Newsweek magazines’ extensive lists of mostly kitsch “geek gadgets.” Even though the lists include some very useful designs like efficient mosquito netting, advanced prosthetic joints, new optical lenses for implants, needle-free HIV testing equipment, and fire protection fluids, the majority of designs will neither enhance the lives of people nor enrich the culture, and the majority are made up of redesigned junior go-carts, robot toy soldiers, computer disc-protectors, boats on ice-skates, strapless goggles, computerized shoes, surfboards that enable surfers to transmit e-mails or shoot videos, or water-skiers propelled by remotely controlled drones. Nylon replicas of cumulus clouds are lauded. So are translucent cement blocks, a plethora of silly video and audio gadgets, computers, and cameras for an ever-growing group of nerds who have little time left in their days to find out that essential life is really free of gadgets.

Only persons with amazingly short generation-minds would believe that this is the goal of education. In all of this, I see no high risk but further trivialization of the contributions by groundbreaking thinkers and scientists in trying to understand the complexity of the universe, culture, and society. Man’s ability to invent and discover must be cast in a much larger framework of human existence in which economic concerns are only a fragment of the complex web of social, cultural, and humanistic factors. People trained by tech-conscious universities generate most of the commercial “stuff.”

But in the institutions’ inability to secure funding for original research and for more necessary and important activities, university professors have stepped away from the pure knowledge development into the areas of technology applications. They have become industrial product designers and promoters of contemporary gadgets. They are either competing with the private sector or are part of the industrial complex already (while double dipping, receiving private and public funding for their research).

It may be time to revisit Lewis Mumford, 1895–1990, American author and critic, who understood that man is his own supreme artifact, putting the objects he constructs into a tertiary category. In his view, man is himself the proof of his humanistic evolution. Mumford lamented that even in his prime time, as in ours, much thinking is unfortunately done by one-generation minds that because of ignorance or arrogance ignore that all recorded history is contemporary history and that all forms of artifacts and technics have their roots in human history and reflect the human organism. He is one person who would seriously challenge those who would eliminate liberal arts education, because he was afraid of the artist who does not read and the engineer who does not see. Not just literature, images, and objects or music which “language” automatically includes, makes up the cultural reservoir but finally everything man has discovered, probed, and realized. It holds the key to vision, to all conventions and clues for behavior, philosophical analysis, and evaluation of social interactions. If university students would be steeped in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and culture, and then approach technological investigation, they would rarely develop meaningless and demeaning products, processes, and procedures.

I wonder if the honorary Harvard degree will spur Bill Gates to finally invest in constructing within himself the liberal arts infrastructure that is the only means to make his success meaningful. Others have done that over history. Mayamoto Musashi (1584–1645), an invincible samurai, comes to mind, turning himself from successful warrior into a sensitive sage, calligrapher, and poet. I wish Bill Gates the best of luck in this transformation.