MBA Online Gains Popularity
It is that loveliest time of the year on college campuses -- commencement -- a good season to think about how critical our colleges and universities will be in the years ahead. The challenge of the technology revolution cannot be met without an enormous national effort to upgrade skills. But whatever efforts we make to expand our technology curriculum should be made in tandem with a step-up in the quality and level of support for the liberal arts. Without a strong liberal arts program, the drive to sustain a self-governing, free enterprise system will falter. My own 40-year commitment to small business has always been based on the liberal arts values and perspectives offered to me by some remarkable teachers. Together, these individuals gave me the philosophical underpinnings of my small business conviction. Harold D. Lasswell was a leading political scientist and an effective man of public affairs. The nature and uses of power were his central interests. His two most memorable ideas were: Our system can be made to work only by those willing to learn the mechanics of its decision-making processes. And, an understanding of the emotional and nonrational elements in human beings is essential if one hopes to comprehend political behavior. James Burnham is best known for his book The Managerial Revolution and as a founding editor of William F. Buckley Jr.'s conservative political journal, National Review. Yet I remember him best as a magnificent teacher of one course on aesthetics and one on the thought and literature of the Renaissance. He left me with a sense of the identity between innovation and the creative process, whether the end product is a painting, a technology, or a new law. Economics was my major. A course taught by Bruce Smith influenced me most. In one class, he developed a compelling, graphic model to describe how pressure groups influence public policy. No group on Smith's chart represented small business, and one student asked what group spoke for that constituency. Small business was still a minor concern for me. My interests were in the emerging field of communications research -- the study of the mass media. My journalism-related studies made me think about the misuse of the media by concentrated control, whether government or business. As I got to know John Chamberlain and Herbert Brucker at Columbia, that issue linked up with the larger questions of economic diversity and entrepreneurship. Chamberlain was a mine of information about business. He wrote for Fortune but had an abiding interest in the early Yankee entrepreneurs, The Enterprising Americans, as he called them in a 1963 book on the subject. With Brucker, I would talk at length about the impact FM radio and television would have on competition in the newspaper and magazine business. The liberal arts perspectives I got from my teachers maximizes the prospects for the good society, for the happiness of men and women. And the economic diversity secured by small business provides the environment in which those values flourish. The liberal arts perspectives I got from my teachers maximizes the prospects for the good society, for the happiness of men and women. And the economic diversity secured by small business provides the environment in which those values flourish. |
