Sure, if Reed College trashed its whole (exceptionally loose) curriculum and means of student evaluation and catered to the needs and whims of teenaged Steve Jobs--i.e., if Reed College valued Jobs' opinion of what higher education should be when he was a college student--he might not have dropped out. And if Harvard would have just given Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg what they wanted to become genius world-altering billionaire technological innovators--whatever that might have been--they might have stuck around for a measly bachelor's degree. But the fact of the matter is that none of these people was ever actually interested in higher education, and their ends, not to mention their means, always have been fundamentally different than those of a higher education institution. Put simply: while Bill Gates would prefer that colleges and universities focus their curricula on job training and job creation, this is not the mission of a college or university. If people like Gates want job-training and job-creation centers, they certainly have the means to do what Gates has already begun to do: fund their own institutions that satisfy those core missions. For the rest of us: well, maybe we're not all convinced that entrepreneurship is the only civic virtue (or that there are no such things as human virtues that might be cultivated in the academy).
So PMB repeats: if you want to learn something about how to change higher education for the better, don't ask people just because they're rich and successful. Ask people who actually have a stake in higher education. Ask journalists, professors, small business leaders, engineers, maybe even grad. students. Don't ask someone who never saw much value at all in the answer to that question, or the institutions to which the answer most pertains.
Ask PMB, and this is what he'll tell you:
We need to end the humanities and focus on job creation. The first departments to go will have to be the English departments. Does English create jobs? No. English does not create jobs. Most people already know how to read and write English, like these people:
“It is my job to ensure proper process deployment activities take place to support process institutionalization and sustainment. Business process management is the core deliverable of my role, which requires that I identify process competency gaps and fill those gaps.”
If you are reading this then you know how to read English, which means we don't need English departments, which are redundant, which are redundant.
The next departments to go will be the foreign language departments. Do foreign languages create jobs? No. Foreign languages do not create jobs. You might say, "but PMB, aren't Arabic and Mandarin foreign languages?' No, Arabic and Mandarin are not foreign languages. Arabic and Mandarin are business codes, like Python and C++. Business codes, like all business things, create jobs. Foreign languages do not.
The next departments to go will be the religion departments. If you believe in a religion you can go to church. If you are an atheist you can go to England. If you are an atheist and I am an evangelical, you can go to hell. But neither religion departments, atheism, or the devil create jobs. Therefore we should not have religion departments, which are redundant, which are redundant.
Speaking of which, we no longer need philosophy departments, where logic is taught. Logic does not create jobs, and jobs are not created by logic, therefore we do not need philosophy departments.
The next departments to go should be classics departments, which do not create jobs. Think about it: if we called Greek and Roman antiquity the subject of "the classics" 200 years ago, then our classics education is 200 years behind. Presumably, since Rome declined in the 5th century CE, our "classics" departments should have been updated to cover the period 200 years after the fall of the Roman empire, which is right in the middle of a period called "The Dark Ages." Studying the Dark Ages would have been much more relevant to contemporary efforts at job creation; but classics departments have failed to relate, innovate, synergate, and put food on my DINNER PLATE. So classics departments have to go.
The next departments that have to go are the law departments. Do law departments create jobs? Well, ok, maybe sometimes they do. But does the LAW create jobs? No, the law prevents jobs. PMB proposes that we keep the lawyers and law school departments, which generate revenue and create jobs, and get rid of THE LAW, which DESTROYS JOBS.
Finally, once we've scrapped all of these departments, we need to get rid of history departments. History departments do not create jobs. But they do remind us of when job creation fails at job creation. We must eliminate all backward-looking history departments effective immediately, lest we bear witness to all we've just dumped in the shredder, the entire history of humanity.
