If I had a dollar for every time an opinion writer complained about our college graduates becoming only financiers and consultants, I would be so wealthy that I would not contemplate taking one of those jobs. Just last week, Eli Moyse ’27 offered a sharp and well-argued addition to the genre. But that genre is still a relatively tired one. So instead of complaining, I would like to offer our financiers and consultants some praise.
It was the literary critic Christian Lorentzen who called “careerism” the dominant literary style in America. One becomes a careerist when one elevates breadwinning to the highest value. According to the careerist, money is the highest benchmark for the life well-lived. The careerist eschews a life of ideas and chooses a career. Philip Roth is Lorentzen’s example of the careerist novelist. Lorentzen demonstrates how Roth spent his lengthy life lunching with publishers, nabbing book deals, movie deals, television deals, whatever would advance his all-important career. Lorentzen didn’t consider him as the great novelist he was, but as a restless, hungry man, wanting little more than money.
Careerism is not just a characteristic of the world of writers: it is Dartmouth’s reigning value. Talk to pre-med students long enough and they will shed the “helping people” mask and admit their desire for the financial security of a career as an orthopedic surgeon. Talk to soon-to-be Ph.D. students and they like the idea of life as a tenured professor. Talk to pre-law students and, well, you get the idea. That there is something beyond labor has slipped our minds.
We so love careerism at Dartmouth that four years of intellectual exploration and youthful living has come to be called our “college career.” Daily emails stream in about recruiting events for banks and consulting firms. The tone of emails discussing schoolwork or clubs is not so distinct. Much of the environment has melded to become distinctly careerist.
Even the incessant op-eds about financiers and consultants likely indicates something about our careerism. Not only is it such an obvious subject matter that everyone feels a need to write about it — careerism has such a gravitational pull that defining yourself in relation to it, even negatively, advances your career.
Of course we all need to get by. For some, getting by means enough currency for hostels and overnight trains in Eastern Europe. But for others, getting by is only a West Village apartment — and maybe a timeshare in the Hamptons.
That we all pursue money need not be true. One could imagine a novelist who, drawn in by reading Melville in Sanborn, wants to make that experience possible for readers of his own work. He may feel anxiety about failing to convert the Dartmouth logo on his diploma into hundreds of thousands of dollars, but hey, he is writing novels. One could imagine a young student stunned and awakened by Hannah Arendt — who isn’t? — and so enchanted that she writes philosophy of her own. Not the career of immediate allure that followed her hitherto straight-line path to Yale Law School, but sometimes duty calls.
And as for our earlier example of Roth — in between meetings, interviews, and deal-makings, he wrote. He sat at his desk and added to the American canon. What is American Judaism after “Portnoy’s Complaint” is a question I still struggle to answer, and one that I only ask because of him. Had he become a banker — or a librarian like Neil Klugman of “Goodbye Columbus” — the world would be worse off.
But our beloved financiers and consultants cannot hide behind transcendent values. Nobody worth talking to can justify the importance or relevance of these careers. Sure, any good economist will explain the necessity of a robust financial industry for any strong economy. But none of our financiers and consultants use such motives. Rarely are they ashamed of their desire to accumulate wealth.
What our financiers and consultants represent is Dartmouth’s revealed preference. Each one is likely the more honest person than any of their peers who choose different paths, because while the orthopedic surgeon may claim a love of surgery; the professor a desire to rewrite the narrative of American history; the lawyer a desire to understand America’s tax code — the financiers and consultant put it plainly: I want to be rich; I want a good job.
May God grant me the strength to be as honest as them.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
