https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/15/prodigies-of-credulousness-in-the-ivory-tower-of-utopia/
“There are few ways,” Dr. Johnson said to a friend, “in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.”
This a great truth, and one might wish that The Wharton School had taken Dr. Johnson’s observation to heart. After all, this storied outpost of the University of Pennsylvania, is, or was, one of the nation’s premier business schools. As such it is, or rather it was, dedicated to instructing its students in the practical application of Dr. Johnson’s truism. To what end should management at a publicly traded company aim? Increasing shareholder value: period, full stop.
In recent years, however, like its parent institution, and indeed like the education establishment in general, The Wharton School has become a repository of woke clichés and politically correct slogans. Toward the end of September, they took the momentous step of abandoning any pretense of being a business school. Doubtless they will continue to offer classes on finance and accounting. But the school’s “Curriculum Innovation and Review Committee” recently voted to approve two new majors and areas of concentration, one in “Environmental, Social, and Governance” issues (ESG for short), the other in “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI). In other words, henceforth at Wharton students at both the undergraduate and graduate level will be able to major in virtue signaling.
I was recently at a panel discussion concerned with locating the origins of the ideology of “wokeness.” The term itself is of fairly recent vintage. I first heard it five or six years ago. But in essence wokeness overlaps largely with the phenomenon of “political correctness,” a pathology that in its American context dates from the 1980s but which has its roots in that hideous assault on civilization we call “the Sixties.”
For many years since, “the Sixties” has been less the name of a decade than of an existential provocation. As a slice of history, the purple decade actually encompasses some 20 years. It began some time in the late 1950s and lasted at least until the mid-1970s. By then it had triumphed so thoroughly that its imperatives became indistinguishable from everyday life: they became everyday life. The Sixties mean—what? Sexual “liberation,” rock music, chemically induced euphoria—nearly everyone would agree with that, even though some would inscribe a plus sign, others a minus sign beside that famous triumvirate. The Sixties also mean free-floating protest and political activism, a “youth culture” that never ages, a new permissiveness together with a new affluence: Dionysus with a credit card and a college education. Above all, however, the Sixties meant the insinuation of political correctness into the conduct of life.
