Playing Right Into Their Hands

The prolific and high-minded debate in these pages over Harvard's qualifying heat of rat races--recruiting--has unfortunately resolved little. More likely it has widened various gaps: between career-seekers and idealists, between capitalists and socialists, between those who now enjoy signing bonuses and those who are destined to become permanent fixtures on their parents' couches.

My view on the matter is admittedly derivative. I spent much of January leafing through the pages of the Baffler, a leftist cultural criticism journal led by the likes of Thomas Frank, whose thesis is irrefutable: In this new gilded age, in which Sport Utility Vehicles abound and frequent flier perks become sweeter every year, our culture has one driving motivation, one underlying sense of consciousness, one theme--the unbridled cult of materialism. All must bow to the almighty corporation, the omnipotent dollar.

This all sounds like old hat, and you certainly didn't need the Baffler to find this out, but its critique gets better. It argues our decade has reached a new pinnacle of capitalism because the corporation has crushed or subsumed any thing that might stand in its way. The fifties, for example, had the Beatniks, those whose lifestyles of drug-abuse, idleness and aimlessness stood in stark contrast to white-bread I-like-Ike America.

Now, as the Gap might tell you, Jack Kerouac actually wore khakis, and as Nike might tell you, William S. Burroughs actually wore Nikes. Similarly, pictures of those long-haired clench-fisted hippies who took over University Hall in the seventies now ceremoniously decorate the walls of the cafe at the Barnes and Noble Coop.

Think about all of today's advertisements that urge you to "Break the Mold," to "Topple the Tyranny" or to not do what the old bald men are telling you to do. The paradox and crisis of today, Frank would argue, is that you can break the mold and topple the tyranny all you want, but that's exactly what the corporate mold and tyrants want you to do.

Now consider the Harvard soon-to-be graduates yearning to join the ranks of the consultants at McKinsey or the I-bankers at Goldman Sachs. Many times, we will have all but mapped out our career path, which consists vaguely of a high-pressure two year program, a two-year stint across the river and then limitless possibilities. In many cases the entry-level job is nothing but a means to an end, so that the most substantive difference between McKinsey and Mitchell Madison is the former has a higher percentage of acceptances to Harvard Business School. Such an atmosphere does not breed a sense of corporate community or identity but rather a paradigm of exploitation.

Compare today's system to that of the fifties, in which employees might work for one company until they retired. Indeed, Willy Loman could not work for his company's competitors or a different industry. He had to sell item Y for company X or die trying. Thus, as we, graduating seniors, exploit the investment banks and the consulting firms in the name of career opportunities, we rebel against the old, more static career models. Our job market is one of tremendous horizontal and vertical mobility; to stay too long at one place just does not make good economic sense.

But just as the corporations encourage us to rebel against old models of soft-drink consumption or blue jeans wearing, they are the ones who encourage us to rebel against the old style of employment. The McKinsey recruiters at the Office of Career Services will be the first ones to tell you just how many of last year's consultants made the B-School cut. Just as much as we might exploit them for their opportunities, resources and salaries, they will undoubtedly return the favor.

This model of mutual exploitation undoubtedly represents decades of research and refinement. Just as today's advertisement campaigns casually capitalize on counter-culture-subsuming themes such as "revolution" to arrive at the most efficient means of marketability, so too the consulting firms and investment banks use today's employment patterns to arrive at the most efficient means of labor-profitability.

After all, the recent burgeoning of the consulting sector and simultaneous cross-the-board downsizing of middle management is based upon the relative cheapness of consultant labor. Why pay a long-time company employee with a family to feed and corporate benefits to collect, when you can hire the same job out to Harvard kids at Boston Consulting Group, who will do it for less?

We should realize that our manners and motives in accepting offers as consultants and investment bankers are in themodus operandiof corporate America. Ec 10 sourcebooks in hand, we join a cult whose only guiding principle is the profit motive. We need not feel hopelessly idealistic or Marxist if we dare to ask for more. Maxwell N. Krohn '99 is a computer science concentrator in Kirkland House. This past year he was the publisher of the Harvard Advocate.