Observations from the Edge

September 10, 2009
Tonight our exercise was to argue whether or not a huge corporation would be allowed to build its campus near a small rural town. The issues in debate were environmental pollution, noise and traffic near an elementary school, and the myriad social problems that would result from a large influx of wealthy city folk flooding the small town to work at the campus. My team argues the part of a neighboring town who will also be affected by the move. "Give us passes to your corporate gym" my classmates offer in negotiation. I am amazed at how callously they take gentrification and human suffering in stride. Tonight, I am no longer Stringer Bell, but instead McNulty, seeing with my own eyes that the world is not just. "Give us money. 25 mill," they press in negotiations. "What will you do with that money?" I ask. Give it to people who have been forced out of their homes by rising house prices, I wonder? Or use it to treat the once swimmable, now polluted local rivers and streams? "Just let them build," one student suggests, "and we'll see what happens."


October 8, 2009
My classmates are growing on me. Tonight I grilled them about different professors and classes to take, and for the first time felt a sense of comradery with them for going through this MBA program together. They still seem to speak a different language. One girl admitted to wanting to work with volunteers. Stunned, I asked her "as in, working for a nonprofit?" She replied "most companies that have volunteers are nonprofits." I am fascinated by their corporate speak, and wonder who they are miming--their parents, their coworkers, or other students. I am beginning to wonder if I misread them in earlier class discussions, mistaking irony for evil. Tonight I have to argue the part of a corrupt dictator, and I hear myself saying "Who cares about the people, they didn't elect us anyway." The class chuckles and I realize, "Right, this is a game." Not everything that people say in here is what they actually believe. Suddenly I see how, in my sense of displacement and alienation--I lost my sense of humor.


November 5, 2009
After returning from a conference on business and sustainability, I excitedly report to my classmates about all the wonderful new happenings in the green movement, especially about the emergence of a new corporate form: the For-Benefit Corporation. I explain how this new "B-Corp" will lie somewhere between the helplessly ineffective do-gooder nonprofits and the evil mongering for-profits as corporations that receive some tax incentives for operating ethically and sustainably. My classmates' eyes glaze over expressionless faces and I wonder, what am I doing wrong in my attempts to engage these people? By this point, I am sure that at least some of them have souls, yet why are they so unmoved by this exciting possibility? Am I too far off the deep end for them to rally with me? Would associating with me be social and political suicide for them? Sometimes out of class and on breaks students shyly come up to me and commiserate on that our stats exam, or ask me a question about accounting class. But in class they are a bloc. Perhaps they are not really listening at all.


November 19, 2009
Tonight our topic was equal opportunity employment practices, and specifically affirmative action. To demonstrate the historical landscape, my professor shows a silent film about the civil rights movement and then a video clip of Martin Luther King Junior's "I have a dream" speech. Though I commend my professor's noble intentions, I worry that the connection is lost on many of my peers. What does the racism of the 1960s have to do with paying a fair wage today? What do sit-ins at lunch counters have to do with Walmart? Through the haze of my criticism I realize that I have never watched this momentous speech before. In a shaking voice Martin Luther King Jr. quotes the United States Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal." How far we have come, I muse. Last week when we discussed corporate pay and this week when we discussed affirmative action, everyone's main concern was that the most qualified person get the job. Not that everyone should have an equal chance, or that there be a fair playing field or even that we promote ethical employment practices that prioritize staff training and benefits--no, their top concern was that the most qualified person, regardless of whether they got to that place of qualification by climbing on the back of less fortunate races and genders and classes for decades--that these folks are able to get the job that they deserve. And what about the rest of us, I want to ask them, those created a little less equal, what do we deserve?