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Hire Those Brats! I’m Serious!
Do I really need to describe this? We all know what’s happening on college campuses. Whining, coddled, over-sensitive little brats demanding this and that, weeping over emails, that sort of thing.
And one of the more popular responses is — at least from folks who are roughly aligned with our point of view — Hey, those kids are in for a rude awakening and Who on earth is going to hire those entitled brats?
May I offer a slightly different interpretation?
What skills are on display, on Yale’s Cross Campus and University of Missouri’s quad? Yes, yes: emotional displays of silliness, thuggish disregard for free speech, and open debate. Okay, stipulated.
But there are also some pretty impressive skills being deployed here. At the University of Missouri, the whole nonsense erupted because certain football players refused to play ball unless certain conditions (and those conditions kept sliding) we met — in other words, they leveraged their capital (football makes a lot of money) and made a large institution bend to their will. A university president was essentially dismissed. The campus has come under the indirect control of a smallish group of powerful students.
Not bad, actually, from a sheer power-politics perspective. I mean, we don’t even really know how exactly all of this started.
At Yale, a group of students has exploited their overseers’ weak and pathetic need to appear “inclusive” and “nurturing” and “safe.” We’ve all seen the pictures: thoughtful and intellectually accomplished professors and administrators begging their charges for forgiveness, covering themselves in shame and remorse, confessing to all sorts of crimes and shortcomings.
Again: pretty impressive for a group of students at one of the most elite universities in the world. Think of the exams they’ve been able to get cancelled! Think of the late term papers that won’t be penalized!
Let’s total up the life skills on display here: 1. brilliant use of financial leverage; 2. exploiting an opponent’s weakness and cowardice; 3. remorselessly demanding that heads roll; 4. and here’s the best one: Doing it all on someone else’s dime!
I don’t know about you, but those seem like some pretty impressive life and business skills. I don’t know about you, but if I were a college recruiter from, say, Goldman Sachs, I’d have to say that these are exactly the skills I’m looking for.
Economics, financial statistics, that sort of thing you can learn in a webinar. But an instinct for blood and power? That’s some powerful innate stuff right there.
My advice? Hire those brats. Hire them at Goldman and JP Morgan Chase and Cravath. Pay them really well the first year in order to get them hooked on being members of the power elite — there’s nothing that shakes off progressive ideology like a fat end-of-year bonus — and watch those killer instincts go into motion.
Just make sure to stay on their good side. You wouldn’t like to see them angry.
Published in Culture, Education
Actually, they’ll be the ones operating the guillotine.
Hire them as mason tenders if they don’t like what school’s offering. See if they make it through the first day.
So . . . you would rather hire someone who’s sounds like the girl on the right than the guy on the left?
http://www.youtube.com/embed/Zmji36q8E4o
Mizzou hunger-striker Jonathan Butler (the guy who claimed to have been hit by the UM President’s car [spoiler: he walked up to it and kneed the bumper himself]) complains about white privilege and his struggle.
Here’s his family’s home.
I’d like to struggle like that.
Children, if you want to convince me that you have it bad, it helps if you actually have it bad.
The only way you have it bad is that you’ve been spoiled rotten.
Rob,
I don’t quite think you have the complete idea yet.
Reconsider.
Regards,
Jim
Ep 1. “The One Where White People Inherit a System of Privilege and Wealth.”
Have a little compassion. He probably had to shovel the driveway.
You kidding? One word: snowblower.
I’m sure they hired a guy with a plow on his truck for the winter.
You guys think small. Obviously they paid the clouds to go snow over some poor neighborhood.
More like: Paid illegal alien to do it way below minimum wage. That’s why Mom & Dad can support the $15 an hour thing. They aren’t ever going to pay anybody anywhere near that much. Junior can support any kind of absurd admissions, grading, testing standard. He knows it doesn’t matter because Dad will buy him the job of his choice. Dad will just make the right donation at the right time and Junior will be hired by the metro-sexual network pronto. It’s tax deductible too. Dad is such a tax wiz everything is sheltered anyway. That’s why he doesn’t care about the corporate tax rate or the personal tax rate. Dad doesn’t care about the Luddite Obama energy policy either. Arbitrage has a very lean carbon footprint.
You kidding? One word: Snowjob.
Regards,
Jim
Clearly they don’t have landscape privilege. Where are the trees or is this in west Texas after a rain?
This is a really good point. The idea that the main purpose of a corporation is to function as a charitable outreach organization to support its employees’ personal needs is becoming more and more entrenched and it’s hard not to believe that some of this isn’t happening as a direct result of the snowflake syndrome that besets many new recruits to the workforce.
As a manager who was committed to supporting and protecting the organization (in a positive way), I was often gobsmacked to discover intelligent, educated, ‘white-collar’ workers who simply didn’t get it, and who couldn’t understand that the organization wasn’t put there to provide for every jot and tittle of their personal needs and wants. Thankfully they were in the minority, but I wonder if it will stay that way for long, especially as companies fall all over themselves to outdo each other to retain employees by giving them whatever they want.
(Disclaimer: I like a happy, productive employee, and a humane, rational, decent employer as much as the next person. But some of the gyrations I’ve had to go through as a manager over the years have been absurd.)
Hoping/wishing that these clowns in the universities will one day get a dose of reality to smarten them up will only work so long as there’s a real world out there with someone still in it who’s willing to smack them upside the head when they start their shenanigans. And then a boss to back that person up.
May those sorts of folks live long and prosper. In the real world anyway, because it’s pretty clear there aren’t many left in the shady groves of academe.
I thought this was a post about bratwurst.
1 star.
Pushing around weak willed adults who have the same disease they do is not an impressive feat.
They will fail once they are out of the safe zone. They need to trade in the diversity officer for a drill instructor.
My clients are hiring veterans without degrees but with leadership experience . I have one who runs a machine shop and brings in a handful of kids who are one their way to jail every year. He has a better than 60% success rate teaching them welding and machining and watching adults emerge. The other and unmentioned part of ‘the millennials’.
The cream of the early part of that generation went to a recruiting office right after 9/11.
Eight years on a campus for a masters degree? Sounds like self inflicted child abuse. Birds know when to kick the baby birds out of the nest, sounds like these parents and academics are a bit dumber.
To keep it a bit real, 2 people I work with got laid off yesterday – contractors, like myself, but boom: gone. Why? Mostly because the way their labor is coded in accounting, and someone way up at the top has decided that there’s too much of that. Tends to reduce EPS when earnings are down, and, well, there you go.
That’s the real world. The world these toddlers are walking into doesn’t really care about their feelings, nor should it, in large part. Have a marketable skill and you won’t go hungry, and you’ll have less to cry about.
Eric, you know me well enough that I don’t do micro anything. It is full on aggression.
The real world you speak of is dying from our neglect.
In the new world if the two contractors were precious Mizzou snowflakes the CEO would immediately be subjected to a twitter storm accusing him of racism, the remaining snowflakes will walk off the job expecting full pay, CNN and VOX will rush to the scene of the oppression.
The CEO resigns under pressure. The 2 contractors are hired as full time employees with benefits. Portions of the office are partitioned as racially segregated safe places.
The stock price is halved in 90 days and the company fails within 2 years. The snowflakes collect unemployment, SNAP, SSDI, etc.
…and neither one will think their actions had anything to do with it.
I think it was Zig Ziglar that said a great employee is capable, energetic and honest. Of the three, honestly is most important because if I’ve hired a crook, I’d rather he were lazy and incompetent.
It’s called tyranny. The football players, arguably the worst fit in any institution of higher learning, are dictating who can work at the University of Missouri. The patients are running the asylum now.
As to the argument that thanks to the coddling they get on campus, these children are ill-prepared for the real world, a common response I’ve read over the last few days goes like this:
“Regarding whether these students will ever learn to cope with the ‘real world,’ shouldn’t the goal be trying to create a world with safe spaces for more people, reducing the number of hateful people? Instead of just shrugging your shoulders and accepting that reality, you can do something to limit it, reduce it, make it less prevalent. Shouldn’t college be preparing students to do that?”
So the most obvious argument in response to these whiny brats — that they’re just being whiny brats who need to grow up — will ultimately fail. The “real world” allies of these coddled students believe that the ultimate goal is to make the whole world exactly like their police-state campuses.
Be very afraid.
Admit it: it would be fantastic!
There’s nothing to admit. Willful stupidity and deliberate dishonesty are not funny. And slapstick is so 1950s.
Eric Hines
OK OK, so maybe I overreacted a little. It would be more like this.
Regards,
Jim