William Whyte, Jr. , from his famous and
thought-provoking book published in 1956, The Organization Man.
When I was a college senior in 1939, we used to sing a plaintive song about going out into the “cold, cold world.” It wasn’t really so very cold then, but we did enjoy meditating on the fraughtness of it all. It was a big break we were facing, we told ourselves, and those of us who were going to try our luck in the commercial world would be patronizing toward those who were going on to graduate work or academic life. We were taking the leap.
Seniors still sing the song, but somehow the old note of portent is gone. There is no leap left to take. The union between the world of organization and the college has been so cemented that today’s seniors can see a continuity between the college and the life thereafter that we never did. Come graduation, they do not go outside to a hostile world; they transfer.
For the senior who is headed for the corporation it is almost as if it were part of one master scheme. The locale shifts; the training continues, for at the same time that the colleges have been changing their curriculum to suit the corporation, the corporation has responded by setting up its own campuses and classrooms. By now the two have been so well molded that it’s difficult to tell where one leaves off and the other begins.
The descent, every spring, of the corporations’ recruiters has now become a built-in feature of campus life. If the college is large and its placement director efficient, the processing operation is visibly impressive. I have never been able to erase from my mind the memory of an ordinary day at Purdue’s placement center. It is probably the largest and most efficient placement operation in the country, yet, much as in a well-run group clinic, there seemed hardly any activity. In the main room some students were quietly studying company literature arranged on the tables for them; others were checking the interview timetables to find what recruiter they would see and to which cubicle he was assigned; at the central filing desk college employees were sorting the hundreds of names of men who had registered for placement. Except for murmurs from the row of cubicles there was little to indicate that scores of young men were, every hour on the half hour, making the decisions that would determine their whole future life.
Someone from a less organized era might conclude that the standardization of this machinery – and the standardized future it portends – would repel students. It does not. For the median senior this is the optimum future; it meshes so closely with his own aspirations that it is almost as if the corporation was planned in response to an attitude poll.
Because they are the largest single group, the corporation-bound seniors are the most visible manifestation of their generation’s values. But in essential their contemporaries headed for other occupations respond to the same urges. The lawyers, the doctors, the scientists – their occupations are also subject to the same centralization, the same trend to group work and to bureaucratization. And so are the young men who will enter them. Whatever their many differences, in one great respect they are all of a piece: more than any generation in memory, theirs will be a generation of bureaucrats.
They are, above all, conservative. Their inclination to accept the status quo does not necessarily mean that in the historic sweep of ideas they are conservative – in the more classical sense of conservatism, it could be argued that the seniors will be, in effect if not by design, agents of revolution. But this is a matter we must leave to late historians. For the immediate present, at any rate, what ideological ferment college men exhibit is not in the direction of basic change.
This shows most clearly in their attitude toward politics. It used to be axiomatic that young men moved to the left end of the spectrum in revolt against their fathers and then, as the years went on, moved slowly to the right. A lot of people still believe this is true, and many businessmen fear that twenty years of the New Deal hopelessly corrupted our youth into radicalism. After the election of 1952 businessmen became somewhat more cheerful, but many are still apprehensive, and whenever a poll indicates that students don’t realize that business makes only about 6 per cent profit, there is a flurry of demands for some new crusade to rescue our youth from socialistic tendencies.
If the seniors do anything, however, it will be from the dead center. Liberal groups have almost disappeared from campus, and what few remain are anemic. There has been no noticeable activity at the other end of the spectrum either. . . . when the McCarthy issue roused and divided their elders, undergraduates seemed somewhat bored with it all.
Their conservatism is passive. No cause seizes them, and nothing so exuberant or willfully iconoclastic as the Veterans of Future Wars has reappeared. There are Democrats and Republicans, and at election time there is the usual flurry of rallies, but in comparison with the agitation of the thirties no one seems to care too much one way or the other. There has been personal unrest – the suspense over the prospect of military service assures this – but it rarely gets resolved into a thought-out protest. Come spring and students may start whacking each other over the head or roughing up the townees and thereby cause a rush of concern over the wild younger generation. But there is no real revolution in them, and the next day they likely as not will be found with their feet firmly on the ground in the recruiters’ cubicles.
Some observers attribute the disinterest to fear. I heard one instructor tell his colleagues that in his politics classes he warned students to keep their noses clean. “I tell them,” he said, “that they’d better realize that what they say might be held against them, especially when we get to the part about Marx and Engels. Someday in the future they might find their comments bounced back at them in an investigation.”
The advice, as his colleagues retorted, was outrageously unnecessary. The last things students can be accused of now is dangerous discussion; they are not interested in the kind of big questions that stimulate heresy and whether the subject – the corporation, government, religion – students grow restive if the talk tarries on the philosophical. Most are interested in the philosophical only to the extent of finding out what the accepted view is in order that they may accept it and get on to practical matters. . . .
Even in theological seminaries, this impatience to be on with the job has been evident. Writes Norman Pittenger, professor at General Theological Seminary: “It is a kind of authoritarianism in reverse. Theological students today, in contrast to their fellows of twenty years ago, want ‘to be told.’ I have asked friends who teach in seminaries of other denominations whether they have recognized the new tendency. Without exception they have told me that they find the present generation of students less inquiring of mind, more ready to accept an authority, and indeed most anxious to have it ‘laid on the line.’”
In judging a college generation, one usually bases his judgment on how much it varies from one’s own, and presumably superior, class, and I must confess I find myself tempted to do so. Yet I do not think my generation has any license to damn the acquiescence of seniors as a weakening of intellectual fiber. It is easy for us to forget that if earlier generations were less content with society, there was a great deal less to be contented about. In the intervening years the economy has changed enormously, and even in retrospect the senior can hardly be expected to share former discontents. Society is not out of joint for him, and if he acquiesces it is not out of fear that he does so. He does not want to rebel against the status quo because he really likes it – and his elders, it might be added, are not suggesting anything bold and new to rebel for.
Perhaps contemporaryism would be a better word than conservatism to describe their posture. The present, more than the past, is their model; while they share the characteristic American faith in the future also, they see it as more of the same. As they paraphrase what they are now reading about America, they argue that at last we have got it. The big questions are all settled; we know that direction, and while many minor details remain to be cleared up, we can be pretty sure of enjoying a wonderful upward rise. . . .
More than before, there is a tremendous interest in techniques. Having no quarrel with society, they prefer to table the subject of ends and concentrate instead on means. Not what or why but how interests them, and any evangelical strain they have they can sublimate; once they have equated the common weal with organization – a task the curriculum makes easy – they will let the organization worry about goals. “These men do not question the system,” an economic professor says of them, approvingly. “They want to get in there and lubricate and make them run better. They will be technicians of the society, not innovators.” . . . .
The urge to be a technician, a collaborator, shows most markedly in the kinds of jobs seniors prefer. They want to work for somebody else. Paradoxically, the old dream of independence through a business of one’s own is held almost exclusively by factory workers – the one group, as a number of sociologists have reported, least able to fulfill it. Even at the bull-session level college seniors do not affect it, and when recruiting time comes around they make the preference clear. Consistently, placement officers find that of the men who intend to go into business – roughly one half of the class – less than 5 per cent express any desire to be an entrepreneur.