464
PARTISAN REVIEW
by one with the formation of the mind and the character of the students,
all else is los t.
Edith Kurzwei1:
I think you're really addressing in a very global way the
kind of confusion we have to live wi th, that in the universi ty we have to
teach also about commerce and in the corporation we have the commer–
cialization of learning.
Nathan Glazer:
This is a very good group of papers even though they all
went in different directions. But I want to follow up on Bernard Avishai's
paper and his vision of the world. I do appreciate it, at least from reading
the business sections of papers, though less from experience with that
world. To judge from some telephone calls by people who want to sell me
something, they don't seem to be engaged in imaginative team playing
when trying to sell me their products. Anyway, it's hard to make the case
that increasing the sales of Coca-Cola, with all the imagination that goes
into it, is important. In other words, there seems to be a contradiction
between the kind of skills and ingenuity you describe, which is certainly
better than the assembly line, and their, let us say, ultimate ends.
Bernard Avishai:
The question you raise is the only part of this discus–
sion that really isn't new because to a great extent that defines the modern
experience. People struggle with the question of why they were put on
earth. You're constandy raising questions about whether or not you're a
means to some end or whether you have a dignity that's an end in itself. I
was trying to speak about this from the mentali ty of a company, not from
what a reasonable human being asks, because a company is not a person. I
was trying to ask what companies that have a mandate to make sugared
water, and have made a living making sugared water, can do to use their in–
house skill, their insight, to help educate young people. I think some of
them can and may do this with as much imagination as schools. It's what
McMillan does when it puts out the Encyclopedia Brittanica, which is a
business. So why do we think of, for instance, Houghton Mifflin when it
puts out the Dictionary of X, Y, Z, which by the way now is integrated
into Microsoft products? Both Houghton Mifflin and Coca-Cola are busi–
nesses. That's not to say that I would go to Coca-Cola to find out the
definition of a human being.
Stanley Rothman: I
have two questions for Bernard. The first: in
Chronicles
there recendy appeared stories about corporations establishing
chairs at various universities in order to really teach people how to work
with their products or learn new things. What you think of this? Second:
