The Origin of Pointy-Haired Bosses

This is where Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss came from:

“I don’t actually know much,” an alumnus told me after he finished his freshman year at Harvard. “I mean, well, I don’t know how to put it. When I’m in classes all these kids next to me know a lot more than I do. Like about what actually happened in the Civil War. Or what France did in World War II. I don’t know any of that stuff. But I know something they don’t. It’s not facts or anything. It’s how to think. That’s what I learned in humanities.”

“What do you mean, ‘how to think’?” I asked.

“I mean, I learned how to think bigger. Like, everyone else at Harvard knew about the Civil War. I didn’t. But I knew how to make sense of what they knew about the Civil War and apply it. So they knew a lot about particular things. I knew how to think about everything.”

Helen Andrews, The New Ruling Class, Hedgehog review, Summer 2016, quoting Shamus Rahman Khan, Privilege.

I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but he failed to learn about the Civil War and World War II in humanities!?

My main blog is the Tipsy Teetotaler, http://intellectualoid.com.