Bush’s liberal arts comment a low-wage blow
Frank Cerabino
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — also known as “the smart Bush” — made a curious remark over the weekend that managed to disparage both college students who choose non-technical majors and the favorite fast-food restaurant of political conservatives.
“Universities ought to have skin in the game,” Bush said while campaigning in South Carolina. “When a student shows up, they ought to say ‘Hey, that psych major deal, that philosophy major thing, that’s great, it’s important to have liberal arts ... but realize, you’re going to be working at Chick-fil-A.’ ”
Bush isn’t the first person to bad-mouth college degrees outside of the science, technology, engineering and math disciplines, but he may be the first to consign those degree holders to a future of near-minimum-wage employment selling Christian chicken.
Bush would have been much
better off to relegate those liberal arts majors to serving up cheesy Gordita Crunches at Taco Bell. After all, it’s OK for a Republican presidential candidate to throw shade on a “run for the border” operation.
But messing with Christian chicken is risky.
Chick-fil-A is a closedon-Sundays, anti-gaymarriage, fast food chain with a Jesus statue outside its corporate headquarters. Praise the Lord and pass the waffle fries.
So it was an unforced error for Jeb to single out the most Republican-friendly fast-food chain in America. And to make it even worse, Chick-fil-A has a scholarship program that pays for some its workers to get their college degrees. Doh! And not to get too picky here, but Bush’s authority on trashing the value of a non-technical college education was not helped by his own decision to major in “Latin American Affairs,” whatever that is, when he was a college student.
It’s safe to say that he’s managed to eke by so far and avoid employment on the drive-thru lane.
If you want to find out what happens to liberal arts majors, you don’t need to restrict your search to low-wage workers tending deep fat fryers.
Hank Paulson, the former U.S. Treasury secretary and CEO of Goldman Sachs investment bank, was an English major. So was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo; and Eric Shinseki, the Army four-star general who was awarded two Purple Hearts and went on to become the U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs.
Sheila Bair, the former head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, majored in philosophy. So did Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal. And the same goes for Wall Street corporate raider Carl Icahn, whose senior thesis was entitled, “The Problem of Formulating an Adequate Explication of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning.”
Media mogul Ted Turner majored in the Classics, studying ancient Greece, over the objection of his father, who considered such knowledge useless to “the doers of the world.”
“I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a major,” Turner’s father wrote him. “As a matter of fact, I almost puked on the way home today.”
But it didn’t stop Turner from becoming a billionaire. And majoring in English and Theater didn’t hurt Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who never took a business course in college.
“Literature is unbelievably helpful, because no matter what business you are in, you are dealing with interpersonal relationships,” Eisner once told USA Today. “It gives you an appreciation of what makes people tick.”
But if you really want to see what happens to all those people who don’t end up studying calculus and mechanical engineering in college, you just have to look at the presidential candidates.
Bush would have been more correct to say, “It’s important to have liberal arts, but realize you’re going to just end up being a Republican presidential candidate.” Consider the evidence: Mitt Romney was an English major. Carly Fiorina majored in philosophy and medieval history. Ted Cruz majored in public policy. Mike Huckabee majored in religion. Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and Rick Santorum were all political science majors.
Even Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon running for president, didn’t get his undergraduate degree in some math-science major.
Carson majored in psychology.