THE ISSUE: Entrepreneurship has been a hot topic both on campus and within the editorial board. Many see it as college students being creative, while others see it as an attack on the ideas of liberal arts through privatization on campus. In this viewpoint, two editorial board members argue for each side. You can read the other argument here.
The rise of entrepreneurship threatens the integrity of liberal arts education. The increasing focus on entrepreneurship corrodes the core value of critical thinking inherent to liberal arts. Critical thinking enables individuals to disentangle the complicated structures that produce social ills.
Entrepreneurship discourages such critical practice as entrepreneurs are expected to integrate into these existing structures. Entrepreneurship’s talk of innovation and outside-the-box problem solving is largely undercut by its restrictive focus on market mechanisms. No one ever thinks outside of the ideological box of the free market. Forms of social entrepreneurship write the social problems out of the process by emphasizing the profit opportunities inherent to social ventures. Overall, the substitution of critical thinking for entrepreneurship is part of increasing corporatization, as universities shift from educating critically engaged citizens to cultivating future employees.
The glorification of the entrepreneur harms its target audience. The entrepreneurial environment requires individual self-effacement in the form of long hours and the collapse of the work/leisure distinction for the sake of a successful enterprise. This conditions workers to work as hard as possible for the benefit of the owners of a firm.
The belief that entrepreneurial hard work leads to success implicitly condemns those who are not successful as lazy. This ignores systemic barriers such as racism and sexism which erase the possibility of a meritocracy. Entrepreneurs themselves rely on complex network of supports from private and public sources to be able to do their work. In practice and in theory, no person is an island, no matter how hard entrepreneurial discourse tries to convince you otherwise.
