HARDWARE
Today’s constantly changing workplace makes a Wabash education more valuable than ever.
“A Wabash liberal arts education prepares men for the many careers they’re going to have, not the one they thought they would have.”
When I spoke those words on April 21 to more than 170 Wabash men gathered for the inaugural Indianapolis Association of Wabash Men Leadership Breakfast, I was looking at the living proof of my conjecture.
You may feel the same way as you read about the alumni featured in this issue of Wabash Magazine.
Today’s constantly changing workplace makes a Wabash education more valuable than ever. Every industry has been flipped upside down. Whole careers baby boomers once pursued have vanished or radically changed as new fields have emerged. Forrester Research has predicted today’s youngest workers will hold 12 to 15 jobs during their lifetime.
Students need a strong foundation that equips them to be nimble, confident, and adaptive. The liberal arts does this by creating a great “hardware system” for students—developing their broad-based decision-making, leadership acumen, and ability to be responsible, while keeping in mind others’ points of view in a dignified manner.
You can’t rely only on the software—the degree of training you get for a particular job. There is a trend these days among families of prospective students to look for training that leads most directly to the first job. That degree might help a young man for a short while, though it may not, and it certainly will not provide him with the tools needed to succeed in the long term.
The pendulums of the job market swing often, and they tend to over-swing. When I grew up in San Francisco, everyone who taught me math was a former engineer, because jobs for engineers had dried up in the early 1970s. Then came the 1980s and the defense industry picked up, computers evolved, and people had to shift again.
Here at Wabash we are working on a more dependable version of that software—Liberal Arts Plus. These initiatives in Global Health, Entrepreneurship, Public Discourse, and Digital Arts interface a liberal arts education with opportunities to download skills and experiences that translate directly into that first job, even while students are receiving and building the hardware to tackle whatever comes next.
The tremendous capacity of this system is one reason why so many Wabash alumni succeed in fields you would not anticipate, given their majors. Steve Ferguson ’63, a political science major and now chairman of Cook Medical Group, is a great example. Having taken phys-chem and other science courses certainly helps, but he has to access much more of his brain while overseeing the largest privately held company in Indiana.
In this issue you’ll read about Jim Dreher ’85, a medical device entrepreneur and founder of Option3 LLC. Jim was a French major, but his ability to think critically, move decisively, and take and manage risks stem from his liberal arts education.
Earlier this spring I attended a presentation of projects from the “Ghost in the Machine” class of the Digital Arts and Human Values initiative, where students—most of them not art majors— put into practice the artist’s creative process. Art requires you to break down your perception of things to see them in a different way, a necessity in today’s world and one of the simple gifts of a liberal arts education.
THE WORLD IS getting tougher. There’s a great hollowing out of the middle; competition is keener than ever. You need to be ready to adapt to ever-changing “software” to thrive.
That agility is readily apparent in the lives of the speakers at April’s inaugural IAWM Leadership Breakfast—Sun King Brewing co-founder Clay Robinson ’97, Indiana Sports Corp President Ryan Vaughn ’00, and Eli Lilly and Company Vice President David Lewis ’81. You will find it among Wabash alumni across the country and around the world.
Equipped with the hardware system of a liberal arts education, Wabash men embrace the constant change of the 21st century with, as Ryan put it, “the obligation to engage, the responsibility to make an impact, and the confidence to figure it out and contribute.”
Wabash Always Fights!
GREGORY HESS
President