Ode to the History Major
By Rob Slee
At the dawn of the twentieth century, students at Miami and elsewhere were educated in the classics. This entailed studying ancient languages, the humanities, a smattering of physical sciences, and history. Over the past one hundred years, however, higher education forever changed, as specialized training in education, business administration and hard sciences fought their way on to curriculums. The move away from a liberal arts foundation has sufficiently progressed to cause many to ponder the once unthinkable: does the focused study of history provide any value to the student?
There are tired, yet true, answers to this question: the past is predictive; historical analysis builds communication skills; a well-rounded education needs no apology, and so on. A big part of the problem, unfortunately, is that history is often taught from a static perspective, i.e., an event occurred at a specific time at a certain place. For example, William the Conqueror defeated an army at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Pure ennui prevents many students from evolving past static history.
Dynamic history, on the other hand, is alive and considers the effect of an event, such as: by conquering the Anglo-Saxon army, the Norman's merged their culture, language and customs with the vanquished to form a new reality - the beginning of modern England. In other words, we exist the way we do today because of a battle fought nearly one thousand years ago.
Certainly the study of dynamic history is more interesting and informative than static history. Dynamic history also better leverages historiography, or the tracing of an idea from its inception. Although not immediately intuitive, understanding the history of an idea is particularly useful, as illustrated by the following experience.
We might collectively refer to historic players as "voice from the past." These voices have something to say. As proof, I offer my last 4 years. In the final days of the late millennium I decided to write a book. My goal was nothing less than to create a new field of study, one that leveraged my prior 15 years as an investment banker. To make a very long story short, it turns out that Finance, as written and studied today, only concerns itself with the behavior of large public companies, which comprise less than 1% of the businesses in America. What about the other 99%? I was convinced a unique body of knowledge existed to explain the private company market. Further, this body of knowledge seemed to possess a triangular interconnection between valuation, capitalization and business transfer. In an effort to confirm my suspicions, I unwittingly set off on a conceptual Lewis & Clark-type survey, not knowing what was on the other side of the next ideational hill, so to speak.
I soon learned that the first person through a conceptual woods has a special responsibility: he/she must map the journey and provide markers for others to follow. Theoretically speaking, he/she must organize and structure the body of knowledge. As it turns out, this is no small task. In a dire moment, I fortunately relied on the professorial talents of Shriver, Baird, Yamauchi, and others, to set the proper course. I knew what I must do: call some old friends.
Of course, Aristotle spoke first. After yet another reminder that "modern-day" America's best intellectual day does not rise to the level of ancient Greece's worst, he offered empiricism as a logical starting point. "Certainty is possible only through a combination of observation and reason," he intoned. Never to be outdone, the rationalists spoke next. Des Cartes espoused his single ideal logic; Liebniz exclaimed that pure reason is the basis for all knowledge. A good start, I thought, but something more concrete was needed. Kant saw his opening and rebutted reason: "Reason cannot tell us about external reality because it only deals in definitions." More confused than helped, I decided to seek someone more familiar - at the least, someone who spoke English.
Help came in the form of Whitehead and Russell. They believed "Set theory" would help me organize the primary concepts of a discipline. Although I was now far from the kingdom of business, I was onto something. The ever-insightful Kuhn, coiner of the overused phrase “paradigm shift,” said the world can be seen through a structured prism of preconceived ideas, language and logic. "A paradigm," claimed Kuhn, "is a set of embodied experiences." I was close now, but still lacked the final organizing structure, which Hegel provided. He proclaimed that triadic logic is the answer: "Unlike most financial logic based on positives and negatives, there is a triadic logic operating here providing powerful cohesion between the moving parts. A system of logic with three bases is dynamic rather than static and serves to bring the three sides of the triangle into a coherent whole. This is the logic of a three-legged stool." After several years of these "conversations," involving dozens of aged acquaintances, I had my answer.
This leads us back to the central question: why should anyone study liberal arts, especially history? The answer is simple: regardless of the endeavor, one can never have too many old friends.
Rob Slee, '80, History, manages an investment banking firm in Charlotte. His book, Private Capital Markets, is being published by Wiley & Sons and will be available in early 2004.