Whether we like it or not, most courses of study at modern-day colleges have certain aesthetic connotations attached to them. We picture our pre-med friends up late at night, scrawling indecipherable chemistry equations on whiteboards; we imagine our English major classmates armed with a tote bag and alternative fashion; the list could go on. These are likely unfair or distorted archetypes, yet nowhere are they stronger than in the field of finance—the major under the umbrella of Boston College’s Carroll School of Management (CSOM). Say the term “finance bro” and a lot comes to mind—probably not all of it positive. And a lot of it is expressly intertwined with politics. There is the perception of the Goldman Sachs-interning, MAGA hat-wearing, Trump-supporting individual that many of us can’t seem to shake.
At the start of the semester, I heard two friends talking about how right-wing the politics of students in CSOM were, one asking the other how many of them would call themselves at the very least, “socially liberal, fiscally conservative,” and the other saying that they’d think it’s 75%. Intrigued by the magnitude of this claim, I wanted to verify it, especially the idea of this split between social issues and economic issues. Are there a wealth of people here who support things like abortion access and LGBTQ+ rights, but when confronted with matters of tax increases or spending on policy hedge a little and either vote for a Republican or don’t vote at all? Is this kind of tension even legitimate? Some argue that to be “socially liberal and fiscally conservative” is to fail the disempowered groups you claim to support by not equipping them with the economic policy changes they would need in order to flourish.
But people still call themselves that. “It’s, like, basically my 8-man,” said someone I ran into one late night in the Walsh Hall lounge when I asked him about his CSOM roommates. Excited to talk to people who matched this description, I asked him if I could interview his roommates about how they got their ideologies, but when this request was passed on, the only thing I got back was dead air. They didn’t want to talk about it; the question was ignored or avoided. “It was saying no without having to say no,” he reported back.
Other attempts didn’t yield much more. Walking into Fulton Hall one afternoon, I took a deep breath and approached two CSOM boys, disturbing their peace of studying. When asked whether students’ politics leaned one way or another in CSOM, one said, “it’s pretty varied,” and looked to his friend for corroboration, who only nodded. When asked what their politics were, he said, “I’d rather not say,” and, knowing when certain welcomes become overstayed, I walked away.
Frustrated by these barriers to information, I talked to acquaintances and friends of friends in the school, some of whom hold complex, not-quite-liberal political views, and on every occasion I was batted away. One of them said he wouldn’t know anything about it. Multiple said that politics don’t come up in CSOM. A girl I met said that from what she does know, the strain of social liberalism and fiscal conservatism is strong and commonplace there, and a boy I know said that within the school there’s a difference between things like investment banking and business analytics. The IB guys are pretty right-wing, he said.
All of this is hearsay and should be treated with the lessened value that it deserves, but over the course of my questioning it became clear that the story here might not be CSOM’s political conservatism, but CSOM’s political silence. What was stressed in many conversations was that CSOM, as a pre-professional institution, does not have the same free-wheeling political valency and rhetoric of the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences (MCAS); the students are taking notes on economic diagrams, not reading Angela Davis or Tom Wolfe or debating the pros and cons of a free-market system. But in any case, there is something pernicious about silence. And at a time when nearly every part of the federal government and economy is being dismantled by an unelected billionaire, it can be discomfiting to think that the next generation of business and economic leaders do not seem to have politics on their radar.
Ryan Mulderrig, the Associate Dean of CSOM, who also coordinates the first-year business ethics class PORTICO, stresses the importance of his class and the message of social responsibility it carries. “We don’t want to create automatons who are just number crunchers, finance savants who have no real understanding of the world in which the decisions that they make are having an impact.” However, the discussion in CSOM classes, for better or for worse, seems to be much more focused on business than the society around it. “Social issues,” said Mulderrig, “like civil rights, or LGBTQ issues, or anything like that doesn’t really come up in a political class and probably doesn’t come up in many of the business classes either. So we don’t get to see or hear about that as much.”
I then talked to Thomas Wesner, a professor in the Business Law and Society Department of CSOM, who said “I don’t have data on it, but anecdotally, Carroll School students I think are definitely in favor of less regulation of the market,” which certainly backs up the claims of fiscal conservatism in the school. Beginning to wonder whether the chicken or the egg came first, whether fiscally conservative students apply to CSOM or if there’s something in CSOM that makes undecided students more right-leaning, Wesner said, “there is sort of, well, I would say a strong bias in favor of markets functioning best when they’re regulated only to moderate levels,” and, “there is a pro-free market bias.” And on whether the popular strand of social liberalism and fiscal conservatism is contradictory, he opined, “my sense is that it’s neither paradoxical that someone would hold those views or illogical or inconsistent.”
Is CSOM inherently right-leaning? It depends on how one defines that. I asked my closest CSOM friend this question and she said that the classes run on a capitalist model where “the goal of a corporation is to increase stockholder value.” From my inquiries, I got the impression that the school is far more apolitical than ideological, that the political discourse that is often the lifeblood of college campuses is drowned out by more of a silence emanating from Fulton Hall. Only time will tell whether anything between continued political ambivalence or quiet flirtations with conservatism will serve the world well in the next generation.
If there is anything really hopeful to take away from this all, it is what Mulderrig said about a “triple bottom line,” which is an emerging idea in business that alongside shareholder profit, other goals of a company can be to help the employees who work there and to aid the environment. He cites businesses like Patagonia and Chobani as ones who have, “managed to be extremely profitable while also not abandoning their sense of social responsibility.” And in a world where the power of capitalism and business conglomerates go unrestrained, and where the educational upbringing of their future participants is politically ambivalent at best, that is one development that can seem like improvement.
Really into tacky boba shops, pretentious novels, and long talks with friends that are a mix of both
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