Who Killed the Humanities?

Over the past generation, David Brooks notes, fewer and fewer college students are signing up to study courses in the humanities. In place of English literature and Greek philosophy they are studying accounting and finance. Link here.

Given the state of the job market, Brooks fears that the trend will continue, and maybe even accelerate.

At the same time, and coincidentally, Stanley Fish has posted a paean to the virtues of classical education on his Times blog. Link here.

I will say that I am highly sympathetic with both columns. Given my somewhat advanced age I too remember a time when high school was filled with courses in Latin, French, algebra, calculus, trigonometry, history, civics, and the like. These were the courses that Stanley Fish took in high school, and he would be willing to force today's students to study them also.

Fish is right to say that students would benefit from reading great fiction, wrestling with great ideas, and learning the history of their and other nations.

But, if the humanities have lost out to accounting and finance, who is responsible? Who killed the humanities? Neither Brooks nor Fish even mentions this issue, perhaps because it is not a new question. Furthermore, most people agree on the answer.

And yet, the question of who killed the humanities, is for lovers of Sherlock Holmes stories, the dog that didn't bark.

There are at least three answers.

First, when the 1960s counterculture set out to reform university education it gave students vastly more freedom to choose their own courses of study. As a result, students began to gravitate away from humanities courses. They were voting with their tuition money, and they chose to take fewer courses in English literature.

Second, and, and more importantly, the counterculture introduced theories and practices that tended to degrade great literature and great philosophy. Professors began to make a career out of attacking the classics and devaluing what they called: the canon.

As good cultural warriors these academics happily declared that the classics that Brooks, Fish, and I hold dear are nothing more than instruments of societal oppression. By their lights the classics became classics because they were supporting the ruling power elite and the patriarchy. Worse yet, they were working to repress and suppress sexual pleasure. The victims of the classics were the working class and minorities.

When today's students take a course in literature they will be learning that Shakespeare sexist, that Aristotle was misogynistic, that Plato was homophobic, that Dickens was a cultural imperialist... and so on and so on.

The most relevant question is whether or not today's professors would be able to teach the classics or the canon in ways that Brooks, Fish, and I would like.

Students may be moving away from serious study of the great classics, but, in that they are simply following their professors who gave them up a generation ago.

A student might thrill to the genius of Jane Austen but why should she take a course from a professor whose most recent paper purports to explain away Pride and Prejudice by an analysis of how often Jane Austen masturbated?

Once counterculture warriors reduced the classics to symptoms of societal ills, it was not long before they decided that there was no real difference between great literature and great advertising slogans, between great philosophy and mediocre comic books. They insisted that there was no such thing as intrinsic value, intrinsic artistic merit, or intrinsic philosophical greatness.

Clearly, many universities still offer academically rigorous courses in the classics. But if you should decide to major in a department that falls within the category of the humanities, you will find it nearly impossible to avoid rampant political correctness.

And that too is part of the problem. How fairly will a college student's work be judged by a professor who wears his political correctness as a badge of honor? How objectively will his work be appraised by a professor who believes that his role is to indoctrinate his students?

Given the importance of grades, why would a student take the chance that he will be spending good tuition money on a course where his professor will tell him how to think and that will lower his grade if he chooses to think differently.

Doesn't this offer at least a partial explanation for the growing enrollments in courses in accounting and finance? As opposed to the humanities and the classics, these increasingly popular courses involve numbers. When you take a test in accounting there are right and wrong answers. If you take a course in finance you will know that you will be competing on a level playing field, on exactly the same basis as your peers. You will feel confident that you will be judged on your ability and your hard work, not on whether or not you can parrot the professor's opinion.

Can you say as much about a course in Shakespeare or Hegel?

Sorry to say, but college students did not kill the humanities. Clearly, that dishonor belongs to those culture warriors who entered the teaching profession after the 1960s and who have dedicated their careers to its deconstruction.

Coaching Lessons: "Is Any Job Better Than No Job?"

Last week I wrote a somewhat alarmist post called: "The Mind of Young America." Link here.

In it I examined three pieces of data. First, compared to previous generations young Americans today are suffering an empathy deficit. Second, in a time of 20% youth unemployment, 40% of young people have turned down a job offer. Third, young people seem to have learned in college that they should only work for 40 hours a week. They have no sense of the old work ethic.

If you should ever happen to be called upon to advise a young person who is trying to choose between a suboptimal job offer and continued unemployment, you are likely to hear the following query: "Is any job better than no job?"

As it happens, that is the title of a discussion on the New York Times site where a number of interesting experts offer different responses to the question. Link here.

The different points of view are all interesting and enlightening. They show the different approaches you might take to the question. And thus constitute a comprehensive analysis.

For the record I found the advice of Hara Estroff Marano, an author and editor at large at Psychology Today, to be most consonant with my own point of view.

Of course, the question itself is loaded. No one really believes that you should take just any job. And no one really believes the opposite: that you should hold out for the perfect job.

If you read all of the comments you will, hopefully, come away with a sense that you can make your best decision when you learn how to balance the advantages and disadvantages of any specific job, based on your abilities, your interests, and the state of the job market.

Young people who think that their quest for self-actualization allows them to ignore the realities of the job market are most likely to pay very dearly for their narcissism.

In the end, there are so many advantages to getting and holding down a job, that you need a very, very good reason to continue to be unemployed.

As Marano points out, getting a job counts as a success; it allows you to compete in the open marketplace; it gives you the chance to develop a good work ethic; and it opens further opportunities to advancement. In other words, a job will push you to develop your good character. You cannot develop your character and your game day skills by sitting on the sidelines.

This is more true when you start seeing job listings that read: "the unemployed will not be considered." Link here. It's a lot easier to get a job when you have a job.

Keep in mind that a teenage Colin Powell's first job was sweeping the floors of a factory in the Bronx.

Some might consider such work beneath their dignity or their credentials. It may well be. Powell did not see it that way. He told himself that he was going to show them that he could be better at sweeping floors than anyone else. He decided to use the job to show his diligence, his efficiency, his dedication to his work, and his good character.

After a while, his boss noticed and started wondering how such a good employee could be merely assigned to sweeping floors.

Had Powell acted as though he were too good for the job, he most likely would not have been promoted.

All managers agree that a good attitude cannot be taught, and that an employee who brings one to the job will have a much brighter future than an employee who is perfectly self-involved.

Some commentators on the Times site suggested that in a slow job market it might be a good idea to do advanced study to upgrade your credentials. In some cases this is an excellent suggestion; in others, not so good.

Here the calculations are difficult and complex. If you are planning to sit out the recession in grad school, this does not feel like such a great idea. If you can find a program that will prepare you for a good job in a growing field, that seems like a better idea.

Keep in mind that a young person starting out in grad school must weigh the cost of his future education against the future value of his degree.

A few years back many young people decided that going to law school was a great idea. They were willing to incur somewhere close to $200,000 in debt because they knew that their future salaries as first year associates would be sufficient to pay off their loans and to allow them to maintain a comfortable lifestyle.

In the time that it took these young people to complete law school the legal profession has undergone something of a sea change. Because of the recession it has been forced to retrench. Fewer and fewer high-paying associate jobs are available. The low paying jobs that are somewhat available do not pay well enough to allow the young lawyers to pay off their loans.

A few years ago it seemed like a great opportunity. Now, not so much.

It is very difficult to make a decision based on a projection of what the future will look like four years out. Most often when we do so we assume that the future will look just like the present, only more so.

In the current economic environment that approach is looking less and less useful.

Should We Blame the Technology?

Is alcohol responsible for alcoholism? Scientists know what alcohol does to your brain. Will this knowledge deter alcoholics? Does it relieve them of responsibility for their behavior?

No serious person suggests that alcohol is responsible for alcoholism. Blaming alcohol is the way into alcoholism, not the way out.

Responsibility is not a scientific issue. But when science encroaches into ethics, it can very easily mislead.

Often enough, research into addiction makes people feel utterly powerless to fight against it, or even to control it. If that is true, wouldn't it be logical just to give in to it?

The same line of reasoning applies to recent articles about internet addiction. We read about people who are hooked up to email, Facebook Twitter, texting and the like as though they were on an intravenous opiate drip.

They can't live with it; and they can't live without it.

In yesterday's New York Times Matt Richtel described a family, the Campbell family, that, by all appearances, is hooked on electronic gadgets and social media. Link here. Richtel's long and detailed account of how these gadgets have taken over the life of this family should certainly sound a cautionary note.

According to scientists, these Steve Jobs-produced gadgets elicit something that they call "a dopamine squirt" that is positively addictive.

One can only stand back and marvel at the imagination of the scientific mind!

I am not going to belabor the by-now old idea that Steve Jobs is an incarnate devil luring us all to emotional and intellectual ruin.

I prefer looking at another concept that Richtel engages: multitasking. I have already expressed by thoughts about why multitasking is a bad idea, here and here.

Today I want to emphasize how cultural values lure people into addictive behavior. When the culture decides, for example, that multitasking is a desirable, it induces people to believe that if they can multitask-- bouncing between Facebook and Twitter and email in split seconds-- they are enhancing their productivity and creativity.

The culture transmits ethical values. When it tells you that it is a good to do several things at once, you are more likely to try to reorganize your life to correspond to this new principle. If it seems to be making you distracted and disconnected, well then, the only conclusion must be that you do not multitask enough.

One other reason causes you to persist in this most modern form of multitasking: it produces repeated "dopamine squirts," and thus becomes addictive.

But as Richtel points out, multitasking makes distraction into a way of life, causes people to lose focus, and produces fragmented thought patterns.

Unfortunately, multitasking also feels good. And the culture has for quite some time taught us that: If it feels good, do it.

How can something that feels good be bad for you? Well it can, and addictive behaviors must have been invented to ensure that when we grow up we put away notions like: If it feels good, do it.

Of course, you do not need high technology and social media to get addicted to fragmented thinking and incoherent sentences. You could have learned as much by doing psychoanalysis and learning how to free associate. Call it a low-tech addiction.

For those of who trained in psychoanalysis in Paris way back when, the idea that free association is addictive is not news. The French analysts did not exactly use that word, but that was their sense of it.

Free association is an acquired skill. Given that it is socially dysfunctional behavior precious few people have an instinctive ability to say whatever comes to mind, regardless of its relevance or the effect it might produce on a listener.

When a patient wants to show his analyst that he is learning how to free associate, he starts speaking in thought fragments, jumping around from one topic to another, throwing in an occasional bizarrely disconnected. Ah yes, talking about my girlfriend made me think of a walrus!

It is all supposed to lead to Ah! Ha! moments, moments where it all becomes clear, where it all makes sense, and where it all proves that Freud was right. Amazingly, this was theorized before scientists had discovered "dopamine squirts."

If you want to know why some people spend so many years in psychoanalysis-- in the old days I knew a number of people who had had more than 20 years of analysis-- and why they need to see their analysts every day, why they even like doing it every day, and why some of them go into withdrawal when they terminate treatment, then perhaps the reason is that free association is like an addictive drug.

Juan Williams on Crisis Mismanagement

Yesterday on Fox News Sunday Juan Williams offered one of the clearest and most succinct-- and high concept-- explanations of what wrong with Obama's leadership.

In Williams' words: "... when it comes to the crisis, when it comes to the gulf oil spill, the wars, the recession, they [the Obama administration] feel as if it's being imposed on them, rather than taking the helm. I think that's what Americans are sensing right here. ... Are you able to handle a crisis in a convincing way that inspires confidence? And so far the president hasn't done that."

This does not require too much commentary, but surely the difference between competent and incompetent crisis management is that the incompetent manager acts as though the crisis is being imposed on him while competent manager takes charge, seizes the challenge, even to the point of making it look like he has been waiting for it.

The Internet Promotes the Free Trade in Ideas. But at What Price?

Every new technology has its detractors. Change disrupts routines; it is the enemy of the familiar, and we all prefer the familiar to the strange.

Sometimes change disrupts the order of society itself. The arrival of the internet has circumscribed the power, prestige, and jobs of many of those who have worked in the media. It has also threatened the authority of teachers. Beyond that the internet has threatened those who want to use their positions in the media to control the minds of their fellow citizens.

These three groups are not the same. And they should not be lumped together.

Writing effectively, whether in a book or a magazine article, does not come naturally. At least it doesn't to me. A good editor will sharpen your concept, improve your prose style, and guide you toward a more organized and felicitous presentation of whatever you want to say. Many times an editor will help you to discover exactly what it is that you want to say.

A good publisher will ensure that your work comes to the attention of the largest number of potential readers. And a good reviewer will offer potential readers a capsule summary of your work, along with a fair estimation of its value.

At least, that is the way it is supposed to work. I have been fortunate enough to have worked with great editors, so I can attest that sometimes it does work that way.

But it does not work that way automatically. Publishing can only work at its best when its practitioners have a liberal and open mind, and when they respect the work of their authors and the sensibilities of their readers. This is not always the case, but sometimes, and hopefully, it often is.

And yet, publishing is a business, and lately, under attack by the internet, where free really does mean free, the business model has become less and less lucrative. And this has meant more marketing-driven works, more celebrity works, and less of the kind of serious books whose absence people bemoan but that they don't buy.

Now we have something new, called self-publishing, which used to be called vanity publishing, and the blogosphere. And let's not forget Facebook and Twitter. Through these internet-driven media more and more people can communicate whatever, whenever, wherever, and with whomever they wish.

The second group threatened by the internet is the teaching profession. Not the entirety of the teaching profession but those educators who see themselves less as educators, and more as indoctrinators. Such teachers want to exercise strict control over students' access to ideas and information, because they want to control student minds.

Their means of control is obviously the grading system. Whether they realize it or not, grades can be used as an instrument of power and control. Students may or may not be aware of it, but if they believe that they will receive poorer grades for taking politically incorrect positions, they will be induced to think the way their teachers want them to think.

The same impulse to establish a monopoly in the marketplace of ideas, is also manifest in more mainstream media. I will not belabor the point, but the mainstream media tends to think the same way and to present information the same way, and thus to exercise a measure of control over the minds of their consumers. The most egregious recent example is the media's failure to question Barack Obama about his credentials, his qualifications, his views, and his past associations. To its eternal discredit the media gave Obama a pass, and thus transformed itself from reporter into propagandist.

People who have dedicated themselves to fighting the culture wars feel that it is their moral duty to control information, to control access to opinion, and to control minds. The internet is their nightmare.

But, Clay Shirky suggests in the Wall Street Journal, the wild west of the internet seems to be the enemy of peer reviewed journal articles. After all, peer review provides something of a guarantee of quality and veracity. Don't we lose this when everyone can offer an opinion, or even his own version of the facts. Link here.

Let's make a couple of important distinctions. When peer reviewed articles appear in scientific journals, that means that fellow scientists have checked the data and the experimental method. They are willing to guarantee the correctness of the procedures and the results. When you are dealing with experimental science this is the right and proper way to go about things.

Science deals in facts, and very few of us have the means to check out experimentally-derived facts.

Even there it is possible to game the system. Recent debates about the validity of climate science have been attacked because major climate scientists seem to have figured out ways to game the system, to ensure that articles are sent for peer review to like-thinking colleagues, and to make it nearly impossible for detractors to receive funding for their research.

The same is more true in the humanities. The fever swamp of political correctness has found the humanities to be the most congenial hothouse. In principle, articles and books in the humanities have been cleared by objective peers, but, in many cases the peers in question do not believe in objective judgement. They are so committed to their ideology that they judge the work of others on the basis of whether or not it furthers their cause.

It does not, of course, need to be this way. I recall an old anecdote about England's Cambridge University. When Bertrand Russell was asked whether or not he would recommend Ludwig Wittgenstein for a fellowship, Russell declared, as I recall, that Wittgenstein's work might well prove that he, Russell, had been wrong about basic issues, but, nonetheless, this was no reason to deny a great philosopher a fellowship.

I do not know how often that happens today, but I hope it happens more than I think it does.

All of this to say that the internet has threatened the monopoly of those who would control access to fact and opinion, but it has also opened the media to what Glenn Reynolds called "an army of Davids." The internet has created the freest marketplace of ideas that has ever existed. The fact that it is subject to abuse merely suggests that human beings are participating in it. All previous media were subject to abuse. They are probably being abused as we speak. When people rail against the blogosphere they conveniently forget the problems that inhere in the old media.

As it happens, the products of the new media are of uneven quality. As Clay Shirky writes: "The bulk of publicly available media is created by people who understand little of the professional standards and practices for media. Instead, these amateurs produce endless streams of mediocrity, eroding cultural norms about quality and acceptability, and leading to increasingly alarmed predictions of incipient chaos and intellectual collapse."

As it happens, Shirky is being somewhat ironic here. One person's mediocrity spurs another person's insight. Shirky is actually arguing that this is what always happens when a new media arrives on the scene. When the printing press was invented the increasingly easy availability of written texts revolutionized European intellectual life, by breaking the Catholic Church's control over access to the Bible, and by launching a political culture based on inexpensive and easily available newspapers and pamphlets.

Eventually, Shirky adds, the free market worked to sort it all out. The net effect was: "increasing, rather than decreasing the intellectual range and output of society."

To fear the free and open expression of information is to fear democracy itself. Often enough, those who want to exercise the most strict control over information are most afraid of having to hear the voice of the people.

Shirky makes another very important point. Today the internet allows more and more people to participate in public debate. Whether by blogging themselves or by writing comments on the blogs of others, whether by writing on their Facebook page or sending their comments to their Facebook friends, or even Tweeting, people today have become ever more active participants in the political and cultural debate.

Isn't that intrinsically desirable in a democratic nation?

I would add one point. When you write things down, and especially when you write things for public consumption, the act itself tends to clarify your thought, to calm down your enthusiasm, even to the point, as most writers know only too well, of seeming to produce new ideas in the very act of writing down the old ideas.

Writing and reading are educational, especially because they encourage participation. Isn't it better to have people actively participating in the political discussion than merely being passive consumers of the information that a selected elite has decided to put out there?

In Time of Crisis, Who to Blame?

A month or so ago market strategist David Rosenberg declared that while the recession seems to be over, the economic depression is not.

If he's right, it's the 1930s all over again, and, as Roger Simon suggested today, for many people that means it's time to blame the Jews. Link here.

When I read those words, I did a double take myself. How could it happen that after so many years of work on eradicating racism anti-semitism could be making a comeback. At the least, the statement sounds like hyperbole.

But then again, what are we to make of these remarks by Helen Thomas, the longest serving member of the White House press corps. Speaking directly into an open video feed, Thomas expressed her opinion that the Jews should get out of Palestine, where they are an occupying power, and go back to Poland and Germany where they belong. Link here.

Egregious and outrageous Helen Thomas certainly was. She is since apologized. The real question, as Roger Simon states it, is what possibly could have made her think that it was alright to make such an anti-semitic statement? Wouldn't she be afraid that it would ruin a lifetime's reputation?

Could it be that what with the airways and television screens and press are filled with attacks on Israel, Thomas never got the message that even if it is alright to hate Israel, hating the Jewish state is not the same as hating Jews?

Sometimes it looks like Palestine has replaced global warming as the liberal cause du jour? And as the world rallies to the Palestinian cause, we should note that the Palestinians do not really make such fine distinctions between Israelis and Jews.

For his part Roger Simon suggests that Helen Thomas felt empowered to express anti-Semitic thoughts publicly because she is simply following the lead of our president.

In his words: "Consciously or not, our president-- with his increased and pompously self-righteous pressure on Israel-- has sent a message to the world. It's time to blame the Jews. And the world, in economic extremis, is all too eager to find someone to blame."

In time of economic trouble, governments always seek scapegoats. As I wrote previously they work long at hard at crafting a narrative that will place the blame somewhere other than on their persons and leadership. And we all know that Obama has wanted to blame terrorism on Israel and the financial crisis on Wall Street bankers, like the partners of Goldman Sachs. Link here.

One of the reasons that Obama is having a political problem with the catastrophe in the Gulf is that he has been having trouble fixing the blame. Instead he vacillates between feckless disinterest and yesterday's mindless and meaningless macho posturing.

Obama has created a political environment where it is perfectly fine to stand in front of him and trash the laws of an American state. And he has created an environment where no one thinks twice about walking into the White House and taking a cheap shot at George W. Bush.

Leadership involves creating an atmosphere where people feel compelled to demonstrate respect. On that score, Obama is surely misleading. He is setting the example that allows others to feel safe in attacking those he has singled out for blame.

And we should note that Obama's attacks on Israel have been working their way through the more intellectual segments of our media.

Peter Beinart is leading the charge, but this week he was joined by Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic and a leading Jewish intellectual.

What does Wieseltier have to say about the flotilla incident? Quite simply, he presents the blame-Israel-first narrative, even declaring that Israel has lost the moral high ground to Hamas. Link here.

Admittedly, Wieseltier and other liberal Jewish intellectuals pay lip service to the horrors that Hamas has visited on the people of Gaza. On occasion they even mention that Hamas has declared itself to be at war with Israel and has maintained allegiance to a charter that calls for the destruction of Israel.

And yet, the notion that Hamas could ever occupy the moral high ground is a disgraceful and ignorant. Nothing about Hamas spells moral high ground, except in the minds of terrified and guilt-ridden intellectuals. Besides, no one has ever won a war by occupying the moral high ground.

This pious invocation of values in the middle of a war is most often a stepping stone to surrender. What would get you to the moral high ground quicker than laying down arms?

The worst part is that Wieseltier and his ilk are actively asserting the anti-Israeli line. They are undermining Israeli credibility, by blaming adopting the Hamas line that Israel is responsible for whatever problems the Palestinians may or may not be suffering.

Keep in mind that these intellectuals voted for the policies that are being played on in the Middle East. They voted for Obama and they should have known that his background did not exactly make him the most likely supporter of Jewish state. I venture that they despised George W. Bush, who was strongly pro-Israeli.

Faced with the choice of repudiating their support for Obama or advancing his narrative, they have chosen the latter. If they repudiate Obama, what would that say about their vaunted intelligence: that they were tricked or duped?

In all fairness, I must add that the Obama administration seems to be stepping back a bit from its harsh condemnation of Israel. Yesterday Vice President Biden came to Israel's defense, and Democratic Rep. Anthony Wiener has been strongly critical of Turkey's role in fomenting a crisis.

I fear, however, that this does not signal a shift in policy. It feels more like speaking with forked tongue, speaking out of both sides of your mouth, a lesson in political expediency. The Obama administration has lost considerable Jewish support and, most likely, significant Jewish campaign contributions.

Allowing Joe Biden and Anthony Wiener to take the Israeli side feels like a too little, too late, a sop to Jewish voters, while Obama himself again refuses to take the Israeli side.

Citibank Fires Aphrodite. Aphrodite Sues.

Here's some advice that most men know all too well. Unless you are some kind of a professional stylist, never, ever tell a woman how to dress.

When your date or your girlfriend or your wife dresses up for a special occasion-- make that, for any occasion-- your job is to lavish her with all the praise you can muster. No matter what you think. No matter how she looks.

Even male therapists know this, often from having learned the hard way. A woman will happily accept that she has an Oedipus complex or an Electra complex, or, more recently, a Phaedra complex, but if her male therapist should ever hint, suggest, or intimate that her appearance is in any way strange or bizarre or off-putting, he will learn more than he wants to know about the old line: Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Women work very hard on their appearance. And since their dress codes are not dictated by uniforms, they have to work harder at it than men. Your appearance is your public face; you can control it; and you want it to present yourself at your best. Women usually have a very good idea of what makes them look best, whether it is most attractive on a date or most professional on the job.

If they do not, an army of makeover specialists, to say nothing of best friends, is at the ready to help them out.

A man judging a woman's appearance is like Ellen Degeneres judging American Idol. He might be witty and charming, but if he knows as much about women's dress as Ellen knows about music, he should simply sit back and say nice things.

This to introduce the sad story of one Debrahlee Lorenzana, a woman who was recently fired from her job at Citibank for dressing inappropriately. Now, she has also decided to sue the bank because, she charges, her intrinsic and essential sexiness proved too much for the men at the bank to handle.

As a goddess of feminine sensuality, a veritable postmodern Aphrodite, she could not, despite her best efforts, camouflage her true nature to fit Citibank's standards.

The Village Voice has the story and accompanies it with a modelicious slide show that could easily pass for a look book. Link here.

I will mention in passing that my local Citibank branch is but a few short blocks from Lorenzanas. And I will attest that all of the women at my local branch always comply with Citibank's dress code. They all dress professionally, all the time.

When Lorenzana complains to the Village Voice that other women at her branch were wearing low cut blouses and micro-miniskirts, the charge does not ring true to my experience.

Nor does it ring true to the strictly unscientific sampling conducted by the highly estimable site, Dealbreaker. Link here.

The self-selected group that wrote in to Dealbreaker had conducted business in the Citibank branch where Lorenzana had worked. Most of them admit to the fact that her appearance was a distraction-- sometimes for better, sometimes for worse-- and therefore, that it was out of place. In fact, Lorenzana had gained a degree of notoriety for her sensual appearance.

If you read the Village Voice story, much of it emphasizes the extensive discussions that Lorenzana had with her male manager. If said manager felt compelled to have continuing conversations with her about her appearance, surely there was something wrong. And if he, like most men, did not express himself with the skill that a stylist could have mustered, we must, by my lights, accord him some slack.

Explaining to a woman how she should dress does not come easily to most men. As it should not. Most women are perfectly competent at adopting an appropriate professional appearance, so the question does not arise very often in very many offices.

As she tells it, Lorenzana tried everything to cover up her burgeoning sensuality. To no avail. Since all of her efforts failed, that meant that she was simply too hot for their repressive Puritanical culture.

I believe we should add that most women are not especially happy about having one of their professional colleagues dress like a vamp. They might even feel that it distracts from their own professionalism and contributes to a less than harmonious work environment.

In any event, given her manager's difficulty dealing with her appearance, Lorenzana was transferred from the Chrysler Building branch to the Rockefeller Center branch. Perhaps Citibank was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, because it assigned her a female manager.

The result: the female manager fired her after about a month on the job.

Which led Lorenzana to sue.

She is now proposing a multicultural defense. She is a Puerto Rican, and this apparently means that you are so thoroughly sensual that you cannot hide it or dissimulate it.

She insists that she tried. But alas, this postmodern Aphrodite could not even use fashion and stylings to tamp down her effulgent sensuality and render her appearance more fitting for a bank.

Of course, there is more to sensuality than skirt length and cleavage. For all any of us know Lorenzana's demeanor, the way she looked at people, her gestures... might have been giving people the sense that she was there for love and not for work.

Ought a Puerto Rican to adapt to New York banking culture? Of course, she should. As they say: when in Rome do as the Romans.

People come to New York City from all over the world. If everyone insisted in following different dress codes, speaking different languages, and having different table manners, the city and its businesses would quickly descend into a Babel-like anarchy.

Maybe Lorenzana will win her suit. Maybe she will not. The least we can say is that she is sufficiently well adapted to American culture to know that her grievance should be litigated. The sad part of her story is that she does not have much of a future in the professional world.

Perhaps, as Susan Walsh suggests, she is angling for a role on Donald Trump's The Apprentice. True enough, her uncontrollable sensuality seems more fitted to a celebrity culture than to a bank.