Much profit and titanic businesses have grown in Californian soils, but so too have malodorous weeds, the sort that suck wealth vampire-like from established industries while smugly calling themselves “disruptors”
On a recent trip to Quebec City, I sought refuge from the rain inside Notre-Dame Basilica.
Despite noisy tourists, donation boxes blemishing every sanctuary and a gift shop planted tackily inside the once-grand vestibule, the basilica’s mission managed to poke through the noise.
But just barely.
Buildings do more than keep us dry. They express our values – and how we sometimes betray those values.
And so I wonder what York University hopes to say with its newest building, the Bergeron Centre for Engineering Excellence.
Home to the Lassonde School of Engineering – named after its patron, mining tycoon Pierre Lassonde – the Bergeron Centre features a striking façade, small classrooms and laboratories where York plans on training “renaissance engineers.”
Unlike regular engineers, renaissance engineers will, in the spirit of Michelangelo, master a range of disciplines: engineering, art, law and more.
It’s an admirable goal, and considering how long Canada has languished in the sediment of world innovation rankings, no doubt needed.
And with so many graduates struggling to find work, a different approach to teaching might help them land jobs or make jobs for themselves.
But one aspect of the $69 million building strikes a hollow note. In an attempt to break the mould of a traditional engineering school – and to look current – York has modelled Bergeron Centre after a Silicon Valley startup. The building has voguish open concept workspaces, whiteboards in the hallways and “anarchist labs,” where students can hack out ideas without their teachers watching.
(Students will have to bring their own hoodies or buy one from the university’s tuck shop.)
Am I the only one skeptical about York’s decision to parody Silicon Valley?
Yes, good work, much profit and titanic businesses have grown in Californian soils, but so too have malodorous weeds, the sort that suck wealth vampire-like from established industries while smugly calling themselves “disruptors.”
Consider one of the more notorious startups in recent years: Uber. This taxi-company-by-any-other-name “disrupted” (read: broke) bylaws in Toronto and other cities until city councillors changed the law in Uber’s favour.
Is this the type of startup York hopes to emulate?
Or how about Airbnb, a company making news for warping rental housing markets in cities where it nests?
Or music streaming services that have helped to decimate the incomes of musicians?
And how should we feel about the many startups designing software to automate human labour on a grand scale? We will praise their daring engineering from the breadline.
Startups have cachet. They’re cool and make for good marketing brochures, and so it’s no wonder that York has plugged into a fad it hopes will draw tuition dollars to its campus.
But had York’s leadership read Disrupted, Dan Lyons’ hilarious and disturbing memoir of life in a startup, they might have tempered their enthusiasm to dress up as a startup.
Disrupted tells how Lyons, an out-of-work journalist, found a job as a writer at HubSpot, a startup specializing in “inbound marketing.” Over the course of Lyons’ book, HubSpot reveals itself to be insensitive, ageist, cultic, creepily social, unbendingly, irrationally positive and humourless. It exemplifies the worst aspects of the small-minded, know-nothing corporate culture that startups claim to oppose.
When we talk about startups, we’re talking about attitude, business models, not theory on learning. In fact, the values exhibited by so many startups aren’t worth replicating.
We don’t need to build basilicas at our universities, but a little dignity, please. Let’s hold fast to the good idea that universities are not, should not and cannot replicate business.
In the end, we’ll have to trust York’s professors to sidestep the university’s adulation of startup culture and teach future engineers how to build a better society. That means imparting humanitarian values, values that often run counter to the profit model.
Please, teach students how to think like entrepreneurs. We need that. But filter out the anti-social Silicon Valley arrogance causing so much damage to so many people. •
Robert Price is a communications and professional writing instructor at the University of Toronto
