La historia más inspiradora del año + Los hermosos mensajes de Milton Garzón de Ahmsa

Domain-marketing para posicionar su negocio en Internet

¿Vas a lanzarte a un negocio en Internet? ¿Quieres adaptar tu negocio tradicional para promocionarlo por la Red? La posibilidades, con varios miles de millones de internautas en el mundo, son muchas. Pero para tener más probabilidad de éxito, es necesario buscar un buen dominio sobre el que hacerlo crecer.  De hecho, un buen dominio de Internet es un activo tan valioso, en muchos casos, como la propia marca y de hecho se puede valorar como tal.

Aquí ocho consejos para comenzar con buen pie un negocio en la red.

·                     El dominio de Internet es, para un negocio, tan importante como la marca o la ubicación física. Por eso es recomendable chequear en registradores de dominios como godaddy.com o enom.com, entre otros mucho existente, si el dominio deseado está libre. Con una sencilla búsqueda en esta web sabremos si el dominio que queremos para nuestro negocio está libre o no.

·                     Resulta recomendable registrar no solo la versión .com del nombre deseado (como por ejemplo www.minegocio.com) sino dominios similares y alternativos como los nacionales  (.co en Colombia) y otros (.net). 

·                     Selecciona dominios cuantos más cortos mejor, ya que son más fáciles de recordar por los usuarios o clientes habituales. En el mercado secundario de dominios, la mayor parte de dominios vendidos tienen entre 4 y 12 caracteres. los dominios de más de 20 caracteres se suelen descartar para su uso comercial por la dificultad que presentan a la hora de ser memorizados.

·                     Los dominios relacionados con el contenido y el negocio del mismo tienen, además, ventajas a la hora de ser posicionados en buscadores.

·                     En los negocios basados puramente en Internet, el nombre de dominio es equivalente a la marca o el nombre de una empresa convencional. Una identidad de marca fuerte junto con otros factores contribuye decisivamente a éxito de un proyecto comercial en Internet. Por lo tanto, un buen nombre de dominio deberá ser fácil de recordar y transmitir una imagen positiva. En este sentido, es aconsejable evitar nombres de dominio formados por añadidos (tales como "online" o "web") o dominios que incluyan guiones.

·                     Selecciona dominios cuantos más cortos mejor, ya que son más fáciles de recordar por los usuarios o clientes habituales. En el mercado secundario de dominios, la mayor parte de dominios vendidos tienen entre 4 y 12 caracteres.

·                     Si los dominios deseados están registrados por otras empresas,  se pueden buscar dominios alternativos en mercados secundarios como sedo.com. Aunque algunos dominios como spain.com alcanzan valores superiores al millón de dólares en el mercado, el precio promedio de .es en el mercado secundario es de aproximadamente 1.100 euros.

·                     Se puede buscar dominios Premium fáciles de recordar y disponibles en el mercado secundario en www.sedo.com

·                     Para campañas concretas, cada vez más empresas utilizan dominios diferenciados de la web corporativa, de formas que puede hacer seguimiento de los resultados de una campaña concreta y además utilizar el slogan como dominios. Es lo que hace Endesa con actitudazul.com, Banco Santander con  www.becas-santander.com.

Autor: Ana Paula Vazquez Cisneros.

Director Sedo España y América Latina

Innovar de verdad

 

Autor: Moisés Wasserman

Fuente: Eltiempo.com

 

La innovación está de moda. Se propone en todos lados como la panacea. Se creció tanto que se volvió locomotora, cosa que no lograron la ciencia, la educación o la salud. Parece que lo puede todo la muy novedosa innovación.

  

Pero que sea tan “nueva” es un hecho algo sorprendente si se piensa que los patriarcas de la economía, Adam Smith en 1776 y David Ricardo en 1817, ya habían planteado los efectos sobre la productividad de la invención de nuevas máquinas el primero, o de técnicas e invenciones el segundo. Julio Flórez dijo que “todo nos llega tarde...” y yo agregaría en este caso: tarde y mal definido.

Resulta que ahora llamamos innovación a cualquier idea que más o menos funcione. Si mejoramos un formato de informe, si ponemos la salida a la derecha en lugar de la izquierda, si hacemos una cola en zig-zag y no recta, nos sentimos montados en el tren que arrastra la locomotora invencible de la innovación.

La innovación puede ser incremental o radical. La primera consiste en mejoras de un producto o proceso bien conocido, la segunda en la generación de algo inexistente, producto de un nuevo conocimiento. La incremental no genera un cambio sustancial en la productividad de una empresa o una nación porque, aunque bienvenida, es de corto término y muy fácil de superar. La radical produce cambios profundos y de larga duración.

Un ejemplo, siguiendo con el símil de la locomotora: si añadimos una puerta en el centro del vagón, estamos haciendo una innovación incremental que puede imponerse en algunas líneas férreas, pero no es patentable y se puede imitar y superar fácilmente. En cambio, cuando se construyó un tren bala que levita sobre los rieles usando superconductores y que viaja a 360 kilómetros por hora, se estaba cambiando la forma como la gente se transporta en la tierra.

En otro campo de la actividad humana: si un productor de arroz diseña un empaque pequeño para quien cocina porciones mínimas, es posible que tenga éxito temporal en sus ventas entre las familias pequeñas. Pero quienes modificaron genéticamente el arroz para que su grano produjera vitamina A, no sólo resolvieron un problema grave de nutrición en la humanidad y están evitando millones de futuras cegueras, sino que aseguraron el mercado de semillas para muchos decenios en el futuro.

La innovación incremental es sencilla, la hacen los avispados y es reemplazada por la idea de otro más avispado (no digo que no sea importante, lo es y hay que mantener una cultura de mejoramiento continuo). La innovación radical, en cambio, es difícil pero puede modificar de fondo el comportamiento económico de una sociedad o de un país. Ella sólo se logra usando resultados de investigaciones científicas del más alto nivel. Sólo la hace quien fue educado, como investigador, para imaginar lo que no existe.

Los países que han sido exitosos innovando y que tienen economías fuertes y competitivas han entendido que para generar una verdadera cultura de innovación deben crear un “ecosistema” en el cual ella se dé en forma natural, como un producto necesario e inevitable. Ese sistema tiene muchos y diversos componentes, entre los cuales tres son de importancia fundamental: una estructura legal y administrativa que promueva la propiedad intelectual y facilite la constitución de empresas tecnológicas, un conjunto de estímulos sociales y económicos para quienes inventan y, sobre todo, una ciencia fuerte, madura y ampliamente financiada que le confiera al país un potencial de respuesta ante los retos que surgen permanentemente. Ojalá nuestro sistema de Ciencia y Tecnología comprenda todo esto y no se vaya por el camino light.

Moisés Wasserman

Profesor Emérito

Universidad Nacional

¿Un país solo para javerianos y uniandinos?

Autor: Sergio Ocampo (Analista)

Fuente: Larepublica.com.co

“Un país donde el presidente es un Santos, el director del primer periódico del país está casado con una Santos, el director de la revista más importante es un Santos, el que está trabajando tras bambalinas por la paz es un Santos y el que le hace la oposición es un Santos, no existe ni en África”.

La frase, lúcida, crítica, ligeramente pretenciosa y quizá expiatoria, no proviene de ningún representante de la tradicional y resentida izquierda colombiana, sino de Francisco Santos, ex periodista, ex vicepresidente y desde la semana pasada ex director de noticias de RCN radio. Y digo pretenciosa, no porque haga alarde de su linaje administrando tantas posiciones de poder, sino porque se autocalifica como “el que le hace la oposición” a su primo presidente. Y digo expiatoria porque de ese modo “Pacho” parece confesar que estaba en la radio para servir de caja de resonancia de los odios e intereses uribistas, y no para hacer periodismo.

Pero lo verdaderamente importante es que la frase resume (¿a consciencia?) uno de los males más inveterados e insolubles de este país, que lo hacen a la vez uno de los más feudales y con peor pronóstico de desarrollo humano real. Hablo de la profunda exclusión social.

El tema es sin duda muy traqueado, pero vuelve a cobrar plena vigencia por los diálogos de paz que empiezan a abrirse paso. En mi mente están las palabras de Lucía González, guerrillera del ELN y delegada para los acercamientos entre la insurgencia y el gobierno en 1991, que arrancaron en Cravo Norte (Arauca) y se hundieron en Tlaxcala (México): “Mientras en Colombia el 98% de la tierra sea del 1% de la población, no habrá nada qué hacer, ni dialogar, ni negociar”, decía ella.

Tal vez las cifras de Lucía no eran muy precisas, pero iban bien encaminadas. De acuerdo con el informe de Luis Jorge Garay “Crisis, exclusión y democratización en Colombia”, en la actualidad un 1,08% de los propietarios posee más del 53% de la tierra del país. El propio Garay revela además que el acceso a los activos financieros también ha estado restringido a unos pocos, tanto que los primeros 1.500 acreedores más grandes copan el 75% de toda la cartera de los bancos. Y de colofón, según la última Encuesta de Calidad de Vida, de Fedesarrollo, el 10% más rico de la población se queda con el 51% del PIB, mientras que el 10% más pobre apenas se reparte el 0,6.

Pero más que económico, el asunto de la exclusión es político y es cuestión de decisión política no disminuirla, y en lugar de ello profundizarla y, sin duda alguna, perpetuarla de modo intergeneracional.

Eso hace que, sin mérito alguno y apenas por la inercia de la cultura política y las relaciones de poder, Julio César Turbay Quintero (Junior) haya terminado siendo contralor general (en una de las peores gestiones, por demás); o que Simón Gaviria sea presidente de la Cámara y director del Partido Liberal, a los 31 años. Carolina Hoyos Turbay, sobrina de Junior justamente y viceministra de Tecnologías, lo resumía perfecto en una entrevista en 2008 cuando era comisionada de Televisión. A la pregunta de si no creía que se le estaba demorando el nombramiento en un Ministerio, ella respondía algo como un ya llegará. “Sé esperar. Soy una Turbay”, decía con la lógica de quien cree que aquello hace parte del orden natural de las cosas.

Hace unos días, por cuenta del remezón en el gabinete ministerial, La República publicó una serie de informes sobre los ministros de los últimos 21 años. Allí se comprueba que, por ejemplo, Mauricio Cárdenas, hijo del zar del café, ha sido titular en 18 años en Minas, Hacienda, Transporte y en Desarrollo, cuatro carteras todas económicas, pero muy distintas. Independiente de los grandes méritos de Cárdenas, un país incluyente habría pensado en cuatro colombianos para esos cuatro cargos. Y hay más datos: los 149 ministros que ha habido desde 1991 en los 16 ministerios del Ejecutivo, son egresados en un 62% de solo cinco universidades: Javeriana, Andes, Bolivariana, Nacional y Rosario. Solo las dos primeras suman el 44%. ¿Dónde está el resto del país?

Sin duda, esta forma de organizarse bajo el esquema de excluir a las enormes mayorías y preservar para sí casi todos los espacios en el campo del poder es útil y funcional para las élites pues les permite mantener intactos sus privilegios y sus patrimonios en todo sentido, social, económico, simbólico; sin embargo, es una estrategia miope y torpe en el largo plazo porque frena el verdadero desarrollo y la expansión social de masas enormes, no necesaria y exclusivamente pobres.

“Pacho” tiene razón. Esto no pasa ni en África.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers

Autor: William Deresiewicz*

Fuente: The American Scholar

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation”, a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.

The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.

But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest”, as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh”, when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige). I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.

I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart”. The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.

What about people who aren’t bright in any sense? I have a friend who went to an Ivy League college after graduating from a typically mediocre public high school. One of the values of going to such a school, she once said, is that it teaches you to relate to stupid people. Some people are smart in the elite–college way, some are smart in other ways, and some aren’t smart at all. It should be embarrassing not to know how to talk to any of them, if only because talking to people is the only real way of knowing them. Elite institutions are supposed to provide a humanistic education, but the first principle of humanism is Terence’s: “nothing human is alien to me”. The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.

The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value. It’s been said that what those tests really measure is your ability to take tests, but even if they measure something real, it is only a small slice of the real. The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”

There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s intellect or knowledge. There is something wrong with the smugness and self-congratulation that elite schools connive at from the moment the fat envelopes come in the mail. From orientation to graduation, the message is implicit in every tone of voice and tilt of the head, every old-school tradition, every article in the student paper, every speech from the dean. The message is: You have arrived. Welcome to the club. And the corollary is equally clear: You deserve everything your presence here is going to enable you to get. When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their SAT scores are higher.

At Yale, and no doubt at other places, the message is reinforced in embarrassingly literal terms. The physical form of the university—its quads and residential colleges, with their Gothic stone façades and wrought-iron portals—is constituted by the locked gate set into the encircling wall. Everyone carries around an ID card that determines which gates they can enter. The gate, in other words, is a kind of governing metaphor—because the social form of the university, as is true of every elite school, is constituted the same way. Elite colleges are walled domains guarded by locked gates, with admission granted only to the elect. The aptitude with which students absorb this lesson is demonstrated by the avidity with which they erect still more gates within those gates, special realms of ever-greater exclusivity—at Yale, the famous secret societies, or as they should probably be called, the open-secret societies, since true secrecy would defeat their purpose. There’s no point in excluding people unless they know they’ve been excluded.

One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more. The political implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists. “Work must always be”, Ruskin says, “and captains of work must always be… [But] there is a wide difference between being captains…of work, and taking the profits of it”.

The political implications don’t stop there. An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn’t understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students’ experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.

That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by smiling clerks. There are few, if any, opportunities for the kind of contacts I saw my students get routinely—classes with visiting power brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries. There are also few, if any, of the kind of special funds that, at places like Yale, are available in profusion: travel stipends, research fellowships, performance grants. Each year, my department at Yale awards dozens of cash prizes for everything from freshman essays to senior projects. This year, those awards came to more than $90,000—in just one department.

Students at places like Cleveland State also don’t get A-’s just for doing the work. There’s been a lot of handwringing lately over grade inflation, and it is a scandal, but the most scandalous thing about it is how uneven it’s been. Forty years ago, the average GPA at both public and private universities was about 2.6, still close to the traditional B-/C+ curve. Since then, it’s gone up everywhere, but not by anything like the same amount. The average gpa at public universities is now about 3.0, a B; at private universities it’s about 3.3, just short of a B+. And at most Ivy League schools, it’s closer to 3.4. But there are always students who don’t do the work, or who are taking a class far outside their field (for fun or to fulfill a requirement), or who aren’t up to standard to begin with (athletes, legacies). At a school like Yale, students who come to class and work hard expect nothing less than an A-. And most of the time, they get it.

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity”. A is the mark of excellence; A– is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.

Here, too, college reflects the way things work in the adult world (unless it’s the other way around). For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend. If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you don’t need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out again last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man.

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, they tend to give up more quickly than others. (Let’s not even talk about the possibility of kids from privileged backgrounds not going to college at all, or delaying matriculation for several years, because however appropriate such choices might sometimes be, our rigid educational mentality places them outside the universe of possibility—the reason so many kids go sleepwalking off to college with no idea what they’re doing there). This doesn’t seem to make sense, especially since students from elite schools tend to graduate with less debt and are more likely to be able to float by on family money for a while. I wasn’t aware of the phenomenon myself until I heard about it from a couple of graduate students in my department, one from Yale, one from Harvard. They were talking about trying to write poetry, how friends of theirs from college called it quits within a year or two while people they know from less prestigious schools are still at it. Why should this be? Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure. The first time I blew a test, I walked out of the room feeling like I no longer knew who I was. The second time, it was easier; I had started to learn that failure isn’t the end of the world.

But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. This will seem counterintuitive. Aren’t kids at elite schools the smartest ones around, at least in the narrow academic sense? Don’t they work harder than anyone else—indeed, harder than any previous generation? They are. They do. But being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework.

If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. A friend who teaches at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.

Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions. I don’t think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism in the American university, but in the 19th century students might at least have had a chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or in the literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on campus. Throughout much of the 20th century, with the growth of the humanistic ideal in American colleges, students might have encountered the big questions in the classrooms of professors possessed of a strong sense of pedagogic mission. Teachers like that still exist in this country, but the increasingly dire exigencies of academic professionalization have made them all but extinct at elite universities. Professors at top research institutions are valued exclusively for the quality of their scholarly work; time spent on teaching is time lost. If students want a conversion experience, they’re better off at a liberal arts college.

When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.

Indeed, that seems to be exactly what those schools want. There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty. As another friend, a third-generation Yalie, says, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. Of course, for the system to work, those alumni need money. At Yale, the long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics has been abetted by administrative indifference. The college career office has little to say to students not interested in law, medicine, or business, and elite universities are not going to do anything to discourage the large percentage of their graduates who take their degrees to Wall Street. In fact, they’re showing them the way. The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.

It’s no wonder that the few students who are passionate about ideas find themselves feeling isolated and confused. I was talking with one of them last year about his interest in the German Romantic idea of bildung, the upbuilding of the soul. But, he said—he was a senior at the time—it’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.

Yet there is a dimension of the intellectual life that lies above the passion for ideas, though so thoroughly has our culture been sanitized of it that it is hardly surprising if it was beyond the reach of even my most alert students. Since the idea of the intellectual emerged in the 18th century, it has had, at its core, a commitment to social transformation. Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power. It means going into spiritual exile. It means foreswearing your allegiance, in lonely freedom, to God, to country, and to Yale. It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage. “I am not afraid to make a mistake”, Stephen Dedalus says, “even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity, too”.

Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time. Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools and, in particular, again, at liberal arts colleges than at the most prestigious universities. Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven. But others end up there because they have a more independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school or even with looking good on a college application. Maybe they just sat in their room, reading a lot and writing in their journal. These are the kinds of kids who are likely, once they get to college, to be more interested in the human spirit than in school spirit, and to think about leaving college bearing questions, not resumés.

I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone looks. You hardly see any hippies or punks or art-school types, and at a college that was known in the ’80s as the Gay Ivy, few out lesbians and no gender queers. The geeks don’t look all that geeky; the fashionable kids go in for understated elegance. Thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla. The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy. Everyone feels pressure to maintain the kind of appearance—and affect—that go with achievement. (Dress for success, medicate for success.) I know from long experience as an adviser that not every Yale student is appropriate and well-adjusted, which is exactly why it worries me that so many of them act that way. The tyranny of the normal must be very heavy in their lives. One consequence is that those who can’t get with the program (and they tend to be students from poorer backgrounds) often polarize in the opposite direction, flying off into extremes of disaffection and self-destruction. But another consequence has to do with the large majority who can get with the program.

I taught a class several years ago on the literature of friendship. One day we were discussing Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, which follows a group of friends from childhood to middle age. In high school, one of them falls in love with another boy. He thinks, “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone”. A pretty good description of an elite college campus, including the part about never being allowed to feel alone. What did my students think of this, I wanted to know? What does it mean to go to school at a place where you’re never alone? Well, one of them said, I do feel uncomfortable sitting in my room by myself. Even when I have to write a paper, I do it at a friend’s. That same day, as it happened, another student gave a presentation on Emerson’s essay on friendship. Emerson says, he reported, that one of the purposes of friendship is to equip you for solitude. As I was asking my students what they thought that meant, one of them interrupted to say, wait a second, why do you need solitude in the first place? What can you do by yourself that you can’t do with a friend?

So there they were: one young person who had lost the capacity for solitude and another who couldn’t see the point of it. There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude. It used to be that you couldn’t always get together with your friends even when you wanted to. Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships. “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?”: my student was in her friend’s room writing a paper, not having a heart-to-heart. She probably didn’t have the time; indeed, other students told me they found their peers too busy for intimacy.

What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude. They took this in for a second, and then one of them said, with a dawning sense of self-awareness, “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?” Well, I don’t know. But I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.

The world that produced John Kerry and George Bush is indeed giving us our next generation of leaders. The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.

William Deresiewicz is an essayist and critic. 

Legalización vs. Objetivos del Milenio

Autor: Andrés Ramírez Ordóñez  

Director programa de adicciones

Asociación Hogar Niños por un Nuevo Planeta

www.ninosporunnuevoplaneta.org

Legalización de las drogas vs. Responsabilidad social

En la recién finalizada cumbre de las Américas celebrada en Cartagena, uno de los temas que se debatió afortunadamente sin consenso, fue sobre la legalización o no de las drogas, sus ventajas y desventajas.  Al respecto, yo tengo mi propia opinión:

Uno de los análisis que se me ocurrió hacer, es si la legalización es social y/o ambientalmente responsable y para esto quiero ver en cuáles de los objetivos del milenio esta legalización aportaría, pues partiendo de la base que el compromiso de todas las sociedades y todos los países va encaminado hacia estos objetivos quiero dar algunos puntos de vista.

Erradicar la pobreza extrema y el hambre:

Imaginemos una persona que consume cualquiera de las drogas ilegales comprometida con trabajar, con tener la salud mental para que su trabajo sea productivo, cuando abiertamente en las oficinas inhale cocaína o salga al balcón y se fume un “cigarrillo de marihuana” que como es legal lo venderán en cajetillas, para en ese momento asumir la responsabilidad de trabajar y con su “buen” desempeño apoyar a erradicar la pobreza extrema y el hambre. 

Yo de mi parte, me niego a pensar que una persona pueda aportar o siquiera le importen las personas menos favorecidas cuando el mismo no se respeta.

El consumo de drogas hoy apoya la indigencia, mi hipótesis es que tendríamos mayor población viviendo en pobreza extrema y hambre.

Educación primaria universal:

Las drogas no contribuirían a una infancia desarrollada y al nacimiento de niños sanos y fuertes, pues muchos más niños serían producto de padres consumidores, esto para empezar, pues la droga aleja a los padres del contacto con los niños, habría mayor abandono y muchas más dificultades para que la primera infancia tuviera acceso a esta educación.

No creo que la legalización de las drogas contribuya a que la educación mejore, mucho menos la educación universitaria, en donde ya todos los alumnos podrán legalmente tener contacto con el consumo de las drogas. Unas que deprimen el sistema nervioso central, otras que lo estimulan, las hipnóticas, alucinantes, los opiáceos, etc. 


No creo que sea muy emocionante tener que dictar una clase para alumnos que consideran que la droga los apoya a entender y estar mas atentos a la clase, o tener que lidiar en colegios y universidades con síndromes de abstinencia, depresiones severas y alucinaciones. En fin, con cualquiera de los síntomas que genera el consumo de las drogas ilegales.

Promover la igualdad de género:

Vale la pena mencionar que al abuso físico y sexual ocurre en la mayoría de las ocasiones bajo el efecto de sustancias psicoactivas por parte del agresor, esta legalización contribuiría al incremento de estos abusos y no solo a las mujeres, sino a más niños. 

Los anuncios de “Marketing” utilizarían la imagen de la mujer como ya hoy ocurre con muchos productos en donde la mujer es un objeto sexual o un trofeo.  Imaginemos como los nuevos empresarios serían dueños de empresas productoras de cocaína, marihuana, los laboratorios farmacéuticos empezarían a producir metanfetaminas y las llamadas drogas de club.  No creo poder imaginar los comerciales y el uso de la figura de la mujer ayudando a vender y promover el consumo de algo que daña al ser humano como son las drogas que hoy son ilegales.  Me niego a imaginar a la figura femenina, materna, a dañar a otros.

Reducir la mortalidad infantil:

Como lo mencione anteriormente el uso de estas sustancias promovería la mortalidad infantil, los embarazos no deseados, el nacimiento de niños y niñas con deficiencias de todo orden. Ya hoy las drogas legales como el alcohol y el cigarrillo dicen en las botellas y en las cajetillas que el producto mata. ¿Cómo se puede reducir la mortalidad infantil con el uso y abuso de las drogas? No encuentro aporte alguno a que la legalización ayude a que los embarazos sean mejores y los niños nazcan con las posibilidades de crecimiento y desarrollo deseados.  Hoy en día muchos padres maltratan a sus hijos en ocasiones dejándolos al borde de la muerte, con otras sustancias o la mezcla de sustancias estos abusos podrían ser mayores y con toda seguridad contribuir poco al desarrollo de los niños.

Mejorar la salud materna:

Nuevamente hablamos de la importancia que la mujer este saludable y libre de drogas antes, durante y después de su embarazo.

Cuando se está en embarazo no es solamente “comer por dos”, es respirar por dos, es cuidar de dos.  Lo que la madre consume también lo consume el feto, uno de los síntomas que se pueden sufrir es el síndrome de alcoholismo fetal el cual entre otros problemas puede incluir retraso mental, defectos congénitos, características faciales anormales, problemas de crecimiento, problemas con el sistema nervioso central, dificultades para recordar y aprender, problemas visuales y/o auditivos, problemas de conducta, etc. Este síndrome persiste toda la vida y a la fecha no tiene cura.  En este caso el análisis no aporta a que la legalización contribuya a mejorar la salud materna, nuevamente quedo sin argumentos para considerar la legalización de las drogas.

Combatir el sida, la tuberculosis y otras enfermedades

Bajo el efecto de sustancias psicoactivas el deseo sexual y la irresponsabilidad de los actos sexuales aumenta sin límites, sin cuidados.  La promiscuidad aumenta, así como las peleas, las agresiones, los abusos.  El alcohol y otras drogas interfieren con el juicio de la persona en cuanto a su conducta sexual y otras, lo que hace que los encuentros sexuales sean no planeados y sin protección, así como el uso compartido de agujas, cucharas y otros implementos para cocinar drogas, esto aumenta el riesgo de contraer VIH / SIDA.  Hoy en día el uso de drogas es, en este momento el mayor factor que en Estados Unidos propaga el SIDA.

El uso de drogas y la adicción pueden también acelerar el progreso de la enfermedad del SIDA y otras enfermedades.

Garantizar la sostenibilidad del medio ambiente

Las personas que usan drogas son personas con su autoestima deteriorada, son personas que no se preocupan por ellos, mucho menos les va a preocupar el medio ambiente. La sostenibilidad requiere trabajo permanente, constante y una conciencia clara que los recursos son limitados para que actuemos en consecuencia, dudo mucho que una persona en consumo pueda hacerlo.

La cantidad de tierras que se sembrarían en cocaína, amapola, marihuana y otros serían muchas, quitando oportunidad a que sean sembradas de alimento para un mundo que cada vez tiene mayores dificultades para conseguirlo, se talarían muchos mas bosques, muchas mas selvas, no creo pues que contribuya la legalización de las drogas con este objetivo.

Fomentar una asociación mundial para el desarrollo

El consumidor por naturaleza tiene mayores grados de disfuncionalidad que una persona no consumidora, tiene incapacidad para relacionarse asertivamente, para trabajar en equipo.  Pensar que un consumidor de sustancias psicoactivas tiene capacidad de asociación es difícil y mucho menos para el desarrollo, pues el desarrollo implícitamente contiene mejoramiento y el consumo hace que quien consume este en dirección opuesta, es decir que se deteriora día a día. 

Con este pequeño y resumido aporte quiero manifestar mi desacuerdo desde un punto de vista social y ambiental de la legalización de las drogas, tengo desacuerdos desde otras perspectivas de las cuales no hablare en este momento, sin embargo creo que la legalización no acabará con quienes negocian ilegalmente este producto, ellos se trasladarán a otros negocios ilegales, pues es su condición.  Algunas personas se lucrarán enormemente como hoy lo hacen las compañías productoras de las drogas legales.

Veo a diario personas que mueren o intentan hacerlo con el consumo, actuemos activamente en pro de la vida, en pro de la igualdad y en pro del planeta.

Nota: Los invito a leer directamente a Andrés Ramírez en su maravilloso blog http://ramirezoandres.blogspot.com/