CRIMSON MERCENARIES

Extracurriculars have reached new heights of vocational inanity this week with the introduction of the Harvard-Radcliffe Consulting Club.

Consulting seems to be eating up an more and more Harvard grads each year as increasing numbers of students seek employment with the innumerable firms (all coincidentally based either in Cambridge or New York City) that come to lure them from the professions each fall. These firms need smart (credentialed) people (fresh meat) to provide (spout) that special skill (ability to bullshit) of symbolic analysis (ability to bullshit well).

Harvard students likewise are abandoning the traditional fields populated by generations past--law, business, medicine, banking--in order to set up shop as experts not in any particular field, but as wise souls able with the slightest effort to raise profit margins. In some respects, one can't blame students, who are often laden with debt, for taking high-paying positions with anyone. And it's not that consultants are killing women and children. Rather the problem with consulting is just that it's so, well, unnecessary.

Who wouldda thunk that a cadre of business-minded mercenaries would emerge from intellectually fertile Yard? The field of consulting is a waste of time for both intelligent individuals and for the society which hires them. If businesses can't run their own show and need to hire Harvard grads to tell them what to do, perhaps they shouldn't be in business.