Why History Matters

By Amy Lewis. It's advising season on my campus. My management students will want guidance selecting their spring classes. Their major classes are easy to pick -- we have checklists and flowcharts to let them know what they "need" to take. It's the general education requirements and free electives that stump them. I typically point out that employers want well-rounded employees who can draw on a breadth of knowledge. Sometimes I share that the best course I took as an undergraduate was a physical geography class completely unrelated to my major — that you never know which class will completely captivate you. This fall, I will tell my students something different as I urge them to consider taking classes outside of the business school: Those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to sell offensive T-shirts.
Last week, I was browsing the web, looking for current events to discuss in my undergraduate management classes. I came across several mentions of a T-shirt being sold by the Gap bearing the phrase "Manifest Destiny" and the unsurprising outrage and calls for Gap to stop selling the shirt and to offer a formal apology. Facing protests that the shirt was, at best, culturally insensitive and could easily be interpreted as glorifying the massacres and cultural destruction of Native Americans, the designer apparently issued a flippant tweet about the survival of the fittest. Quickly, Gap stopped selling the shirt, and issued an apology. More...