As an underpaid, adjunct English professor who can’t make a living at my craft – in a society that doesn’t value teachers as it should – tired of being broke, I recently embarked on a career as a NYC real estate agent. Talk about culture shock! From the stimulating “groves of academe,” a place of intellectual and creative nourishment where the growth of persons takes center stage, I entered a shallow, plastic, darwinian landscape full of empty suits and fashionista types, but low on genuine caring and intelligent conversation.
That’s when it hit me. It’s not just real estate that has morphed into a soulless shark pit of disingenuity, but most of corporate America. As popular TV shows like The Office and Donald Trump’s The Apprentice give evidence to, back-stabbing rules the day in our corporate spaces which have given up even a semblance of humanity or sense of community. Consider the financial scandals of 2008. A small cabal of Gordon Gekko-type slicksters engineered a “fantasy finance” scam that wrecked the American economy and are, today, laughing all the way to the bank as they’re yet to be prosecuted. And these are our corporate leaders! Admired and looked up to by the rest of the herd.
Still, there’s always hope. As a teacher, in fact, radical hope is my stock-in-trade. A hope I first inculcated in the Village (of course!) in 1998 at the NYU School of Education, where I earned an MA in English Ed. Known in the profession as THE most cutting-edge, forward-thinking program of its kind, armed with ideas like Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of hope” and Maxine Greene’s “Imagine things as if they might be otherwise,” I completed three “rescue mission” assignments in troubled ghetto high schools in NYC. Each time, I was replacing the regular teacher who quit or, in one case, fled the building.
Now it’s corporate America that needs rescuing.
Not one to back down from a challenge, to help heal and transform the current nihilistic corporate landscape, I created the Ethical Business Society – which meets at sNice Café in the Village – and published a book called The Ethical Sales Agent: a Transformative Sales Pedagogy to Liberate Corporate Culture & Save America. When I tell people I wrote a book on ethical sales, their first response is, “Isn’t that an oxymoron?!” I reply, “Well, hopefully it won’t be anymore after you read my book!” When they ask me where I get my hope and idealism from, I respond, “from Greenwich Village.”
In addition to NYU, two other radically progressive Village institutions have, and continue, to nurture my dreams of a better world that might be. They are Judson Church, where social justice is married to spirituality, and the Village Independent Democrats (VID). It was, in fact, at a VID meeting that I heard American historian Kim Phillips Fein’s lecture on how the right-wing colonized the corporate space with groups like the Business Roundtable; a process to which my Ethical Business Society seeks to be a progressive antidote.. With a little help from the Village, I trust it will work out fine.
John Bredin is real estate agent who helps clients buy and sell their homes in the NYC metro area. He also teaches English part time at the college level. His TV show, Public Voice Salon – a progressive dialogue on culture, politics and the critical issues of our time – airs in Manhattan: Thursdays at 5pm on Time Warner channel 34. John is a self-proclaimed “business activist,” and has served five terms on the Executive Board of the Village Independent Democrats.
