Disfigurement of Businessman In the relationship of education to business we observe today a fine state of paradox. On the one hand, the emphasis which most business places upon a college degree is so great that one can almost visualize the time when even the office boy will have his baccalaureate. On the other hand, we seem to preserve the belief that some deep intellectual chasm separates the businessman from other products of the university system. The notion that business people are quite the Philistines sounds absurd. For some reason, we tend to characterize vocations by stereotypes, none too flattering but nonetheless deeply imbedded in the national conscience. In the cast of characters the businessman comes on stage as a crass and uncouth person. It is not a pleasant conception and no more truthful or less unpleasant than our other stereotypes. Business is made up of people with all kinds of backgrounds, all kinds of motivations, and all kinds of tastes, just as in any other form. of human endeavour. Businessmen are not ambulatory balance sheets and profit statements, but perfectly normal human beings, subject to whatever strengths, frailties, and limitations characterize man on the earth. They are people grouped together in organizations designed to complement the weakness of one with strength of another, tempering the exuberance of the young with the caution of the more mature, the poetic soarings of one mind with the counting house realism of another. Any disfigurement which society may suffer will come from man himself, not from the particular vocation to which he devotes his time. Any group of people necessarily represents an approach to a common denominator, and it is probably true that even individually they tend to conform. somewhat to the general pattern. Many have pointed out the danger of engulfing our original thinkers in a tide of mediocrity. Conformity is not any more prevalent or any more exacting in the business field than it is in any other. It is a characteristic of all organizations of whatever nature. The fact is the large business unit provides greater opportunities for individuality and require less in the way of conformity than other institutions of comparable size—the government service, or the academic world, or certainly the military. The paradox in the relationship of education to business is______.