"For 25 years, Yoshi Tsurumi, one of George W. Bush’s professors at Harvard Business School, was content with his green-card status as a permanent legal resident of the United States. But Bush’s ascension to the presidency in 2001 prompted the Japanese native to secure his American citizenship. The reason: to be able to speak out with the full authority of citizenship about why he believes Bush lacks the character and intellect to lead the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy.
“I don’t remember all the students in detail unless I’m prompted by something,” Tsurumi said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “But I always remember two types of students. One is the very excellent student, the type as a professor you feel honored to be working with. Someone with strong social values, compassion and intellect — the very rare person you never forget. And then you remember students like George Bush, those who are totally the opposite.”
The future president was one of 85 first-year MBA students in Tsurumi’s macroeconomic policies and international business class in the fall of 1973 and spring of 1974. Tsurumi was a visiting associate professor at Harvard Business School from January 1972 to August 1976; today, he is a professor of international business at Baruch College in New York.
Trading as usual on his father’s connections, Bush entered Harvard in 1973 for a two-year program. He’d just come off what George H.W. Bush had once called his eldest son’s “nomadic years” — partying, drifting from job to job, working on political campaigns in Florida and Alabama and, most famously, apparently not showing up for duty in the Alabama National Guard.
Harvard Business School’s rigorous teaching methods, in which the professor interacts aggressively with students, and students are encouraged to challenge each other sharply, offered important insights into Bush, Tsurumi said. In observing students’ in-class performances, “you develop pretty good ideas about what are their weaknesses and strengths in terms of thinking, analysis, their prejudices, their backgrounds and other things that students reveal,” he said.
Bush, by contrast, “was totally the opposite of Chris Cox,” Tsurumi said. “He showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him.” When asked to explain a particular comment, said Tsurumi, Bush would respond, “Oh, I never said that.” A White House spokeswoman did not return a phone call seeking comment.
In 1973, as the oil and energy crisis raged, Tsurumi led a discussion on whether government should assist retirees and other people on fixed incomes with heating costs. Bush, he recalled, “made this ridiculous statement and when I asked him to explain, he said, ‘The government doesn’t have to help poor people — because they are lazy.’ I said, ‘Well, could you explain that assumption?’ Not only could he not explain it, he started backtracking on it, saying, ‘No, I didn’t say that.'”
Bush once sneered at Tsurumi for showing the film “The Grapes of Wrath,” based on John Steinbeck’s novel of the Depression. “We were in a discussion of the New Deal, and he called Franklin Roosevelt’s policies ‘socialism.’ He denounced labor unions, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Medicare, Social Security, you name it. He denounced the civil rights movement as socialism. To him, socialism and communism were the same thing. And when challenged to explain his prejudice, he could not defend his argument, either ideologically, polemically or academically.”
Students who challenged and embarrassed Bush in class would then become the subject of a whispering campaign by him, Tsurumi said. “In class, he couldn’t challenge them. But after class, he sometimes came up to me in the hallway and started bad-mouthing those students who had challenged him. He would complain that someone was drinking too much. It was innuendo and lies. So that’s how I knew, behind his smile and his smirk, that he was a very insecure, cunning and vengeful guy.”
Many of Tsurumi’s students came from well-connected or wealthy families, but good manners prevented them from boasting about it, the professor said. But Bush seemed unabashed about the connections that had brought him to Harvard. “The other children of the rich and famous were at least well bred to the point of realizing universal values and standards of behavior,” Tsurumi said. But Bush sometimes came late to class and often sat in the back row of the theater-like classroom, wearing a bomber jacket from the Texas Air National Guard and spitting chewing tobacco into a cup."
It is very nice that students today in the USA are often required to do some volunteer work in the community. I think, however, that getting a job, a working class job would bring much more understanding of what the world is like for most people and lead to a much stronger social conscience than giving charity or "do-good" deeds. This story about Bush is hopefully extreme, but sadly quite prevalent.
In the course of my life, I have had several eye opening jobs. In the late 60's, I was hungry and took a sweatshop job in nowhere Pennsylvania. I worked in a Hathaway shirt sweatshop sewing the left dart on a size ten white blouse for 8 hours a day. (now, of course the sweatshops are in lovely far away places like Ghana and Indonesia) We had two 10 minute potty breaks and a half hour lunch at our machine. One certain days there were speed-ups when an order had to go out. They were brutal. I never once saw the whole blouse.
I was privileged because this wasn't going to be my life; it was a stop over band aid. By a half hour into the routine, I was stiff, then my back hurt, then my eyes hurt, then I was bored to death, deciding to get drunk or scream or shoot myself. By afternoon I was a robot with no thoughts or feelings.
The woman next to me had sat at the same machine for 14 years. She was kind. Lucky for me because she helped me a lot. The thing is that I still, fifty years later get dizzy when I go into a Dollar Store or see Disney products and think that every single piece of crap that we buy has a human in much worse circumstances giving their life and their health to make these products.
I tried to help with the coffee harvest in the Guatemalan Highlands during the 'troubles' and I gave up after 1 1/2 hours. The high producing workers were getting 70 cents a day.
I have bar tended at a bar where I was issued a gun (which I declined) because it was so rough. I have been a waitress and a chambermaid. This is all nothing to me. I had an education, health, guts, gumption, freedom. But the reason I am telling you this is that even with a good home and food to go home to, these experiences were some of the most educational of my life.
In El Salvador, I experienced hunger, real hunger, for the first time in my life. I left when I was done, but the villagers I knew couldn't leave. I hate hunger. I guess what is one my mind today is that it doesn't matter what school we go to, but I hope all of us can get enough real life education to never be George Bush sneering at "Grapes of Wrath" and never feel superior to anyone. I don't think I could ever find the courage or strength to carry on in many of the circumstances I have witnessed.
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