When I attended Wichita State, I went through the Business School and earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration. There were your normal business classes, administration, economics, statistics and others. There was one class that I remember above them all. It was a mandatory class that everyone in the business school had to take. It lasted an entire year, two semesters, and you earned 2 hours of credit for each semester. Not nearly enough credit for the time you had to put in. This class wasn’t like any other class in the business school and I think it was designed to mess with you and make you not want to have anything to do with business going forward. I guess they figured if you could get through this class then you probably could survive in the business world.
The class was called “The Artificial Society”. The class was huge. It was divided into companies. Basically, you had about 10 people in each company. There were approximately 30 companies. People had to volunteer to be Presidents of the companies, you had to submit a resume to be selected to be a president. I turned in a resume and was selected. Once selected you then had to create an employment contract and get 9 or 10 people to sign the contract and that became your company. You were basically a Consultant Firm. You had to decide on a name and a logo. The employment contract laid out the terms of the employment, how compensation would be distributed, etc. Compensation was points earned with the products that you created. The products were Consulting Reports. I almost forgot, for those students who were not members of a company there was the Government. Those people essentially wrote research reports for their grades and did other Government related things to mess with the companies.
Once you had a name and a logo you then had to decide what your Consultant Reports would look like, how they would be bound, what you would use to prepare them and duplicate them for distribution. The Professor and his TA’s would come up with things that we needed to prepare consulting reports on. Most of the information was very detailed and required a good deal of research to come up with solutions and recommendations. An average report for us was around 50 pages. The name of our company was SCOWTAS. This was an acronym that stood for Student Consultants Organized within the Artificial Society. That was my idea and since I was the president that was our name. We bought an IBM Selectric Typewriter and a Ditto machine. The outside of our reports were on Heavy Orange Paper with our name and logo on the front. These reports would eventually find their way into the Ablah Library and become part of the history of the Artificial Society. Kind of cool to be on the shelves of the school library for posterity. Each assignment required us to create a consultant report. We had to prepare 30 of these at a time. The Professor and his TA’s would set up three groups of 10 companies. They decided who you would be competing with. Whoever you were competing with you had to provide each of those companies with 3 of your reports. Each company would evaluate those 10 companies and rank them from 1 to 10. You received points based on how your competitors ranked you. You would then receive a certain number of points. I chose to keep the points until the end of the semester, then divide them up as fairly as possible based on the employment contracts and our eventual grades would be the result of the points that each person had earned. It was crazy. I had heard of horror stories where the President of the company kept all of the points for himself so he could get an A and the other members of the company were screwed. When that happened, those students could appeal to the government for some kind of remedy, but I never knew the outcome of those situations.
It seemed like we were always pulling all niters to complete the reports. In a semester you might have as many as 6 of these to produce. It was crazy. Everyone had to participate. If you flaked on the members of the company there had to be consequences. We tried to make sure that everyone was involved and that everyone was given a fair share of the points earned. I wrote the introductions to every report. I also wrote the conclusions. We assigned different items to each of the members to complete reports on and then we would compile the finished products, type them on the Selectric and print them on the Ditto machine. Everyone had specific tasks and the end result was that everyone in my company earned at least a C and many earned a B. No one earned an A or a D. It was crazy. We remained in-tact for the second semester. Many other students found other companies to join. I considered it very positive that our company stayed together for both semesters and we all made it through this difficult and frustrating course. I failed to mention that in addition to the company reports we also were given the most unfair tests. These were multiple choice tests like I have never seen before or since. You were to choose the best answer but the questions were linked to each other. There could be as many as 8 or nine choices on a given question and the answer you came up with determined how you would answer the next several questions. If you chose incorrectly on the first of a series you would miss all of the questions in that series. Totally unfair, also almost impossible to study for. Again, I am convinced that the entire class was designed to just mess with you.
Everyone who enrolled in and graduated from the Business School had to complete the Artificial Society. That meant that if you graduated from WSU with a business degree you had a common bond with all of the other graduates. I am not completely sure that the exercise helped me in my future endeavors, but it did help me understand how to create and build a company. How to manage that company to achieve success. How to hire and keep good employees. How to create and publish quality reports. How to purchase and sell equipment… (The Selectric and the Ditto machine) and how to successfully navigate the system. There were conflicts, there were issues, but we found ways to resolve them so we could move forward. Outside influences impacted our ability to complete the reports, but even those were dealt with successfully. Bottom line, we didn’t let anything stand in the way of completing those reports and producing them and putting them in the hands of the companies that would determine our fate. Over time we developed a good reputation for producing quality reports, that looked good, and yielded some well thought out recommendations as consultants. We were proud of the product. It led all of us to successfully complete the class with passing grades. I believe that all of the members of our company started the process as friends and ended the class as friends. This was not always the case in many of the other companies.
I don’t know if this class still exists. It probably does in some form. The concept is almost too demented to not continue it. I haven’t been back to the Ablah Library, but I imagine that our reports are still on the shelves. That is a small and interesting legacy for SCOWTAS. Someday I would like to return to the campus and check out the library and find those reports. Right now, they would be over 50 years old.
