University uses the stage to educate students on real-life issues

At Jesuit-run Fairfield University in Fairfield, Conn., faculty members are taking to the stage in order to draw out real-life drama.

As Tuesday's New York Times reports:

A collaboration between the university's arts and sciences and business schools, the production earlier this month [of "Glengarry Glen Ross"] was part of the syllabus for a dozen classes in business, economics, philosophy, communications and politics. A political science course took a Marxist view, discussing the work as an emblem of the dark side of capitalism. A philosophy course on existentialism examined the way the characters lost sight of their true selves. Business professors focused on both the ethical and practical problems of the office depicted in the play.

Mostly, "Glengarry" was used to give the Fairfield students, many of whom are already worried about finding jobs in a slow economy, a glimpse of a harsh reality: a world where they may find themselves subject to abusive managers who pit them against one another, with the threat of firing always in the air.

"We talk a lot about preparing people to go out into the world and find jobs, but we don't talk much about what it's going to be like out there," said Alistair Highet, the play's director and the editor of the university's alumni magazine.