Not Because It's Polished, But Because It's Honest: Celebrating the Kelloggian

By: Raj Dwivedi

We will hear a lot of graduation advice over the next few weeks. Most of it will be didactic, fortune-cookie-esque wisdom that has become standard fare for graduation speeches and lectures. In fact, "love a lot" was apparently a recurring line in one of the Nota Bene lectures—though I may be misremembering that.

I have never graduated from business school before, so I'm unsure if there's anything uniquely special about doing so. I have sat through countless conversations about scale, AI, first-principles thinking, and I am excited to sit through a couple more weeks where we will talk about velocity, ambition, or caring. Implicitly, we were taught to think of our lives as something to be optimized, essentially a process that converts time into productivity.

I'll try to be less cynical in this piece. I have, after all, enjoyed many aspects of being in a classroom. Binge drinking and the lack of responsibility aside, I have enjoyed reading my peers in these pages.

My original pitch to co-Editor-in-Chief, Cathy, was some version of a self-appreciating Kelloggian article, which I am quickly losing steam on 200 words in. Sorry.

But I have appreciated hearing from my classmates about relationships, or Rob writing about rocket launches or whatever shit his galaxy brain is into. A few articles have read like AI slop; for example, [CENSORED BY EDITOR], but most of it has been excellent writing or a chronicling of events people here genuinely care about.

We are one of the few local journalistic organizations that is growing, and I appreciate that.

As our professors can attest, I find myself asking, “Who is writing this?” fairly frequently. The question feels increasingly important. Because increasingly, the answer is: nobody.

There is now an entire category of writing that feels engineered in a lab to sound vaguely intelligent while saying absolutely nothing. You read three paragraphs and realize your eyes have moved across the page but your brain has retained nothing—except maybe the phrase “in today’s rapidly evolving landscape.” There is something uniquely bleak about language optimized entirely to avoid offending anybody or having a point.

And to be fair, business schools are exceptionally good environments for producing this kind of prose. We reward polish. Confidence. Conciseness. The appearance of thought. I have done it myself. We all have. Half of professional adulthood is learning how to speak in a way that sounds intelligent on a panel while revealing as little of yourself as possible.

Writing for a newspaper—even a student one—feels different. You cannot fully hide in it. At least not if you are doing it honestly.

A bad article reveals laziness immediately. Good writing, even when imperfect, usually reveals obsession. You can feel when somebody actually cared enough about a subject to stay up too late thinking about it. And increasingly, I think attention is one of the few genuinely scarce things left.

This became more obvious to me recently while watching trailers for The Devil Wears Prada 2 (which appears to be, somewhat hilariously, about the death of journalism). Beneath all the fashion-world theatrics is a point that feels uncomfortably real: institutions do not usually die dramatically. There is no cinematic final speech. Things just slowly stop being funded. People stop reading. Local papers shrink. Student newspapers disappear. Everybody agrees journalism is important in theory while behaving as though somebody else will handle it in practice.

And then one day nobody is left at the city council meeting. Or the school board meeting. Or asking questions that make powerful people uncomfortable. Communities lose the ability to describe themselves accurately. Reality gets replaced with algorithmic sludge generated by people who do not live there and do not particularly care.

That sounds dramatic, but I genuinely believe local journalism is one of the last remaining ways communities maintain an honest picture of themselves. Which is strange to realize at business school. The big, higher ed pitch of ‘we teach you how to think’ is so mind numbingly arrogant, though being here has made me hone in on WHAT I should think about.

Most of us came here to become investors, consultants, operators, founders—whatever modern prestige category we preferred on LinkedIn two years ago. We learned about leverage and markets and organizational behavior. But one of the more unexpectedly meaningful parts of this place has been watching classmates try to build something deeply unscalable simply because they thought it mattered.

That deserves respect.

Not in an overly self-important “democracy dies in darkness” kind of way. We are not war correspondents. We are students occasionally writing articles instead of doing recruiting prep. But there is still something valuable about documenting a place while you are inside it. Capturing the strange little ecosystem of a business school before everybody scatters across airports and cities and corporate org charts.

Memory matters. And increasingly, it feels like memory requires active maintenance.

I worry a little that we are graduating into a culture that is becoming incapable of sustained attention. Everything is content now. Everybody is posting. Nobody is reading. AI can already generate passable articles, emails, speeches, condolences, wedding vows, and probably this sentence itself. Which means human writing may become valuable for the same reason live music became valuable after Spotify: not because it is more efficient, but because somebody was actually there.

Maybe that is what I appreciated most about reading this paper over the past year. Not perfection. Presence. You could feel people trying to say something real.

And maybe that is the responsibility now. Not just professionally, but civically. To pay attention to the places we live. To care enough to document them honestly. To resist the temptation to flatten every experience into content or branding or productivity metrics.

Truth to our neighborhoods is still our responsibility.

And if local journalism dies, it will not die all at once. It will die through neglect. Through exhaustion. Through people deciding somebody else will do it.

I hope somebody keeps doing it anyway. Read More by Raj Dwivedi: A Brave New World: Is VO2 Max the New Social Currency?