Tonic for Executives

The students were middle-aged and obviously prosperous. Some were balding, and all had the air of men of responsibility. But in all its 68 years, California's Pomona College (enrollment: 1,025) had rarely had a more eager class. They were 25 rising executives, with jobs ranging from blast furnace superintendent to insurance company vice president. They had been sent to Pomona, at company expense, to gulp down as big a dose of the liberal arts as possible in two weeks.

When Chairman Floyd Bond of Pomona's economics department began planning a summer session for executives, his first idea was to set up a stock course in business management. But the more he planned, the more he began to wonder whether that was what the nation's over-specialized executives really needed. "It seemed to me as it did to Emerson," Bond recalls, "that what we want is not lawyers, but men practicing law; not doctors, but men practicing medicine. For a good society, we must have not specialists and broad-gauge people, but specialists who are broad-gauge people." He switched from business to culture, asked a number of California firms if they would be willing to send along a promising official at full salary plus $100 a week for expenses. The reception was generally enthusiastic. Said one company director: "We thought it was worthwhile to provide managers, who normally have a rather confined technical background, with a broader intellectual base."

Is Man Rational? To get the first students in the proper mood, Bond sent each six books to read--Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture, Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead's Science and the Modern World, The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse, and Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine.

Most arrived admitting a bit sheepishly that they had read only two or three. But as the course got under way, interest kindled, and the students' zeal had the professors feeling breathless. From 7:30 a.m., when their day began, until past 11 at night, the middle-aged scholars gobbled up lectures on everything from physics to philosophy, e.g., "Homo Symbolicus or Is Man a Rational Animal?"

The men asked their professors so many questions after each lecture that the morning classes inevitably continued into the afternoon. The campus swimming pool and tennis courts were ignored. They vetoed a theater party in favor of a lecture on astronomy, refused a final social afternoon with their wives for three hours of additional classwork. Though the evening lectures were supposed to end at 9, most adjourned after 11.

$2.50 or $10,000. Every meal became an occasion for intellectual talk. "Since the first night," says one student, "we have scarcely talked business to each other --though that was all we had to talk about the first night." To their own surprise, the biggest hit was the poetry readings by ex-Rhodes Scholar Edward Weismiller. "I pay $2.50 for a book," said an insurance company vice president, "and I get $2.50's worth of good out of it. But that Weismiller gets $10,000 out of the same book." Added Gorden E. Willett, a Farmers Insurance Group office manager: "I used to think that poetry was fine for the other fellow but not for me. Now I know better. I'm the other fellow."

Though the Fund for Adult Education has given Pomona only enough to carry on the program one year, Economist Bond feels that he will have no trouble making the course permanent. At course's end, 22 of the 25 said they would like to come back next year. Said one executive: "The lectures all seem to blend.

You can tie in everything--philosophy, economics, poetry and everything. It becomes one ball of wax. If I had to make a choice between this and a vacation, I'd take this."

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