How to Become an Executive

With their recent shower of gifts to the nation's colleges and universities (TIME, Jan. 24 et seg.), U.S. corporations have shown their increasing awareness of the value of a liberal education. But gifts aside, none has gone so far in its appreciation as the Bell Telephone Co. of Pennsylvania. Last week Bell announced the results of as bold an experiment as has ever been tried in business: a fulltime, ten-month course in the liberal arts for young executives.

The plan for the course began when Pennsylvania Bell's President Wilfred Donnell Gillen decided that something was lacking in the average rising young businessman. For all his competence and specialized knowledge, Gillen felt, the young executive seemed to have neither the background nor the ability to make the sort of broad decisions that modern business demands. What training would give him that ability? In 1952 Gillen took his problem to the University of Pennsylvania (where he got his B.S. in 1923), and gradually campus and company began to work out a curriculum. The university set up a special Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives, in 1953 enrolled its first students from seven different Bell companies. By last week, having "graduated" 17 Bellmen and enrolled 19 more, the institute felt that it had enough evidence to pronounce the Bell experiment a success.

Confessions & Calculations. In planning the curriculum, the institute decided to make it not only as broad as possible, but as tough. Each morning, instead of reporting to the office, the students were plunged into a world of philosophy, literature, history and art. They took courses in logic, ethics, esthetics, gulped down big doses of music, economics, architecture, studied some of the major concepts in the social and natural sciences. Though their classwork was done mostly in seminars, they heard lectures by such scholars as Anthropologist Carleton Coon, City Planner Lewis Mumford, Yale's Henri Peyre (who spoke on Rousseau's Confessions), Brandeis University's Ludwig Lewisohn (Faust), Colby's President Julius Seelye Bixler ("Empirical Calculation of Consequences"), and Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm ("Psychology and Ethics"). They visited the U.N., the museums of Washington, Philadelphia and New York; they attended a Quaker meeting, heard concerts by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

They read everything from Beardsley's Practical Logic to Crane Brinton's Ideas and Men. They studied the Bible and the Bhagavad-Gita, proceeded to the Iliad, the plays of Sophocles and Shakespeare, Dante's Inferno, The Brothers Karamazov, Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses, The Magic Mountain and Moby Dick. They read The Portable Medieval Reader and the Autobiography of Cellini, studied the economics of Adam Smith and Marx, of Tawney, Keynes and Executive Suite.

Each man got copies of all the books assigned, kept them as a nucleus for his own private library.

Filling the Void. In their last six weeks, the students faced a sort of summing up --an attempt by the institute to relate its studies to the present by concentrating on International Relations, Political Science and American Civilization. But by that time, the students had no need to be sold on the value of the course. Among the changes, big and small, that the ten months brought:

P: student from Minnesota who admits that he had "a kind of void" in the arts, has now become interested enough to subscribe to a print-of-the-month club and to buy some originals on his own. What did he hang on his walls before? "Mirrors."

P: A student with a liberal-arts degree who used to buy books because "they looked nice on the shelves," now subscribes to the Book Find Club and the Readers' Subscription, is an inveterate browser in the university bookshop. In the old days, says he, "I used to go home from the office, listen to my wife tell about her day, turn on the television, and go to bed. If my new attitude sticks, it would be criminal to go back to the old way. I've found there is so damn much I want to know."

P: A division plant superintendent with a degree in physical education felt that he once had no interest in life except his job. Now he is a company representative to the meetings of Philadelphia's World Affairs Council, has revived his old interest in music, has even made friends with his neighbor, an English professor from Temple University. "I used to think," says he, "that we businessmen were on one side--the really important one--and there on the other side were the intellectuals like the professor. Now, you should hear the talks we have in my rumpus room."

Do these changes, trivial as some of them are, indicate a future race of superior executives? Says one student: "You go through some soul searching. This may not teach us to make decisions faster--or even as quickly--but they'll be better decisions." Adds a divisional revenue accounting manager: "I used to do only the things that had always been done before. Now I ask myself what this department is going to be like 20 years from now, how this decision is going to fit in. I used to think that there was nothing in life besides earning money and looking forward to a Cadillac. Now I ask myself what is right, rather than what should I do and what am I expected to do. There have been innumerable times since leaving the institute when I've said to myself: 'You wouldn't have thought of that a year ago.' "

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