Humanities, Inc.

During the 1950s, senior executives at AT&T briefly hoped that the humanities could revitalize their company. Trained mostly in technical subjects such as engineering or business, their midlevel employees, they feared, were narrow in their interests and knowledge, mechanical in their approach to problems, and incapable of independent thought. Thus CEO Cleo Craig initiated a pilot program, The Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives, designed to enrich and broaden the minds of a select number of employees. Each year starting in 1953, AT&T relieved approximately twenty managers of all work duties for ten months and sent them to the University of Pennsylvania to receive a liberal arts education, free of charge. Participants not only read more than a typical PhD student in a year of graduate work, they visited museums, attended classical music concerts, and mingled with prominent intellectuals over cocktails.

AT&T had tried out a similar initiative in the 1920s. Then president of New Jersey Bell Chester Barnard sent hundreds of his employees to the University of Pennsylvania for several one-week periods to study the humanities, but he decided that the program, to be successful, would need to provide a lengthier, more rigorous experience. By the 1950s, AT&T was finally making the ample profits that Barnard’s vision necessitated, and so, under Cleo Craig’s recommendation, the president of Pennsylvania Bell Wilfred D. Gillen and his Vice President of Personnel John Markle II reinstituted Barnard’s program.¹ Morse Peckham, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, devised the curriculum, which consisted of courses in philosophy, literature, arts, and science, and guest lectures from major intellectuals including Lewis Mumford, W. H. Auden, Delmore Schwartz, Henry S. Commager, and David Riesman.²

Figure 1.

Industrial Psychologist Morris Viteles (second from left, front row) with several participants from the Institute of Humanistic Study (date unknown). [Box No. V68, Folder No.8, Morris Viteles papers] Archives of the History of American Psychology, The Center for the History of Psychology, The University of Akron.

The Bell employees appreciated certain aspects of the program more than others. Some preferred learning about politics and economics to learning about art and literature. But they were, on the whole, determined to understand as much as they could of what they encountered. One participant became so frustrated during the several hours he spent trying to make sense of Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos that he had to take an aspirin and a sedative at two in the morning in order to sleep.³ And practically everyone, apparently, struggled and fretted tirelessly over the presentations they were required to give on individual chapters of James Joyce’s Ulysses; one musically inclined presenter, seduced by the Sirens episode, devoted forty-two hours to tracing its themes and motifs.⁴ All participants relished the opportunity to meet famous thinkers; getting to “walk with the greats” was an “ego-building experience,” according to one survey of the program.⁵ And generally speaking the reviews were extremely favorable, with many alumni calling the ten-month period the most significant and memorable of their entire life.⁶

The program’s popularity, of course, was not enough to justify its substantial costs. Its administrators also needed to demonstrate that it would serve the interests of AT&T. To that end, they put forth a series of arguments, in committee reports, at conferences, and in internal memos, designed to establish the usefulness of the humanities to business. They also hired industrial psychologist Morris Viteles and the consulting firm Douglass Williams Associates to study the effects of the program; both gave the Institute positive reviews. AT&T was initially pleased with the results and instituted similar, though less extensive programs at Swarthmore, Williams, Dartmouth, and Northwestern. But support for the program gradually waned, and the new CEO at AT&T Frederick R. Kappel, who took office in 1956, was unconvinced of the Institute’s effectiveness and discontinued it four years into his tenure.

Why was AT&T’s experiment confined to the 1950s? One key factor was the cold war: during...