On the op-ed page of The New York Times today, Wes Davis remembers a Bell Telephone Company project of the 1950s called the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives, which sought to provide its employees with a broader cultural education that would make them better managers, able to respond to crises more thoughtfully. They read James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, too:
The capstone of the program, and its most controversial element, came in eight three-hour seminars devoted to Ulysses. The novel, published in 1922, had been banned as obscene in the United States until 1933 and its reputation for difficulty outlived the ban. The Bell students “found it a challenging, and often exasperating, experience,” Baltzell wrote.
But, prepared by months of reading that had ranged from the Bhagavad Gita to Babbitt, the men rose to the challenge, surprising themselves with the emotional and intellectual resources they brought to bear on Joyce’s novel. It was clear as the students cheered one another through their final reports that reading a book as challenging as Ulysses was both a liberating intellectual experience and a measure of how much they had been enriched by their time at the institute.
Not to last, alas. Though the Institute was judged a success, “Bell gradually withdrew its support after yet another positive assessment found that while executives came out of the program more confident and more intellectually engaged, they were also less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities.”
So endeth the humanity in Humanistic Studies. The full text of Davis’ post is here. Happy Bloomsday.
