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The Making of a President “I don’t know that I thought about attending college until my senior year,” says Millsaps College President George M. Harmon, recalling his high school days. “And I certainly never entertained the thought of becoming a college president. I went to Tech High School in Memphis, which was not looked upon as a good school then, but I had good grades and good teachers who encouraged me to apply to Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College).” Harmon won a $100 scholarship from Southwestern toward their $400 tuition, but he needed $300 more, a figure far beyond his reach. Then, as he debated whether to forego college altogether, fortune smiled on him. The Southwestern Honors Scholarship winner from Tech High decided to follow her boyfriend to another college; the $200 scholarship then went to Harmon, and the high school matched it with their own $200 scholarship for the freshman year. And because of his mother’s job at Sears, he was eligible to apply for, and won, a one-year $100 scholarship from the company. He now had $500, enough money for tuition and books. Enough, even, to change a life. He worked during the college year as a wrestling coach for Tech High, having lost only one match in his entire high school career. Summer work was harder to find, but he earned his union card for riverboat work after filling in as a janitor in the port. It was a dirty job, temporary with no promise of more work, and no one wanted it. He took it and proved himself to the union hall. He spent four summers as a riverboat deckhand on towboats plying the Mississippi, Ohio, and Illinois rivers, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week – a college boy among roughnecks and prize fighters. In 1956, the tugboat deckhand graduated from Southwestern with a B.A. degree in Economics and Phi Beta Kappa and Omicron Delta Kappa honors. In keeping with his personality, he played football all four years, a small but fierce combatant who never made the first string but never quit trying either. At the final game of his senior year, the team presented him with the game ball. And later, as a wedding present, his coach Rick Mays wrote a poem about him called “The Bench Warmer,” which ended with a prediction: “To the man on the bench, I give my hand / With the greatest respect, ‘cause he’s my man / Please don’t worry, he’ll go far, / Be it jet propulsion or motor car. / Somewhere in life, he will be a star.” The Bench Warmer completed his M.B.A. degree at Emory University in 1957, after which he joined Continental Oil Company in Houston, Texas. Seven months later he was drafted into military service, stationed in Washington State. In 1958, fortune smiled on him again with his marriage to Bessie W. Porter, a native of Memphis and a nurse by profession. “Getting married allowed me to move out of the barracks, a second benefit,” Harmon jokes. In 1960 their first child, Nancy, was born. The year before Harmon had enrolled at Harvard University, completing his Doctor of Business Administration degree in 1963. He worked full time on the research staff for three out of four years at Harvard, one year of which they spent on a research project in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where their second daughter Mary was born in 1961. After completing his doctorate, Harmon joined the Syracuse University faculty and taught graduate and undergraduate business courses from 1963 to 1966. “I enjoyed my teaching at Syracuse. And I didn’t mind the research, but I hated to fool with writing it up and getting it published. But I did it and was promoted to associate professor.” When a chance came to join the Planning Research Corporation, a worldwide consulting firm in Washington, D.C., as Senior Associate, Harmon was ready to move from teaching and pure research to practical business applications. The higher-paying job came at the right time for the family. He had his mother to support along with three children, Elizabeth having been born in Syracuse in 1964. “Traveling continuously, both within the United States and abroad, while raising a family, was not always fun or easy,” says Harmon, “but it made the travel later required at Millsaps less of a challenge.” What does one do with a great position in the nation’s capital? For starters, don’t answer the phone. But Harmon did. And it was Professor Ralph Hon at Southwestern calling, who had served on the Sears selection committee that gave him the $100 scholarship 15 years before, a man who became a second father to Harmon during his undergraduate days. Dr. Hon was retiring as chair of the Department of Economics and Business Administration, and he wanted Harmon to take over the department “I wasn’t interested for many reasons,” Harmon says. “But I thought I owed him a debt, and the school a debt. And I was raised to always pay my debts.” So in 1967 he took a substantial reduction in pay to return to his alma mater to run one of its smallest departments. Over seven years, he added faculty, improved the quality of the program, and increased the number of departmental majors significantly. “George taught all of his courses at 8 a.m., and he chose rooms where he could lock the doors at 8 a.m.,” recalls Duke Cain, president of Cain Lithographers, Inc. of Jackson, who took more than 30 hours of business classes from Harmon at Southwestern. “He was a very organized teacher and thinker. He wasn’t the type to teach out of the textbook, and he added new material every year. He was by far the best teacher I ever had at any educational level.” Memphis was booming in the mid 1970s, particularly in the business sector, yet there was not a strong graduate business program in the city. Harmon saw a golden opportunity. “Basically, I wanted to take over the market. I knew it was the right time and the right school,” he says. “I proposed that Southwestern establish a graduate school of management within the framework of a top quality liberal arts college similar to what Washington and Lee had done at the undergraduate level in 1903, but offer an M.B.A. in addition to the undergraduate bachelor of arts in economics and bachelor of business administration.” This was not to be. “I had been pretty aggressive in growing that department. I had made a lot of liberal arts faculty mad, and while the new (as of 1973) president liked the idea at that time he didn’t want to go against the faculty. I felt I had done everything I could do, and I started looking around.” In 1974, he became Dean of the Division of Business and Management at the West Virginia College of Graduate Studies in Charleston. Finally, after seven years of running an undergraduate department, he would direct a graduate business program. Then came the fundamentalists. America had largely recovered from the turbulent 1960s, but pockets of extremists from the political left and right still flared up from time to time, and place to place. One such time an place was Kanawa County, West Virginia, 1975. Fundamentalist church groups, expressing their views on education, burned books in the streets. “It was awful,” Harmon says bitterly. “It was a case of a vocal minority poisoning the community. Bessie and I couldn’t raise our children in an environment of such intolerance.” They moved after one year, this time to Michigan. There Harmon became the founding Dean of the graduate program n the School of Business and Management at Saginaw Valley State. Over three years, he built a well respected M.B.A. program. Then the phone rang again. It was the Deep South calling. PREVIOUS PAGE | PAGE 2 OF 5 | NEXT PAGE |
