Sidney Harman (’39) came to City College’s 23rd Street campus (present-day Baruch College) during the Great Depression. He studied business but also devoured arts and humanities courses. He loved ideas and writing, believing that we should handle both with originality and insight. The Harman Writer-in-Residence Program is an incarnation of his belief that “writing is thinking.”
Dr. Harman urged leaders to be innovative, calling for “poet managers” who could distill wisdom from the past and move forward boldly into the future. He himself was the quintessential poet manager.
Throughout his life, he lent his talents to business, education, government, and the arts. A high-fidelity industry pioneer, Harman founded Harman/Kardon in 1953, growing the company into Harman International Industries. From 1970 to 1973, he was the president of Friends World College, an experimental Quaker institution. In 1977 and 1978, Harman served as the U.S. under secretary of commerce. He founded the Program on Technology, Public Policy and Human Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In 2009, the 50th anniversary of his graduation, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Baruch.
At USC Harman was the Judge Widney Professor of Business and was appointed a Presidential Professor in 2010. He was instrumental in the 2007 creation of a new cultural center in Washington, D.C., named Sidney Harman Hall in his honor. Dr. Harman served as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was a member of the executive committee of the board of trustees at the Aspen Institute.
Dr. Harman authored Starting with the People, with Daniel Yankelovich, in 1988 and Mind Your Own Business in 2003.
In the last year of his life, Sidney Harman turned to journalism, acquiring Newsweek and merging it with The Daily Beast, a web publication. It was a bold move that he hoped would result in the “renewal and reinvention of media.” Looking forward, he said, “It may well lead the revolution.”
—Roslyn Bernstein, Director of the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program and Professor of Journalism and the Writing Professions