Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1692

Carbon of a letter from Heath at 462 West Hall, Harvey Mudd College, to George C.S. Benson, President, Claremont Men’s College, Claremont CA.

June 23, 196l

 

Dear George:

 

     During the year now coming to a close that I have been

a guest of the Harvey Mudd College, I have had opportunity to make some personal appraisements of its methods and aims.

 

     Especially in the Department of Physics I have found going on some research and instruction on the interaction of light quanta in collision with atoms of various vaporized metals under spectroscopic observation.

 

     This research being already definitely in progress and seeming of great probable value, I have been happy to provide (very modestly as a beginning) for the purchase of some auxiliary apparatus necessary for its more effective carrying on.

     It occurs to me that with similar opportunity to observe what has been already undertaken in Claremont Men’s College — especially any forward work beyond the merely customary and conventional, in the somewhat neglected field of economics and public affairs — I would be happy, in like manner, to be of increasing aid, materially and otherwise, in such advanced research and instruction.

 

     The above suggestion is strongly prompted by your letter of June 14^th, which was delayed in reaching me by way of Santa Ana — especially that part of it in which you refer to a program of research in political economy now existing within Men’s College and which, as you say, so clearly parallels many of my own purposes and activities.

 

  After a first-hand further acquaintance, I might become greatly interested in this as perhaps leading towards a much-to-be-desired congruency or working synthesis between economics and the other sciences, even possibly including some of the practical aspects of religion and its related inspirational arts. For economics as a science is deserving of vastly more than generally it has had at the hands of its often narrowly specialized or close-focused professionals.

  Soon or late, some college, university or estab­lished research organization — conceivably in Claremont — will achieve worldwide distinction as the first to discover the non-political proprietary foun­dations of our modern life-serving Western and, in all its normal practices specifically Christian, Free Enterprise Society — and especially its now broad­ly advancing development of value-creating and there­by self-sustaining proprietary (instead of tax-supported) community administration.

 

     In the quoted words of the sage and politically skeptical Benjamin Franklin, “He who shall first in­troduce into public affairs the principles of prim­itive Christianity will revolutionize the world.

                    Cordially,

                      Spencer Heath