Employees Take a Break, Hit the Books

It sounds like an Orwellian routine. Every Wednesday at 10 a.m., about 450 employees acting on their president’s order have to stop all regular work.

As a lull descends on their workplace, they are required to take out their books, newspapers or magazines. And they have to read for the next half an hour.

But Richard Moore, president of Santa Monica College, is no Big Brother. His order, directing all non-teaching personnel--deans, janitors, gardeners, clerks, accountants, receptionists--to take a reading break each week has received rave reviews from the employees. A month after the program was instituted, they look forward to unplugging their headsets, switching off their computers and closing down their counters for 30 minutes of John Stuart Mill or Sidney Sheldon.

“It’s like a religious thing,” Moore said. “A church or a monastery stops each day to pray. Much of what we are about is reading. And it is the president’s job to see that everybody reads.”

Moore said it was to his dismay that reading had become a “lost art” that prompted him to “steal the great idea” from an open house he had attended at Paul Revere Junior High School in Pacific Palisades.

“I’m irritated that people depend on television for their information and The Times advertises itself as a paper that can be read quickly,” Moore said. “I don’t think reading is something which is supposed to be quick or convenient.”

The program was greeted with some skepticism at first. Gordon Newman, the dean of admissions and records, understood some employees’ initial resistance.

“They had a lot of work to do. It was an awkward change of pace,” he said.

But soon, Newman said, they found that “they felt refreshed and could work twice as hard.”

“I like it a lot. It gives me the chance to read, something I never got the time for,” said Yolanda Felix, a clerical assistant at the Job Center.

Cecilia McNeely, who works in the public information office, said the short break in the middle of the week gives her “a wonderful opportunity to read short stories, poems and articles.”

Some students are less delighted with the program, contending that it was instituted with little advance notice and makes Wednesday mornings a difficult time to accomplish things at the college.

Kanil Senarath, one of about 1,000 international students at the college, said he was unaware of the program until a recent Wednesday morning when “it was very inconvenient getting a cassette from the library.”

But the students, by and large, are supportive of the program.

“It’s a short period,” Senarath said, “and the employees seem to be strictly following it. What they may be trying to do is to form a reading habit. And that’s a great idea.”

Employees quickly began talking to each other about the books they were reading, which led Moore to propose a corollary program of “witnessing.”

Now, faculty members with classes meeting on Wednesdays and Thursdays take five minutes for “witnessing to the class about what they themselves are reading--not as related to the class but what they are reading as human beings.”

“I think it would have been really nice had I known as an elementary school child or a college student . . . what my teachers were reading,” Moore said. “Were they reading murder mysteries? Were they reading Faulkner?”

Moore regards the reading program as part of a broader effort of continually rethinking the role of the college.

“Education is failing to help people enjoy the values and the pleasures” of life, he said. “We have to significantly and radically do different things to education if we’ve even got a ghost of a chance of doing our job.”