Biography | Jim Farley — The Economics Degree Taken Under Healy Clock

People treat a Detroit chief executive as a product of an engineering school in Ann Arbor or West Lafayette.

His first degree was a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Georgetown University, class of 1985.

The flagship building on that campus is Healy Hall, the National Historic Landmark whose clock faces the Yard.

Farley entered as a government student and switched to economics.

After the first year he worked twenty to forty hours a week while enrolled, including a stretch on Capitol Hill.

The College of Arts and Sciences still lists him as C'85.

His father, James D. Farley, had taken a School of Foreign Service degree in 1950.

On the Hilltop he also met Cornelia Connor, later Lia Farley, of the class of 1987.

Georgetown's own alumni pages are the clean source for the major and the year; later summaries that add computer science as a second undergraduate field are not repeated on the university's current profile.

Healy Hall is the building a visitor can stand in front of without inventing a classroom number.

It was designed by Smithmeyer and Pelz and finished in 1879.

The pin is the hall, not a residence hall and not a current office.

On 16 May 2026 he came back to Healy Lawn as the College commencement speaker and received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.

That later morning is a separate public date.

This memory is the 1985 paper.

The economics degree did not put him into a bank.

It put him, after a short stop at IBM and an MBA in Los Angeles, into Toyota's new luxury channel and then into Ford.

A reader who assumes every car chief is a mechanical engineer can correct the assumption here, under the clock.

Photo: Healy Hall, Georgetown University, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons.