“The Analyst Papers,” named in honor of CMC’s first student newspaper, the Analyst, is a five-part series published by the Forum, the official student publication of Claremont McKenna College.

For the first time, the history of Claremont McKenna has been brought online. The Analyst Papers has been published in the form of five accessible articles, with the aim of navigating through years of characters, monuments, and obstacles. CMC’s history is a short one, but a good one, and few know much of it. To learn it is to better understand what CMC stands for, its challenges and its future.

In 1996, the Trustees of CMC commissioned California historian Kevin Starr to write a book commemorating the College’s first fifty years. His remarkable work, “Commerce and Civilization: Claremont McKenna College, 1946-1996”, has been a key source for this series.

Additionally, CMC’s Development Office has opened the College’s archives to Forum staff for this project. We thank them, as well as the CMC Alumni Association, for access to primary sources and first-hand interviews.

Part I: The Founding: An Idea, Long Before a College

Part II: CMC’s Conservative Heart

Highlights in Part III:

· CMC’s campus mirrors the school’s founding philosophy, as well as the conditions in California that existed as it was developed. North Quad in particular represents a unique space on its own terms, personifying the school’s founding struggles.

· Within its first four years, the school grew from six prefabricated units to an early draft of North Quad, with CMC’s four most iconic dorms standing erect.

· The Athenaeum, an idea first concocted in 1968 by Donald McKenna, was not completed as a space until 1983 – giving the campus an intellectual mantlepiece.

Part IV: Claremont Men’s College, with Women

Part V: Our Place in the Liberal Arts

____________

Part III

The Challenge of the Campus

While CMC's first students lived in the basement of Bridges Auditorium, dormitories that the College first called its own were vet units, pictured here in 1947.

In June of 1946, Robert Bernard made a judgment call.  Gordon Kaufmann, architect behind the primary Scripps College Quad and Harper Hall, had just completed his preliminary drawings for Honnold Library.  Bernard, a founding trustee, was planning on sharing these drawings with Marie Rankin Clarke – a wealthy and generous philanthropist who had expressed interest in the Group Plan.  George Martin, another trustee, had warned Bernard not to ask Clarke for money on behalf of the new men’s school, but rather to approach her as an emissary for the entire consortium. But Bernard, before bringing the drawings to Ms. Clarke’s room at the Biltmore, asked Kaufman to sketch in the hopeful foundations of CMC’s campus to the East of Honnold.

Up to that point, the only plans for a Claremont Men’s College campus were six prefabricated buildings, acquired as a result of a housing surplus at an Army Air Force Base in Santa Ana.  Called “hubs,” these units lived on as the original nickname for the Student Union and, now, The Hub. President Benson had purchased these units through the Federal Public Housing Authority – another New Deal program vital to the anti-New Deal boosters of the new college.

In its very first days, before these units arrived, CMC students lived in the basement of Bridges Auditorium, famously decorated with potted palm trees and referred to by its inhabitants as Coconut Grove. They took classes in makeshift rooms, surrounded by sheets draping from the ceiling in Bridges’ attic before the arrival of all the units.

Allison and Rible drew this blueprint for Claremont Men's College in 1947. It is likely the first of its kind.

While meeting with Ms. Clarke, Bernard explained what the area just East of the library contained – Claremont Men’s School.

Starr writes, “When Mrs. Clarke showed interest in the new school, Bernard followed up by sending her a copy of the program of the opening convocation, together with the photos of students living in the basement of Bridges Auditorium.”

Mrs. Clarke ended up giving $500,000 before the first semester of the school came to a close.  With such bold beginnings, the school incorporated, and began to plan out its physical environment.

Sixty years later, another trustee, Henry Kravis, would sit down with another architect, Raphael Vinoly, to dream up the next step for CMC’s academic village.  In between were six decades of transitional and incremental campus development.

Unlike Scripps, largely planned out and financed with Ellen Browning Scripps’ initial investment, CMC could only build a campus environment piece by piece. Each piece would provide CMC’s founders with serious fundraising challenges.  But each piece, at least through the 1970s, would reflect both the foundational ideas – California conservatism – as well as the norms of the typical American campus structure.

Somehow, these campus foundations had to be reconciled with a college that had visions way beyond the confines of acreage.

CMC’s campus is often discarded or discounted when compared to the gorgeous gardens of Scripps or the handsome and traditionally tailored campus of Pomona.  But while there is no aesthetic competition with the Scripps physique, CMC – North Quad in particular – has its own architectural legacy and stories.

This past reflects and twists the American notion of the campus space, symbiotic of both CMC’s daunting and unlikely struggle for national success, and its roots in California’s growth.  In short, the bleakness of CMC’s architecture, thanks to Benson, who had little concern with its form, is in itself something to celebrate.  CMC’s campus space is a story representative of conservative roots, social norms after World War Two, and California’s multi-partisan progressive tradition.  In this, North Quad provides its own brutal beauty.

CMC students made the most of limited resources, Analyst coverage shows.

The Group Plan became a vestigial of Los Angeles traditions of progressivism and boosterism. Bernard, in a Harper’s article, explained not just of CMC but the entire consortium: “No period of American history has a monopoly on founding…there is nothing to be undone here; we start from scratch.”

Only in California could such a statement be made. In 1923, a Los Angeles Times editorial read, “We are being hotly pursued by our future.” Los Angeles, never a static place, internalized these fears, explain historians, soldering themselves to doctrines of development. CMC’s founding is rooted in California’s fanatic 1920s growth.

Architecture, particularly in southern California, is an expression of history and social process. CMC is no exception, representing its own flavor of the “academic village,” derivative of a distinctly American feature of higher education – the idea of the university as a community in and of itself. For CMC, this community would mimic 1940s restraints: “values of thrift, efficiency, and functionalism,” explains Starr.

He continues, “Like the odds and ends of military attire favored by the undergraduates in the first two years, surplus housing units of either wood or steel vividly evoked the transitions of the postwar era.”

The first permanent structure was the original Story House.  The building, named after Russell M. Story, served as a dormitory, commons, and focal point for campus life. By 1947, however, work had already begun on dedicating the furnishings of a campus.

Out of a dire need for dormitories came the first pillar of North Quad.  Architecture firm Allison and Rible, an omnipresent character throughout the campuses accelerating first fifteen years of growth, presented Benson and his trustee building committee with their work: a dorm turned inside out.  Instead of a central corridor, rooms would be accessed from a first or second story gallery.  The endeavor, now Appleby Hall, turned out to be a cost-effective success in the short run. And the College’s first dorm came to personify CMC’s aspirations and inclinations – functional and pragmatic, yet democratic, and distinctly Californian.

By the 1950s, CMC's architects were asked to draw up plans for a student center that would be shared with Scripps College. It would eventually adopt its colloquial name, "The Hub."

Benson, aware of the need to define and begin projecting a campus for recruitment and fundraising needs, had Allison and Rible quickly turn the project into a master plan – the initial rendering of a four dormitory quadrangle with an adjunct cafeteria.  By 1950, the four-legged quad was enclosed by Appleby, Green, Boswell, and Wohlford.

The college rounded out the 1940s with Pitzer Hall at the Western end of the Quad.  Before construction, however, there was a need to acquire the land. After World War Two, California experienced a significant housing crisis. “Even the most embattled shelter represented an asset,” explained Starr.  In total, the trustees spent $100,000 to clear the land for Pitzer Hall.  With limited funds and Russell Pitzer’s gift already tied up in loans associated with the construction of the dormitories, trustees pored over Allison and Rible’s drawings looking to cut costs.  Hot water in the bathrooms was eliminated by Benson.  Fortunately, through small gifts and loans from local banks at the hands of respected trustees, construction started in 1949, mirroring the construction on the Eastern end of the quad of Boswell Hall.

In this 1952 rendering from a promotional pamphlet, the shape of the campus begins to crystalize.

Upon the conclusion of the Korean War in 1953, the American economy accelerated – particularly in Southern California, where a building boom commenced. CMC trustees, many personally reaping the rewards of the 1950s, were eager to fund CMC’s own building boom.  Pitzer Hall was expanded in 1955.  In 1957, construction on Collins Hall, giving North Quad a permanent dining location, was completed.  The dining hall sat just off the quad, overlooking the green with large glass windows that demanded a vibrant and public eating routine, a dramatic contrast with Mallott Commons’ intimate rooms or Frary’s monolithic dining room.

While amidst a boom, the overlapping projects pushed the College’s finances to its limits, mandating further austerity for the buildings.  But within fifteen years, CMC’s academic village had arrived, after donations and loans were precariously strung together, leaving behind evidence of the financial restrictions imposed on the campus’ architectural needs.  In 1959, the interest on the $750,000 in loans taken out from the bank and endowment was about the same as an associate professor’s salary.

Now with a campus, the trustees and administrators sought to further provide the furnishings the college’s environment. Sixteen projects, including Auen, Fawcett, Benson, Berger, and Marks Halls, were completed during the 1960s.  Pitzer Hall, by the 1960s, could no longer support the administrative needs of the school.  Bauer Hall, with its groundbreaking in 1967 after Modestus Bauer’s $2.2 million gift, provided the solution. Bauer Hall provided the eastern end of north quad, and, remarkably, was accepted as an impressive architectural terminus for the quad.  The building mimicked the themes of North Quad: exterior corridors, simple hints of Mediterranean style, and an emphasis function over form. Bauer Center, while certainly no rival to the Kravis Center across the quad, still provides CMC with its own academic rotunda, and has played a key role in defining North Quad as a dynamic and multipurpose place that contained residential, academic, administrative, and social spaces.

Claremont McKenna's current master plan calls for an extension of the College's original quad.

The following years, while not without construction, were years focused on academic and administrative planning and development. Little physical change occurred when the College went coed. It was not until the 1980s that North Quad received an intellectual mantlepiece with construction of the Atheneaum. Donald McKenna pushed the project to establish a permanent building for speakers and discourse.  As early as 1968, McKenna had formulated the concept of the Atheneaum, a space that could simultaneously serve as an intellectual hub to exchange and learn but also mesh with the school’s ambitions to maintain a residential college. A $2 million building, construction began in 1982 and was finished within a year.  Now the campus had an explicit space where intellectual pursuits flirted and mingled with the CMC community in a social setting.

With the completion of the Ath and now further aware of how its identity had adapted to changing times, CMC announced a Master Plan in the mid 1980s.  Of most importance, Starr notes, was the realization that the older buildings were “disconcertingly Spartan in appearance,” due to lack of funding, and the aesthetic minimalism of the founders. Still, the campus had overcome architectural austerity to develop a profound space that respected the academic ambitions of the College. And while the founders saw little intrinsic value in designing a campus beyond its basic needs, these very tenets had, in a twist of fate, created a unique California campus that would become cherished by its inhabitants.

Read Part IV: Claremont Men’s College, with Women.

“The Analyst Papers,” named in honor of CMC’s first student newspaper, the Analyst, is a five-part series published by the Forum, the official student publication of Claremont McKenna College.

For the first time, the history of Claremont McKenna has been brought online. The Analyst Papers has been published in the form of five accessible articles, with the aim of navigating through years of characters, monuments, and obstacles. CMC’s history is a short one, but a good one, and few know much of it. To learn it is to better understand what CMC stands for, its challenges and its future.

In 1996, the Trustees of CMC commissioned California historian Kevin Starr to write a book commemorating the College’s first fifty years. His remarkable work, “Commerce and Civilization: Claremont McKenna College, 1946-1996”, has been a key source for this series.

Additionally, CMC’s Development Office has opened the College’s archives to Forum staff for this project. We thank them, as well as the CMC Alumni Association, for access to primary sources and first-hand interviews.

Part I: The Founding: An Idea, Long Before a College

Highlights in Part II:

· The College’s founding philosophy was rooted in post-World War Two conservative principles. In its first decades, CMC’s leadership openly declared its political affiliations as official positions of the College.

· CMC became the intellectual home of Southern California Republicanism, which created two presidents: Nixon and Reagan. Both were very loyal to the College.

· The 1980s is examined as a capstone era, and a turning point.

Part III: The Challenge of the Campus

Part IV: Claremont Men’s College, with Women

Part V: Our Place in the Liberal Arts

____________

Part II

CMC’s Conservative Heart

This cartoon was featured in California Journal in July 1981, accompanying a piece by William Greenberg on the state of Claremont as a "bastion of conservatism."

When its doors finally opened after decades of struggle, the one thing that seemed secure for Claremont Men’s College was its mission.

That mission, articulated in a variety of ways since the idea first sprouted in the 1920s, may have been put best in a document written by its first board members in 1952, entitled A College Declares Free Enterprise. CMC’s purpose, the pamphlet read, would be to train men “who will help carry on our American free-enterprise way of life.”

Ultimately, it was this motivation—to found a college for the American century, emphasizing democratic and free market values—that became the primary justification for Claremont’s existence. It drove the dozen men who had the conviction to make the College come together. It certainly became an increasingly rare position in higher education. And in post-World War II America, it would be an ideal that would dominate the nation’s political discourse. CMC was at the heart of this struggle, and at the heart of CMC was an agenda.

· A Core Philosophy ·

When a college chooses a motto, it’s safe to assume that they consider it a telling indicator of the institution’s founding philosophy.

Amherst’s motto declares, “let them give light to the world.” Haverford states, “not more learned, but steeped in better learning.” Yale states simply, “light and truth.”

Claremont McKenna says that civilization prospers with commerce.

“The educational program of this institution is primarily related to the public and private corporate character of modern life,” read a document, Memorandum on Proposed College for Men at Claremont, written in May of 1941. Russell Story’s edits of the piece, including frequent rewrites of this declarative sentence, show just how important it was to make clear the College’s purpose.

Kevin Starr, author of the College’s official historical account, believes that CMC, grounded in such a forceful political philosophy, had a conservative character from the start.

“From the beginning, Claremont Men’s College had a point of view and an image,” Starr wrote. “In contrast to the orientation of the usual liberal arts college—New Deal liberal in politics, Keynesian in economics, skeptical in matters of emotional patriotism—Claremont Men’s College acquired, indeed sought, an opposing identity: free market in economics, anti-New Deal Republican in politics, unabashedly patriotic.”

Indeed, virtually all of Claremont’s pioneers were anti-New Deal Republicans, whose greatest political achievement may have been founding CMC.

For the founders of Claremont Men's, there was no question whether or not CMC was different from other liberal arts colleges.

Benson was the most vocal of all. In a speech he gave in 1952, he referred to the New Deal as a “‘Santa Claus’ philosophy of something for nothing”—the idea that “government owes me a living.” Not long after the speech was given, Benson was recruited for a time to work for the Eisenhower administration.

Donald McKenna was no less conservative. He would often note his distaste for the liberal bend of his alma mater’s faculty, and their reliance on pro-debt, pro-inflation Keynesian teachings. In CMC’s early years, McKenna even made frequent calls for the reestablishment of the gold standard.

McKenna’s personal archives, given to the College upon his death, show his political leanings remained steady throughout his life. He held on to an invitation to the “Humane Vision of Conservatism” conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, 1981, and wrote fondly of a 1989 dinner he attended with President Reagan at the Century Hotel in Los Angeles. He staunchly opposed the reelection of Bill Clinton in 1994 (shockingly, the year the College Democrats Club was first formed at CMC, according to Forum coverage from the time.)

Another author of the 1952 document, in which Claremont declares itself for free enterprise, was Herbert Hoover, Jr. Notifying Hoover of his election to the board, Benson wrote him that the College, from its founding, had “taken a firm stand in favor of political and economic liberty.”

It even appears as if Russell Pitzer, a founding figure at CMC, had conservative leanings—ironic, given the political leanings of the college that bears his name today.

“CMC is interested in the area where government and economics intersect,” a skeptical David Boroff wrote in “California’s Five-college Experiment,” a Harper’s Magazine 1959 profile of the Claremont Colleges, “militantly committed to free enterprise and ‘intelligent conservatism’ (the adjective speaks volumes).”

Indeed, to put this philosophy into practice, through education, required a different model. Benson suggested a streamlined curriculum would fit, one he called “political economy,” that would emphasize free market economics and constitutional government.

“Claremont Men’s College believes in free society,” the board of trustees upheld in the 1950s. “We cannot maintain our society free if we ask the government for largesse.”

· A Crisis of Mission: Claremont After Camelot ·

For a college to take a political stance, it must accept it will face inevitable trials of conscience. Claremont has had a few.

Some may point out that its very founding was reliant on the brand of government aid the College leadership scorned: the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill.

But part of CMC’s conservatism has been consistent support for the American military. The College’s first class was packed with former aviators, sailors and soldiers, and part of the justification of CMC’s founding was that men would need to learn how to lead in public life, and in business settings, after leading on battlefields. And when the Korean War broke out less than five years after Claremont finally opened, there was a deep fear that the call of duty would deplete the student body to a point where the College wouldn’t long survive.

As the College grew, its conservative roots continued to shape its course. Pictured above: the construction of Bauer Center.

This support held true even during the escalation in Vietnam, when it seemed the conservatism of the country, and CMC, was most clearly under threat.

The 1960s challenged every American college, some with already liberal faculties. Brown, for one, decided to dramatically change course in 1969 with its adoption of the free elective curriculum.

Violence was also bursting out across many campuses. Nationally, the most widely publicized riots occurred at UC Berkeley and Kent State, where the National Guard killed four students in protest. In Kent, one of the primary targets of protestors was the ROTC.

In Claremont, as well, the ROTC was under siege. Over 160 students marched on the base in Bauer Center over the course of two years, the bulk of which occurred in a two-day siege in 1970. But instead of National Guardsmen defending the space, there were three-dozen CMC students. Protestors from the other Colleges used rocks as weapons against them.

To Benson, the decade presented a tremendous challenge to everything he had worked for. The students themselves had a conservative bend—not many other colleges formed clubs like the “CMC Student Committee to Support American Fighting Men in Vietnam”—but to Benson, this was a fight that went beyond a war gone terribly wrong. This was about maintaining calm in a community that was supposed to teach self-discipline and governance.

By 1967, Benson was forced to start compromising. That year he published Balance on Campus, a pamphlet that called for an equality of partisanship in the College faculty.

“A college is not a place for indoctrination,” he stated, “on one side or the other.”

The next year, Benson resigned as president.

It took three years for the campus to grow quiet after Benson left, and not before things degenerated even further. Pomona’s branch of SDS, “Students for a Democratic Society,” threw firebombs at Collins Dining Hall and planted them in CMC trash bins. Story House—CMC’s first true building, and a beautiful one—was fatally burned.

Story House, the heart of CMC's campus in its early years, fell victim to a fire in a period of politically motivated violence in Claremont.

Pomona’s Black Student Union, just days before the Story House fire, had asked CMC’s faculty whether they wanted to see the Colleges burned down, Harry Jaffa and Ward Elliott recall.

“If I were to choose,” Elliott tells the Forum, “I would bet on arson over the official story.

“Hot radiator pipes don’t burn down buildings,” he adds.

But while events fired up on campus, the mission of the College seemed to hold steady. A document referred to by the administrative leadership as the “McKenna Report”, issued by Mr. McKenna in 1968, reported that the identity of the College had survived the decade uncompromised. And steadfast through the heat, unwavering like others, CMC moved into an era where its core philosophy would reach a national stage.

· Ground Zero for Republican California ·

CMC’s first students were fresh off the Pacific front, but the College struggled to bring ROTC to campus. The organization has a one-station policy per university, and Pomona already hosted. So Benson appealed to his friend, and congressman, Mr. Richard Nixon.

Nixon would become a friend to the College, before his presidency and throughout. CMC even made a noble effort to locate his presidential library on campus, before the Watergate scandal erupted, and the College stepped back.

This advertisement for ROTC was featured in a Forum edition from the 1980s.

But Nixon wasn’t the only prominent conservative to put stock in Claremont. Barry Goldwater, Milton Friedman, Leo Strauss, and William F. Buckley were hailed during their frequent visits, Strauss and Buckley in particular. Faculty member Harry Jaffa was considered a brainchild of resurgent Republicanism. And Ronald Reagan, a friend of Claremont before his bid for the White House, would lean on the College throughout his presidency.

“I was going to write and let you know how proud I am to have so many of your graduates and faculty members serving here in my administration,” President Reagan wrote to Jack Stark by hand in 1981.

“I have long enjoyed my association with Claremont Men’s College,” Reagan continued. “The contribution of your school… is invaluable.”

Reagan’s victory, and the historical legitimacy he brought as president to modern conservatism, represented a capstone on grassroots efforts that began in 1940s Southern California. Indeed, it would be difficult to separate that effort with the founding and the rise of Claremont, which shared with Reagan a similar trajectory, congruent challenges, and through the turbulence, a conservative heart.

Read Part III: The Challenge of the Campus.

“The Analyst Papers,” named in honor of CMC’s first student newspaper, the Analyst, is a five-part series published by the Forum, the official student publication of Claremont McKenna College.

For the first time, the history of Claremont McKenna has been brought online. The Analyst Papers has been published in the form of five accessible articles, with the aim of navigating through years of characters, monuments, and obstacles. CMC’s history is a short one, but a good one, and few know much of it. To learn it is to better understand what CMC stands for, its challenges and its future.

In 1996, the Trustees of CMC commissioned California historian Kevin Starr to write a book commemorating the College’s first fifty years. His remarkable work, “Commerce and Civilization: Claremont McKenna College, 1946-1996”, has been a key source for this series.

Additionally, CMC’s Development Office has opened the College’s archives to Forum staff for this project. We thank them, as well as the CMC Alumni Association, for access to primary sources and first-hand interviews.

Highlights in Part I:

· There were three major attempts to start the school, the first two cut abruptly by the Great Depression and Pearl Harbor.

· Pomona, whose leadership gave up on the Group Plan by the 1940s, actively opposed CMC’s founding.

· CMC was nearly named Pitzer, after a key donor. Other possible names included Clarke College or Bauer College.

Part II: CMC’s Conservative Heart

Part III: The Challenge of the Campus

Part IV: Claremont Men’s College, with Women

Part V: Our Place in the Liberal Arts

____________

Part I

The Founding: an Idea, Long Before a College

Who was McKenna, anyway?

“An individual,” writes Kevin Starr in Commerce and Civilization, “who had typed a multipage, single-spaced letter on a transcontinental train trip in 1945 outlining the postwar possibilities of a third college.”

Your average loyal and loving CMC student is expected to know at least the basic history of the Claremont Colleges. The brochures usually cover it as if it were a fairytale. Pomona was the founding member, molded in the New England type; its third president, James Blaisdell, had the wise and bold idea of creating a consortium on the Oxford model, so as to preserve the integrity of the small liberal arts college while acquiring the resources of the large university; and CMC, at first Claremont Men’s College, was ultimately founded with some strong momentum built by America’s victory in the Second World War.

All of this is truth, though truth that mystifies and simplifies a wonderful story of characters with familiar names– Story, Benson, Bernard, Mudd, Pitzer, and of course, McKenna. All were idealistic men tested by trying times. The great idea of a men’s college in Claremont was actually born in the 1920s– when the business of America was business, when capital was flowing fast into Southern California, and when the town of Claremont was still desert brush in the shadows of mountains.

· The American ‘Oxford’ Model ·

These pamphlets, called the Claremont Papers, were the Federalist Papers of CMC's founding.

Before Claremont McKenna’s founding, its fathers had the college envisioned for more than twenty years. Claremont may be the academic product of the post-World War II era, but the idea of Claremont long preceded the war.

Pomona President Blaisdell’s “Group Plan”, as the Claremont Colleges plan was called, first became his brainchild after Pomona’s trustees voted in 1920 to limit the student body to a mere 750 men and women– half of what it is today. It was then that the president realized an opportunity to build something greater than Pomona could ever be standalone: a new type of academic federation, in a brand new place.

The key was finding the funds, and at first, they were readily available. Blaisdell’s biggest achievement was the solicitation of Ellen Browning Scripps, a self-made woman living in La Jolla who, with her brothers, had built the largest newspaper chain west of the Mississippi. In a letter to Scripps, Blaisdell wrote this oft-circulated quote:

“My own very deep hope is that instead of one great, undifferentiated university, we might have a group of institutions divided into small colleges– somewhat on the Oxford type– around a library and other utilities which they would use in common. In this way I should hope to preserve the inestimable personal values of the small college while securing the facilities of the great universities. Such a development would be a new and wonderful contribution to American education.”

Enticed by the idea, Scripps gave a large donation to buy 250 acres of land surrounding Pomona’s campus for future colleges. Based on the purchase, the Articles of Incorporation of Claremont Colleges were approved in Sacramento in 1925, with Blaisdell, Seeley Mudd (Harvey’s father) and Scripps’ lawyer as trustees. And within a year, Scripps completed her commitment to the plan by funding the founding of the first full-fledged consortium child, Scripps College for Women, in 1926.

It all seemed so easy. Within just a few years, the vast wealth of the 1920s had produced a great new project in the Pomona Valley, where the sun beat down on rolling citrus groves and untold academic promise. Blaisdell became convinced his plan would be realized in full, and quickly began sketching a third head of the Group: a men’s college that would, with no stitch of humility, serve to sharpen the fundamental tools of modern democratic society. In Claremont, men would learn commerce as a liberal art.

But shortly after CMC was first dreamed up in 1927, crisis hit Claremont and the nation. Black Friday quickly buried the hopes of the college’s founding, and in a sad twist of irony, ugly economics brought the project to a halt.

· Keeping the Plan Afloat ·

The hopes of most, at least; but not Blaisdell. Announcing his retirement in 1935, Pomona’s most visionary president made a passionate plea for CMC’s founding his last words on campus. “Blaisdell’s report not only endorsed the concept of the third college but argued additionally that it was crucial to the survival of the Group Plan,” wrote Kevin Starr in his account. “Only by achieving a three-college synergy, Blaisdell stated, could the Group Plan demonstrate its true capacity for further federalization.”

The men that held that dream together are now considered the true founders of the Claremont Colleges. Harvey Mudd, a man of serious money and influence on the coast, insisted the plan could come together with incremental gifts over several years. Russell Story, a succeeding president of the Claremont enterprise, focused on giving the vision more organization by making public relations pamphlets for possible donors and commissioning a detailed curriculum draft. The drafter, Arthur Coons, spent much of his time in Oxford at Nuffield College – the university’s twenty-second, also founded to prepare students for professions in public service and business.

In a very real way, the fate of the college rested on the motivation of less than a dozen men.

Story began looking early on to George Charles Sumner Benson, his former student of politics at Pomona and a senior tutor at Harvard’s Lowell House, to fill a position of leadership that had long remained void. Benson showed great interest in leading the third college, but showed an equal amount of reservation; the plan had failed once before, and moving out West was a great commitment to a college that didn’t yet exist.

And in a telegram the Forum obtained written to Richard Bernard, a passionate Claremont board member and the name behind Bernard Field Station, Story detailed another serious, seemingly endless concern: fundraising.

“The foundation chase is about over. With Rockefeller and Carnegie it is a closed chapter so far as general education is concerned,” he wrote. “The Men’s College will have to go on its own. Everyone admits to its excellence and appeal, but no money. So be it… my convictions have been deepened, but the plan will have to carry itself.”

Despite all of Story’s momentum, another catastrophic event hit at the heart of America, and this time the world as well. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, attention was invariably drawn away from the Claremont Plan by the war effort.

“The venture,” Story wrote to a friend at Johns Hopkins, “which was so close to being established in 1929, is now the victim of another set of circumstances equally catastrophic, if not more so. Certainly the idea will find embodiment some place, somewhere, some time.”

Shortly after the war began, Story died of a heart attack.

· Pomona Turns as McKenna, Mudd & Pitzer Run ·

Donald McKenna is Claremont’s very own entrepreneur and Harvard dropout. Born into a steel family that became key to the war effort, McKenna, second cousin of Andrew Carnegie, tried going his own way in the turbine business before rejoining the family project. McKenna steel had high percentages of tungsten, making it a tougher alloy produced at the perfect time.

As a student at Pomona College, Donald McKenna was a fine student– sometimes.

The family became wealthy right when McKenna found a passion. He became involved in the third college project– by 1942, synonymous with the very experiment of collegiate federation in America– once he moved back to Claremont in the 1940s. Originally he, like most other Claremont founders, had gone to Pomona for undergrad.

Slowly but surely, McKenna committed himself as the third college’s largest financial contributor. He eventually promised up to half what was necessary for the college to open. Harvey Mudd, now chairman of Claremont’s board, approved of the college’s founding if they secured the final funding needed. But they needed double McKenna’s gift, and there were very few donors in sight.

McKenna and Bob Bernard went on a scurried hunt for the final donor needed. They found one in Russell Pitzer, one of the largest citrus growers in the region (yes, that’s what the Pitzer orange tree icon is all about).

Claremont College Undergraduate School for Men – the first official name of the institution, contrary to popular belief – was finally set for its founding in 1946. The school would open without an endowment, riding on the gifts of McKenna, Pitzer and the saving grace of the GI Bill.

Not soon after its founding, Pitzer would offer another major gift to put his name on the college. CMC’s leadership turned him down, not quite ready for a namesake, much less one with little substantive significance. Instead, Pitzer gave half the donation he originally offered for the construction of Claremont College’s first academic building. Pitzer Hall was completed in 1950, and was torn down sixty years later to make room for the Kravis Center.

Other names for the college, mulled throughout its history before settling on Claremont McKenna, include Clarke College, after a key figure who donated a large sum but had no interest in taking the school’s name; and Bauer College, after Modestus Bauer gave the college its largest gift to date in the ‘70s for the construction of Bauer Center.

Another milestone gift came from Lawrence Green, solicited by Benson in the winter of 1947.

“It involves many headaches and anxieties, but it is a real pleasure to watch a vital educational institution grow,” Benson wrote, in a letter kept in the College’s archives, “especially one with a program as significant to American higher education as is ours.”

But while Mudd, Pitzer and McKenna ran with the mantle of collegiate federalism taken from Blaisdell and Story, they found one final, surprising obstacle in their way that would threaten the entire enterprise: Pomona College.

Pomona’s longest-serving president to date, Elijah Lyon, led an active and cunning campaign to block the founding of CMC. Lyon and the faculty feared, as Starr wrote, what might become a “competitive enterprise” in Claremont: an in-grown alternative to what was supposed to be the East Coast college of the West.

Lyon’s first move was to attempt a seizure of the third college property, which he said was needed for additional faculty housing. Scripps’ faculty strongly objected; after all, their girls had been promised a male-college counterpart for over twenty years. And Lyon managed to infuriate Harvey Mudd, who went ahead and purchased the land for its safekeeping.

At a meeting between Pomona Dean Edward Sanders and Bernard, even the very subject of CMC’s founding began to frustrate the administration.

“Oh, isn’t it about time that we wrote that off?” Pomona’s dean howled.

After decades of struggle, Claremont finally had its first convocation in 1947.

When Lyon failed to confiscate CMC’s promised land, he targeted its leadership. The Pomona administration made Benson an offer he couldn’t refuse: the college would create an entirely new department based on the curriculum and philosophy of Claremont Men’s, and would pay Benson big bucks to run it. Benson would avoid risking his career on a shaky venture, and by incorporating CMC into Pomona, the need for a third college would be eliminated.

To such a threat, McKenna and Bernard made a final counteroffer. While focusing on directing CMC to its founding, Benson would be given a five-year position as head of Claremont’s graduate programs. Benson accepted, and the third college had its leader and, later, first president.

Bernard would later reflect on that moment in an oral history, now buried in the College’s archives.

“The people that entered into the plan did so knowing full well that this was a new undertaking, that it was a pioneer undertaking, that it was a struggle,” he said.

He added: “There was more than Pomona at stake in Claremont.”

There was great irony in Pomona’s betrayal of the Group Plan: after all, the very idea had originated at Pomona, and virtually all of its advocates had studied there. But the founders did differ from the Pomona norm in one key respect. While its faculty had remained liberal throughout the great traumas of the early 21st Century, CMC’s founders had become entrenched in a hardened, ambitious conservatism – a trait that would define their budding college in the years to come.

Read Part II: CMC’s Conservative Heart.

Top 20 things I would buy if I were President Gann* and had a boatload of money (in order of importance):

1. A new athletics/recreation center to replace Ducey.  Easily the most important thing for CMC right now.
2. A computer science professor (or two).  We only have one now.
3. A new website
4. More “networking” trips during breaks like the ITAB (Silicon Valley) and FEI (NYC) trips.  Both were some of the best learning experiences I’ve had in the past four years.
5. Renovations and furniture for the Hub
6. Renovations and furniture for the computer labs (better furniture, more screens, etc… check out the Mudd/Pomona labs and you’ll see what we’re missing)
7. Renovations and furniture for the Reading Room
   (Onto the frivolous purchases…)
8. Giant plasma screens and speakers all over campus broadcasting the same thing at all times
9. An elaborate mini-golf course between Boswell and Green
10. An outdoor pool for non-athletic use (Scripps is too far and has inconvenient hours for men)
11. A large outdoor hot tub at the Senior Apartments.  (Important: cleaned and sanitized daily, at least.)
12. A bronze statue of Donald McKenna outside Collins Dining Hall.  Oxidized to look old and grand.
13. A gold statue of Henry Kravis outside the Kravis Center.  Polished daily to look new and expensive.
14. Scripps College (just the students, the Motley, and the dining hall.  They can keep the other stuff.)
15. A lazy river from Kravis Center to Bauer Center.  (Important: shut off and emptied on Thursday and Saturday nights.)
16. High speed train from Claremont Boulevard to the top of Mt. Baldy
17. Chairlift (gondola?) from South Quad to North Quad
18. Pitzer College (KKR leveraged buyout style)
19. The Mudd Hole
20. Loanable go-karts (with front-mounted video cameras)

Other changes would include abolishing senior thesis, most GEs, and demolishing McKenna Auditorium and Ducey Gym.

*Henry Kravis, Robert Day, or any other super rich donor would do

Disagree? Did I forget something? Leave it in the comments.

According to Mr. Arnold, the decision to keep the stipend at $3,000 (it was $3,000 last year as well) came when the Career Services Center reported receiving a record number of applications. KLI found itself trying to raise enough money for every applicant and has been mostly successful, but is unable to raise the stipend amount this year.

“KLI elected to retain the $3,000 stipend amount in order to maximize the number of internships we could support,” said Arnold in an interview today. “The challenge is a positive one in that [Career Services and the Kravis Institute] collectively got more applications this year than have ever been received– over 180, as compared to about 130 last year.”

Although Mr. Arnold reports that the KLI will be able to support “the great majority” of applicants, he says they will not know the final numbers for at least a month because many students have applications that are not complete. This includes applicants who are waiting to hear back from their organization or are still searching for an internship. “We won’t know what the final picture will look like for another month,” says Mr. Arnold.

Since the KLI program’s pilot year five years ago, many students have come to depend on CMC’s sponsored internship program, which provides students who choose certain non-profit, unpaid internships with a stipend for living expenses such as housing and food. In the past, KLI internships have involved domestic organizations from the Heritage Foundation to Habitat for Humanity (KLI’s 2007 international internships are listed here). When asked what he would do if CMC cannot fund his internship with the Sierra Club in San Francisco, Joe Swartley ’11 says, “I don’t know what I would do… I would probably wash cars or work at a retail store to make money.”

Other sponsored internships are available through CMC, including the McKenna International Program. The McKenna International Program is in the 9^th of a 10 year gift from Donald McKenna.

Even though the program has an application process, in past years almost all students were awarded a stipend for their internships. According to Mr. Arnold, this is not subject to change, but it is obviously more difficult to raise money for over 180 students than it is for 130 students or fewer. It is a task to raise money because funds may not come from tuition or fees paid for by students themselves. “The students contribute zero to a program that last year provided over $300,000 in stipends,” says Mr. Arnold.

“Henry Kravis has provided the institute with a lot of funding, some of which has been directed toward growing the internship program,” says Mr. Arnold. “There have been major gifts in the past couple years from [CMC Trustee] Shaw B. Wagener ’81, and members of the KLI Advisory Board, such as Duane Kurisu [Parent '08], as well as others. President Gann has also been directly involved in securing funding.” Mr. Arnold emphasizes that a lot of people have been instrumental in supporting the programs, even though it is more of a collaborative effort than a centralized one.

Despite some disappointment from students who were anticipating more in funding, CMC’s sponsored internships have come a long way in the past five years when they were started. Three years ago, stipends were increased from $2,500 to $3,000. This year, more than $500,000 will be awarded in stipends.

“We want to be as supportive as possible, keeping in mind the increased demand,” says Mr. Arnold. “I understand the concern about funding… but it is a program that has grown because of the great support by the administration and through faculty involvement in the academic portion of the internships.”
_____________________________

Example e-mail:

“Greetings, Your summer internship application has been received and reviewed for support by the Kravis Leadership Institute (KLI). Pending final confirmation from your organization of acceptance and responsibilities, I expect the KLI will be able to support your internship with a $3,000 stipend to cover expenses associated with your otherwise unpaid internship. Please continue to provide any additional relevant information to the Career Service Center. Additional information concerning academic requirements will be forthcoming. You will be required to attend an internship meeting in April to go over the requirements of the program. Details about this meeting will also be forthcoming.”