Claremont McKenna College - Ayer Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

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earlier, James Blaisdell, then serving as president of Pomona College, had first envi- sioned and promoted the Group Plan calling for the development in the City of Clare- mont of an OxfordiCambridge-style cluster of independent colleges grouped around central facilities. In 1925 his executive assistant, Robert Bernard, had filed the incor- poration papers in Sacramento for such an institution. Most recently Bernard, in his capacity as managing director of Claremont College tas the central coordinating col- lege of the Group Plan was namedi, had borne the brunt of work and responsibility in organizing the School for Men, including the recruitment of George C. S. Benson, who would serve for the next twenty-three years as president of the School, soon to be upgraded into an autonomous college. As chairman of the Board of Fellows overseeing the development of the Group Plan, Harvey Mudd had authorized the School in its hectic, hurried first phase of organization. As provost of Claremont College, E. Wilson Lyon, concerned as to what impact the new School would have on Pomona College, had given his reluctant consent. Putting up the money for Bensons appointment, pledging himself to Jfurther funderaising, expressing confidence that it could be done, Donald McKenna had transformed the School from a dream and a plan to the living reality represented by the eighty-sixyoung men, the seven professors, the sparse staff, the trustees, and guests in attendance. N aturally, there were speeches following the organ prelude by William Blanchard, professor of music at Pomona College, and the invocation by Dr. Blaisdell, an or dained Congregationalist minister. Issued a few weeks later in pamphlet form, the brief and cogent speeches by Mudd, Hard, Lyon, and Benson stand up well under contemporary scrutiny. In their cumulative themes, in factethe history of the Group Plan, the appropriateness of the OxfordtCambridge tOxbridgei model to Southern California, the value of liberal learning as preparation for the active life, the art of management in both the public and private sector, the need in postwar America for vigorous men of ethics and liberal education to assume leadership roles in business and governmentethe speeches, like the men onstage, offered a prophetic reprise and paradigm of the energies and influences flowing into the School now gathered for its first convocation. Briefly, Chairman Mudd suggested the twenty years of planning and effort that had gone into this moment. President Hard of Scripps aligned the new School with both Scripps, founded in 1926, and the more venerable Pomona, which dated from 1887. Like these institutions, Hard noted, the new School would have its central identity as a liberal arts college poised midway between tradition and the fu- ture. In his remarks, Pomona President Lyon, 3 Rhodes scholar, put aside his ambivae lence toward what he feared might become a competitive enterprise and generously placed the new School in the context of the Group Plan. That dreameof the Citrus groves and stony helds of Claremont blossoming in clustered collegesecontained Lyonis own memories as a student at Oxford and his sense of that longing for federated Formulating and Founding the Enterprise, 1926-1946 3

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2 technician in the Army Airways Communication Service. Even closer to home,Wa1- ter Wiley had spent two years as a member of the Navyis V-12 unit at UCLA. A month before he was scheduled to be commissioned in the Army Air Force, John Noll was hospitalized. Rather candidly, another new student, Robert Emett, later admitted to having first heard of the new school while serving a short stint in a naval brig. It was from the brig that Emett applied and received his letter of acceptance. Whether veterans of combat or stateside service, whether officers, NCOs, or en- listed men, the returning servicemen filling out their forms with the help of Dr. Jordan and Mrs. Ward were equally eager to make up for the war years that had taken a por tion of their youth, endangered their lives, and put their dreams on hold. That meant higher education: college, an impossible dream for so many before the war but now, thanks to the GI Bill, an imminent reality. True, they had come to a school not yet a college, a school hastily organized over the previous spring and summer, its director on the other side of the continent teaching at the Harvard Summer School. These young men in various assortments of civilian and military clothing were not waiting in line to start a college, although the college could not be founded without them. They were waiting in line to redeem dreams nurtured in Quonset huts in the South Pacific, in midnight watches on the Atlantic, on submarine patrol, or amidst the boredom of stateside duty in remote places: dreams of getting an education, of becoming some- one, something, somebody, a self not even glimpsed before the war. Now that they had survived the cataclysm, had become sergeants and ensigns and lieutenant colonels and privates First class with the Combat Infantrymanis Badge, it was all so very pos- sible. It was right in front of them, here in this improvised school whose campus remained as of yet an empty, rock-strewn desert wash spotted with sagebrush and scrub oak. Two weeks after registration, on 6 October 1946, the eighty-six students assembled with their director, professors, and staff in the Mabel Shaw Bridges Auditorium tthe larger of two Bridges auditoriums on the Associated Colleges campusi for the opening convocation of the Claremont College Undergraduate School for Men. Onstage were Harvey Mudd, Chairman of the Board of Fellows of Claremont College, who presided over the ceremony; Dr. James Blaisdell, president emeritus of Claremont College; Dr. Frederick Hard, president of Scripps College; Dr. E. Wilson Lyon, president of P0- Inona College and provost of Claremont College; Robert Bernard, managing director of Claremont College; and Dr. George C. S. Benson, director of the Claremont Col- lege Undergraduate School for Men. Also onstage with the other fellows ttrusteesi of Claremont College was Donald McKenna, a Pomona- and Harvard-educated busi- nessman with an abiding interest in higher education. It was a symbolic gathering. Each of these individuals represented in the most di- rect and compelling way the past, present, and future of the enterprise. Twenty years Claremont McKenna College

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community in American undergraduate education which in the 19205 and 19305 had energized the creation of the undergraduate house system at Harvard and the under- graduate college system at Yale. Flattering references indeed-Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Swarthmore, Pomona, and Scrippsefor a school lacking classrooms, dormitories, libraries, and endowment; a school that, if the truth be told, was wingng it, flyng by the seat of its pants, as some of the Army Air Force veterans in the audi- ence might put it; a school barely able to make its quota of students on registration day, and with those who did show being of varied academic preparation and ability. Yet this was 1946, and great dreams were in the air, a war having been won and all America-Southern California especiallyebeckoning a returning generation, faculty and students alike, with the promise of recovered time and new beginnings. Certainly George Charles Sumner Benson, the hnal speaker that October morning, had sensed this moment, this Southern California opportunity. The one-time senior tutor of Lowell House at Harvard, formerly of the faculties of Chicago, Michigan, and Northwestern, a Claremont man, Pomona Class of 1928, the thirty-eight-year-old Benson had but a few months earlier been seen at the Claremont Inn in his lieutenant colonells uniform, reestablishing his Claremont contacts, discussing prospects, mull- ing over what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Now he had it in hand: the challenge of a lifetime, building a college that would bridge the world of learning, which he had chosen for his career, and the world of affairs, in which he had glimpsed an even more compelling identity. Those two worlds, Benson told the convocatione thought and action, liberal learning and administration, commerce and Civilizatione- would be brought into dynamic interaction at the Claremont College Undergraduate School for Men. Here management itself would become a liberal art; and business and economics would be linked to liberal studies. Here in a school that had no de- partments and few electives, but a carefully crafted program, students would be en- couraged to seek a new synthesis, to put aside that false sense of a necessary opposi- tion between business and government which seems to pervade much of American thought. Here would be put aside as well that false distinction between theory and practicen that had divided Americans into dreamers and doers. Our effort,N Benson concluded, His not to do away with theory but rather, Jfollowing scientific method, to secure better theory by lthel constant checking of our principles against the facts of the political and economic world.,, A mixture of sincere belief and boosterism, the notions emerging from the speeches delivered that opening day by Benson and the others were at best overly optimistic, even high-flown, and at the worst doomed for failure, given the practical and philoe sophical gulf yawning between theory and practice, whether in the United States or elsewhere. Bensonis assertion that the hastily recruited faculty of a hastily organized, 4 C laremont McKenna College