Claremont McKenna College - Ayer Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

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10 the Pacific Coast. Pomona College, he would later write, offered him an opportunity to build and pioneer in a bold new settingeyet under the aegis of the venerable Con- gregationalist tradition. Blaisdell assumed the presidency of a debt-ridden institution of some goo students, more than half of them doing preparatory work, with a faculty of thirty-eight teaching in some twenty-one departments of instruction. By 1919 Blais- dell had all but eliminated the college preparatory program, increased the college enrollment to 685 05 students short of the 7oo-student body he considered ideal for Pomonal, brought the debt under control, and quadrupled the resources of the in- stitution. Like all of Southern California, Pomona College entered the 19205 experie encing unprecedented growth. More than a million Americans were in the process of moving into the region the college considered its own. A $3-million construction and endowment campaign was launched. With the trustees having decided in 1920 to limit Pomona to 750 men and women, however, in an effort to sustain quality, the College found itself turning away two out of every three students applying for admission. In nearby Los Angeles, the University of Southern California would respond to equal pressures through growth, and the Re- gents of the University of California would soon be setting in motion the process lead- ing to the establishment of UCLA. Blaisdell and his trustees, however, believed that something precious would be lost if Pomona were deprived of its collegial intimacy. Blaisdellls answer to this dilemma was the Group Plan. Claremont, he argued, should support the growth of an OxfordlCambridgeestyle academic culture in which a Cluster of autonomous colleges would share certain central programs and facilities -library, business offices, health services, chaplaincies, science laboratories, ath- letic programsewhile maintaining their distinctive governance and identities. In the summer of 1922, Blaisdell sent his executive assistant, Robert Bernard, Pomona Class of 1917, to visit the University of Toronto where an Oxbridgevstyle cluster program, the only one of its kind in North America, had been implemented. Bernard returned with a most enthusiastic report. He became, indeed, 3 Timothy to Blaisdellls Paul in the twenty-year effort to implement what from the first was called the Group Plan. With Pauline zeal, Blaisdell spread the faith, especially among possible patrons. Southern California, Blaisdell wrote newspaper magnate Ellen Browning Scripps in 1923, would soon be needing a great suburban institution of higher education on the order of Stanford University in Palo Alto. illVIy own very deep hopef, Blaisdell cau- tioned Miss Scripps, then living in La Jolla, is that instead of one great, undifferenti- ated university, we might have a group of institutions divided into small collegese somewhat on the Oxford typeearound 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 university. Such 3 develop- ment would be a new and wonderful contribution to American education. Claremont McKenml College

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speaking audiencei, like the segregated Mexican K-4 grammar school, signaled a society whose Anglo and Latino elements were at once convergentethe middle- class elegance of the Mexican troupe players, the scrubbed and starched Mexican American Children in the barrio school, the seIf-respect so evident in photographs of Mexican-American families, the taste for good architecture and landscaping, the identification with education and citrus as sources of employmenteand yet regard- ing each other across barriers of religion and ethnicity. Given its predominantly Anglo-American Protestant tone and its DNA code as a cole Iege town, it is perhaps not too surprising that Claremont, California, operating in this instance in the person of Dr. James Arnold BIaisdeII, president of Pomona College from 1910 to 1928, would soon be envisioning its future on the model of Oxford and Cambridge. James Blaisdell was the very model of a Congregationalist college presi- dent. Born and raised in Beloit, Wisconsin, across the street from Beloit College where his father taught philosophy, Blaisdell graduated from Beloit in 1890, then went on to the Hartford Theological Seminary, from which he graduated in 1892, in prepa- ration for ordination as a Congregationalist minister and a call to his first pastorate in Waukesha, Wisconsin. In 1903 Blaisdell was recalled to his alma mater as university chaplain, librarian, and professor of biblical literature and ancient Oriental history. Again and again in reminiscences and other forms of testimony, those who knew BIaisdell, either in parishes in Wisconsin or Michigan, at Beloit or later in Pomona, testihed to his superb speaking voice and magnetic presence. Learned, eloquent, charismatic, committed to both the pulpit and the classroom, Blaisdell embodied the tone, the style, the value, and the organizational approach of American Congregationalism, a tradition that had been at the founding of Harvard and Yale as well as Amherst, Oberlin, Carleton, GrinneII, Beloit, Colorado College, and the College of California, forerunner of the state university. In matters of polity and organization, Congregationalism, by its very definition, favored the autonomy of the local unit, whether church or college. This social and psychological disposition in BIaisdeII, a preeminent Congregationalist pastor-educator, disposed him in the direc- tion of smaller or reasonably sized colleges, like his beloved Beloit, over the encom- passing mega-university that was implicit in the Germanic model brought to the United States with the founding ofJohns Hopkins in 1867. That model was even then, in the early 19005, propelling most of the Ivy League twith the exception of Dart- mouthi and the newly established Land Grant universities, including the University of California at Berkeley, in the direction of encompassing programs and expanding campuses. In 1910, at the age of forty-three, Blaisdell was called to the presidency of Pomona College, Claremont, the premier collegiate expression of Congregationalist value on Formulating and Founding the Enterprise, 1926-1946 9

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What Blaisdell did not say was what only time and history would reveal: the power of the OxfordwCarnbridge metaphor. Beginning with the boom of the 18805 and con- tinuing with the second boom that began in 1919 and continued through the 19205, Anglo America was staking Southern California for its owneand not always subcon- sciously. Southern California Business, for example, the magazine of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, made frequent references to Los Angeles as the last great English-speaking metropolis to be founded. The downside of this AngloAmerican triumphalism, so evident everywhere in the decade, was the near-apartheid quality of social and cultural life in Southern California: the restricted covenants in its housing, its attitude of nolo tangere toward the Jewish community, its suspicion of Catholics, its rejection of other races and peoples. Yet Southern California cannot be cited as an exclusive instance of these attitudes. In many ways, the heart of Anglo America was hardening across the nation in the first decades of the twentieth century in the matter of exclusivity. The good news was the willingness of Southern Californians to re-create or to found brand-new cultural institutions-Whittier and Occidental Colleges, the Uni- versity of Southern California, the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, the Mount Wilson Observatory, the California Institute of Technologyevividly expressive of AngIo-American Civilization. It was to this impulse that Dr. Blaisdellis Group Plan addressed itself. If Anglo America was in the process of rapidly building up English- speaking Protestant civilization in Southern California, did not the Oxford or Came bridge model then offer in the language of academic polity a most comforting meta- phor for culture and institutional development in the Southland? Had not these insti- tutions, after all, been at the core of English-speaking civilization since the thirteenth century? And why should not a comparable presence be re-created through sheer force of will in this sunny southern clime? Born in England in 1837, educated at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, after her family emigrated to the United States, eighty-six-year-old Ellen Browning Scripps was the perfect person to comprehend Blaisdells dream and make an effective re- sponse. She was, First of all, a very wealthy woman who was approaching the end of her life with no direct heirs. Second, she prized education and had been generous to her alma mater, Knox College, which had awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1911. But of equal importance, Ellen Browning Scripps neither inherited nor married her wealth. She had made it the hard way. She had earned it. She and her brothers had built their fifty-plus newspaper chain on their own, paper by paper, and Miss Scripps twho never marriedi had been crucial to the enterprise as eopyeditor, columnist, re- porter, and, later, business manager. Her support of Knox College and her cofounding along with her brother of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in Lajolla testified to her interest in education and research and to her generosity. As a self-made woman, Formulating and Founding the Enterprise, 1926e1946 11