Claremont McKenna College - Ayer Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

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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

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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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moreover, Ellen Browning Scripps was not afraid to take a Chance. In early 1924 she made a gift to the trustees of Pomona College of funds sufficient for the purchase of 250 acres around the Indian Hill mesa in Claremont. This property, she decreed, together with other land purchases and exchanges in the immediate Vicinity, should be retained for future growth along the Group Plan model being so compellingly ad vanced by President Blaisdell. Already, in 1924, at Blaisdellls urging, the board of trustees of Pomona College had appointed a committee of two trustees, mining engineer Colonel Seeley Mudd and real estate developer Llewellyn Bixby, and two faculty members, Ernest Jaqua, dean of the faculty, and George Burgess, professor of government, to investigate iithe future expansion of Pomona College in relation to the possibility of developing other coordi- nated institutions? Blaisdell set the agenda for this committee by submitting to them on 15 March 1925 a document entitled iiPreliminary Statement Submitted for Conside eration by the Committee on Future Organization, which was in effect the founding manifesto of the Group Plan. In this document Blaisdell called for the eventual estab- lishment of multiple colleges enrolling between 150 and 300 students, each with its own board of trustees and faculty, together with the establishment of a central college for graduate work, summer schools, extension, library operations, and similar activie ties. Only two features of Blaisdellls proposal-namely, that, as in the case of Oxford and Cambridge, individual colleges would grant one common degree; and that the leader of the institution be named Head Fellow in lieu of the more corporate term Presidenteproved impractical in subsequent years. Meanwhile, thanks to Blaisdell's iPreliminary Statement and the ongoing deliber- ations of the Committee on Future Organization, the fundamental Vision behind the Group Plan began to take hold. In his Pomona commencement speech that year, for example, delivered in the Greek Theater on 15 June 1925, William Bennett Munro, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History and Government at Harvard, then serving as a visiting scholar at the California Institute of Technology, positioned the debate on the future currently under way at Pomona in the most flattering terms by associating discussion of the Group Plan to comparable transitions in the ancient world; to the rise of the university in the Middle Ages at Padua and Paris, then across the Channel at Oxford and Cambridge; to the migration of Oxford and Cambridge to the New World through the founders of Harvard and Yale and the other colleges of colonial America; and then, in the late nineteenth century, to the establishment of Pomona itself, which was now seeking to stimulate the founding of other institutions. KiIt is your task, Munro urged, iito determine, now that you have arrived at the parting of the ways, whether you will do just as all other colleges have done and are doing, or whether you will do something new, different and manifestly superior. That very same month, the Firm of Jamieson and Spearl of St. Louis, specialists in 12 Claremont MeKemw College