Claremont McKenna College - Ayer Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

Page 29 text:

college architecture, after a thorough study of the plans of Oxford and Cambridge, released a full-color rendering showing the three hundred acres extending from P0- mona College on the south to the Indian Hill mesa and surrounding property north of Foothill Boulevard gloriously arrayed in linked college clusters, elegantly landscaped and served by a library, a menis and a womenis athletic helds, a gymnasium, a univer- sity church, and other central facilities. The Group Plan now possessed its rationaliza- tion from Blaisdell and the Committee on Future Organization, its encouragement from Professor Munro and others, its illustrative imagery from Jamieson and Spearl, and its property from Ellen Browning Scripps. Most important, Pomona College enjoyed a board of trustees who were unafraid to act in a bold and decisive manner. Uniiied in Class, ethnic and cultural background, and, in most instances, graduation from Pomona or a similar institution, the trustees shared a common Vision and purpose. Successful in the worlds of investment, engi- neering, real estate development, law and government affairs, citrus growing, and reli- gion tthe Protestant Episcopal bishop of Southern California served as Vice chairman of the board, and four other trustees were Congregationalist ministers holding large pastoratesi, the Pomona trustees reflected and exercised the strength of the Southern California oligarchy then in the process of directing the economic development of an entire region and shaping its politics and culture. Trustee chairman George Marston of San Diego, for example, was the very model of the oligarch as progressive reformer. To this department store owner, the largest private-sector employer in San Diego, must be given the major credit for the preservation and development of Balboa Park and the commissioning of the Nolen Plan that guided San Diego into its unfolding urban identity. Other trusteeseCOIonel Seeley Mudd, William Honnold, Llewellyn Bixby, Frank Harwood, Marston himselfewere among the most wealthy and influ- ential oligarchs in Southern California. Accustomed to act, flattered by the grand associations of the Group Plan, their imaginations especially stimulated by the full-color rendering that was in its own dis- tinctive way a real estate development prospectus of great force, the trustees met on 17 September 1925 and, in rapid order, named President Blaisdell, Colonel Mudd, and Jacob Harper tthe attorney for Miss Scrippsi the nucleus of the board of trustees ofa new corporation, the Claremont Colleges. Nine trustees signed the articles of incor- poration. On 13 October 1925 Robert Bernard, the young executive assistant to Blais- dell, took the overnight train to Sacramento. The next day, on the thirty-eighth anni- versary of the founding of Pomona College, Bernard filed the Articles of Incorporation of Claremont Colleges with the secretary of state. The Board of Fellows met at Clare- mont on 9 December 1925, adopted by-laws, and elected President Blaisdell the head fellow, Colonel Seeley Mudd Chairman, and William Honnold vice chairman. Bere nard was elected secretary. The Board of Fellows took direct responsibility for a new Fornmlating and F ounding the Enterprise, 1926-1946 '3

Page 28 text:

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

Page 30 text:

14 C laremont McKenna College entity, Claremont University Center, which would coordinate graduate education and all centralized administrative functions. While remaining president of Pomona Col- lege until 1928, Blaisdell, ably assisted by Bernard, bore the primary responsibility for directing this fledgling entity. With incorporation and the founding organization ac- complished, Blaisdell embarked upon a yearlong sabbatical 0n the East Coast, the Continent, and England, which he spent Visiting Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other East Coast institutions, a number of great universities of Europe, and Oxford and Cambridge, gathering associations and ideas relevant to his own Group Plan. The Hl'steand stunningleachievement 0f the newly established Board of Fellows of the Claremont Colleges was the founding of Scripps College for Women. Indeed, the rapidity of this event might very well have augured for an equally rapid founding ofanew menls college, had not the stock market crashed in October 1929. While Blais- dell was in the East and in Europe, Dr. Ernest Jaqua, acting head of Pomona College, continued preparation and plans for the new venture, which Miss Scripps had already energized with gifts of land and money. On 15 June 1926 Jaqua reported to the Board of Fellows that ten men and ten women had accepted appointment to the Scripps Board of Trustees and that Articles of Incorporation had been Hled in Sacramento three days earlier. Miss Scrippss attorney, Jacob Harper of La Jolla, agreed to serve as chairman of the board. The equal ratio of men and women trustees, very unusual for the time, eventually yielded to a preponderance of women trustees. Among these womenemainly college graduates, linked by birth or marriage to many of the leading families of the region-were Ellen Browning Scripps herself and Sarah Bixby Smith of Claremont. Sarah Bixby Smith was a Wellesley graduate, a member of the pioneer ranching family Bixby-Flint, and the recent author ofAdolae Days 0925i, an account of her girlhood on the San Justo, Los Cerritos, and Los Alamitos ranchos at Long Beach, destined to survive as one of the finest memoirs ofits kind in the literature of Califor- nia. Professor Munro of Harvard, soon to transfer his flag to Cal Tech, was also on the board, as was Ernest Jaqua, whom the board soon designated president of the new institution. In materializing Scripps College forWomen, the trustees of this second undergrad- uate college in the Group Plan spared no expense. The decade of the 19205 was in general characterized by distinguished architecture, especially in the public sphere. Nowhere was this more true than in Southern California. To design Scripps College for Women, its board of trustees selected two of the best talents of a most talented region and era. Architect Gordon Kaufmann of Los Angeles envisioned and designed the new institution as a Spanish Renaissance Cloister, with courtyards and connecting arcades, resplendent in creamy concrete surfaces, red tile roofs, decorated windows, doors, columns, tile porticos, and iron grills. Landscape architect Edward Huntsman Trout complemented Kaufmannls shimmering Spanish Cloisters with a central mall