Claremont McKenna College - Ayer Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

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and attendant walks, lawns, trees, and shrubs perfectly harmonizing with Kaufmannls Mediterranean metaphor. On the sunny afternoon of14 October 1927, the fortieth anniversary of the founding of Pomona College, Ernest Jaqua was inaugurated as president of Scripps in the Greek Theater of Pomona College. The previous month, a freshman class of fifty stu- dents had arrived. Posing for the camera along one of Kaufmannis newly completed arcades, a number of them in riding attire, all of them in the bobbed hair of the period, these elegant young women, redolent of the regional privilege from which they came, signaled the almost-ovemight arrival of Scripps College for Women as an institution in dialogue with the Seven Sisters in the East and Mills College to the north. Not only did the Group Plan have its second college, Southern California now had a most suitable institution to which it could send its daughters: Daisy Buchanans who might mesmerize the Gatsbys of Southern California, the seIf-made men, or marry success- fully within their own class upon finishing the Scripps course in humanities and fine arts, and move to places like La Jolla, Rancho Santa Fe, Palos Verdes, Pasadena, Bel Air, Brentwood, or Santa Barbara. There they might start families, play tennis and golf, serve at the center of a thousand community efforts, or perhaps, the most innova- tive of them, acquire further credentials and enter business, the professions, higher education, and,afte11941, serve as commissioned officers in the WAVES, the WAGS, the WRENS, the SPARS, or the Red Cross. It now became time to plan and to found a third collegiate institution, a merfs college balancing Scripps. Blaisdell himself frequently remarked during this period, the late 19205, that the system of collegiate federalism embodied in the Group Plan would re- quire at least three colleges to prove itself. Further impetus to immediate expansion came from a million-dollar unrestricted bequest to the Claremont Colleges from the estate of Colonel Seeley Mudd following his death on 24 May 1926. Born in a sub- urb of St. Louis in 1861, Mudd had graduated in 1883 from the mining department of the School of Engineering of Washington University in St. Louis and had made his fortune as a mining engineer in Colorado and a Los Angeles-based mining consul- tant associated with Guggenheim interests. A member of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, Mudd attained the rank of colonel of engineers during the First World War and became active at Pomona College following his release from the service. In and of itself, the colonels backgroundeengineering in the Far West; e11- trepreneurial investment in gold, copper, and sulfur in Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Texas; a lifelong love oflearning and education; a fierce loyalty to the Congregational- ist Churcheepitomizecl and reprised the types of trustees and the nature of the ener- gies flowing into the Claremont Colleges at the time of incorporation. Seeleyls unre- stricted gift of one million dollars was as munificent as Southern California itself. Formulating and Founding the Enterprise, 1926-1946 15

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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

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Encouraged by the Seeley gift and the successful opening of Scripps, the Board of Fellows of Claremont Colleges in early 1927 named a committee to look into the mat- ter of a third college. Professor William Munro; formerly of Harvard, now professor of government and history at Cal Tech and a Scripps trustee, chaired the committee. Filed on 8 April 1927, the seven-page typescript Report of the Special Committee on Aims and Purposes, also known as the Munro Report, represents the first formal call for a mens college at Claremont. In the nineteen years to follow, there would be a number of other reports on the prospective menls college: the Special Commission on Economics Report of November 1928; a curriculum proposal prepared by Professor Kenneth Duncan in January 1929; the Lyon Report of December 1929; the Lyman Committee Report of March 1930; the Blaisdell Report ofJanuary 1936; the Intercol- legiate Council Report of January 1937; the pamphlet series of mid-1938; the Arthur Coons Curriculum Report of November 1939; and the joint statements by Russell Story, Arthur Morgan, and T. V. Smith of April 1941. Yet each of these reports repre- sents the amplification and refinement of ideas set forth in the Munro Report of April 1927. Although plans for the third college would be worked and reworked for the next nineteen yearseespecially in the matter of curriculum, a near-obsessive topic among academicsethese refinements did not represent new identities. From April 1927 until the actual organization of the Claremont Undergraduate School for Men in the spring of 1946, the third college was envisioned by one and all as an institution oriented toward a business and public affairs program within a liberal arts frame- work. This orientation took its origin and was reinforced partly by a process of exclu- sion. If Pomona College set forth the paradigm of a broadly comprehensive coeduca- tional liberal arts college, and Scripps College for Women set forth the paradigm of a womenls college preparing young women for marriage, teaching, or limited opportuni- ties in business or the public sector, then the third college, quite logically, should be for men, Whom the third college would train for careers in the male-oriented public and private sectors. That is exactly what the Munro Report proposed: a residential college of two hun- dred students preparing young men for careers in business, public affairs, and the law. tThis pre-legal option was subsequently deemphasized in pre-1946 planning; yet it im- mediately surfaced as an ongoing ambition among the student body, once the college was foundedJ The 1927 Munro Report frankly stated that such an education would be expensive, some $1,200 a year; hence the college was intended mainly for the sons of the prosperous, with limited scholarships available for deserving students. It would cost $2 million to open such a college, the Munro Report concluded: $1 million for expenses and $1 million for endowment. President Blaisdell was delighted with the Munro Report. The next step, be con- cluded, was to Ene-tune the curriculum. Blaisdell proceeded to do so by appointing a 16 Claremont McKenml College