Claremont McKenna College - Ayer Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

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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

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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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three-rnan Special Commission on Economics, chaired by Professor Frank Fetter of Princeton, whom Blaisclell hoped to interest in the presidency of the proposed third college. In November 1928 the Commission released a report that translated into cure riculum recommendations the generalized proposals made by the Munro Report a year earlier. The memorandum of Professor Kenneth Duncan, dated 16 January 1929, most likely built upon this report. In any event, Duncan submitted a brief document outlining, course by course, a four-year program, followed by a graduate year. Blaisdell then retained the services of Dr. Leverett Lyon of the Brookings Institu- tion, an expert in undergraduate business education, who in December 1929 com- pleted a KiBrief Report on the Problem of Establishing a Third College at Claremontf, In this report Lyon made an effort to integrate the proposed business curriculum into a social and philosophical perspective. Such a school, Lyon wrote, iishould reflect in all of its courses the fact that business is an outstanding way in which modern activi- ties are organized. . . . It should keep its students constantly aware of the ethical ques- tions raised in economic organization, and the relation of the business to the eco- nomic order. The new college, Lyon recommended, should be an upper-division institution only, accepting students who had completed the first two years in either junior colleges or other institutions. It should also offer a postgraduate year leading to a masters degree in administration. iSixty-eight years later, Claremont McKenna College would authorize a flveeyear B.AJM.B.A. program in cooperation with the Drucker School of Management at the Claremont Graduate School, a program trace- able to this 1928 proposall Delighted by Lyonls report, Blaisdell appointed yet another committee, even more impressive than that chaired by Munro. It consisted of Blaisdell, President Charles Edmunds of Pomona, President Ernest Jaqua of Scripps, and board members Will Clary, John Treanor, and Edward Lyman, who served as chair. In its report, issued in March 1930, the Lyman Committee further amplified the Lyon Report, which had in turn amplified the Munro Report. While keeping Lyon's recommendation of a gradu- ate year leading to a masters degree, the Lyman Committee recommended a standard four-year program. Although the insights of philosophy, history, sociology, and politi- cal and social science would have a strong place in the curriculum, the Lyman Report argued, they should have a distinctive cast, which is to say, they should be business oriented. The Lyman Committee, in short, explicitly showed the presence of three businessmen trustees in formulating curriculum: men who had made much of their wealth in the boom years of the 19205 when, as President Calvin Coolidge had put it, the business ofAmerica was business. Yet that world of business, so assured, so prosperous, came tumbling down in the stock market crash of October 1929. Even as the Lyman Committee made its optimis- tic report calling for the outlay of $2.1 million over a four-year period to establish the Fornmlating and Founding the Enterprise, 1926H1946 I7