Claremont McKenna College - Ayer Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

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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

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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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third college, a $10-million campaign launched by Scripps, Pomona, and the Clare- mont Colleges in 1928 came to a grinding halt. It would take another sixteen years for the third college to open its doors. Not that planning for the third college ceased during the Great Depression. It did not. In early 1935, ten years after the incorporation of the Claremont Colleges, James Blaisdell, then approaching his sixty-eighth birthday, announced his retirement. Ac- cepting his resignation, the Board of Fellows asked Blaisdell to spend his final year in ofhce preparing a report on the Group Plan. Issued on 1 January 1936, Blaisdellys re port not only endorsed the concept of the third college but argued additionally that it was crucial to the survival of the Group Plan. Only by achieving a threeecollege syne ergy, Blaisdell stated, could the Group Plan demonstrate its true capacity for further federalization. Upon his retirement, Blaisdell was succeeded by an academic leader equally committed to the third college concept, William Ament, professor of English at Scripps, who served as acting president of Claremont Colleges for the next two years. A faculty member at Pomona who had transferred to Scripps, Ament possessed an intercollegiate outlook. During his tenure, an Intercollegiate Council was orga nized in June 1936. Consisting of three members of the Board of Fellows, the presie dents of Pomona, Scripps, and the Claremont University Center, together with a fac- ulty representative from each college, the Intercollegiate Council functioned, in effect, as the senate and guardian of the Group Plan. At Amentis urging, the Intercole legiate Council took up the question of a third college, dormant since 1930. With the assistance of Robert Bernard, acting president Ament wrote the Counlcilis Fifteen- page report, which was endorsed by the Board of Fellows in January 1937. For all its compactness, the Intercollegiate Council Report took the case for a third college to broader and more focused levels of explication and argument. Interestingly enough, it endorsed the three-year programejunior, senior, and graduate yearerec- ommended by Dr. Lyon but rejected by the Lyman Committee. It also located the site of the third college east of Pomona College, centered on the former home and estate of Sarah Bixby Smith. Most important, the Intercollegiate Council Report gave ex- panded treatment to the public service aspects of the curriculum, especially as they related to publiciprivate cooperation and the similarities between public and private organizational theory. Business, the report implied, only flourished when the public sector was in order; yet without a flourishing private sector, based in business, the public sector either withered away or grew tyrannical. Graduates of the third college might equally be expected to bring their managerial skills and their broad philosophi- cal and liberal arts outlook to careers in either the public or the private sector. Like the Munro Report and the Lyman Report before it, the report of the Intercollee giate Council seemed, momentarily, capable of provoking action. Accepting the re- 18 C laremont McKe'VLmi College