National Reports
BLIVEN, BRUCE
NATIONAL REPORTS Little Oxford' Thrives on West Coast By Bruce Bliven Former Editorial Director, "New Republic" Claremont, California is a pleasant college town of 10,000 people, located some 35...
...As for the faculty, Dr...
...First, it is being added to a group of existing small colleges that are banded together as the Associated Colleges of Claremont...
...Word gets around that Harvey Mudd is a place where there will be a maximum of hard work and a minimum of frills...
...By 1925, population pressure was mounting...
...but times were hard, and when an abandoned hotel, left over from an earlier real-estate boom, was discovered empty and available in Claremont, the new institution happily moved over...
...But Dr...
...he turned out, not surprisingly...
...In 1949, he was called to the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington as chief of the Physics Division...
...It does the spadework—necessarily an enormous amount—when a new college is to be created...
...One of the members proposed that seniors should automatically go to the head of the waiting line in the school cafeteria...
...The Claremont Colleges are likewise small, and standards of scholarship are high...
...Since that institution has been going many centuries...
...The state as a whole welcomes—if that is the right word—about 1,000 migrants and 600 new-born infants every day of the year, and this section of the state gets the lion's share of the increase...
...NATIONAL REPORTS Little Oxford' Thrives on West Coast By Bruce Bliven Former Editorial Director, "New Republic" Claremont, California is a pleasant college town of 10,000 people, located some 35 miles northeast of Los Angeles...
...His name is Dr...
...In his first two years in college, the student has practically no options as to his courses...
...I was fascinated, reading the undergraduate newspaper of one of the Associated Colleges, to note that the Student Council had held a meeting to discuss what new traditions should be established...
...It does, however, conduct the Claremont Graduate School, which offers instruction in such subjects as science, education, political economy, psychology and international relations...
...This will be true of Harvey Mudd...
...So was the pressure on Pomona...
...The Claremont Colleges are dormitory colleges...
...It is not surprising, therefore, that communities growing at this fantastic rate show many of the gaudy aspects of all raw frontier communities...
...Lee DuBridge, and flew several missions in the European Theater of Operations to test radar in flight...
...Blaisdell's, but the execution lay heavily on the shoulders of a bright young Pomona alumnus, Dr...
...Finally, this group of colleges has set its face sternly against the prevailing currents of civilization in Southern California...
...As for the students, no special devices are being used to select them...
...He must take two more years of English, two each of mathematics, chemistry and physics, one year of Western civilization, and some mechanical drawing and machine-shop work...
...Joseph Piatt, and he has been devoting himself to creating a new college that will open this month...
...Blaisdell's assistant, and who recently celebrated his 40th year of service...
...How do you go about starting a college...
...Piatt, an atomic physicist, worked in the Radiation Laboratory at MIT during the war under Dr...
...Students also have plenty of athletics, both intramural and intercollegiate...
...Robert J. Bernard, who went straight from college to become Dr...
...Indignant parents by the hundreds came and pounded on the desk of the late President, James Blaisdell, demanding to know why their sons and daughters could not get admittance...
...Despite the emphasis on scholarship, none of the Claremont Colleges wants to produce what in the old days was called "a greasy grind...
...Thus, the idea of a group of such colleges was born...
...This college, Harvey Mudd, named for a distinguished Los Angeles mining engineer who died recently, is interesting for several reasons...
...Piatt has, of course, been enormously aided by the existence of the other members of the college group...
...In spite of its name, Claremont College has no students of its own...
...with few exceptions, students in all of them are expected to live on their respective campuses...
...After the war, Piatt joined the Physics Department at the University of Rochester...
...Only one year after Claremont College and its Graduate School were brought into being, Blaisdell and Bernard saw the need for a new institution...
...Its quiet streets are shaded with eucalypti, peppers, sycamores, tulip trees, jacaranda, redwoods, live oaks and a dozen other beauties of nature...
...Thereafter, he will spend 65 per cent of his time on his own specialty and 35 per cent in continued study of the humanities...
...Those who find this situation a challenge will come...
...Next year, another class of freshmen will be admitted, and so on until 1960-61, when all four undergraduate classes will be functioning...
...the individuals thus proposed were checked and re-checked, since the personalities of the faculty members will be more important at Harvey Mudd than in most other places...
...the cornerstone of the first dormitory was laid this spring...
...Students will be required to apply themselves in a wider area than at many other institutions...
...This led to the opening in 1947 of Claremont Men's College, planned to accommodate about 350 students...
...Science courses at Pomona College are open to Harvey Mudd students if they wish to take them...
...They have modeled themselves on Oxford—Oxford, England, that is, and not Oxford, Ohio, which confusingly enough is the seat of Miami University, which ought to be in Florida...
...Twenty-one years later, there was a heavy demand for professionally trained administrators in both business and Government...
...And hard at work in an office at a big, paper-littered desk is a round-faced, smooth-shaven, friendly man in his forties with crisp, wavy grey hair...
...Secondly, this college was called into existence because the men in charge of the Associated Colleges felt a need for an institution of its particular type...
...accordingly, Scripps College was brought into being, with a liberal-arts curriculum embracing the humanities and the social and natural sciences...
...Pomona College, first of the present group, was established in 1887...
...Blaisdell didn't want to let Pomona double or quadruple in size, as it would promptly have done...
...Many aspects of undergraduate life are already in operation, such as a concert series that brings world-famous artists to perform in the large, handsome auditorium that the colleges share...
...Ellen Scripps, sister of newspaper tycoon E. W. Scripps, founded the school...
...Its chief task, however, is to correlate the various activities that all the colleges share...
...Is it really possible to maintain, in a milieu like Southern California, the atmosphere of Oxford...
...There is a reasonable degree of social activity, with the customary extracurricular undergraduate journalism, musie and dramatics...
...What branch of science the student will pursue may be postponed to as late as the beginning of the junior year...
...The Committee on Future Colleges, drawn from the Board of Trustees of Claremont College, believes firmly in private higher education...
...Luckily, the entire faculty does not need to be chosen at one time...
...to be a senior...
...It will be dedicated to science and engineering, will have a freshman class of about 60, and will accept no transfers from other institutions at any higher level...
...He has traveled up and down the United States, meeting possible candidates or men who might know of possible candidates...
...There were few colleges for women in the West that were not under denominational auspices, and none at all in Southern California...
...Piatt began with a wide personal acquaintance among American scientists...
...Their campuses are continuous, and they have certain activities in common, including libraries, college bookkeeping, and health services for students...
...Technically it is not a member of the group, but its scientists do some teaching in the Claremont Graduate School...
...Harvey Mudd is being established not only because of the shortage of scientists and technologists, but to meet the even more acute shortage of specialists who have some vision beyond the narrow range of their occupations...
...Even to enter, they must have had in high school three years of satisfactory work in English literature and composition, three years of mathematics, including trigonometry, and some study of one or more foreign languages...
...From the beginning, Pomona kept itself small —not more than 1,000 students, of whom 55 per cent are men...
...1 suspect this might cause some lifted eyebrows along the banks of the Thames...
...In 1951, the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, a center for botanical study and research, moved from a site some distance away to be near the Associated Colleges...
...As its name suggests, it was intended to be in Pomona...
...He began with an already-existing medical service, a library with a quarter of a million books that has special science collections, a controller, and a business staff, including a purchasing department that buys for all the colleges and saves a good deal of money thereby...
...About half of them will get some degree of financial aid...
...Claremont College also operates a summer session with both graduate and undergraduate courses, which annually attracts about 1,000 students...
...He wrote to many "kev people," asking them for nominations...
...one should not be too hasty in trying to answer the Claremont question...
...it is a suburb of Pomona, which is about five times larger...
...Oxford, of course, consists of a group of small colleges, austerely conducted for mature young people who are assumed to pursue learning for its own sake...
...He believed firmly in the small-college idea: comparatively large faculty, small classes, and intimate give-and-take both inside and outside the classroom...
...But the Claremont Colleges have tried to settle for plain living and high thinking...
...Obviously, they see great advantages in setting up a series of small colleges closely connected with one another while still completely independent as to their general direction and scope...
...Another tradition, not proposed but already-in full flower, was recorded in the student handbook, which savs firmly: "All freshmen men must have crew cuts by September 21...
...there is close contact between faculty and undergraduates...
...And if colleges and universities in many parts of the United States nowadays go in for weird sideshows, perhaps nowhere is this more the case than in Southern California, where it is a moot question whether certain institutions of higher learning are influenced for the worse by Hollywood, or vice versa...
...The plan was chiefly Dr...
...This saves a great deal of money and makes possible some things that none of the colleges could afford individually...
Vol. 40 • September 1957 • No. 36
