Education: How to Eat Cake

Through the big doorways of a white auditorium at Claremont, Calif, (pop. 7,000) one day last week, the presidents of three thriving colleges—E. Wilson Lyon of coeducational Pomona, Frederick Hard of Scripps College (for women) and George Benson of Claremont Men’s College—filed in solemn procession for a special ceremony. As they do every two years, the three were meeting to proclaim which of them would serve as next provost of a fourth college, the Claremont Graduate School. This year, it happened to be President Hard’s turn to take over; but the ceremony itself involved more than an exchange of titles. It was all part of an experiment that exists nowhere else in the U.S.

The man behind the experiment is a goateed, retired Congregational minister named James Arnold Blaisdell. Last week, at 85, he was too tired from a round of fund raising to attend the ceremony, but he was nevertheless there in spirit. As founder of the Associated Colleges at Claremont, he still lives on the common campus, still receives a steady stream of callers, still chugs about in his 1934 Plymouth to offer advice to all who seek it. “After all these years,” says one Claremont official, “Dr. Blaisdell is still the elder statesman of our world here.”

Dine Together. When Congregationalist Blaisdell first arrived at Claremont in 1910, he moved into a world that was anything but prosperous. Pomona College, which he took over, was a dingy, debt-ridden place with an enrollment of 300 and only five buildings. Blaisdell immediately set to work writing alumni for funds. He made speeches, broadcast the name of Pomona across the state. By the end of World War I. Pomona had 750 students and more applicants than it could handle. It was then that Blaisdell made his decision : instead of allowing Pomona to grow into one big campus, he hit on the idea of an Oxford-like association of small colleges. “There are a lot of students,” says he. “who profit most by sitting on the other end of a log with a great teacher. But you can’t have that in a large school. No college should be larger than the number of people who can dine together.”

In 1925 Blaisdell opened the Claremont Graduate School right next to Pomona. That same year Miss Ellen Scripps, half-sister of the newspaper tycoon, became so enthusiastic about his idea that she gave him the first of many gifts ($500.000) to start a college for women. Finally, in 1947, the association opened the college for men.

Share Alike. Today the four colleges share the same auditorium, the same medical services and the same 270,000-volume library. But though students at one campus may take courses at any other, each college maintains its own character. Scripps has a basic three-year humanities program in which each subject explores the same century at the same time. The graduate school stresses the social sciences (“We want to become in the social sciences,” says one official, “what CalTech is in the physical sciences”), and the men’s college puts its emphasis on government and economics. Each campus has its own endowment, and each can boast of having one-third of its faculty in Who’s Who.

From his tiny clapboard house, old Dr. Blaisdell has watched the associated colleges grow into a community of 73 buildings. Instead of 300 students, Pomona now has 1,000; the men’s college has 330, and Scripps and the graduate school have more than 200 each. But such statistics are of only secondary importance to Blaisdell. “What we have here,” says he. “are all the advantages of a large university and all the advantages of the small school. We have our cake and eat it, too.”