Education: The Rise of Harvey Mudd

Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif, is still too young to have much tradition. What it has, as it prepares to start its second school year this month, is 118 students (7 girls), 17 faculty members plus a half-completed campus, built with funds whose core is a gift of more than $2,000,000 from the widow and family of Harvey Seeley Mudd, a California mining engineer who died three years ago.

The tiny faculty—last year it numbered seven—took on a challenging task from Mildred Mudd, who died last month (see MILESTONES), and her fellow trustees: to create a topflight college of science and engineering, and to build its curriculum up from basic science, not from other colleges’ texts and courses. A further provision: 35% of each student’s study was to be in the humanities, a proportion larger than is required at such schools as M.I.T. and Caltech. “We need creative, responsible scientists and engineers,” explains young (43), pipe-smoking President Joseph B. Platt, head of the physics department and onetime (1949-51) chief research physicist for the Atomic Energy Commission. “These men will need solid training in the basic sciences on which technology is built. They can learn the applications of these basics on the job. The ability to judge values will be just as important to them as the techniques of their trades. The humanities develop this kind of judgment.”

Avoid the Lopsided. Harvey Mudd College puts its students through two years of required courses before letting them choose a major from four technical fields: physics, chemistry, mathematics and engineering science. Whenever possible, liberal arts courses are keyed to the sciences. Students learn, for instance, the sort of culture England had when Newton developed his laws of motion. But the liberal arts range widely and independently. This year Harvey Mudd’s 43 sophomores will write major research papers on nonscientific subjects. Says Assistant English Professor George Wickes: “We don’t want to turn out lopsided kids.”

Harvey Mudd’s permanent faculty is young (average age: 34) and bright. Recruiting is not difficult for President Platt; in addition to the fine climate and mountain-valley site, the college pays excellent salaries and offers new faculty members the chance to spend part of their first year doing nothing but planning courses. Large areas of the new college’s curriculum are still not mapped in detail, and professors meet to dovetail their separate requirements at beer-and-sandwich klatches.

Wanted: a Senior. Harvey Mudd is the youngest of five schools closely grouped in the Associated Colleges at Claremont, Los Angeles County. The others: coed Pomona College, the oldest (founded 1887) and best known; Claremont College, a graduate school; Claremont Men’s College; and Scripps College (for women). The five have separate faculties and endowments, share a central business office, a library, infirmary and auditorium.

Reputation of the Associated Colleges has helped assure prospective students of Harvey Mudd’s solidity, but recruiting has hit one notable snag: by week’s end, the college had not been able to enmesh a senior transfer student. A senior class, even of one member, would let the school apply for accreditation—necessary to make students eligible for national scholarships and fellowships.

Such minor worries and a mountain of large ones shadow the new college; a new science building is blueprinted, for instance, but the money is not in the bank. But President Platt speaks optimistically: “Our problem is to sustain momentum, but the idea has taken hold. The kids have been dropping back all summer long to see how the new dorm was going up, and to meet the new faculty. Cross-fertilizing the sciences and humanities is looking less like an impossibility.”