In the early decades of the Twentieth Century, Pomona College found it difficult to keep up with the heavy influx of population to the temperate region of Southern California.  Four of five applicants to the college were turned away; and yet, the Board was wary of expanding the small traditional liberal arts college.  It was the President of Pomona University, James Blaisdell, who suggested the addition of several independent colleges under the "umbrella" of an organized central institution, based on the model of Oxford University.  It was hoped that future colleges would simultaneously embody the "special virtues of the small college and the advantages of the large university" (1).  That is, they would be have the intimacy of the traditional liberal arts college with the personalized attention of low student/faculty ratios, while also getting the wide array of support services offered by large universities, such as libraries, wider course offerings, more faculty, and extensive facilities.  The Group Plan was put into action in 1925 with the foundation of the CUC - The Claremont University Consortium (2).   It was Blaisdell's vision that CUC would serve as a central institution which would coordinate shared functions for each of the colleges in order to avoid a wasteful duplication of services and a "cross-fertilization" (3) of ideas.    

    From the beginning there were questions about the practical validity of such a plan.  To many the idea of cooperation among autonomous and competing institutions could only ever be a fantasy.  At the 1925 Pomona Commencement, speaker William Bennett Munro hesitantly expressed his hope that the spirit of intellectual cooperation could overcome individual jealousies:
Can we develop in this country, an institution which is large in its resources, broad and deep in its intellectual life, with an atmosphere that is stimulating to the highest type of creative scholarship, but which nevertheless preserves the wholesome community of ideals of the small college...?  It would be a great achievement if it could be done and would mark a new era in the development of higher education. (4)

    Concerns surrounding questions of joint cooperation of the colleges versus individual jealousies are often phrased using the terminology of sovereign states: the words separatism and federalism appear repeatedly in the written histories of the Claremont Colleges since their conception.  The problem that is inherent in all federal organizations continues to plague the Claremont Consortium to this day, namely, it is the question of “where the line [is] drawn between the common interest and the interests of the separate units?” (5)  Always an idealist, Blaisdell hoped to create an example at Claremont of "sovereign states combining and cooperating to become a whole greater than the sum of its parts" (6).

    Blaisdell realized that the success of the Group Plan hinged upon the willing collaboration of the individual colleges.  Therefore, the most imperative aspect of the Group Plan for Blaisdell, which he continued to stress until his death, was the aspect of group-cooperation and “cross-fertilization.”  At the very least, he hoped that the association of the colleges would stimulate “productive competition rather than jealousy” (7).  Scripps College (the first independent college to be created), still limited in endowment resources and sharing Pomona's library and athletic grounds, knew especially that "there must be team-play and close cooperation" if the plan was to succeed (8).  A straightforward but unsigned statement entitled “Scripps As a Claremont College” in the archives of the Denison Library emphasizes the perception that “not merely in its plan, but in its life and work [Scripps] must belong to the Claremont enterprise: it cannot afford to be a local monument or a walled-in nunnery….The teaching staffs of the Colleges must have opportunities of cooperation and mutual interests which can only come from some participation in joint work.  Where this does not exists the institutions fall apart, and instead of a [Claremont University Center] we shall have only a group of colleges located in Claremont and associating only in the most superficial manner” (9).

    In a paper presented to the Association of American Colleges in 1930, Blaisdell elaborated on the importance of understanding a college to be not only a cluster of buildings, but as a place “where scholars live and think together" (10).  "The center of a college,” he insisted, “is in great conversation, and…out of the talk of college life springs everything else...I covet for you and this college that fruitage from high conversation which is the power of public speech" (11).          

    Owned and operated by the CUC as a joint venture of all of the individual colleges, the Graduate School should be center of Blaisdell’s “conversation” (12).  As such, in several ways the Graduate School is representative of several of the flaws in Blaisdell’s Group Plan.  The position of the Graduate School in relation to the undergraduate colleges has been unclear from the beginning: Are the undergraduate colleges obligated to share their faculty with the Graduate School and will they be financially responsibly for this institution?  In 1936 an Intercollegiate Council was called to discuss these matters.  Historian Francis Drake called it “a recognition of the fact that the original concept of CUC...no longer prevailed, but rather, that CUC, even though it performed certain common functions, was one of three separate colleges which dealt with each other as independent institutions” (13).  Although few questions were resolved at the council, in an effort at soliciting the support of the Graduate School by the undergraduate colleges, a joint exchange of both graduate and undergraduate students across campuses was agreed upon.       

    Throughout the next decade, the increasing success of the Graduate School meant less and less time for CUC to devote to the group interests of the colleges.  According to Blaisdell’s vision, the Graduate School was supposed to belong to and be shared by each of the individual colleges.  However, whereas the CUC and the Graduate School were supposed to have been the “servant and instrument of the separate college,” (14) more and more it began to seem that it was the Graduate School which was CUC’s “principle concern and its chief reason for existence” (15).  For many, in fact, it seemed that CUC “was simply a Graduate School" (16).

    Faculty appointments in particular, were an area of contention between the Graduate School and the undergraduate colleges which hindered Blaisdell's vision of cooperative partnership.  The faculty of the Graduate School was made up primarily of Professors of Education and therefore relied upon the undergraduate colleges to provide instruction in all other fields.  While the Graduate School was not obliged to pay for the use of the undergraduate faculty, the undergraduate colleges were obligated to send their faculty to teach one seminar a semester at the Graduate School for every three of their own faculty members.  However, although the Graduate School utilized the faculty of the undergraduate institutions, it had no say in the appointment of faculty at the undergraduate institutions (17).  Clary insists that such cooperative problems were not present at the faculty level, where most professors were and still are readily available and pleased to cooperate with the faculty and students of other colleges.  Rather, he argues that such issues arise where prerogative, corporate authority or prestige are involved amongst the administration of the individual colleges (18).

    In 1942 another Intercollegiate Council was called to discuss the troubled relationship between the Graduate School and the other colleges.  The Operating Agreement of 1942 which was subsequently enforced took some power from CUC by depriving it of many of its coordinating functions, treating it as a coordinate rather than a coordinator.  Slowly, the Graduate School would begin to appoint more professors to serve full-time on its own faculty.  During this time, President Story of the CUC started the move to make “the Graduate School less dependant on the undergraduate facilities” (19).  Under him, faculty appointments were made in seven fields - literature and classics, political science, economics, history, international relations, education and religion (20).  Slowly, throughout the proceeding decades, the Graduate School would continue on this path towards autonomy from the CUC and the undergraduate colleges.  During the 1990s this course was completed when the Graduate School succeeded from the CUC and is now an independent entity.

    According to historians, by 1950 Blaisdell himself no longer believed this fantasy of cooperation was a reality:
As the years have passed, I have many times wondered whether such an attitude requires at every step, too-large and too-far seeing, a generosity of mind.  If so, I fear that I have done you all a disservice.  For decisions will have to be made with constant unselfishness in deciding where the line runs between the functions of the separate colleges and the common good (21).  In his writtings, Robert Bernard, Blaisdell's successor and the most influential of the CUC presidents, lamented the lack of discourse and conversation amongst the separate faculties of the six schools reminding the CUC Board of Fellows that "when individual faculties meet only by themselves and have little if any contact with other faculties...the full range of intellectual stimulation and cooperation inherent in a group plan remains an unrealized potential" (22).   Today the six schools do share the Honnold Library, the Bridges Auditorium, the Garrison Theater, the McAllister Religious Center, the Baxter Medical Center and Health Services, an international student organization, the Huntley bookstore, a heating plant, grounds maintenance, several lecture series, the Baxter Science laboratories, and the Human Resources Institute.  There is a Tri-College Science Program shared by Pitzer, Scripps, and Claremont McKenna.  Also there are several intercollegiate student activities and organizations.  However, since the Group Plan's inception in 1925, all efforts at mutualization have failed except when it immediately benefited one of the colleges individually (23).  Along these lines, while there are several shared functions between the six schools, many silos still exists which hold captive the unrealized potential Bernard spoke of.

Footnotes:
1  Drake, Frances Bernard. Two Men and an Idea. (Claremont, CA: Claremont University Center, 1970), p. IX.
2  The name of the CUC has been through many variations and evolutions, after much debate was changed to Claremont Graduate School and University Center in 1963 and again in the 1980s to the Claremont University Consortium.  The group of colleges is commonly known as the Claremont Colleges.  For purposes of clarity I will refer to the central institution jointly shared by the Claremont Colleges by its present abbreviation CUC, The Claremont University Consortium - sans the Claremont Graduate School, now the independent Claremont Graduate University.
3 Drake 166.
4 Ibid. 23.
5 William Clary. The Claremont Colleges. (Claremont, CA: The Claremont University Center, 1996), 30.
6 Drake X.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid, 31-32.
9 Blaisdell, taken from Drake 33.
10 Clary 27.
11 Drake 43.
12 In contrast, the University of Oxford does not have a single Graduate institution, but rather, each of the individual colleges administers its own Graduate program.  Each discipline is organized into societies which stretch across each of the colleges and meet regularly to discuss class offerings and faculty appointments.
13 Drake 54.
14 Clary 21.
15 Drake 58.
16 Ibid. 61.
17 Clary 61-84.
18 Ibid. 60, also confirmed by an interview with Janet Brodie 20 November 2006.
19 Drake 64.
20 Clary 84.
21 Drake XI.
22 Ibid. 39.
23 Clary 46.