Coming of Age
In Feb. 15, 1963, an earnest Midwestern
family man who landed in California in 1893 via Colorado and Iowa founded Pitzer College. Russell K. Pitzer
believed in the transformative value of higher education, and his
philanthropy was dedicated to developing educational and medical
centers in his new home of Claremont. The fledgling college's first
president was a poet, John W. Atherton, whose inauguration was held
in the College's new blacktop parking lot on a cloudless, azure
sky California day.
A different kind of educational philosophy would be created here,
a structure where students, faculty, and administrators would all
have a voice in determining their common future. College Council
was instituted and emeritus faculty still remember with a laugh
and a groan the intense battles, the endless arguments, and the
late nights, because everything was so important, so crucial, and
the future sufficiently uncertain that they could ill afford lapses
in judgment or direction. These raw, exciting, and iconoclastic
times for the College were matched by the turmoil that existed in
California and the rest of the nation that year. This was a time
marked by civil rights protests throughout the South; 200,000 people
marching on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his
"I Have a Dream" speech; a growing war in Vietnam; journalists
and political commentators taking note of a "credibility gap"
in the U.S. government's statements concerning foreign affairs;
and President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas. About the Vietnam
War, President Kennedy had commented on
Sept. 2, 1963, during a TV news interview with Walter Cronkite:
"If we withdrew from Vietnam, the Communists would control
Vietnam. Pretty soon Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Malaya would go."
Nearly 40 years have passed since Kennedy's pronouncement. Generations
have come of age, and Pitzer College has matured and grown. The
College's first endowment campaign is under way with two years remaining
and $29 million has been raised toward the $40 million goal.
The College is in excellent financial condition, and in order to
continue to maintain its position as a preeminent institution in
an era of keen competition among liberal arts colleges and to remain
true to its mission of teaching young people to question and challenge
established wisdoms, this is a crucial campaign.
For Pitzer, the heady days of exhilarating creation have given
way to a College that has been
recognized time and time again for its tremendous contribution to
the landscape of higher education. Pitzer College has never been
stronger. This year Pitzer is ranked the 8th most diverse campus
in America by U.S. News and World Report with students
of color representing 30% of the Class of 2006. Pitzer, one of the
youngest colleges included in the rankings, is rated 38th out of
217 liberal-arts colleges in academic reputation and 47th in selectivity
of applicants for admission. Pitzer is included in the Princeton
Review's "The Best 345 Colleges" - where it is ranked
the ninth most politically active campus. Kaplan Publishing's "The
Unofficial, Unbiased Insider's Guide to the 320 Most Interesting
Colleges," cites Pitzer as offering "the most creative
curriculum of all The Claremont Colleges."
Wonderful news for the College, all of it, and yet it is tempered
by the realization that nearly 40 years after the founding of the
college and Kennedy's predictions America talks again of war. As
opposed to the conventional platitude that the world has grown smaller,
the world has grown larger within the all-too-clearly vivid recent
past. The idea of a shrinking globe is reassuring, cozy and facilitates
a warm glow that we are all coming closer and all coming along into
a better near-future across the many political and economic bridges
that now connect all points on the globe. But then there are the
daily headlines and the present preoccupations with security that
get in the way of the cozy projections, leading to doubts about
the future. The idea of a world becoming larger - as when seen close-up
in newspapers and broadcast media - is much less reassuring. Some
of the world's peoples and cultures feel threatened by the prospect
of having their way of life submerged or pushed aside by alien value
systems. What makes the world a larger place for us, the people
who live in the richest and most powerful nation, is the task before
us, the task of becoming sensitized to the resistant pluralism of
the peoples of the globe, the job of working out creative strategies
of mutual accommodation rather than confrontation that will make
the image of a
materially better future for everyone a place where global pluralism
is protected and respected. What makes the world a larger place
for us is the enormous task ahead, for each of
us individually, as a Pitzer College community and together as a
nation; to communicate clearly a message of tolerance and respect
to our old friends, to skeptics, and to people who regard with hostility
the current position of the United States as the preeminent world
power. We need to say that we understand that we have a lot to learn
in a short time about the mutual management of social change; we
are committed to the process of learning to join with others to
preserve traditions that are not our own; and we will do all that
we can to support the preservation of a pluralistic global future
- because we have learned an important lesson - to value difference
for its own sake and for what we can learn from it. In short, in
a world made larger by our responsibility of living in this time,
we need to turn the world toward the values that define the mission
and goals of higher learning, and I am proud to say, that define
Pitzer College in particular. We can start by each of us redoubling
our efforts to carry our shared values and message of openness,
humility, and eager dedication to creating fairness beyond our campus.
In that spirit of openness, Pitzer College students travel throughout
the world to study, to learn and to contribute to their host communities.
Last year, Pitzer students studied in 36 countries and studied 16
languages, and of our graduates in 2002, 57% participated in an
external studies program. Because of our outreach, Pitzer occupies
39th place in U.S. News and World Report's rankings for its study
abroad programs, and 19th place in its percentage of students who
study abroad. Education is Pitzer College's deepest purpose; in
the Jeffersonian sense of a people enlightened, we educate and prepare
people for the task of exercising the wisdom called for by the circumstances
of the historical hour. To prepare ourselves to pass on a preserved
and refreshed standard of freedom and security, every one of us
must take responsibility to educate ourselves to embrace a new level
of humanism strong enough to face the challenges of a changed world.
Nearly 40 years have passed, new solutions are needed, and Pitzer
students both past and present will help create them.
We have come of age.
This column originally appeared in the Fall 2002 Participant.
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