A QUIET REVOLUTION CONTINUES — CLAREMONT STYLE
by
Steadman Upham, President
Claremont Graduate University
Remarks delivered to faculty, staff, students, the Board of Trustees, and the seven boards
of visitors of the schools at Claremont Graduate University’s Opening of School
Convocation, September 8, 2000.
Welcome to Claremont, or welcome back to Claremont, whichever the case may be. I am
delighted that you’ve joined us this afternoon for a gathering that we hope will become
an annual tradition at Claremont Graduate University—our Opening of School
Convocation. If you are new to CGU, this convocation has brought you together with a
large segment of our academic community. And make no mistake – CGU is a real
community. We depend on, collaborate with, learn from, and value our colleagues at
CGU. You are now an integral part of this institution. Look around at those seated near
you. If you see someone you don’t know, please stand up and introduce yourself.
Convening an opening of school convocation gives us the opportunity to focus on a
beginning. Beginnings are symbolically important because they are filled with hope and
promise. CGU begins this academic year with tremendous hope and promise. We
celebrate the arrival of new and returning students, new and continuing faculty and staff,
new and returning board members. We also celebrate the university’s 75th anniversary
this academic year, providing us with the opportunity for a retrospective look at the
people upon whose shoulders we now stand. We have a series of events planned over the
next several months to mark and commemorate the university’s history, and to celebrate
the accomplishments of its people and programs.
The 2000-01 academic year continues CGU’s development as a major, national
university. This past summer, the Carnegie Corporation changed Claremont Graduate
University’s designation from a Doctoral I university to a Doctoral/Research University –
Extensive, the highest rating in the new classification system, and a group that includes
Stanford, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Princeton. Among private universities in
California, only four institutions are listed in this category: Cal Tech, Stanford, USC, and
Claremont Graduate University. This new classification raises the bar of performance for
CGU, making our comparator group the very finest universities in the world.
CGU’s quest for new brilliance and leadership continues. This year we shall be
searching for a new vice president of development, a new dean of the School of Politics
and Economics, and ten new members of the faculty. We also celebrate the appointment
of one of our own, Professor Constance Jordan, as the founding dean of the Centers for
the Arts and Humanities—soon, I hope, to become the School of the Arts and
Humanities.
We are a strong, intellectually vital, and fiscally stable university. I am pleased to report
that CGU again ended the last fiscal year with a balanced budget. This accomplishment
was a collective effort, and I want to thank and congratulate every member of the staff,
each administrator, and the faculty for this result. Along with inspired teaching and
recruitment of new students and faculty, balancing the budget is among the most
important annual tasks that we have at CGU. A balanced budget stabilizes the university
and allows its endowment to grow. In these times, nothing could be more important to
the future health and well-being of the institution.
On July 1, 2000, Claremont Graduate University became an independent corporation,
fully divested from Claremont University Center. This legal action brings to an end 75
years of graduate education as a central service in Claremont. CGU is now a full-fledged
member of The Claremont Colleges, on equal footing with the other six members of the
consortium.
As we begin this new era of corporate autonomy, we also celebrate another major
milestone. For the first time in the University’s history, CGU’s permanent endowment
has crested the $100 million mark. We should all take great pride in this fact because it
reflects so profoundly on the deep and abiding generosity of the university’s friends and
supporters. Two short years ago, CGU’s endowment stood at $74 million. Aggressive
fundraising effort coupled with sound investment strategies, favorable markets, and
balanced budgets have permitted this rapid endowment growth.
Even though $100 million is a very large sum of money, income from it provides only
about 15 percent of CGU’s annual operating budget. This fiscal reality means that we are
charged each year with raising 85 percent of the money needed to run this university, a
balance of payments that creates a precarious situation for CGU.
CGU’s endowment represents its future. As former Stanford University President
Gerhard Casper has so aptly noted:
a university's endowment is not a checking account, but rather a trust fund; we, the
current generation, are trustees for all future … generations. Common sense, and, in
many cases, the law do not allow us to spend the endowment's principal. And our duty to
the future [ensconced at CGU in board policy] does not allow us to spend even all of the
interest, dividends, and capital gains; we must reinvest enough to ensure that the
endowment is not eaten away by inflation. …For the overall financial health of the
university, it is essential that we increase the role endowment income plays in the
university's finances. …In short, we need to place more emphasis on raising additional
endowment funds1.
These same words apply directly to Claremont Graduate University. We, too, must raise
additional endowment funds. In considering the meaning of President Casper’s words, it
is important to realize that Stanford’s endowment is currently the sixth largest of any U.S.
college or university and stands at about $5 billion. Yet the earnings from this massive
sum also only provide about 15 percent of the revenue needed to pay for Stanford’s
annual operations, meaning that Stanford also must raise 85 percent of its operating
revenue each year. In other words, and relatively speaking, Stanford and Claremont
Graduate University are in roughly the same position with respect to the impact of
endowment earnings on their operating budgets.
This calendar year, Claremont Graduate University must finish the $50 million Campaign
for Endowment that was begun in 1994. Two years ago, the campaign total stood at $24
million. Today, contributions and pledges total $49 million, and all campaign gifts will
be fully paid to the university by 2004. My intention, God and generous friends willing,
is to finish campaign fundraising by the end of the year. Our rapid progress on the
Campaign for Endowment during the last two years is yet another testament to the
steadfast generosity of the university’s friends.
But that’s enough talk about money. Let’s focus on the ideas that shape the university and
guide our future. During the past two years, we have crafted a new vision for Claremont
Graduate University. Four strategic objectives have been identified that build on past
achievement and now guide all planning and actions (enhancement of academic quality,
development of transdisciplinary teaching and research, increased visibility as a national
university, and financial reengineering). Once again the senior administration and the
deans met over the summer to advance thinking on these matters and to develop the
annual work plan. This plan will be discussed with the FEC shortly and will be the basis
for part of the discussion at the annual faculty retreat in September.
Our major task this year is to find ways to build on the collective actions of our academic
community that follow from last year’s all-university retreat and the many focus group
discussions that preceded it. In other words, Claremont Graduate University’s quiet
revolution must continue.
The work done last year in these for a now shape the university’s self-study document for
the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) reaffirmation of accreditation
site visit that will occur in March 2002. This vitally important exercise has already
included, and will continue to involve, all segments of our scholarly community. Dr.
Teresa Shaw is coordinating the drafting of the self-study, and I thank you in advance for
cooperating with her to make sure the document reflects accurately our many
accomplishments, our approach to teaching and learning, and the important challenges
that lie before us.
Last March we began to talk about CGU’s "quiet revolution" and our commitment to a
"prime strategy" that begins and ends with faculty-student relationships. Graduate
education is built around the strength and vitality of the faculty-student bond. The
acquisition of knowledge is a deeply personal experience, yet it is facilitated by frequent
and meaningful interaction with learned faculty and informed peers. Such interaction
forms the nucleus of CGU’s social environment of learning. At the core of everything we
do and stand for is the faculty-student relationship. It is what makes us distinctive and
excellent. Improving the quality, value, meaning, and significance of such relationships
constitutes Claremont Graduate University’s prime strategy for advancement to greater
academic excellence and recognition. When we succeed with our prime strategy, our
quiet revolution facilitates progress on all of our other goals and objectives.
As we begin this academic year, I am reminded of the commitment that is made by
CGU’s academic programs to each new student who enters the university. Our pledge
upon admission is to connect each student individually to our learning environment and
to Claremont’s broader academic community. Strong faculty-student relationships are
vital in forging such connections. To be faithful to our commitment we must not only
make the initial connection. We must also make sure that students remain connected to us
as individuals throughout their programs of study. All of our scholarly habits and
practices should be devoted to our prime strategy, making it a continuous process of
learning for every person at the university—students, faculty, and staff.
We do well with our prime strategy, but to improve academically and advance on our
goals we must do better. CGU’s WASC self-study process provides a timely way for us
to review just how faithful we are to our pledge and to put in place periodic assessments
to evaluate our success. I ask that Provost Hart undertake this review with the WASC
Self-Study Committee, paying particular attention to practices that lower student attrition,
improve academic achievement, and speed progress to degree completion.
At the core of CGU’s new vision is a reconfiguration of teaching and research based on
the idea of transdisciplinary scholarship and intellectual and personal diversity. CGU
now has six academic schools and a division of executive education (EEL) that have been
created from previously dispersed academic centers, institutes, departments, and
programs. CGU’s schools, EEL, and the Centers for the Arts and Humanities are now led
by deans who have personnel and budgetary authority for the units. This "responsibility
center management" (RCM) or decentralized organizational structure is working well for
CGU thanks to the talent, commitment, and dedication of the deans and the vice
presidents. RCM places incentives and rewards where they belong, with the units that
generate and expend the revenue. RCM holds enormous promise for our university, but it
also poses a threat because it has the potential to increase competition among CGU’s
schools. Should this occur, CGU will become a fragmented academic community. It is
thus imperative that we redouble our efforts to create and strengthen intellectual and
academic interconnections among the schools and reinforce the notion that CGU’s
schools are not just budgetary units.
The isolation of our schools from each other for budgetary reasons will result in
unwelcome disjunctions in our intellectual enterprise, a
condition that is antithetical to Claremont Graduate University’s development and
success. Consequently, we must actively counteract the centrifugal forces of RCM to
eliminate budgetary practices that force academic units apart. To this end, I ask Provost
Hart, Vice President Everhart, and the Strategic Planning Committee to examine our
policies related to the counting of student FTEs to make sure that our budgets are not
creating impediments to academic cooperation. Management of dual degree program,
cross-registration, cross-listing of courses, and joint faculty appointments are areas of
explicit concern. I ask that this examination of policies be undertaken immediately in
conjunction with the SPC’s study of faculty committee work and faculty governance that
will occur this year.
There is another, more important reason to focus overtly on counteracting academic
fragmentation, and it has to do with CGU’s academic heritage and intellectual legacy. If
I were asked to identify one overriding characteristic of our graduates as I meet them
around the country, it would be that they possess a unique intellectual style. They are
synthesizers. Over the 75-year history of the university, CGU has become known in the
world as an institution of higher learning that produces synthesizers, holistic thinkers, and
problem solvers who look across the disciplines to find the knowledge and wisdom they
need to succeed.
We should all be enormously proud of this distinctive and extraordinary intellectual
style. It is one reason why Claremont Graduate University has produced three
MacArthur Award winners and 29 college presidents, an unprecedented number for any
institution, let alone a small, private, graduate-only university that is just 75 years old.
In letters, science, and the professions, matters of intellectual style prevail. They shape
and define schools of thought and distinguish institutions and people. Chicago, Black
Mountain, Bloomsbury, Oxbridge, and a host of other names denote particular styles of
learning, thinking, and knowing. Given Claremont Graduate University’s unique
academic legacy, it is now time that we begin to talk about a "Claremont style" of
thinking that is devoted to synthesis. The Claremont style is the historical product of our
approach to learning, the diverse but complementary intellectual talents of our faculty,
and the academic environment here in Claremont where we sit cheek-by-jowl with the
academic genius of six other colleges.
The Claremont style has been consciously cultivated at CGU into a rich and fertile
ground for teaching and learning. The style of synthesis is itself singular and exceptional,
and because of it we are poised to make an even greater impact on the future. In the
future, “the world will be run by synthesizers, people who are able to put the right
information together at the right time, think critically about it, and make important
choices wisely”2. Our graduates, our current students, and those who will enter our gates
in the future acquire this style and carry CGU’s legacy forward.
We now need to nurture and enhance this aspect of our academic character. To this end,
the idea of transdisciplinarity unites CGU’s academic units by creating as a core
institutional value the thematic, contextual, methodological, and epistemological
interconnections that join different branches of knowledge. Transdisciplinarity is CGU’s
countervailing force to repel intellectual and scholarly fragmentation. Because of our
academic history, it is also uniquely ours. Edward O. Wilson puts it bluntly when he says
that “the fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos are not reflections of the real
world, but are artifacts of scholarship”3. CGU’s "artifacts of scholarship" should be the
reassembly of meaning from the silos of learning imposed by the boundaries of academic
disciplines. Our model of scholarship should emphasize the unity of knowledge and
underscore the importance of bringing together diverse approaches to questions of
common intellectual concern. CGU’s deeper purpose in this endeavor is to broaden and
deepen inquiry and research by connecting different domains of teaching and learning.
Many of CGU’s faculty and students share a scholarly interest in the same general topics
or questions. Many, for example, study leadership and its development, decision-making,
public policy, or learning systems, but do so from widely different disciplinary vantage
points. At CGU one or more of these issues is the basis of teaching and research in
management, education, politics and policy, economics, philosophy, history, human
resources design, information sciences, mathematics, and evaluation. Other CGU
scholars focus on meaning and identity, symbolic systems, hermeneutics, and aesthetics
in the ancient, modern, and contemporary worlds. Common interest in these domains of
knowledge provides the basis for intellectual connectivity among researchers that
transcends specific disciplines, whether those disciplines are the fine arts, history, cultural
studies, musicology, literature, or religion. In other words, CGU’s transdisciplinary
academic model facilitates the creation of overarching intellectual connections that
advance the study of broad areas of inquiry across, through, and beyond the academic
disciplines.
The goal of this effort is to create frameworks for teaching and research that literally
transcend the major areas of inquiry represented at the university, thereby linking faculty
and students from widely different intellectual traditions, disciplinary norms, and schools
of thought and practice. The transdisciplinary academic model powerfully shapes
Claremont Graduate University’s academic environment by building on our past
achievements to produce synthesizers. The university is at once a center of research and
teaching that is systemically integrated for the purpose of creating and transmitting
knowledge, improving practice, and advancing understanding. Of fundamental
importance to this intellectual vision is a faculty whose ideas, perspectives, experiences,
and world views reflect and encompass the diversity of knowledge, thought, and
practice. It is this last point that I now wish to address.
During the next few years we shall have the extraordinary opportunity to recruit many
new faculty members to Claremont Graduate University. We enter the recruiting market
at an optimal time, well in advance of other universities who will also face a demographic
transition in their faculty ranks. CGU has the unparalleled prospect of replacing retiring
or departing faculty with a diverse group of younger scholars who can help advance the
university’s model of transdisciplinary scholarship and teaching. Creating increased
diversity in the faculty ranks looms as a crucial challenge to the intellectual
transformation currently underway at Claremont Graduate University.
I ask you to think for a moment about what we mean by diversity in this context. For the
past decade, race, ethnicity, and gender have been the signposts at CGU for our diversity
efforts. These variables might be called the phenotypic expressions of diversity since
they rely primarily on the outward expression of physical characteristics—skin color and
anatomy. Over the past two decades, phenotypic criteria have guided the nationwide
effort to achieve greater equity in admissions and enrollment in higher education. At
CGU, we have worked hard to diversify our student body. This effort has been modestly
successful, and it continues with great energy. Today, gender balance in our graduate
student population has been achieved, although some imbalances exist in specific
programs. Similarly, significant progress has been made in diversifying our student
population along the lines of race and ethnicity, although much remains to be
accomplished.
Regrettably, we cannot say these same things about the university’s efforts to recruit and
retain a diverse faculty, despite major efforts in this area. We all know that we must do
better. Claremont Graduate University now has an historic opportunity to determine the
composition of its faculty for the future.
Race, ethnicity, and gender continue to be meaningful signposts for diversity efforts, but
as a graduate university these are not the only axes of diversity we must consider as we
renew CGU’s faculty ranks. Our commitment to transdisciplinarity means that we also
must consider diversity in the world of ideas, values, meaning, experience, knowledge,
and practice when we contemplate faculty renewal. These measures of diversity expand
our field of view beyond the phenotypic variables of identity to give us a mature
expression of diversity and its importance to teaching and learning. Yes, race, ethnicity,
and gender continue to be important variables in our progress on diversity—in fact, they
define our initial field of view. But race, ethnicity, and gender are not independent of our
intellectual purpose. We must also create at the university a diversity of mind and world
view, something that is far more difficult to achieve than expanding the hues of skin color
or balancing x and y chromosomes.
The greatest challenges to inclusiveness and diversity in the contemporary university
(and in society) are those posed by intolerance, discrimination, prejudice, bigotry,
unfairness, insularity, and inequity. Regrettably, these behaviors are not solely reactions
to the phenotypic expression of diversity. They pertain almost more easily to matters of
the mind.
Let us therefore recognize the enormity of our task. When we talk about diversifying the
faculty ranks at Claremont Graduate University, we mean finding new colleagues that
broaden and deepen the expression of phenotypic, experiential, and intellectual diversity
within our scholarly community. Yes, we want new colleagues of color, but not just
because the color of their skin is different. Rather, we want such colleagues to join our
community to augment the experiential and intellectual foundations of the university,
something that is absolutely necessary to the model of teaching and learning we are
creating. Such diversity in our academic environment is also absolutely necessary for
preparing the next generation of leaders for society. Our central guidance in this vital
effort follows from our commitment as an academic community to transdisciplinary
scholarship and from our intellectual heritage as a graduate university that develops
synthesizers.
Meeting our goal in faculty recruiting is thus the highest priority of the University. To
underscore the importance and urgency of this task, I charge Provost Hart, the deans, and
the faculty with recruiting a critical mass of new scholars in the next three years who
enhance significantly the diversity of CGU’s faculty along the lines I have described
above. We are in search of senior scholars recruited via target of opportunity hiring
strategies who will come to the university with tenure. Cluster hiring, a concept that
proved somewhat controversial when I mentioned it last March, may provide a model for
CGU’s diversity hiring. However, whatever model of faculty recruiting we employ, let
us not confuse the model with the goal. These efforts to recruit new faculty to CGU
literally will define and characterize the university for years to come.
The vision we have for Claremont Graduate University grows from our history and from
our accomplishments. CGU’s quiet revolution places faculty-student interaction at the
core of the educational process. Such interaction becomes the university’s prime strategy
for creating the most fertile and demanding academic environment. Within this context,
CGU’s model of transdisciplinary scholarship unites the disciplines around areas of
shared intellectual interest, allowing scholars to find all of the meaningful touchstones in
the world of ideas. When these strategies are practiced consistently and well, the
university imprints upon its students a Claremont-style of thinking. This style produces
synthesizers whose leadership and positive contributions are changing the world.
A great ship asks deep water. At this point in our 75th year, Claremont Graduate
University is a great ship in search of blue water and more expansive seas. I am
convinced that the model of teaching and scholarship we are building together will take
us to such a place. Our voyage will encounter the treacherous eddies and currents of
pragmatically difficult choice, but unparalleled opportunities and great rewards abound
along the way. Because of the significance of the challenge, however, I know of no other
university aspiring to greatness that has either the institutional will or the ability to follow
the direction we have selected. We have thus chosen a most difficult but utterly
transforming course. Our aspirations for academic excellence at Claremont Graduate
University demand no less.
NOTES
1. Gerhard Casper (1997). Cares of the University. Palo Alto: Stanford University.
http://www.stanford.edu/home/stanford/cares/noframes/
2. Edward O. Wilson (1998). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York:
Random House.
3. Ibid.