Friday, Jul. 27, 1962
Little Giant
Occidental College is an oak-and-eucalyptus oasis of Italian Renaissance buildings dotting a green hillside on the northeastern fringe of hurly-burly Los Angeles. Its campus is small (120 acres), and-- so is its coed student body (1,400). When the Ford Foundation bestowed its massive manna on liberal arts colleges last month, "Oxy's" $2,500,000 was the biggest Ford grant west of the Mississippi. Why?
Among West Coast educators, the answer is simple. In a state long dominated by huge public colleges. Occidental has parlayed smallness. smart leadership and intellectual freedom into a warm, friendly spirit, first-rate teaching, and a taste for the experimental. Once considered to be a preserve for academically delicate youth from patrician Pasadena, Oxy has in fact long been especially strong in history, diplomacy and world affairs. It installed the first nuclear reactor (in 1958) for undergraduate teaching in Southern California, has such high pre-med standards that graduates are virtually assured of acceptance in medical schools of their choice.
Goal of Greatness. In 1960, Occidental men won two of the eleven Rhodes scholarships awarded in the West, plus ten Woodrow Wilson fellowships for prospective college teachers, the same number as giant U.C.L.A. Against stiffer competition this year, Oxy got four more Wilson fellowships and another Rhodes (U.S. total: 32). the seventh in its history.
By Western standards, Oxy is a venerable institution of learning. It was founded 75 years ago by Los Angeles' Presbyterian ministers, who gave it a lavish land-grant endowment, and grandly called it "Occidental University." After land values collapsed and enrollment plunged to twelve, Oxy became a "college." It survived a disastrous fire, and by 1905, the year when a poetic 18-year-old named Robinson Jeffers graduated, Oxy was solvent enough to dream of becoming "the Princeton of the West."
That notion was scotched when women were admitted. But the goal of greatness persisted. Academic standards have been kept high: this year Oxy accepted fewer than half of its applicants, and it looked for more than good College Board test scores (the freshman mean: 615 out of a possible 800). More decisive were written essays and proof of intellectual curiosity. Instead of summer loafing, next fall's incoming freshmen were busy last week perusing a list of prescribed books, from Edith Hamilton's The Greek Way to Western Civilization and Calvin Hall's A Primer of Freudian Psychology to William Golding's Lord of the Flies.
Oxy now gets only half its students from Southern California, and it looks for the best without regard for class or race. This year's senior president, for example, was a Negro. The result is a student body less feverishly cerebral than Reed's, less sophisticated than Swarthmore's, less social than Stanford's--but one marked by a pervasive sense of concern.
Effective Effulgence. Occidental's boss is veteran (since 1946) President Arthur G. Coons. 62. an Oxy alumnus ('20) and a Penn-educated economist. A noted educational statesman, Coons was chairman of the committee that worked out California's new "Master Plan" for public higher education--a plan for expansion that makes life more perilous than ever for California's private campuses, especially for those as small as Oxy.
Coons is unworried. Occidental is far from rich, though Coons has sharply raised its endowment, to $8,000,000, boosted faculty salaries to an average $8,400. But Coons counts on Oxy's charm and intimacy to attract able teachers and students. They prefer the small classes and lively questioning to the jammed lecture halls of U.C.L.A. and Berkeley. "Sometimes they call me the professor of effulgences around here," says Coons. "But our problem is not survival. The problem is at what level of effectiveness you are going to survive. The small, private college can have clear, definite goals. It can change and pioneer."
Oxy is doing just that. Next year it will go on a "three-three" schedule (patterned after Dartmouth's) to intensify teaching and banish trash courses. The plan: three eleven-week terms, with only three major courses per term. Professors need handle only two courses at a time, can prepare better for deeper learning at the tutorial level. "It's an attack on trivia," says Coons.
The goal is not more specialized "cliche scientists," buried in physics, but more "total human beings." Though the heyday of football is over. Occidental still turns out some fine athletes (e.g., Olympics Diver Sammy Lee). But what is getting more attention on Oxy's summer campus this week is the American Assembly conference discussing "The Secretary of State." The man who will keynote the debate once held the job himself: the Hon. Christian Herter.
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