Honnold Mudd Library of the Claremont Colleges, 2000 5. Do you have information on the history of the Claremont Colleges?
After a brief sojourn in nearby Pomona, Pomona College, a small liberal arts institution established by the Congregational Churches of Southern California, moved permanently to Claremont in 1888. In the early 1920s, the college was flourishing and some believed it should expand to accommodate more students. Its president, Dr. James A. Blaisdell, argued against the idea of creating “one great undifferentiated university” and hoped instead to develop a system along the lines of that used by Oxford and Cambridge in England, that is “a group of institutions divided into small colleges . . . around a library and other utilities which they would use in common.” In 1925, the Claremont Colleges were incorporated. In the years that followed, a handful of new colleges sprang up. Scripps College, a liberal arts school for women, opened its doors in 1926 using seed money from Ellen Browning Scripps. The end of World War II and the subsequent GI Bill spurred the creation of the Claremont Scripps Co
