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Pomona College Magazine is published three times a year by Pomona College
550 N. College Ave, Claremont, CA 91711
Online Editor: Mark Kendall
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Editor: Mark Wood
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PCM Editorial Guidelines
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Phone: (909) 621-8635
Fax: (909) 621-8535
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 Reflections on a Campus
Review/ A Book a Marjorie Harth
By David Alexander
Pomona College: Reflections on a Campus
By Marjorie Harth
Director Emerita of the Pomona College Museum of Art
With essays by Ronald Lee Fleming,
George L. Gorse and Verlyn Klinkenborg.
169 color and 59 black-and-white illustrations.
Pomona College / 192 pages / $60
YEARS AGO, WHEN I FIRST BECAME A COLLEGE
administrator, the phrase “bricks and mortar” was used to
describe a rather unworthy obsession for the unappealing
institutional demand for proper quarters. One of the most disparaging
remarks one could make about university or college
presidents was to refer to their “edifice complex.” Just as “molecular
biology” has a nobler ring to it than “steam plant” so the
notion of raising money for the physical structure of a campus
and its upkeep was deemed less dignified than raising money for
the endowment or academic programs or faculty and staff
salaries. Some foundations and philanthropists made no bones
about their disdain for bricks and mortar; happily, others saw the
utter necessity of the maintenance and modernization of the
physical plant. In its unprecedented national program of college
and university support in the 1960s, for example, the Ford
Foundation made provision in its grants for the funding of
unglamorous projects like roads and boilers. Infrastructure must
be healthy and robust enough to sustain and augment the academic
program. Colleges, like humans, need to observe
Juvenal’s advice: mens sana in corpore sano.
 In her remarkable book, Professor Emerita Marjorie Harth
embraces this notion by emphasizing the significant influence
the environment has on learning. She argues that “campus” first
meant the grounds, then the buildings, but finally, and most
importantly, the spirit of the institution. She quotes former
President Peter Stanley’s singularly insightful comment that “at
the end of the day, the College’s identity and integrity are
expressed visually in the shape and character of its house.” She
then proceeds to call our attention to the beauty and utility of
the shape and character of Pomona College’s house.
The book, she informs the reader, is neither a history of the
College nor an architectural history. She is too modest. The
book offers a carefully reasoned, if brief, history of the College.
One of the lingering values of the book will be her careful
research into the construction of the buildings and the
development of the campus. Never before has so much useful
information about the campus been gathered into one place.
Moreover, by putting the buildings and facilities in the context
of their times she presents an account of the development of
both domestic and international architectural styles with
artistic sensitivity.
The book is cleverly planned. Its sections begin with introductory
essays, followed by descriptions of each building with a
little Who’s Who-style entry giving specific details about dates,
architects, donors and often the costs of the project. This
arrangement allows Professor Harth to comment on the buildings,
sometimes unfavorably, and permits her to call attention to
the renovations and demolitions. She makes much of the lack of
a consistent architectural style on the campus, but in so doing
she is able to place changing architectural tastes and construction
methods in historical context. The renovations themselves
serve as historical documents: frequently older infelicities in
ill-conceived
renovations were subsequently improved.
The illustrations are eye candy. Henry Cabala is an artist with
the camera. His angles of view offer us fresh looks at the old
familiar places. I have always felt that Pomona College’s portfolio
of campus pictures has been stunning from the earliest days:
consider the lovely picture of Blanchard Park on page 30 of this
book, made, I believe, from a glass plate negative. Mr. Cabala’s
masterly work contributes a major addition to the pictorial heritage
of the College. Other photographers’ work is dazzling as
well. Mark Wood sees unnoticed details: cornices and volutes,
the center of the sculpture adorning the Seaver Laboratory for
Chemistry, the ornament salvaged from Holmes Hall. He
entrances us as he looks with his camera through leafy branches.
The dramatic layout of the photographs in the book enhances
their aesthetic quality. Lilli Colton, the book’s designer, has
fashioned a gallery of beauty.
Short comments from graduates have been interspersed
throughout the book, and three major essays round out the
text. It will take a stony heart not to be swept up in Verlyn
Klinkenborg’s vivid account of seeing the campus as an alumnus.
He tells us that a campus is “to create a sense of protection, a
sense of enclosure, and with it a sense of freedom.” Both education
and memory are shaped by the campus: “the walk to class
was never quite the same, not because of the change in season,
but because of the change in text. One week it was Lear and the
next week it was The Tempest.” This perceptual changeableness
of the campus intrigues him: “almost every senior feels that he
or she is living in a place that has been many places in the time
they’ve been here.” To the returning alumnus and alumna, he
declares, “year by year the campus reconfigures itself in your
own mind, so that when you walk past Wig Hall you’re walking
past the current crop of freshmen, not the place where you were
a freshman.” In a lively essay, George Gorse celebrates the work
of Myron Hunt, whose master plan for the campus is still being
followed. Professor Gorse gives us a brief account of the influences
on campus design of Thomas Jefferson, the Columbian
Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, H.H. Richardson and other architects.
Professor Gorse graphically describes the early buildings: Sumner Hall
in its original form was “a sort of
Congregational cathedral for the westward bound, Manifest
Destiny-inspired migration of the American Enlightenment”
and many-gabled Holmes Hall was “topped by a Victorian
bell tower rising like a straight-laced head above starched collar
and tie.” Ronald Lee Fleming’s postscript, “Dusty Sage to
Urban Oasis: Reflections on a Place,” is an elegy to the vanished
Eden of Southern California “decimated by shopping
malls, roads and housing tracts.” He tempers his sophisticated
lamentation by challenging the College to reinforce the “larger
strategy of place-making … as it recovers its connection
with its own estimable past and increases its commitment to
the region beyond the oasis of Claremont, where the word
‘Eden’ still beautifully applies and the eucalyptus continue to
frame the view.”
Professor Harth manages in the relatively short compass of
the book to get it all in. Her book allows one to gain a comprehensive
awareness and appreciation of the munificent philanthropy
of Frank Seaver and the Seaver family, brought up
to date by the glories of the newest science buildings, grand
in scale and sensitive to the environment. She describes the
College gates, President Blaisdell’s daring public relations
gesture when he commissioned Myron Hunt to design gates
for the intersection of still dusty streets at a time when the
College was desperate for new funds—the motivation being
the idea that every great college has gates. Professor Harth
incorporates informal details, those activities and anecdotes
that give life to a campus: Professor Pronko’s Kabuki Western
“Revenge at Spider Mountain,” cannonballs in Smiley,
Harwood Halloween, Walker Wall upon which the students
may post their own pasquinades. One must note that not all
in the book is sunny, for she quotes critical remarks by architects
about the work of others, and she does not shrink from
including controversy and complaint.
Professor Harth’s acknowledgement of the collaboration
of Don Pattison, who has committed himself so devotedly to
Pomona College that he represents an encyclopedic repository
of institutional memory, and her dedication of the book to
Caroline Beatty, whose life was the College, links her work
with two persons who embody the guardianship of the heritage
of Pomona College.
As President Oxtoby says, “This book is, first and foremost,
an examination and celebration of Pomona College as a
place—the aesthetics, traditions, priorities, needs, choices and
sacrifices that have shaped this campus over the past 120
years and continue to shape it today.”
Pomona College: Reflections on a Campus is available for $60 plus
shipping through the online
Coop Store.
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