Harvey Mudd College seeks high-ability students with the potential to develop thoughtful and creative solutions to the world’s challenging problems. Those who attend Harvey Mudd learn that technology divorced from humanity is worse than no technology at all. They commit to intellectual honesty. They learn humility. And they leave with a broad scientific and technological perspective that is applicable to many professions.
Undergraduate Focus
The opportunities offered by Harvey Mudd’s exclusive undergraduate focus give the College’s students access to some of the top undergraduate engineering, science, and mathematics faculty in the country. More than 95 percent of all faculty (full-time, part-time, and instructors) hold a PhD, and courses taught by graduate students are extremely rare. Students enjoy a faculty dedicated to their education. They study and work in facilities that are comparable to what graduate students enjoy at research universities. Students at Harvey Mudd College learn both theory and practice. All students conduct research or do engineering design; all have the opportunity to work on the real-world problems of corporate and not-for-profit clients through the College’s Clinic Program. These opportunities for hands-on learning give Harvey Mudd College graduates an advantage that has resulted in a high placement rate of its job-seeking graduates. Harvey Mudd also is an outstanding setting in which to prepare for an advanced degree.
Additionally, Harvey Mudd College recognizes the importance of preparing its graduates to live and work in a multicultural world. Students have the opportunity to participate in a community that values diversity and promotes cultural competence. The social environment is also shaped by an Honor Code that sets a tone of trust and collaboration and minimizes the intense competition that is often the by-product of bringing together exceptionally accomplished individuals.
Historical Overview
Harvey Mudd College was founded in 1955 and began operations in the fall of 1957, less than one month before Sputnik I launched the Space Age, making technical education a priority in the United States. Forty-eight students and seven faculty were the pioneers who shaped this unique, highly selective institution born of the generosity of businessman and philanthropist Harvey S. Mudd and the vision of Joseph B. Platt, the nuclear physicist who served as the College’s first president. Harvey Mudd College became the fifth autonomous member of a much larger center of learning, The Claremont Colleges, an affiliation that broadens both academic and social opportunities for its students.
College Mission
The founders of Harvey Mudd College drafted a challenging mission statement in 1956 that continues to guide the Harvey Mudd faculty, administration, and students:
Harvey Mudd College seeks to educate engineers, scientists, and mathematicians well versed in all of these areas and in the humanities and social sciences so that they may assume leadership in their fields with a clear understanding of the impact of their work on society.
Harvey Mudd College pioneered—and put into practice—the idea of relating human needs to engineering and science education. It was able to do so because, as a new institution, it had no particular tradition to uphold or other barriers to innovation. And the school’s innovation and spirit of educational adventure—qualities that attract superior people—appealed to new faculty, staff, and students. Ever since its founding, the College’s faculty has consisted of top-flight professionals—humanists who are not dissuaded by technology and engineers and scientists who have an abiding faith in liberal learning.
Dedicated Faculty
All of Harvey Mudd College’s full-time faculty have PhDs or a terminal degree in their field of study, and all are engaged in research. Each faculty member’s focus, however, is teaching the approximately 840 students at the College. Upper-division classes and laboratory sections average between 10 and 15 students. Faculty-student interaction is particularly good as students take advantage of the extensive research and design opportunities.
A Proven Curriculum
In the beginning, the courses and curriculum of Harvey Mudd College were formulated under a grant from the Carnegie Corporation and featured a rigorous Core designed to graduate engineers, scientists, and mathematicians with grounding in all of these fields as well as an understanding of their social context. This Core is still at the heart of the modern curriculum that fully integrates the humanities and social sciences. While the original Core has been modified on occasion throughout the years since 1957, the founders’ vision for a broad foundation for future work continues to be a hallmark of a Harvey Mudd education and is reflected in the most recent Core revision, implemented in fall 2010. Now, as at the institution’s inception, all Harvey Mudd College students receive general education in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts (more than a quarter of all course work, more courses, in fact, than at any engineering college in the United States) and basic work in biology, computer science, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, and physics—the departmental major programs that the College offers. Students may also design individual programs of study outside of these majors, or major in an area of study offered at one of the other Claremont Colleges.
Experiential Learning
Harvey Mudd College is widely recognized for its programmatic innovation, excellence, and rigor. A recipient of the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Award for the Integration of Research and Education, Harvey Mudd College has long recognized the importance of collaborative student-faculty research, setting aside nearly $3 million annually for this purpose. U.S. News & World Report has consistently ranked Harvey Mudd as one of the best undergraduate engineering programs in the nation, with 40 percent of recent graduates majoring in that field. Harvey Mudd surpasses nearly every other college in the United States in the percentage of its graduates that go on to earn PhDs.
Harvey Mudd offers undergraduates unique, hands-on laboratory and field experience usually reserved for graduate students. Anchored by a research-supportive curriculum, students pursue research during their entire time at Harvey Mudd. They collaborate with faculty both during the academic year and in the summer through Harvey Mudd’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program. In addition, several academic majors require senior research.
Harvey Mudd professors believe research is an extremely powerful teaching tool that leads to students’ disciplinary learning, and professional and personal growth, well beyond traditional classroom settings. Students and faculty collaborate on many projects that are presented jointly at professional scientific conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. Students and faculty are frequently honored for this work with distinguished national awards.
Clinic Program— The Clinic Program, an internationally recognized hallmark of Harvey Mudd College, engages juniors and seniors in the solution of real-world, technical problems for industrial clients. Founded as an innovation in engineering education in 1963, this program has been expanded to other Harvey Mudd academic departments and has been copied by institutions worldwide. Harvey Mudd’s engineering, mathematics, physics, and computer science departments each conduct Clinic projects that draw upon the unique talents of our students and faculty advisors. Since Clinic was developed at Harvey Mudd College, more than 450 organizations have participated, and Harvey Mudd students have completed more than 1,500 projects.
Students work in groups of four or five under the guidance of a student project manager (team leader), a faculty advisor, and a liaison from the sponsoring organization. Projects begin in September, involve about 1,200 to 1,500 work hours, and are completed the following May. The sponsor’s liaison outlines the project requirements, approves the team’s proposal for accomplishing the work, and receives weekly progress reports. In most cases the student team visits the sponsoring company during the first month and typically provides the results in a presentation to senior officials at the end of the project. Clinic teams present their research and/or designs during public forums held on campus and submit final written reports to the sponsoring organization upon completion of the project. Sponsors retain full rights to all intellectual property developed by the team.
Clinic is the centerpiece of the professional practice component of the College’s curriculum. Sponsors pay a fixed fee for student teams to work on current problems that the company or agency needs solved. The objective is to produce useful results on an open-ended, authentic project to the client’s satisfaction within the constraints of time and budget. The students do the work; the faculty advises, coaches, and evaluates; and the client informs, guides, and accepts or rejects the results. This time-tested program produces outstanding solutions for the vast majority of clients. Companies often apply for patents from the results of Clinic and the students assist in the patent process.
Built upon this extraordinary collaboration, the Global Clinic Program supports long-term sponsored engineering and science projects in which teams of Harvey Mudd students collaborate with teams of students from partnering schools all over the world. Students work on international team projects with members from different countries, cultures, and institutional backgrounds, with different disciplinary interests and languages, but with a common unifying purpose and overarching project goals. The Global Clinic students make a series of presentations and written progress reports during the year, honing their technical writing and public speaking skills.
Global Clinic projects run for nearly one year—part of a summer plus one full academic year. Harvey Mudd students travel to the partner institution for an intensive multi-week program. Students from the partner university visit Harvey Mudd for a similar period of time during the summer or academic year. The student teams remain in weekly contact with each other during the academic year via email, teleconference, and videoconference and with the sponsor liaisons via a weekly multi-conference call. Faculty members from each institution are appointed to guide the teams, monitor progress, and assist with facilitating team communications. The faculty members work cooperatively to ensure that the academic goals for the students are met, including establishment of the summer curriculum.
Every Clinic and Global Clinic project is formally presented at a year-end event called Projects Day.
Research— Research is an integral part of the education of all students at Harvey Mudd College. The ability to conduct original investigations, to plan an approach to a problem, and to see it through are essential to success in any scholarly endeavor. Time is set aside during the spring semester to celebrate the work of Harvey Mudd students as they present their original projects in design or research. Whether this work is done as an individual research project with a faculty advisor or as part of a class project, the emphasis is on the students’ own achievements. All Harvey Mudd students learn how to find, evaluate, and synthesize information, using the most modern approaches to information technology. They are inspired to think of what is not known, not just what is known, and to believe in their own questions and vision. They are encouraged to be competent as well as creative and confident.
Whereas research universities may struggle with ways to simulate the research experience for large numbers of students, Harvey Mudd faculty enable each one to experience the real thing. At Harvey Mudd, all students are full research participants; they are collaborators, not technicians. They conceptualize their research problems, access, review, and synthesize relevant literature, design experiments and instrumentation, present written and oral research proposals, and conclude their experience with a professional-quality, written thesis or project report, and a public presentation. In addition to academic-year research, summer research opportunities engage students in 10 weeks of full-time research. More than 200 Harvey Mudd students pursue research projects each summer alongside more than 40 faculty members in biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, mathematics, and physics.
Students with meaningful research or Clinic experience have a competitive edge for top graduate schools and employment opportunities.
Graduate Success
The curriculum developed by Harvey Mudd College is effective—the proof is in the College’s graduates. About three out of four eventually enter graduate schools, most in the top graduate programs in their fields, be it at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Caltech, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, or other prestigious graduate schools. Eventually, most graduates go to work in industry, typically for firms such as Boeing, ESRI, Fair Isaac, Microsoft, Northrop-Grumman, and Raytheon. Harvey Mudd graduates far more than its share of leaders in the pure and applied sciences. Within five years of graduation, alumni have usually reached such jobs as project engineer, research scientist, and systems engineer. Those out more than five years are more likely to be chief engineers, division managers, senior scientists, or even vice-presidents or general managers. An increasing number are entrepreneurs and are founding their own companies—some while still in school.
Many Harvey Mudd College alumni with advanced degrees work for “think tanks” or industrial research centers like RAND, The Aerospace Corporation, Bell Laboratories, IBM’s Watson Research Center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and NASA. Others are on the faculties of Yale, MIT, the University of California (Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Cruz), Columbia University, the University of Washington, Dartmouth, Purdue, Claremont McKenna College, and Harvey Mudd College—and not all teach engineering, mathematics, and science. Included among our graduates are doctors in small towns and at research hospitals like the Mayo Clinic, artists, vintners, entrepreneurs, economists, historians, philosophers, oceanographers, actuaries, and even two astronauts. Harvey Mudd College graduates are able to seek out satisfying places for themselves in a wide variety of fields.
Home to Top Students
The Harvey Mudd College student body of approximately 820 students come from many different places and backgrounds, but they are alike in one way: They have a deep dedication to engineering, science, and mathematics and are also interested in the role of these fields in society. More than that, they are good in these fields, and they like to be around others who share their interests. They spend a great deal of time in classrooms and laboratories, in conference with faculty members, and in study—and enjoy most of their work. They make time to participate in college and community life through volunteer service work, student government, or student publications. They compete on athletic teams or participate in club sports. They enjoy going to concerts, art exhibits, and parties. Many play musical instruments and participate in Claremont Colleges performance groups. They are involved and engaged students who are intellectually gifted with a strong ability in engineering, science, and mathematics.
Campus Facilities
The Harvey Mudd College campus is a pleasant combination of beauty and efficiency. The buildings—residence halls, dining hall, classrooms, office buildings, laboratories, and athletic center—are of a single, carefully planned architectural design, and the grounds have many tree-shaded paths, grassy slopes, flower beds, patios, and plazas. Of course, the vast central facilities of The Claremont Colleges are open to everyone at Harvey Mudd College.
The Harvey Mudd College campus includes:
Residence Halls—Living accommodations for students are provided in nine residence halls: Mildred Mudd, West, North, Marks, Atwood, Case, Linde, Sontag, and Drinkward. North Hall and Mildred Mudd Hall constitute the Seeley W. Mudd Memorial Quadrangle. Marks, Atwood, Case, Linde, Sontag, and Drinkward residence halls are named in honor of David X. Marks, J.L. Atwood, Florence H. and Gerald R. Case, Ronald and Maxine Linde, Frederick (‘64) and Susan (POM ‘64) Sontag, and Wayne (‘73) and Julie Drinkward respectively.
Joseph B. Platt Campus Center—This two-story building was named for the founding president. The Campus Center houses many student services, including the Division of Student Affairs (Residential Life, Health and Wellness, Student Activities, Academic Affairs, Career Services, Institutional Diversity, Community Engagement), Study Abroad, the Registrar, and Facilities and Maintenance. The facility also includes a mailroom, lounge, study areas, music practice rooms, Jay’s Place (a late-night dining and gathering place in memory of Jay Wolkin ‘99), offices for student organizations, and the Green Room, a large meeting area.
Hoch-Shanahan Dining Commons—Completed in 2005, this dining facility, certified under LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) guidelines, can hold 466 diners. It is home to the Aviation Room, which celebrates the College’s former Bates Aeronautics Program and its graduates, and has a number of meeting rooms and patio areas. The building was named for trustees Richmond J. Hoch ‘63 and his wife, Diane, and R. Michael Shanahan and his wife, Mary.
The Norman F. Sprague Memorial Building—The building houses the CIS Help Desk, the Hixon Center for Sustainable Environmental Design, a large area for individual and group work with desktop computers, and lounge seating, as well as, a group work area. The offices of Computing Information Services are on the fifth floor, the Dean of the Faculty offices and the Aeronautical Library Special Collections are on the fourth floor, and work spaces for the Computer Science and Mathematics departments are located on the second and third floors, respectively. The building was a gift of Dr. and Mrs. Norman F. Sprague Jr. in memory of Dr. Sprague’s father.
Kingston Hall—This two-story building, a gift of Mrs. Fredrick C. Kingston in memory of her husband, houses administrative offices including College Advancement and Business Affairs.
R. Michael Shanahan Center for Teaching and Learning—This 70,000-square-foot academic building provides flexible and technologically advanced classrooms, lecture halls, faculty offices, and public spaces. It is also home to the Office of the President, the Office of Admission and Financial Aid, Academic Excellence, and the Writing Center. The building is named in honor of R. Michael Shanahan, former board of trustees chair, for his and his wife, Mary’s, many contributions to the College.
The Parsons Engineering Building—Named in honor of Ralph M. Parsons, this three-story building houses the Department of Engineering, the Engineering Clinic, and the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts.
The F.W. Olin Science Center—A gift of the F.W. Olin Foundation, this three-story building, completed in 1992, houses the departments of Biology and Computer Science, instructional facilities, and research and teaching labs.
The Jacobs Science Center—A gift of Dr. and Mrs. Joseph J. Jacobs, this three-story building houses offices and laboratories for the departments of Chemistry and Physics.
W.M. Keck Laboratories—A four-story building developed with a gift from the W.M. Keck Foundation, this facility houses a portion of the departments of Chemistry and Physics, classrooms, and laboratories.
Beckman Hall—Built with a gift from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, this facility houses classrooms, laboratories, computer facilities for computer science, biology and other departments, and a 75-seat auditorium.
Galileo Hall—This facility contains a concourse of workshops for the fabrication of instructional and research apparatus. The facility was named for the Galileo Society, now called the Legacy Society.
Hixon Court—In front of Galileo Hall is a stunning European fountain and koi pond, a gift from the Alexander Hixon family.
Linde Activities Center—The Linde Activities Center provides a central recreation area for the Harvey Mudd community. It houses a full-length basketball court and is also suitable for volleyball, badminton, and special events. The center also has a computing lab, an aerobics workout area, a fitness area with a full range of conditioning equipment, shower and locker facilities, a lounge area equipped with a big-screen television, and two large multipurpose rooms.
Information Technology
Harvey Mudd College provides extensive computing resources to the campus community; many of them are managed or provided by Computing and Information Services (CIS), including:
- The Linde Activities Center (LAC) computing lab
- Shanahan Center, Room 1443 (beside the living room)
- An equipment loan program (laptops, tablets, projectors)
- Networked printers throughout the campus
- The wireless network
- The Sakai learning management system (housed at Pomona College)
- The Student Portal
- Google Apps for Education (g.hmc.edu)
- Audiovisual support for classrooms and events
- The Help Desk on the first floor of The Norman F. Sprague Memorial Building (Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.)
For details about these and other services, please visit the CIS website, hmc.edu/cis. CIS also maintains an IT News site at www5.hmc.edu/ITNews/.
The Help Desk is the first point of contact for all CIS services. The staff can assist with hardware and software installation, configuration, troubleshooting, repair, or advice. Students may visit in person on the first floor of Sprague or contact the Help Desk via email helpdesk@hmc.edu or via phone at 909.607.7777.
Students at The Claremont Colleges abide by the Claremont-wide acceptable use policy, located at hmc.edu/use-policy. Use of Harvey Mudd information technology resources constitutes acceptance of the policy.
Central to Mountains, Oceans, Deserts
The College is in Claremont, about 35 miles east of Los Angeles, in a suburban area that was once broad stretches of citrus groves. It is at the foot of Mount San Antonio (Mount Baldy), the highest peak in the San Gabriel Range—10,064 feet.
Claremont’s population of about 35,000 live in well-tended homes on tree-covered streets. Freeways provide easy access to desert wilderness areas, Pacific Ocean beaches, the local mountains (snow-covered in the wintertime), Colorado River country, Pasadena (home of the Rose Parade), Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, San Diego and its wilderness and marine parks, Los Angeles and the many attractions of Hollywood—all within a two-hour drive.
The Claremont Colleges
From the beginning, Harvey Mudd College drew great strength from its membership in The Claremont Colleges, currently five small, independent colleges and two graduate institutions. They are—in order of founding—Pomona College (1887), The Claremont Graduate University (1925), Scripps College (1926), Claremont McKenna College (1946), Harvey Mudd College (1955), Pitzer College (1963), and the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences (1997).
Each of the five undergraduate colleges has a four-year academic program leading to its own bachelor’s degree. Each has its own campus, its own students and faculty, and its own distinctive style. Yet the campuses adjoin, and the colleges open their courses to one another’s students and cooperate in sponsoring joint academic and extracurricular programs. Together, they provide students with facilities and services comparable only to a premier university.
With a combination of more than 6,300 students and nearly 700 faculty members, the colleges generate an endless variety of intellectual, cultural, and social activities. Guest speakers, symposia, and conferences are frequent, and there are numerous concerts, art exhibits, film series, and theater productions.
The assets of The Claremont Colleges total more than $4.8 billion, including substantial endowments in all of the colleges, more than 175 buildings, and 550 acres of land—320 now occupied and 230 reserved for colleges and professional schools that may be founded in the future.
Pomona College, founded in 1887, is an independent, coeducational liberal arts college with approximately 1,600 students. It offers 47 majors in the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and fine arts, leading to the bachelor of arts degree. The founding member of The Claremont Colleges, Pomona makes a number of its programs and facilities available to all Claremont students. The Pomona College Theatre and Dance Department offers instruction and performance opportunities to interested students from all the campuses. The Pomona College Symphony Orchestra and other instrumental and choral ensembles also invite other Claremont Colleges students to audition. Oldenborg Center for Modern Languages and International Relations, in addition to sponsoring a wide array of intercultural events, provides a setting for daily foreign language practice at language lunch tables. The Pomona College Museum of Art mounts temporary and student exhibitions for The Claremont Colleges community.
Claremont Graduate University (CGU) (1925) awards master’s and doctoral degrees in 25 academic and professional fields. It has about 2,200 students and a core faculty of approximately 138, supplemented by more than 200 faculty from the undergraduate Claremont Colleges and affiliated institutions. Superior undergraduate students at The Claremont Colleges may work simultaneously toward the satisfaction of the undergraduate degree requirements and a master’s degree. Applicants must be recommended by their respective colleges and usually enter the program at the beginning of their junior year or later. Interested students should consult their advisors as early as possible, preferably during their sophomore or junior years, to plan their academic programs. Claremont Graduate University is authorized to recommend candidates to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing for public school teaching multiple or single-subject clear credentials with cross-cultural, language, and academic development (CLAD) emphasis in most recognized teaching areas. Interested students should contact the director of teacher education at the graduate university for specific information early in their undergraduate careers.
Scripps College was founded in 1926 by newspaper publisher, educator, and philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps as one of the few institutions in the West dedicated to educating women for professional careers, as well as personal intellectual growth. With an enrollment of approximately 980, Scripps administers a four-year liberal arts curriculum that emphasizes interdisciplinary studies in the humanities. Combined with rigorous training in the disciplines, studies provide the foundation for careers in the professions, the arts, business, science, government, and the academia, as well as for fulfilling private lives.
Claremont McKenna College (CMC), founded in 1946, is a coeducational residential liberal arts college with an enrollment of about 1,200. The college educates students for responsible leadership in business, government, and the professions within the context of a liberal arts curriculum that emphasizes economics and government. With 11 on-campus research institutes, CMC provides faculty and students the opportunity to study issues ranging from leadership to international relations to environmental management.
Pitzer College, founded in 1963, is a coeducational, undergraduate, liberal arts college that blends classroom instruction with fieldwork and engages a student’s mind, heart and spirit by integrating educational resources on campus, abroad, and in the local community. Pitzer enrolls approximately 1,000 students in more than 40 fields of study leading to the bachelor of arts degree. Its curriculum focuses on interdisciplinary, intercultural education with an emphasis on social responsibility and community service.
Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences (KGI), established in 1997, provides a professional degree program for scientists and engineers and recent college graduates with science and engineering degrees wishing to pursue business leadership roles in the bioscience industry. This two-year program includes rigorous interdisciplinary coursework, a capstone team project, and an industrial internship. The curriculum interweaves the study of systems biology, computer science, and bioengineering with instruction in organizational structure, finance, management, and business ethics. Upon successful completion of the program, KGI confers the master of bioscience degree. KGI is an independent, coeducational institution of approximately 130 students and was the first American graduate school dedicated exclusively to the applied life sciences.
Resources of the Claremont Colleges
As one of The Claremont Colleges, Harvey Mudd College shares the use of many facilities and services.
The Claremont Colleges Library provides vast resources that include well over two million volumes. The Library partners with The Claremont Colleges in learning, teaching, and research. Committed to fostering intellectual discovery, critical thinking, and life-long learning, the Library ties the academic community to varied cultural and scholarly traditions by offering user-centered services, building collections, developing innovative technologies, and providing an inviting environment for study, collaboration, and reflection.
Honnold/Mudd Library holds collections in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Honnold/Mudd has been a selective depository for United States Government publications since 1913. Its holdings include publications issued by the State of California, the United Nations, other international agencies, and Great Britain. Also in Honnold/Mudd, the Asian Studies Collection includes more than 80,000 items, most in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages. The CUC Records Center, located at 2038 W. 11th Street in Upland, houses paper journals and a small percentage of books from the library collections. Materials at the Records Center may be requested for delivery or may be browsed on site.
Librarians and staff provide assistance with locating and using both traditional and electronic information sources. Librarians teach students how to find, evaluate, and effectively use information and offer research assistance via email and instant messaging. Research instruction for classes and other groups, as well as individual appointments for instruction and research assistance, may be scheduled.
The Library’s large collection of electronic resources provides ready access to a wide variety of bibliographic, full-text, and multimedia information. Via the Internet, it is possible to search Blais, the online catalog, or any of hundreds of databases including services such as Lexis-Nexis Academic and ISI Web of Science. Full-text resources include electronic books and journals, as well as specialized resources such as the ACM Digital Library, Congressional Quarterly Library, and Grove’s Dictionary of Art Online. The Claremont Colleges Digital Library (CCDL) provides access to a growing number of digital collections from the colleges as well as from the library’s Special Collections. Digital collections such as Early English Books Online and North American Women’s Letters & Diaries make available thousands of additional primary source materials. Most of these resources are accessible via the Internet to students, faculty, and staff of The Claremont Colleges.
The Library has many special collections. Some of the most distinctive are the Oxford Collection, the Bodman Collection (history and literature of the Italian Renaissance), the Philbrick Library (drama and theater history), the Westergaard and Bjork Collections (Scandinavia and the Baltic area), and the McCutchan Collection (American hymnology). Students in history may do research in the Macpherson Collection (by and about women), the William Smith Mason Collection (Western Americana), the Wagner Collection of History and Cartography of the North Pacific, the William McPherson Collection of Western Americana, and the Hanna Collection (Western Americana). Local history collections include materials on water resources in Southern California and The Claremont Colleges Archives. For students in the sciences, the Hoover Collection contains rare volumes on the history of science and the metallic arts assembled by President Herbert Hoover and his wife, Lou Henry, and the Woodford Collection includes rare and historical geology books.
Students also have access to several nearby affiliated libraries, including Denison Library on the Scripps College campus; the George C. Stone Center for Children’s Books, a division of Claremont Graduate University’s Center for Developmental Studies in Education; the botanical and horticultural library of the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden; and the library at the Claremont School of Theology.
In addition, The Claremont Colleges support:
Tranquada Student Services Center, headquarters for the student health services of the Colleges. The building also includes Health Education Outreach, the Student Disability Resource Center, and the Monsour Counseling and Psychological Services, with a staff of full-time psychologists trained to facilitate the development of human skills and competencies.
The Robert J. Bernard Biological Field Station contains parcels in various stages of ecological succession and serves as a natural outdoor laboratory for many disciplines.
McAlister Center for Religious Activities, a nonsectarian meeting place for students and faculty as well as a place of worship.
Huntley Bookstore is the source for all course-required textbooks and support materials used at The Claremont Colleges. The bookstore carries many academic trade and reference titles, new releases, bestsellers, academic study aids, school and office supplies, emblematic clothing and gift items as well as magazines, snacks, and soft drinks. Huntley Computer Sales provides both Apple and PC hardware and software at academic pricing as well as a selection of computer supplies, peripherals, and repair services.
Table Mountain Observatory, is located one hour from campus, at an altitude of 7,200 feet, and is owned by Pomona College. The site is on the opposite side of the San Gabriel Mountains from Claremont, shielded from the lights of Los Angeles. At the site, The Claremont Colleges jointly operate a 1.0-meter Cassegrain telescope, the largest undergraduate telescope in the country, which is available for use by qualified Harvey Mudd College students. The equipment available to students for classes and astronomical research includes two optical CCD imaging cameras, a near-infrared array camera, and a stellar spectrograph, all of which are interfaced to modern computers. Data analysis is done on campus in the Astronomical Imaging Laboratory.
Other educational resources of the colleges include the Intercollegiate Feminist Center for Teaching, Research, and Engagement, the Intercollegiate Departments of Africana, Asian American, and Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies, the Offices of Black and Chicano/Latino Student Affairs, Claremont Lincoln University (Claremont School of Theology), the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, the Blaisdell Institute for Advanced Study in World Cultures and Religion, the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity, and the California Institute of Public Affairs.
Harvey S. Mudd, 1888–1955
A mining engineer, Harvey S. Mudd (1888–1955) was a graduate of Stanford and Columbia universities. He served with distinction as president of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers. With his father, he founded and later became president of Cyprus Mines Corp., whose Los Angeles-based international enterprises started with the development of the copper mines on the island of Cyprus.
Harvey Mudd was a director of the Southern Pacific Company, of the Texas Gulf Sulphur Company, and of the Founders Fire and Marine Insurance Company. He was a founding director of the RAND Corporation. He was a trustee of the California Institute of Technology, a director of the Hospital of the Good Samaritan, and a trustee of the Southwest Museum. He was president of the Southern California Symphony Association for 12 years and chairman of its board for nine years.
He had a particular interest in The Claremont Colleges and served as chairman of the Board of Fellows of Claremont College—now the Claremont Graduate University and the Claremont University Consortium—for a quarter of a century. While serving in that position, he helped plan for the undergraduate liberal arts college of engineering, science, and mathematics that was chartered in 1955, shortly after his death.
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