As he enters his final year as President of Claremont McKenna College, Hiram Chodosh is preparing for his "next chapter," one which he hopes will include " . . . writing, teaching, and contributions to resolving national and global challenges in education, law, and civic leadership in the nonprofit, philanthropic, and public sectors."
His focus then, as it has been during his 13-year tenure at Claremont McKenna, will be on the two primary intersecting commitments that drove this attorney into education: helping people remove barriers to their goals and aspirations and helping people in society overcome barriers that exist between each other.
CMC was founded in 1946 as Claremont Men's College by World War II veterans, charging it with a mission to prepare future leaders of private and public enterprise through a distinctive liberal arts curriculum.
Rather than train students for particular jobs, CMC sought to produce graduates able to apply lessons from the study of history, philosophy, literature, the arts, and sciences as well as from business and government courses.
Mabel Benson, wife of founding president George Benson (himself a returning veteran), wrote in the college’s first catalog that, "There is no incompatibility between an education planned for specific types of leadership and an education designed to develop a liberally informed mind.
"In fact, real leadership presupposes the latter, and, in turn, a liberally informed mind can find no more satisfying vocation than in such leadership."
As CMC's fifth president, Chodosh initiated major changes, all of which conform with the founding philosophy – the Open Academy, the Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences, the Campaign for CMC: Responsible Leadership, the Care Center, the Soll Center for Student Opportunity, and CMC's campus expansion that brought enrollment up to 1,300 students, about half male and half female, from the corners of the Earth.
Chodosh's wife, Priya Junnar, who is also retiring at the end of this year, has been director of the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum for over a decade.
This signature program brings scholars, public figures, thought leaders, artists, and innovators to the campus four nights a week throughout the school year to engage with students, faculty, and the broader CMC community.
The Athenaeum, which since 1983 has hosted lunch speakers, roundtables, and smaller presentations, makes Claremont McKenna (and its six sister institutions, all grouped into one giant campus) unique in higher education in America.
Student fellows are selected annually to host, introduce, and moderate discussions with featured speakers, who often spend extra time meeting with students, including the student press and podcast teams.
Another unique aspect of CMC is that nearly three out of four students participate in research with faculty members, largely through the college’s eleven campus research institutes and centers. CMC’s reputation and outreach were greatly enhanced in 2023, as the Campaign for CMC announced it had raised nearly $1.1 billion.
The new funding bolstered existing programs and enabled the launch of the $400 million project to build scientific and quantitative fluency for all students via the revolutionary Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences inside the brand-new Robert Day Sciences Center.
This new funding has propelled CMC to now require that all students take the Codes of Life course to learn how to develop their own artificial intelligence (AI) generative tools in the context of a socially scientific problem.
They learn how to code and learn the economics, ethics, and efficacy of the AI-enhanced problem.
The purpose, said Chodosh, is to enable each of its graduates to be ready to answer the challenges of today (and tomorrow) via a public presentation in teams to an authority – a powerful pedagogy that Chodosh believes will be transformative for their careers.
Chodosh added, this program is also a template for a national project with the Institute for Citizens and Scholars in which 125 college presidents have pledged to develop their own civic commitments and programs that support constructive dialogue and collaborative problem solving.
A longer term goal is to expand this project to 500 to 1,000 institutions, taking what has been learned from the initial round (a drop of water in the academic ocean, Chodosh mused) to spread and democratize this type of hands-on learning for those previously lacking resources.
Chodosh says he has always encouraged faculty members to think deeply about not just the content of their courses but how they are put together.
Are their syllabi teaching from a wide range of perspectives?
Are they lecturing or trying to draw out the confidence of each student to become excellent and develop their own point of view?
Classrooms, he says, should focus beyond the important interaction between students and faculty (top down) and to interactions among the students that can continue after class time – where most real learning should occur.
It is that kind of pedagogy that encourages students in their independent thinking – and not just to please the professor.
It enables students' self-authorship of their own perspectives, and this is vital to prevent the academy from looking at everything through political lenses to get to the heart of matters.
A strong student-centered pedagogy, Chodosh says, is the antidote to looking excessively through a political lens.
At Claremont McKenna, says Chodosh, students are asked to learn via materials and simulations to gain experience in learning what it means to be in a position of influence – which many CMC graduates often find themselves in fairly soon after college.
The faculty's job is teaching students how to create their own authentic lifelong journeys – to fulfill their destinies, one might say.
In order to succeed, administrators and faculty have to keep their eyes on the fast-moving societal changes and to ensure that students are comfortable with their discomfort in lacking an expertise they find they need – and then pursuing its mastery.
"Our graduates", he says, " . . . can get around any new block because they have been there before. They know how to find a way to get around or through the obstacles to their success."
Claremont McKenna has the luxury of choosing its student body – less than 10% of applicants are accepted.
But nationally, the challenges are tough in a world that has lost the leverage of people making and creating things and doing it together.
Far too many are locked into phones or glued to screens at the cost of learning social skills and learning how to build and play together.
People, Chodosh says, need to recognize that higher education can only do so much with 18-year-olds who are entering adulthood without having accomplished high-level goals in their earlier years.
To meet this challenge will require greater collaboration between higher ed and K-12 institutions.
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues. Read Duggan Flanakin's reports — More Here.
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