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 top-flight university.

With a combination of over 6,500 students and about 600 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 $3.8 billion, including substantial endowments in all of the colleges, over 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.

Founded in 1887, Pomona College is an independent, coeducational liberal arts college with approximately 1,500 students. It offers forty-five 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 that open with public receptions and may include lectures and related programs for The Claremont Colleges community.

Claremont Graduate University (CGU) (1925) awards master’s and doctoral degrees in 22 academic and professional fields. 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.

CGU has about 2,050 students and a core faculty of approximately 88, supplemented by more than 200 faculty from the undergraduate Claremont Colleges and affiliated institutions.

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. While many colleges are now coeducational, Scripps continues as a women’s college because it believes that having women at the core of its concerns provides the very best environment for intellectually ambitious women to learn from a distinguished teaching faculty and from each other. Scripps’ four-year liberal arts curriculum emphasizes interdisciplinary studies in the humanities, combined with rigorous training in the disciplines as the foundation for careers in the professions, the arts, business, science, government, and the academia, as well as for fulfilling private lives. The Scripps mission is to “develop in its students the ability to think clearly and independently and the ability to live confidently, courageously, and hopefully.”

Claremont McKenna College (CMC), founded in 1946, is a coeducational residential liberal arts college with an enrollment of about 1,100. 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.

Founded in 1963, Pitzer College 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 offers a curriculum that spans more than 40 majors and focuses on interdisciplinary, intercultural education with an emphasis on social responsibility and community service.

Established in 1997, Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences (KGI) 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, 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, of which the library system is perhaps the most notable. The Libraries of The Claremont Colleges provide vast and more complete resources than those usually found at colleges the size of Harvey Mudd College. These resources include well over two million volumes. The Libraries currently provide online electronic access to articles in over 35,000 journals and receive more than 3,500 journals and other serials in paper.

The Libraries are partners with The Claremont Colleges in learning, teaching and research. Librarians and staff in each of the four libraries provide assistance with locating and using both traditional and electronic information sources. The Libraries also offer research assistance via e-mail and instant messaging. One of the major activities of the Libraries is teaching students how to find, evaluate and effectively use information. Research instruction for classes and other groups, as well as individual appointments for instruction and research assistance, may be scheduled in each of the libraries. Classes in Honnold/Mudd Library are held in either the Keck Learning Room or Keck 2, the Libraries’ hands-on classrooms.

The Libraries' large collection of electronic resources provides ready access to a wide variety of bibliographic, full-text and multimedia information. Through the World Wide Web, 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 Libraries' Special Collections. Digital collections such as Early English Books Online and North American Women¹s 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 in their dorms, labs, offices and homes, as well as in the Libraries.

Collections are housed in four buildings. Honnold/Mudd Library, the central library, contains the main social sciences and humanities collections. Honnold/Mudd has been a selective depository for United States Government publications since 1913. Its holdings also 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 over 80,000 items, most in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. The Ella Strong Denison Library at Scripps College houses collections in the humanities, fine arts and women's studies. The Norman F. Sprague Library at Harvey Mudd College and the Seeley G. Mudd Science Library at Pomona College house collections in the sciences, engineering and technology.

The Libraries have 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). Literary scholars will find much of interest in the special book collections: the Browning Collection, the Gertrude Stein Collection, and the Irving Wallace Collection. 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 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 to the libraries, The Claremont Colleges support:

Bridges Auditorium, a central meeting place with 2,500 seats for cultural and academic gatherings.

Fiske Museum of Musical Instruments, located in Bridges Auditorium and housing one of the largest collections of musical instruments in the United States. It contains over 1,100 American, European, and ethnic instruments dating from the 17th through 20th centuries.

Student Services Center, headquarters for the Student Health Services of the colleges. The building also includes Health Education Outreach 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, encompassing 86 acres of land near the campuses. It 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 provides essential services to the students, faculty and staff of The Claremont Colleges. Huntley is the source for all course-required textbooks and support materials used at the 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 complete 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 Women's Studies Program, the Intercollegiate Departments of Black and Chicano Studies, the Offices of Black and Chicano/Latino Student Affairs, the 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, and the California Institute of Public Affairs.