Ours is a region of unparalleled diversity and dynamism. It’s the harbinger of many of the challenges facing America: rapid growth coupled with the decline of traditional industries; immigration; troubled social services; environmental threats; and the threat of ethnic and religious misunderstandings. Southern California today is much of America tomorrow.

Alas, one can easily create scenarios of failure for our region, for example if growing gaps among communities lead to hostile enclaves, if more and more big businesses leave, if infrastructures and social services deteriorate, if the environment degrades.

One can also imagine scenarios of success, if Southern California’s diversity can enhance creativity, if we can generate effective new designs for education, health, and other public services, and if we can convene diverse communities for honest, creative problem-solving.

One of Claremont Graduate University’s goals is to make success more likely, through our education and research.

Prof. Anselm Min’s current project is to develop a systematic theology for our age of globalization. “What are the consequences for dignity and solidarity of the great economic changes in our world?” he asks. “I think an economist has to be more than an economist, and a theologian has to be more than a theologian. We desperately need an interdisciplinary approach.”


In the remarkable new phenomenon of the Minutemen, citizens are taking up border-patrol tasks they think the government is neglecting. Counter-Minutemen groups have formed, on behalf of the immigrants. In this highly charged context, the new transdisciplinary research led by Prof. Lourdes Arguelles can make a strategic contribution.

Research can inspire essential conversations. It is through the sharing of stories and the building of relationships that Lourdes and her colleagues might help meaning be made—and help forge improvements in the world.

Listen to how the critic Doug Harvey describes the paintings of Prof. David Amico of the School of Arts and Humanities:

How can an artist hope to affect the world? Where many of his contemporaries have insisted on strict categorization and separation of the objective world and the subjective artist, Amico conjoins this dualism with the unfashionable inverse: the world as the artist’s subject… The result is artwork that is unusually alive, that feeds information to the viewer in a flickering, almost cybernetic light, extending an invitation to the observer to partake in the continuity between the world, the artist, and his art.

Prof. Marc Redfield’s recent research is following the problem, in his case across borders and disciplines and back through time. Marc’s issue: the concept of terrorism, and what a so-called war against terror can unwittingly spawn. His method: historical and almost etymological, as he traces the term “terrorism” back to its origin in the 1790s. His result: we see our current situation with new eyes.

Another example of following the problem is in the work of Prof. Allen Omoto.

Allen’s research discovered that civic engagement makes a big difference in how well people with HIV/AIDS and their loved ones fare. Many professors would have stopped there. Allen didn’t. He decided to create a multi-year experiment on how to enhance civic engagement.