Dear Friends and Visitors: A hearty welcome to Claremont Graduate University. I hope you’ll discover here a place that matches your passion to make a difference in the world. Greenland Is Like the Moon is the title of a forthcoming book by Jeff Davenport. The book explores analogies, metaphors, and similes. When I saw Jeff recently for the first time in three years, he was curious about my two-plus years at Claremont Graduate University. “What’s it like?” he asked. What can one say to Mr. Metaphor? Should one compare CGU to an intellectual candy store? A cornucopia of ideas? A rose? To begin with, I told Jeff, people here are remarkably cordial. They are willing and able to talk across disciplines. They take on some of the most important issues of our region and our world with a distinctive Claremont combination of transdisciplinarity, rigor, and application. Contrast this with the academic hostility, insularity, and theoretical narrowness that characterize many other universities. Contrast this with academic research that gets called the increasingly precise pursuit of the increasingly irrelevant. A lot of reasons. We share the liberal-arts-college DNA of the Claremont Colleges. Our small size enables intimacy. We have a lovely, welcoming campus. As one visitor recently said, “It’s like an academic utopia here, and the community fits the part.”
I told Jeff about the plaque on the DesCombes Family Gate with a quote from our first president, James Blaisdell. “The center of a college is in great conversation, and out of the talk of college life springs everything else.” So here was a one-liner for Mr. Metaphor: Claremont Graduate University is dedicated to great conversations that matter—in the classroom and at leisure, in research and in social action, within the university and outside it. Great conversations that matter define our intellectual community. They help advance knowledge. Reframe issues. Catalyze action. Great conversations that matter require the most talented and creative graduate students, the most accomplished and versatile faculty, and the most competent and caring staff. They are why we value diversity in many dimensions. They are why we value partners and interlocutors outside the university. Great conversations that matter encourage us to be transdisciplinary. Increasingly, advances in knowledge come from people and teams that blend disciplines. Society’s most important challenges refuse to be confined to a single discipline or profession. So, for theory and for practice, we encourage great conversations across fields of study and out into the world. Throughout the website you’ll find many examples of great conversations that matter. You’ll find evidence that Claremont Graduate University begins, not with disciplines and schools, but with you, the student and scholar. To enable this focus on you, Claremont Graduate University is:
The result, we believe, is that Claremont Graduate University provides an educational experience found nowhere else in the world. We invite you to learn more by exploring this website. And if you’re intrigued, please come visit and see for yourself how CGU can fuel your passion to make a difference in the world. Sincerely, Robert Klitgaard
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