9 The Claremont Colleges Consortium Reimagined by Aaron, Claire, and Kourosh
The Claremont Consortium: Organizational Imagination and Metaphorical Analysis
Claire Partridge, Kourosh Ariane, Aaron Wazana
12/10/21
Executive Summary
The Claremont Colleges Consortium is an experimental organizational structure that is not reflective of other colleges or organizations in the United States. The schools influence each other in some ways, but ultimately function and make decisions as separate institutions. Though the schools accomplish great things individually, the consortium as a whole could benefit from working more cohesively. In order to begin imagining change, it is crucial that we understand it as a learning organization that can continually refine and improve. Thus, it could be beneficial to reimagine our structure yet leave it open to future changes and improvements. We will look at how the organization functions as a psychic prison, brain, and machine in a metaphorical sense to note the flaws and drive forward towards solutions and an improved future. As a takeaway from this project, we leave a pathway forward that can serve as a starting point towards change.
Introduction
The Claremont Colleges are a unique consortium of individual, yet somewhat connected, colleges that make up a strong and powerful educational community. They work together as “The 5C’s” to provide a small liberal arts education that can cater to a diverse range of students. With Pitzer, Claremont Mckenna, Pomona, Scripps, and Harvey Mudd all taking on individual identities, it can almost be described as a family of schools that each has its own role in the bigger picture. The organization itself is one of a kind and is a huge reason that so many people are drawn to the colleges and is an important unique feature of them.
When looking at the organization as a whole, there are many aspects that are understandably separated, but others that may not make as much sense in how they are organized. Furthermore, we want to understand and contextualize some of the more nuanced issues that arise from the current system of organization and create some possible ways to combat these issues while maintaining most of the integrity of the “5C’s”.
We will start by explaining more about the organization as it is today, followed by a metaphorical analysis that can give insight to some of the existing issues and a path forward to improving the organization and some concluding remarks.
Setting the Scene: The Claremont Consortium in Context
Figure 1: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Claremont Colleges Consortium
The Claremont Colleges have historically been independent institutions who largely make their own policy decisions, yet are still interconnected in many ways. While these differences in institutional policy might be cause for some minor annoyances such as preferential treatment for course selection or exclusive access to athletic facilities, they do not usually impact students’ day to day lives all that much. Because of the relatively minimal impacts on student life, the bigger gaps between the schools remained hidden.
This all changed when COVID struck. Just a couple of days before spring break, the colleges announced that they were sending students home for a while due to the Coronavirus pandemic. There were not many details at the time, but all of the colleges administrations were immediately thrown into a panicked frenzy of planning for the next steps. This is when the five colleges began to visibly sever, and the true differences in their administrations and policies started to reveal themselves more clearly.
The biggest differences in that first semester were differences in messaging and planning around a possible campus return, and in grading policies. While the schools restandardized the grading policy in the following year of virtual instruction, the plans for a possible return to campus remained heavily inconsistent between the schools, especially Harvey Mudd, who seemed to be most likely to return. Similarly, during the first semester back on campus in fall 2021, the differences in policy are more apparent than they ever were pre-COVID. For example, Harvey Mudd does not participate in consortium-wide parties and has students wear masks outside on their campus, Scripps started out the semester with different COVID testing rules than the other colleges, there is no longer cross-campus dining, and Pomona does not allow non-Pomona students in their residence halls. All of these measures dramatically impact students day to day lives and more clearly show where the consortium is divided.
As described above, Figure 1 shows some of the different ways that COVID-19 has impacted the Claremont Colleges Consortium. Throughout this proposal we hope to develop some ways in which the colleges can form a stronger bond with each other and iron out some of the institutional wrinkles that keep them divided in order to make the college experience better for all 5C students.
Metaphorical Analysis: The Claremont Consortium through the Lenses of Psychic Prison, The Brain, and The Machine
Psychic Prison
When looking at the Claremont Colleges as an organization, it may not seem as though they could ever be compared to a psychic prison. Psychic prisons are characterized by a sense of entrapment in a particular way of thinking or being, there exists subliminal messages of who holds the power and has a voice, and there is a sense of complacency with how the organization is vs. how it should be. In Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization, he writes, “Their particular style of excellence had become a trap that prevented them from thinking in new ways and from transforming themselves to meet new challenges” (Morgan 209). He writes this in reference to an organization that he compares to a psychic prison.
It seems almost counterintuitive to ever compare an institution of higher education to a psychic prison (let alone 5 prestigious institutions), but in reality, there are some existing similarities. If we look at the quote above, the first phrase regarding “their particular style of excellence” is a good place to start. There is no question that the 5C’s are excellent among colleges and universities. They’re acclaimed around the world and have a history of molding young people into powerful and capable leaders, intellectuals, politicians, engineers, etc. However, that excellence can breed complacency in terms of organizational development. When we look at what a college is supposed to do at its root, the 5C’s never fail to make the mark. However, once that excellence is achieved, that is not the time to slow down. It’s the time to get ahead and drive forward how people think about and see colleges as organizations in themselves with action and accountability. There are seemingly endless gripes with the colleges, primarily the lack of accountability for a myriad of different subjects. Whether its climate change, health services, endowment investments, or the lack of resources for groups that are marginalized and deserve to have their demands met, the body that makes these organizations part of what they are (i.e. the students) have a dream of creating a better environment on campus and in the world at large.
There is not necessarily an easy path towards this, but seeing college as a psychic prison is a start. Let’s acknowledge that the 5C’s can (and should) continue to transform and drive forward what it means to be “excellent”.
Brain
The structure and organization of the Claremont Colleges has the potential to be seen as very similar to that of a brain. One of Morgan’s guiding principles in viewing organizations as brains is that each piece of it could stand alone and still function individually. In the text he references an experiment where, as an increasing portion of a rat’s brain is removed, the researchers find that the rat can still run, just not as well as it could with all parts of its brain intact (Morgan, 71). A parallel with this experiment could be drawn to the Claremont Colleges. If any one part of the consortium suddenly had to become its own entity, totally unaffiliated with the rest of the colleges, it could still function on its own. However, it would not have the abundant amenities and resources that it has when it is connected to the other colleges.
Morgan also compares the brain’s organizational system to that of a holographic machine which, if broken, can recreate a whole image with any one of its many pieces. He explains that because information is stored in many different places of the brain at once, one part of it can similarly be representative of the whole (Morgan, 73). In terms of the Claremont Colleges this makes a lot of sense. We can think of the “information stored” in each of the colleges as the experiences of the students, faculty and staff. Because so much of our experiences at one college are heavily intermingled with the other schools, like attending classes and clubs together and existing nearby each other, it makes sense that you could see some sort of reflection of all the schools just by analyzing one. Of course this isn’t a perfect comparison, because each of the schools certainly has unique traits, but no school is truly complete without, or entirely separated from, the others.
Morgan also discusses the concept of the cockroach or the mobot, in which decentralized control of different limbs can all contribute to the organism moving forward as one. Intelligence and control, rather than being completely centralized, is derived from many different parts working simultaneously to create order (Morgan, 74). This is definitely reflected in the current organization of the 5Cs. The different colleges, all with their own administrations, currently function independently of one another. However, together order is created out of this independence and allows the colleges to work together and function for all of their students.
Machine
As introduced by Gareth Morgan, author of Images of Organizations, many modern organizations function like machines. In Morgan’s words, “Fast-food restaurants and service organizations of many kinds operate in accordance with similar principles, with every action preplanned in a minute way, even in areas where personal interactions with others are concerned” (Morgan 13). This is especially true of restaurant chains and multinational corporations such as Amazon. Many large corporations utilize actual machinery, but also treat their employees like machinery by having them work on repeated tasks without allowing them to think or grow. “Anyone who has observed work in the mass-production factory or in any of the large ‘office factories’ processing paper forms such as insurance claims, tax returns, or bank checks will have noticed the machine-like way in which such organizations operate. They are designated like machines, and their employees are in essence expected to behave as if they were parts of machines” (Morgan 13).
Although the Claremont Colleges are fortunately nowhere near this style of robotic functioning, there are still minor elements of mechanization that can be reduced. As was expressed under the “Brain” metaphor, the colleges have been working in isolation from each other in some ways with their separate administrations and student governments and have been locked in place within these systems. By working in isolation from each other and by not having a dedicated medium allowing joint growth, the colleges are limited like separate machines that cannot adapt to the times in an adequate fashion. Instead, the colleges could become something extraordinary if they were allowed to expand upon the methods that are currently in place and to explore new ways of growing similarly to how a human child would.
Pathway Forward
Making alterations to the fundamental structure of the Claremont Colleges consortium may not be an easy task, but tangible changes to the organization do not need to be executed immediately or even within the next few years. As has been consistently brought up throughout the semester in Barbara Junisbai’s Organizational Theory course, grandiose changes do not have to be achieved right away. The first steps people take may seem relatively minute at times. However, these steps can set the course towards meeting ultimate goals and transforming an organization. Thus, this pathway forward will serve as the first step that could spark a culture of advancement and could potentially act as a roadmap for the future.
This pathway forward will introduce the principal goals that should be worked towards and will suggest how we can get to these goals. Although these goals do not need to be accomplished right now and though they do not even need to be our current focus, it can be beneficial to set them in writing to have something to work towards. To begin, certain aspects of the colleges such as course registration and resources to marginalized students should be more uniform across the consortium. When it comes time for course registration each semester, Pitzer students are often barred from taking Claremont Mckenna or Pomona courses. Many courses from these schools are limited to students from their respective schools and descriptions on the portal explicitly state things like“CMC ONLY” or “PZ MUST PERM”. Meanwhile, Pitzer openly and lovingly accepts students from the other colleges into what seems to be all of its courses.
Turning to the example of resources, it is unfortunately the case that financial aid is not distributed evenly across the consortium. The colleges vary in their individual funds reserved for aid, but sharing the money allocated across the consortium could solve the issue of uneven aid budgets. This may be a difficult change to implement, but we believe setting the bar high is important since the consortium should always strive to improve where it can whenever possible. Additionally, this would only be fair since the wealthier colleges have long used the resources of the other schools such as classes and dinninghalls (pre-COVID). As things currently are, many students do not have the same opportunities others have. Students of Pomona and CMC are fortunately able to take classes at the other colleges, but the favor is always not returned to the other schools. Sharing such resources across the 5C’s would help to balance things out.
Another goal is for the consortium to make decisions that affect student life together as united entities. During the pandemic, the consortium has had to make many decisions in response to Covid-19. All of the Claremont Colleges have generally had excellent responses to covid, however policies could have been made more effectively and more consistently throughout the 5C’s had they been made in a unified fashion. It simply doesn’t make sense that although students have been able to attend parties with hundreds of other people, they cannot eat in the other campus’s dining halls. If there were some sort of tight-knit group all the colleges were a part of, this issue could be discussed in greater depth and could be solved. Other decisions have been made by the individual colleges that fail to align with the responses of other schools. Why were Mudders allowed on campus when others were sent home as the pandemic first hit? Why didn’t Scripps set mandatory testing at the start of the semester? These are situations that could have been prevented had the covid regulations been originally created in a more centralized way.
The pandemic has been an eye opener, signaling the need to remain dynamic. Rather than being trapped in the psychic prison of being comfortable with how the consortium is right now and allowing things to stagnate, the colleges should begin working together more closely to start a trend of improving together. Unexpected circumstances like this can be reacted upon more effectively by making decisions in a more unified fashion. This does not and should not mean it would be best for the colleges to merge together into a full fledged university. It is important to preserve the individual identities of each college and the unique style of the consortium, and restructuring the colleges as a university could lead us to lose out on the good elements/practices we have. Rather, a proposal the consortium could consider would be to have a centralized 5C group that could consist of student leaders and faculty members from throughout the campuses.
Such a group would act as the unifier of the colleges and could resemble something like the United Nations. It would bring the colleges together to keep things running smoothly and to collaborate when important decisions must be made. Each college could create dedicated student leadership positions within their own student government that students could join to represent their college within the new 5C leadership group. In addition to any faculty that may be fit to work in this group, additional faculty could be hired to create new jobs on the campuses and to grow the consortium organization. This proposal is only a suggestion, but it would create a lasting solution towards bettering the consortium rather than a temporary patch. The consortium is a great system of organizations as it is, so imagine what beautiful possibilities we could develop by working together for further and further advancement.
Conclusion
Using metaphors to understand how we see organizations is an extremely powerful tool because it provides us with some baseline ideas about how to see what an organization really is. There are endless ways to analyze the endless organizations that exist, but when we use metaphors we can categorize what we want to look at so it gives us a basis for comparison. Psychic Prison, The Brain, and The Machine each have their own qualities that give a look into what The Claremont Consortium looks like as an Organization.
With these metaphors in mind, we’ve devised a path forward to look at real improvements that create a more cohesive, productive, and unified education environment.
Works Cited
Morgan, Gareth. Images of Organization. Updated ed. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2006.
Acknowledgments
Claire would like to thank the Organizational Theory class for providing a stimulating learning community this semester as well as her family for their continual support.
Kourosh would like to thank Barbara for a semester of growth and would like to thank Claire, Aaron, and the rest of the class for a great semester.
Aaron would like to thank Barbara, the class as a whole, and my many academic and life advisors.