30 May, 1968

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Statement By The Presidents of The Claremont Colleges In Response To The Black Students Union

In this official public statement, the presidents of the five Claremont Colleges, and the Claremont University Center pledged to start building a student body that reflected the ethnic distribution within the United States.  In their list of promised responses to the Black Student Union, they included their plan to increase Consortium-wide African American undergraduate admissions to “a minimum of 10%,” and to hire, by September 1968, a full-time African American Admissions Officer to help in the recruitment of minority students. The administrators also promised to admit 5 minority undergraduates from a list of proposed names from the Black Student Union, to increase funding for acquiring Black Studies publications at Honnold Library. They also promised to seek to recruit and appoint faculty members from minorities (especially African American faculty) and to propose to the faculty and curriculum committees at the Colleges to design and introduce additional courses about “minority problems, and the contributions of minority groups to American civilization.” In the final paragraph, the presidents propose the building intercollegiate offerings in the area of Afro-American studies, “that might develop into a field concentration.”

30 May, 1968