Fellows Keep Up With the Joneses

In the game of higher education, it’s not who wins or who loses. It’s who is on the board--the board of trustees, that is, or, as it’s called at Claremont University Center and Graduate School, the Board of Fellows.

Friday afternoon was president John Maguire’s annual President’s Forum, this year focusing on “Power: Ambivalence, Ambiguities, Alternatives.”

But the real definition of power came late in the day, at a wrap-up dinner at the home of Maguire and his wife, Billie. There, in a living room crammed with powerful people, Maguire announced that the graduate school had reached its $50-million fund-raising goal in a 2 1/2-year public campaign.

Maguire is an expert at the “board game.” His fund-raising acumen first focused on putting together an extraordinary 45-member Board of Fellows, including names like Capital Research and Management’s Jon Lovelace, Orange County developer David Stein, Southern California Edison’s John Bryson, foundation executive F. Haynes Lindley Jr., retired RCA chairman Thornton F. Bradshaw, Ameron president Larry Tollenaere and civic leaders such as Peggy Phelps and Jean Webb Smith, along with Emmy-award winning actress Barbara Babcock.

Of the $50 million raised: “We have been fortunate. About 40% of that came from the board,” said Ron Olson, Board of Fellows president and attorney and partner in Munger, Tolles & Olson.

Maguire told his dinner guests that when the fund-raising effort had reached $48 million, he called Thomas F. Jones, board member and Jonescorp president, and his wife, Louise. They had given $1 million to start off the alumni portion of the drive. Maguire said he asked Jones: “Would you and Louise give another million? Would you be willing to go to the well again?”

They had agreed, and, as Maguire finished his story, he said he would end as he began, by “passing the hat,” and handed the Joneses two straw skimmers. Jones retaliated by telling Maguire, “You finally gave us a reason to stay off Rodeo Drive.”

Then it was out to the patio for dinner, six tables of Fellows along with four prominent people who were speaking for their supper--Forum participants Matina S. Horner, president of Radcliffe College; former White House Chief of Staff Donald H. Rumsfeld; Roger Rosenblatt, Claremont Graduate School commencement speaker and new weekly columnist for U.S. News & World Report, and Andrea Van de Kamp, Scripps College commencement speaker.

This is one annual event where the table conversation is as lively and challenging as graduate seminars are supposed to be (knowing Maguire’s school chauvinism, he would probably claim that at Claremont such talk is always happening). Fellow and former Huntington Library head Robert Middlekauff, who this semester returned to teaching at UC Berkeley, was enthusiastic about the kind of students he was finding there. “They’re not mindless. They think for themselves. And they are not the ‘me generation’ at all,” he said.

Robert Egelston, the chairman of the board of the Capital Group, said Maguire had let him take a leave from his Fellows duties this year while he chaired a search committee for a new president for the California Institute of the Arts. Not only had he found Steve Levine and recruited him from the Rockefeller Foundation, but, Egelston said, he had also signed himself on as the new chairman of the CalArts board.

After dinner it was toasts galore, topped off by Rosenblatt. After kidding that “I don’t remember when I’ve been quiet so long,’ he said that he rose to toast power. “In one way or another, we owe our lives to language,” and that included the power to make a toast, to express gratitude, to make people feel good, as well as to “cry out” against injustices, to reach toward people in pain, to “praise what we most like about ourselves,” he said.

NICE PARTY--Especially because it raised $175,000 for the Democratic presidential campaign of Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Introduced by Bob Burkett, Interscope vice-president, Dukakis got a chance to say a few thank-yous to a crowd that included producer Freddie and Corinna Fields, Warner Bros.’ Bob and Nancy Daly, 20th Century Fox’s Barry Diller, Disney’s Frank Wells, entertainment lawyer Skip Brittingham and actress Heather Thomas, along with Interscope president Ted and Susie Field, the hosts of the event.