A Brief History of Oxy
The following events in the history of Occidental College highlight Oxy’s 118-year heritage.
April 20, 1887: Articles of incorporation are approved by California’s Secretary of State. “The Occidental University of Los Angeles, California” is founded by a group of Presbyterian clergy and laymen.
Sept. 20, 1887: The cornerstone is laid for the first building in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles.
Oct. 8, 1888: The College’s first term begins with 27 men and 13 women students. Tuition is $50 per year.
June 21, 1893: Occidental awards its first degrees to Maud E. Bell and Martha J. Thompson.
Dec. 16, 1895: The Oxy-Pomona football rivalry begins—Southern California’s oldest. The Tigers shut out the Sagehens, 16-0.
Sept. 13, 1898: The academic year begins with 15 students on the new campus in the Highland Park district of Los Angeles.
June 15, 1905: Robinson Jeffers, age 18, destined to become one of America’s finest poets, graduates from Oxy in a class of 12.
Nov. 15, 1905: “Io Triumphe” makes its first appearance in The Occidental.
Fall 1906: Glee Club founded.
1907: Student body president Clarence Spaulding 1907 is named Occidental’s first Rhodes Scholar.
March 22, 1911: Former President Theodore Roosevelt visits the College.
Oct. 16, 1911: President William Howard Taft visits the College and addresses the students.
January 1912: Construction begins on the Eagle Rock campus.
March 1912: President John Willis Baer announces the trustees’ decision to convert Oxy into an all-men’s school. Students protest, and the idea is abandoned.
Fall 1912: Women’s Glee Club established.
September 1913: A College committee rules that only upperclassmen may wear corduroys.
March 13, 1914: Booker T. Washington visits campus to talk to students and faculty.
March 27, 1914: Swan, Fowler, and Johnson halls are dedicated on Occidental’s 25th anniversary (which was postponed two years to be celebrated on the new Eagle Rock campus).
June 17, 1914: The first commencement exercises are held on the Eagle Rock campus.
Feb. 16, 1916: Amid much controversy, President Baer announces a drive to raise $1 million in 10 days. The effort nets $400,000.
April 1917: The College Army Corps is formed to aid the war effort.
Jan. 25, 1925: The College newspaper staff resigns in protest of a plan to establish a men’s campus in the Santa Monica mountains. The plan is later dropped for lack of funds and support.
June 25, 1925: Hillside Theater is dedicated with a production of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis. The theater is renamed Remsen Bird Hillside Theater in June 1971.
May 12, 1926: Installation of Delta Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
Sept. 27, 1926: Mary Huggins Gamble, widow of trustee David B. Gamble, becomes the College’s first woman trustee.
Nov. 7, 1928: The College Union is officially opened. (The union is later named in memory of Robert Freeman, after his death.) Tuition is $250 per year.
July 1932: The Four Marx Brothers film portions of Horse Feathers on Patterson Field. More than 30 Oxy men and women are used as extras, as well as the entire Tigers football team. A still from the film, taken on the Oxy campus, appears on the cover of Time on Aug. 15, 1932.
Sept. 19, 1933: Julia A. Pipal, head of residence and social activities, releases a list of regulations requiring Sunday social events be “as inconspicuous as possible” and barring women students from visiting fraternity houses without chaperones.
April 15-19, 1940: A “Peace Week” is held, during which students debate the pros and cons of U.S. involvement in the war in Europe.
Dec. 9, 1941: First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visits the campus to speak about the war.
April 1943: Fifteen seniors are called to active duty in the Navy V-7 Program.
July 1943: A Navy V-12 unit is established on campus. Fifty-three enlisted reserve soldiers leave for active duty.
1946: Housing for veterans and their families is erected adjacent to Patterson Field by the Federal Public Housing Authority.
Oct. 5, 1946: The first all-College barbecue is held and continues as an annual event until 1971.
Dec. 9, 1947: “The Bob Hope Show” is broadcast from Thorne Hall as a benefit for the College’s War Memorial Fund.
Aug. 5, 1948: Sammy Lee ’43 becomes the first Asian-American to win an Olympic gold medal with his performance in the 10-meter platform at the 1948 Olympic Games in London. Four years later, he wins a second gold in the 10-meter and a bronze in the 3-meter springboard in the Helsinki Olympics.
Fall 1948: History of Civilization is introduced into the curriculum.
Sept. 18, 1951: Charles Laughton, Charles Boyer, Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Agnes Moorehead present Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell in Thorne Hall.
Jan. 12, 1954: First Fifty Year Club Day held on campus.
June 1956: An unbroken string of conference victories and Olympic champions under Payton Jordan culminates in a national small college champonship in track and field.
Dec. 20, 1958: Seniors John Paden and Aaron Segal both are awarded Rhodes Scholarships in the same year—a unique achievement for an institution of Oxy’s size.
July 7, 1960: The Summer Drama Festival raises its curtain on the steps of Thorne Hall.
Nov. 3-4, 1960: Poet Robert Frost visits campus as a Remsen Bird Lecturer.
Nov. 10, 1960: The Willis H. Booth Music-Speech Center is dedicated.
July 27, 1962: Time calls Occidental a “little giant” in a story on the College’s rise to national prominence.
Fall 1963: Three-term calendar replaces two-semester system.
Oct. 8, 1964: Herrick Chapel is dedicated.
Nov. 6, 1965: Rush Gym is dedicated.
March 8, 1966: Republican California gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan speaks on campus.
Oct. 19, 1966: Eileen Norris Residence Hall is dedicated.
1967: The Oxy Olde Boys rugby club is established, drawing former Tiger football players and sports nuts alike.
April 12, 1967: Martin Luther King speaks at Occidental.
May 27, 1968: Coons Administrative Center is dedicated.
March 18, 1969: A committee on college residence recommends that two residence halls become coed. Two years later, two more halls follow suit.
March 23, 1969: The Occidental Glee Clubs, under the direction of the legendary Dr. Howard S. Swan, performs at the International University Choral Festival in Lincoln Center in New York City. Oxy’s choir is one of four in the nation and 16 in the world selected to perform.
May 6, 1970: The faculty votes to suspend classes after the Cambodian invasion and the deaths of students at Kent State University. Oxy students write 7,000 letters to Washington, D.C., protesting U.S. involvement in the war in Southeast Asia.
Jan. 20, 1971: The new addition to the Mary Norton Clapp Library is dedicated.
Spring 1974: Four Oxy professors (Kenneth Atchity, David Axeen, Robert Gross and John Rodes) receive Fulbright grants to lecture abroad.
Nov. 12, 1977: Occidental wins its first NCAA Division III championship when the cross-country team, led by first-year coach Kevin McNair, edges Humboldt State in 36-degree weather in Cleveland.
February 1978: Severe rains topple at least 23 trees, including two eucalyptuses planted in the Quad in 1914.
Fall 1978: Faculty institutes a “core program” in the liberal arts.
Nov. 10, 1979: “Water Forms II,” a kinetic fountain designed by professor George Baker ’58 in memory of Lucille Gilman, is installed. The fountain gains additional visibility as a Vulcan hot spot in the 1984 film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
Oct. 3, 1982: During an NFL strike, CBS broadcasts the Occidental-University of San Diego football game nationally. Occidental wins the game, 34-20.
1983: Stearns Residence Hall is completed. Among its future residents: Ben Affleck ’95.
1984: The Bill Henry Track is constructed at Patterson Field under the auspices of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee.
Oct. 25, 1986: The Weingart Center for the Liberal Arts (formerly Orr Residence Hall) is dedicated.
Fall 1986: For the first time since World War II, the number of women enrolled at Occidental outnumbers men.
Aug. 5, 1989: Keck Theater is dedicated, the Bioscience Building officially opens, and the Volunteer Programs Center (now the Center for Community Based Learning) is launched.
June 30, 1989: Clancy Morrison retires for the second time as director of food services.
Oct. 3, 1990: Occidental Tomorrow, the two-year strategic planning effort for the College, culminates in the publication of its report, Of Excellence and Equity.
Nov. 15, 1990: Women’s Center dedicated.
Dec. 2, 1992: Occidental is featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal in a story on diversity.
Spring 1993: Occidental students win eight national awards: Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, Mellon, two Watsons, a National Science Foundation Fellowship, and a National Physical Science Consortium Fellowship.
April 14, 1994: Norris Hall of Chemistry is rededicated.
April 20, 1994: Samuelson Campus Pavilion is dedicated where the Art Barn and Women’s Gym once stood.
June 4, 1994: The Board of Trustees announces the five-year, $65 million “Compass for a New Century: The Campaign for Occidental.”
1994: Two-semester system reinstated, while the Core Program is revamped and renamed Cultural Studies Program.
Nov. 25, 1997: The Pamela M. Mullin and Peter W. Mullin Family Studio and Art Gallery is dedicated.
April 14, 1999: The J. Stanley and Mary W. Johnson Student Center and Freeman College Union is dedicated.
May 7, 2000: Ending an 18-year drought of national titles for Occidental, the women’s water polo team wins the Collegiate III championship in a double-overtime win over Claremont-Mudd-Scripps.
March 22, 2001: First Lady Laura Bush visits campus on behalf of the Teach For America program.
March 14, 2003: Occidental’s men’s basketball team reaches the Elite Eight in the NCAA Division III tournament—the first SCIAC squad to do so in the tourney’s 29-year history—with a 67-62 win over the Buena Vista Beavers in Storm Lake, Iowa.
Oct. 12, 2003: The Hameetman Science Center is dedicated.
Dec. 4, 2004: Occidental's football team reaches the NCAA Division III Western Regional Final, falling to eventual national champion Linfield.
April 28, 2005: The Occidental College Debate Union wins the first annual Los Angeles Public Debate Championship.
Spring 2005: Applications for admission to Occidental total 5,120—an all-time record.
July 1, 2006: Susan Prager is named as the 13th President of Occidental. She is Occidental's first female president.