The Exit Interview: President Chodosh on Pre-Professionalism, Free Speech, and Administrative Bloat

President Hiram Chodosh sits down to answer tough questions in a final exit interview.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Image credit: Jasper Langley-Hawthorne

President Hiram Chodosh is Claremont McKenna College’s fifth president, assuming the position after serving as Dean of the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. After thirteen years in the role, President Chodosh will be succeeded by former Washington & Lee president William C. Dudley. President Chodosh’s wife, Priya Junnar, will also depart as Director of the Athenaeum. 

In December 2012, the editors in chief of the Claremont Independent, The Forum, and the now-defunct Claremont Portside published an entrance interview with then president-elect Chodosh. Today’s exit interview was coordinated by the Independent and conducted by the 2026-27 editors in chief of the Independent and The Forum.

Dhriti Jagadish: Thank you so much for sitting down with us. First question: What is your fondest memory at CMC?

President Chodosh: These fondest memory questions are really hard because there are so many. So let's see.

There are a number of moments that flash before my eyes. My very first semester, in late September, I was ponded by students. That's probably the first one that comes to mind. The second is the dedication of the [Robert Day Science Center] building and just standing there, looking up at everybody and just taking it all in, like, “How did this possibly happen?”

But the reason that's such a hard question is that my favorite moments are the quiet ones — sometimes in this room with students who are trying to get over some big challenge or have some new opportunity that they're trying to think through. It's that moment of both finding within them some capability that maybe they didn't think they had, or a solution to the problem that they didn't think they could create, and at the same time heightening their own expectations of what they thought they could do. Those are the moments that matter to me most, and in some ways are the most memorable.

Kendall White: The school has changed a lot over your tenure, and a lot of those changes have been positive. But what is one worrying or negative trend that you've noticed and how do you think the school should address that moving forward?

President Chodosh: I think that there are a number of external pressures, specifically, that bear on your generation that are of continuous concern. The first is the ways in which, as precocious young people, you try to decode what success is. Sometimes that leads to benchmarking that then gets internalized as an instrumental and linear strategy of working back from a result. 

People call this hyper-credentialism, but my way of thinking about it [is that] it's a kind of linear instrumentalism, of feeling that “I have to do this today in order to get there tomorrow.” The problem with that thinking is that the world is way too complex to lay out such a neat linear plan. Often, the people that follow those linear plans don't have as much to contribute to opportunities to lead and have impact. The understandable pressure and stress that's reinforced by parents and employers — and accelerated interview schedules and tracking of early internships — has a corrosive impact on openness, curiosity, exploration, [and] mastery of disciplines that broaden the base of your learning capabilities. In the end, [these] are the most important long-term sustaining assets you can develop. 

Now, I think we do a pretty good job in our highly dynamic and aspirational environment, mitigating that [linear instrumentalism] with a very strong community ethos of mutual support, friendship, and social warmth. When I had seniors over the other night, no one was talking first about their future plans — I had to kind of tease that out of them. They were talking about the special experiences that they had here, the relationships, [and] the special inflection points [when] taking on big challenges. 

That [linear instrumentalism] is an exogenous force that bears on all of you in a very significant way, particularly at a time where everyone's telling you that the job that you've been preparing for won't exist — that there's going to be this huge disruption, and that the pressures on the entry-level job market are the canary in the mine. 

Of course, I want each of you to be fluent in the decoding of the world. I want you to be completely fluent in how the world thinks conventionally about you, so that you can manage and navigate those conventions. But I never want you to substitute that for your own inner values framework and the honoring of your own emotional, intellectual resources. 

Dhriti Jagadish: Thank you for that response. But just to complicate it a little bit, this hyper-credentialism you speak of — CMC is partly responsible, right? We have 11 research institutes that freshmen, from the get-go, feel like they need to apply to. We have the Soll Center, which emails you throughout the semester saying, “Meet with us, meet with us.” Perhaps the seniors are reflective and maybe a bit wistful, but freshmen, sophomores, and even juniors, are still stuck in this rat race. 

And of course, CMC’s mission is explicitly forward-looking, professional[ly]-oriented. CMC says that this complements the liberal arts education, but over the past 13 years, have you seen this ethos [of] pre-professionalism detract from the liberal arts? 

President Chodosh: First of all, the massive opportunities that we provide are not responsible for the rat race that you call it. I think there are aspects of the culture, [such as] when people arrive they're trying to decode what the high-prestige opportunities are. Sometimes they look very narrowly at those and so there's a bit of a feeding frenzy. Then after a while, that kind of calms down [as] people hit a wall here and a wall there. 

In fact, the second phase of this is that [students] settle down into, “Okay, I'm doing way too much. Where should I focus?” And then they get into a much deeper set of focal points. That's not altogether a rat race in that negative way — that is actually a way of discovering what your inner purpose is. There are things that we still need to work on in terms of making sure that entry points into [CMC’s] channels of opportunity are not too early and that [they’re] not foreclosed. That's something that we've been working on institutionally, but it's hard because a lot of [CMC’s] programs have their own autonomy, which is a good thing. 

I think that the way that you framed it is inconsistent with my own conception of what we've always been trying to do. We're trying to create a virtuous cycle of liberal arts and leadership experience—not as a balance, not as a competition, even though, in a given moment, things might compete. What we've really tried to do is to create a virtuous cycle in which, yes, you're learning through experience, but then reflecting on [this] experience: “I need to now get deeper into my studies so that the next time I go around this block, I've got more sophistication, more knowledge, more capabilities to offer to that experiential opportunity.” I would say that the research institutes [and] the student organizations — particularly those that are very simulation-oriented — whether it's Mock Trial, Model UN, or the consulting firms that we have — are all laboratories in which students are not just building up their credentials, but they're actually building up their learning capabilities. By the time they graduate, they've had a massive amount of experience and they've also had a level of deep learning through things like a thesis requirement — which far too many universities have relaxed and very few actually take seriously. At the end of that, what I see are students who are deeply and broadly educated, who have a good sense of what gives them joy and what their strengths are, and who are understandably nervous and insecure about what that's going to mean in this future. But [they] are as well prepared as any student body in the country to take those things on without losing themselves in the next stage of competition, [in] the attempt to not only make a living but make a life. 

Kendall White: CMC has a great reputation for preparing students for fruitful careers, as you just spoke about. Another thing that CMC has a reputation for is its free speech climate. Aside from a couple of blemishes over the past couple of years, the school still maintains a high profile in the world of free speech and open expression on campus. But I guess this leads to a potential contradiction. Does CMC’s desire to maintain this free speech reputation come at the expense of not taking riskier moves, [such as] bringing in more controversial speakers to campus, someone like [Republican gubernatorial candidate] Chad Bianco? Or for speakers on the Israel-Palestine conflict, does the bar for security or ID checks at the door close down opportunities for conversation or prevent those speakers from coming to campus in the first place? 

President Chodosh: First of all, when you take into account the Athenaeum, Open Academy salons, and the total gamut of guest speakers in classes, I do think we have an extremely wide gamut of voices here. I think that there are limitations to some of the figures that people ask about. One, of course, is whether they're here for educational purposes and whether the programs are designed for educational purposes. That's a really important set of values we have to keep in mind: not just to create controversy or to provoke, but to actually make sure that whatever event we've designed is one that's educational in purpose. 

The second thing is that security matters. There is this very important relationship between security and safety on the one hand and freedom on the other. I mean, you don't have to think very hard to understand the profound nature of that relationship. If I'm insecure as a person, I'm much less likely to speak up. I'm much less likely to learn from someone else. I'm much less likely to walk across the street if I'm scared of what might occur to me. If I create some level of safety, both physical safety and emotional safety, I have a much better chance of challenging the assumptions that I have, my worldview, [and] my opinions about certain issues. When we have people coming to campus that pose safety or security concerns, we have a very rigorous approach to that. A lot of that you never see; we make [it] as stealth as we possibly can, so there isn't that visibility, always, of the security. And then there are other times where that visibility is very important, and then we take that very seriously. 

And so I don't see these [values] as contradictory. I see them as integral and in their interrelationships and interdependencies. Some of my colleagues and I wrote a piece years ago on how universities and colleges were responding to sexual assault, and it was called “Safety and Freedom: Let's Get It Together” and you can look back at some of the language in that as evidence of this underlying theory of the relationship between these two things.

Dhriti Jagadish: You have spearheaded the college's dialogue programs, namely Open Academy [OA] and the CARE Center. Yet, some believe that the Open Academy's events are catered to conservatives, while others believe the CARE Center is a kind of safe space away from the rest of campus discourse. Are these institutions at odds with each other? And if these are just misconceptions, how do we address these institutional silos in the areas of dialogue?

President Chodosh: I think that these are misconceptions [regarding] the origins of both of these institutional efforts. I think that at times, from a sociological or cultural point of view, you can see that people project into these institutions either what they want out of them or a negative view of what they don't want. Sometimes institutions like this are [a] Rorschach test for the community. You'll see someone who's not very well-informed making a projection about a certain political angle of something that's completely uninformed because they're just seeing what they want to see. It's a kind of implicit bias or salience problem.

If you actually look at Open Academy programming — if you actually look at the full extent of it — I defy anyone to evidence a political bias in it. If you actually look at what's done in the CARE Center and the difficult conversations that they have, I defy anyone to identify a political, you know, an explicit political bias, in what they're doing. Obviously, everything that we do has a political aspect to it. I'm not saying everything's apolitical. I'm just saying that it's not in that design. 

This year, I know that there was a very strong attempt to bring OA and the CARE Center together, so let's just reflect on that: To actually have a dialogue about that problem — or that perceived problem — and then also to recognize that the CARE Center is actually leading peer to peer dialogue sessions throughout the community. The first experience that students have when they come [is] dialogue training run by [CARE Center Director] Vince Greer, and Vince Greer and [Open Academy Director] Ioannis Evrigenis are working hand-in-hand in terms of advancing our Open Academy and CARE goals. 

I would draw your attention back to the fall of 2013 when I started the very first initiative that was the genesis for this: conversations in my living room. I had young alums come back just two weekends ago, say[ing], “Oh, Hiram, we were there at the beginning of both CARE and Open Academy at your living room table.” And these were conversations over race. These were conversations over the Middle East with Muslim students and Jewish students, separately and then together. That created the very first initiative called Personal and Social Responsibility. If you look back at one of the prongs of that initiative, it was free expression and diversity, in one prong. I've always seen these things as vitally interconnected. And so even if there's sometimes drift [in these programs], or if there's a kind of sociological or cultural or political offset, you're always trying to bring them back to that singular lane and common root system.

Kendall White: Another thing we were wondering is how CMC, and you, under your tenure, have approached the issue of administrative bloat, which, over the past two decades, has really taken off, and the numbers on this are a little hard to find, but it seems that CMC has experienced some of this, but not to the same degree as the neighboring Claremont Colleges. So—

President Chodosh: What's your evidence of bloat?

Kendall White: The numbers of administrators have grown, especially, you know, at— 

President Chodosh: In proportion to what?

Kendall White: Pomona and Scripps, in proportion to faculty—

President Chodosh: Do you have the data on it?

Kendall White: and students growing—

President Chodosh: Do you have the data on it?

Kendall White: I mean, we've looked through the websites and Internet Archive-d how many administrators were here. It's absolutely the case that Pomona, Scripps, Pitzer, they hire more and more administrators and—

President Chodosh: Are you talking about their bloat, or are you talking about our bloat?

Kendall White: I'm talking about it as an endemic issue in higher education, so I’m asking how have you approached this as an issue—

President Chodosh: Okay. Fair enough. 

Kendall White: and do you think CMC has bucked the trend or—

President Chodosh: I just don't accept the characterization of us as bloat.

Kendall White: Yeah, I understand that, I—

President Chodosh: That's where you started, though.

Kendall White: I said in higher education.

President Chodosh: We've managed this very, very rigorously. If you look at the proportion of staff to faculty, the proportion of staff to students as our student body has grown — as our faculty has grown — I think you'll find a proportionate increase of staff. Second, we don't increase staff until we actually have a business model and the resources to increase staff. 

Third though, I would just bring attention to some of the underlying reasons why staff in higher ed has grown. One, it used to be that faculty, in part, took on a much greater set of responsibilities for student support. We went into an era where we wanted faculty to focus a lot more on their research, their teaching, and their self-governance. As student services increased, [staff] helped faculty alleviate some of those burdens. I think our faculty do an excellent job here in terms of student engagement, care, relationships, and mentoring. But I'm just saying generally in higher ed, that has been one of the factors. 

The second is that there are a lot of upstream reasons for the need for student services. We have generations of students that have much greater needs in terms of disability accommodation, in terms of support for what has been a pandemic of mental health difficulties, and also a kind of parenting culture, if you will, that I think has in some ways disabled or disempowered [young people’s] self-regulation, self-efficacy, [and] ability to take care of themselves. And so there are some upstream factors that have contributed to what you describe as the growth of the staff burden that that schools have taken on. In comparison to our peers, given the kind of challenges that we've taken on [and] the massive projects we've accomplished, I think that our staff-to-product ratio is extremely favorable. Just in the area of advancement, which includes our development group, our alumni and parent relations group, and our communications group, we were spending three cents on every dollar raised. Three cents — probably the lowest mark in higher education you'd find. Compared to that would be something between six and eight cents. In the nonprofit sector, 20 cents on the dollar is considered still good. 

If you looked at what we've been able to do — if you looked at our facilities team, and what we're actually spending in terms of managing the Robert Day Sciences Center and the Sports Bowl, and our public art program, [and] the constant improvement of our facilities — I think you'd find that very favorable. If you look at the Soll Center, the internship programs and student experience programs are funded almost entirely by philanthropy, and those staff positions [are] funded through philanthropy. If you look at the support for our research institutes, it's incredibly minimal staff support for the amount of product, the amount of opportunities for advanced research that we support. 

So I think, yes, there's some upstream drivers for this. We've managed this very carefully in terms of ratios. We've also been very careful to [ensure] that we're not funding staff positions through short-term philanthropy, but through long, sustained philanthropy. Then when you look at what we're producing, what we're contributing, I put our staff investments up against anyone in the country.

Dhriti Jagadish: 

And as we're winding down here, the penultimate question, what's next for you? 

President Chodosh:

I will keep [a] very strong connection here. I have a faculty position that will allow me to teach in the future. I have to take some time off from here next year, but we'll come back — and that is still an open question exactly how I'm going to use that [position]. I have a long-term, multi-year visiting fellowship at Oxford to spread out a little bit and to enjoy the benefits of another learning community. [There are] some projects to potentially do with [Oxford] in connection to an emerging partnership with CMC. 

Second, I have a number of projects that I want to continue working on. We have a big higher ed collaboration through the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. I will continue to be involved with peers across the country to disseminate a lot of the programmatic investments that we've made here through the Open Academy and other programs. I have some of my three-decade old projects in institutional justice reform, judicial independence, and South Asian mediation that I'll continue to work on. 

But then, to drive through those projects, I have one idea that I've been cultivating to see if I can attack two pretty significant problems at once in our civic sector. 

The first is to recognize that our civic sector is very fragmented. We have between 1.6 million and 2 million nonprofit organizations in the United States. They do tremendous work [and] benefit a lot of people, but they also are siloed, fragmented and, [to] some degree, in zero-sum competition with one another for the same financial, human, and reputational resources. The competition is good, but there's tremendous opportunity cost in the lack of collaboration. It's very rare that, given a social or civic problem, an organization that's really good at response collaborates with one that's really good at prevention. It's rare that one that's very good at deep impact collaborates with one that's very good at scaling, and very few have agentic or strong evaluation capabilities. 

So the first part is to see if I can elevate the very best of those civic leaders or nonprofits to create a fabric of comparative strengths at a higher level of vision, strategy, resources, evaluation, and execution. To do that, there are two major adjustments in the incentive structure that have to be addressed. The first is just ego. You have to convince people that they can have a much greater impact through other organizations than on their own. But second, you have to address the bottom-line financial limitations of each organization and its budgetary responsibilities to itself. And to do that, you need an integrated bargain to come in from some other philanthropic source [and] invest in the collaboration itself rather than in individual institutions. So that's the first problem. 

The second related problem is that we have a very high accumulation of wealth in society that's not entering the philanthropic sector in proportion. If you look at philanthropy over the last half century on a real dollar per annum basis, we've seen increases in philanthropic contributions of only 2.6 percent. Over the last decade, it's been even less: 2.3 percent. Why? Well, one of the many reasons is that a lot of people in control of this wealth don't see good options in the civic sector. They see the same fragmentation and silo effect and lack of good, common, uniform evaluation methodologies and metrics that I do. The thesis is to offer the potential of bringing that wealth to new models of collaboration in the civic sector as a way of putting it to best use — to actually move the wheel, rather than to just improve some little tread on the tire of the wheel. That idea is something I'm going to try to drive into these ongoing projects and possibly some others that develop, to see if I can actually tackle those two problems with what I call a chicken and egg solution.

Kendall White: All right, our last question is, what's next for CMC? What are you optimistic about looking to the future? What's on the horizon?

President Chodosh: The first — already baked in and green-lighted — are some very exciting plans for the campus. The Sports Bowl will be done this summer. The next economics building for the Robert Day School, [Records Hall], will be built probably within the next few years. When that's built, we'll probably be able to take down Bauer South and extend the North Mall all the way from Kravis Center to the Robert Day Sciences Center. When the football field, track, and lacrosse fields are built, football will go across, soccer will move down to the football field, the track will go away, the stadium features will go away, and then we'll also be able to build our diagonal mall running from the Robert Day Sciences Center down to Roberts Pavilion. There's a lot more that becomes possible with those infrastructural changes. 

Second, what I see is growing interest in our humanities programs, political economy and policy groups, our finance and economics cluster for surfacing in more explicit and formal ways: the most cutting-edge pedagogies and experiences for students, project-based learning, [and] collaborative leadership. [We want to] double down in the humanities, on the imagination, on intuition, on creativity, on the things that I think are even more important than ever before, those traditional liberal arts, [to give students the] ability to frame a really good question in a world where knowledge and information, to some extent, is being commodified through AI. And I see this sort of elevation of those laboratories, [that] project-based learning [in] what we've done with the Integrated Sciences curriculum and the Kravis Department. [It’s] just an amazing opportunity for the college, and I can see this in the leadership of our faculty, the interests of our students, and the draw of the attractiveness of these programs to donors. 

Third, I hope the school will continue to work on some really creative structural thinking about the way we price our education. We've started modeling different approaches that would create a much less asymmetric signal to potential applicants about what [CMC] actually costs and a much more transparent way of pricing out the education — and in my view, a much more sensible way of pricing it against the actual ability to pay, in ways that counter the national perversion of pricing against family income. For Americans making $100,000 or less, the price of education for four-year college programs runs about 77 percent of their income. That's just unsustainable. We have a very generous financial aid program, the Kravis Opportunity Fund, and tremendous social support to make sure that we are continuing to be the best in social mobility for students who are coming from families with fewer resources, to be able to, if they choose, earn a very generous living. But I think we have to face the big challenges with how higher ed has created this system of financial aid. 

That said, the college is in this extraordinary position to tell the story that [CMC] can do many things that other institutions think you have to make tough choices about. In particular, we can establish an environment that is very strong on free expression [with] a politically engaged and sophisticated student body, and also have a student body that's committed to social warmth and connection. Friendships should be regarded as not the cost of a difficult conversation, but the foundation for one. Telling that story and drawing new and more expansive audiences to that story is going to be an ongoing opportunity and an ongoing dividend for the kinds of investments that we've all made. 

Kendall White: All right, thank you so much for sitting down with us. 

President Chodosh: Thank you.

This article was published in conjunction with the Claremont Independent.