The Consortium of Liberal Arts Schools and Independent Colleges (CLASIC) is a professional organization, established in 1979. Originally known as the Small College Consortium with a membership of 14 colleges, CLASIC now includes members from more than 25 Southern California colleges and universities.
This group was founded by Career Center Directors of the Claremont Colleges. We met bi-weekly as a group and I imagine this still happens in some form today; one of our regular gripes was that there was no local group for those at small liberal arts colleges. We decided to take the plunge and get a group together from area liberal arts colleges and to include USC since we were on friendly terms with their staff and they seemed to share many of our concerns, although on a much larger level.
We decided not to name the group, but rather to have the new members come up with the name. The group was very successful, then began to meet erratically for a few years. The Director at Claremont McKenna College at that point decided that the group need to be reinvigorated and I volunteered to serve on that committee.
Founding members included Ellen Townsend of Claremont McKenna, Karen McAndrew of Harvey Mudd, Anna Garza of Pitzer, Jo Anne Cripe of Scripps, and Lauren Stolper at Pomona.
CLASIC has come a long way from the days when we had to figure out how to set up not for profit status and send out paper flyers advertising meetings since email was in its infancy as BITNET, which was used mostly by faculty.