Occidental College history

In 1909, the Pomona College Board of Trustees suggested a merger between Pomona and Occidental, but the proposal came to nothing.

As early as 1910, the year Ki Rhee Lee received his degree as our first Asian-American graduate, almost 10 percent of alumni had foreign addresses.

In 1912, the school began construction of a new campus located in Los Angeles' Eagle Rock neighborhood.

Two weeks after Booker T. Washington came to visit Occidental, on March 27, 1914, Swan, Fowler, and Johnson Halls were dedicated at its new Eagle Rock campus.

Patterson Field, today one of the oldest collegiate sports stadiums in Los Angeles, was opened in 1916.

In April 1917, shortly after the United States entered World War I, the college formed a Students Army Training Corps to aid the war effort.

The Occidental College chapter of Phi Beta Kappa was installed on May 12th, 1926.

Occidental launched one of the country's first Upward Bound programs in 1966, aimed at increasing the number of low-income, underrepresented high school students who become the first in their family to go to college.

Also in 1969, the school opened its first two co-ed dormitories, and two more followed a year later.

Ben Affleck, in full Benjamin Geza Affleck-Boldt, (born August 15, 1972, Berkeley, California, United States), American actor and filmmaker who played leading roles in action, drama, and comedy films but who was perhaps more renowned for his work as a screenwriter, director, and producer.

Affleck’s first role was in a Burger King commercial, and in 1984 he appeared in the Public Broadcasting Service’s miniseries The Voyage of the Mimi.

In 1988, John Brooks Slaughter, formerly Chancellor of the University of Maryland, became Occidental's first black president.

In November 1990, the college, initially established as a Presbyterian institution but no longer religiously affiliated, rededicated the campus' main chapel as the Herrick Memorial Chapel and Interfaith Center.

The result was Good Will Hunting (1997), a drama that starred Damon as Will Hunting, a brilliant mathematician working as a janitor at MIT, and Affleck as his childhood friend; the film also featured Affleck’s brother, Casey.

In Pearl Harbor (2001) he played an enthusiastic American pilot fighting alongside the British in World War II. Although the film was largely panned by critics, it was a box-office success.

In 2002 he appeared as CIA agent Jack Ryan in the successful film The Sum of All Fears, which was based on Tom Clancy’s espionage best seller.

In 2003 Affleck costarred with Jennifer Lopez in Gigli, which received scathing reviews.

In July 2006, Susan Westerberg Prager became Occidental's first female president.

In 2007 Affleck directed his first feature film, Gone, Baby, Gone.

In July 2009, Jonathan Veitch, formerly dean of The New School's Eugene Lang College, became Occidental's 15th president, and the first native Angeleno president.

Affleck later directed and starred in Argo (2012), the true story of a fake film production that provided cover for a CIA rescue mission during the Iran hostage crisis.

In 2016 Affleck also portrayed a math savant who works as a bookkeeper for gangsters and drug cartels in the thriller The Accountant.

Movies from 2019 included Triple Frontier, a thriller in which a team of former Special Forces operatives face a series of moral dilemmas after staging an elaborate heist.

In July 2020, Harry J. Elam, Jr., formerly vice provost for undergraduate education at Stanford University and renowned for diversity and inclusion initiatives in liberal arts curricula, became Occidental's 16th president.

He later reteamed with Damon, on Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel (2021). The medieval drama was based on a true story of a woman who accused a squire (Adam Driver) of rape, resulting in a trial by combat between the alleged attacker and her husband (Damon); Affleck played a debauched count.