As a young man, Malcolm Douglass talked with his father Aubrey about the difficult formative years of "Claremont Colleges," Phoenix in Academe grew out of those intimate conversations with his father and others, like William Clary, Jerry Voorhis, E. Wilson Lyon, Robert Bernard, his mother Evelyn Douglass, and of course the author of the "Claremont Plan," James A. Blaisdell, who had inspired so many. Why did Blaisdell's Plan fail? Why did Aubrey Douglass abandon Claremont? And how did the Claremont Graduate School (now University) emerge from its ashes. This is a personal history in the best sense, founded upon a forty-year commitment to the Graduate University and upon years of work in the Claremont archives. Phoenix in Academe is an elegy for and a celebration of the dream that almost was—and the vision that took its place.