How Prof. Amanda Hollis-Brusky’s paper on the promotion of a theory of executive power and its consequences is making its way to the other two branches of government

In 2011, during her first year at Pomona College, Politics Professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky wrote a paper on the rise of the “unitary executive theory,” used in recent decades to promote the notion of the primacy of presidential power and limit the autonomy of federal agencies. The paper was part of Hollis-Brusky’s larger work on the conservative legal movement.

In January, U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Richard Blumenthal and Mazie Hirono cited and relied heavily on Professor Hollis-Brusky’s in their amicus curiae brief filed in a big U.S. Supreme Court case Seila Law v. CFPB, which may decide the fate of the Obama-era Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Arguments are set for March 3.

It’s 1920, and Pomona College is entering the Roaring Twenties—facing, among other things, the challenges of dancing and Hollywood.

Everybody Dance

With the close of World War I came a push to overturn the strict college rules against dancing on campus. As recently as 1918, an editorial in The Student Life had lamented that “The principle of non-dancing has become ingrained into the very fiber of the institution for reasons which the executives can best express, and it is worse than futile for us to oppose it.” The post-war culture shift, however, soon carried away that prohibition, and, as informal campus dances became common, the efforts of the administration turned to managing them. A floor committee of four men and four women supervisors were authorized “to reprimand any undesirable form of dancing or to request any person to leave the floor.” By 1922–23, four all-college formal dances were being conducted annually in the “Big Gym”—the Senior-Freshman Dance, the Christian Dance, the Military Ball and the Junior Prom.

Silence is Golden

As Hollywood became the movie capital of the world, the Pomona campus soon came into demand as a collegiate set. The Charm School, a silent feature starring Wallace Reid, was the first known movie to be shot on campus, with much of it filmed around Pomona’s Sumner Hall in 1920.

1,000 Strong

The 1921 Metate (published in 1920) notes that for the first time the number of Pomona alumni has topped 1,000.

For more tidbits of Pomona history, go to Pomona College Timeline.

Marshall Scholar

Isaac Cui ’20 has won a prestigious Marshall Scholarship to fund his graduate studies in the United Kingdom next year. During his two years in the U.K., Cui hopes to study at the London School of Economics as well as study political science at the University of Manchester.

Churchill Scholar

Elise Koskelo ’20 has been named one of only 16 American students to win this year’s Winston Churchill Foundation Scholarship to study and conduct research at the University of Cambridge. She plans to study quantum magnetism and superconductivity.

Sustainable Thesis

The senior thesis of Sara Sherburne ’19, titled “Let’s Get Sorted: The Path to Zero Waste,” was recognized last fall by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education as one of six winners of the national Campus Sustainability Research Award.

Solar Cell Grant

Pomona and Harvey Mudd were recently awarded a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation Grant of $442,960 for new lab equipment to support research and development of next generation solar cells.

Paralympic App

While attending the 2015 Paralympic National Games in his home country of India, Arhan Bagati ’21 saw athletes literally crawling up stairs. So he created an app to guide Paralympians to locations that are accessible, including bathrooms, restaurants, theatres and more. The result was InRio and its successor, the IndTokyo app for the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games, available on iTunes and Google Play.

Post/Truth

The theme of the Humanities Studio’s 2019–20 speaker series is “post/truth,” exploring the various facets of today’s post-truth (un)reality through a series of speakers and seminars, including a “Fake News” Colloquium.

Interim Dean of the College Bob Gaines holds a fossil of elrathia kingii, more commonly known as a trilobite.

Interim Dean of the College and Professor of Geology Bob Gaines threw a geological twist into the College’s opening convocation on the first day of the fall 2019 semester by presenting a very small but very old gift to each member of the entering class. The gift—a 504-million-year-old fossil trilobite from the Wheeler Shale in western Utah, was both a memento of the students’ first day of classes at Pomona and a focal point for his welcoming speech, which focused on time, on both the geological scale and the human scale of the four-year college journey upon which each of the new members of the Class of 2023 has now embarked.

“What you hold,” Gaines explained, “is an animal half a billion years old. In Earth terms, this beast is a mere youngster. It appeared after 89 percent of Earth’s history had already elapsed. The last 500-plus million years—which constitute the entire history of complex life on Earth, represent only the most recent 11 percent of Earth’s history and a far, far lesser proportion of the history of our universe.”

After tracing the very long journey each of those tiny fossils had taken through ancient seabeds, rock formations, geological uplifts and ice ages to the present day, he quipped: “So, this is the perspective from which I speak when I remind you that four years is actually a relatively brief expanse of time.”

On the first day of her Devising Theatre class last spring, when Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance Jessie Mills proposed the idea of developing a student-produced play as part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival, five of her students leapt at the opportunity. The festival—an open-access celebration of theatre in L.A.—brings hundreds of new plays to professional theatres each summer. And so, for one week in June at the Broadwater Black Box theatre, Ally Center ’21, Roei Cohen ’21, Alex Collado ’20, Noah Plasse ’21 and Abdullah Shahid ’19 brought to life onstage their own serio-comedy, titled How to Adult. Recent graduates Rachel Tils ’19 and Jonathan Wilson ’19 were also involved as directors.

The students not only had to create their own play; they also had to produce it, including negotiating a contract with a venue for dates and times and setting up and breaking down their own sets. “Creating and producing this work is truly at the center of the liberal arts,” says Mills. “These students pulled from a myriad of sources, experiences and materials to collaboratively synthesize their ideas into one cohesive vision.”

Try not to drool when you read the menu that won Pomona College chefs Amanda Castillo, John Hames, Marvin Love and Angel Villa a silver medal in a recent national cooking competition.

First course: branzino with kohlrabi slaw, ginger-scented maitake fish broth and tempura snap peas.

Second course: pork belly and shrimp with herb-roasted mashed potatoes, tomato purée and roasted corn.

Third course: vegan almond cake with caramelized peaches, bionda ganache, raspberry sauce and cashew and popcorn brittle.

Buffet course: Korean spiced tri-tip with moong bean pancakes, pickled cauliflower and jasmine rice.

The event was the team competition sponsored by the American Culinary Federation during its 25th Annual Chef Culinary Conference at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, last June.

Esther Brimmer with her father, Andrew Brimmer, at the 1983 commencement exercises.

Last May, when foreign policy expert and former member of the Obama administration Esther Brimmer ’83 stepped up to the podium in Marston Quad as the featured speaker for the 2019 commencement exercises, she was following in some big footsteps—her father’s. Andrew Brimmer, then governor of the Federal Reserve, was Pomona’s featured commencement speaker in 1983, the year his daughter graduated from Pomona. In her address, Esther Brimmer recalled her father’s advice to her: “Run with the swift. … Whatever you do, you should try to learn from the best.”

Esther receives an honorary degree at Pomona’s 2019 Commencement

Pomona College’s Writing Center isn’t just about writing any more.

Last summer, the center received a $250,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations to expand its mission to support oral and visual communication as well. The two-year grant will fund programs in which students can hone not only their writing skills but also their speaking ability and their competency in dealing with visual communications in an increasingly image-driven world.

“Through the new center, we propose a transformative reconceptualization of how we understand literacy and how we teach key forms of communication in the 21st century,” says Kara Wittman, director of college writing and assistant professor of English. “Flexibility, thoughtfulness and deliberateness in all these areas will ensure that all Pomona graduates leave the College able to write and speak effectively, advocate compellingly and have an impact on the real-world issues they care about.”

The new Center for Speaking, Writing and the Image will be a leader among liberal arts colleges in supporting written, oral and visual literacies at a single site.

Nine Pomona College recipients of Fulbright fellowships boarded airplanes this fall, headed everywhere from Indonesia to Lithuania. Four others declined the award   to pursue other plans. Here’s the list of new Fulbright fellows, with their majors and destinations:

• Natasha Anis ’19, English major, teaching in Indonesia
• Ellena Basada ’16, English major. teaching in Germany
• Sarah Binau ’19, cognitive science major, teaching in Brazil.
• Tiffany Mi ’19, anthropology and French major, teaching in Spain
• Andrew Nguy ’19, Asian studies major, studying contemporary tea culture in China
• Jessica Phan ’19, molecular biology major, studying the chemistry of addiction in Portugal
• Megan Rohn ’18, international relations major, teaching in Lithuania
• Ivan Solomon ’19, international relations and Middle Eastern studies major, teaching in Morocco
• Laura Zhang ’19, cognitive science major, teaching in Taiwan

The first season of Sagecast, titled “Backstories,” features Pomona faculty members discussing how they came to study what they study, teach what they teach and love the field they love. Sagecast offers our extended community a chance to listen in on vibrant intellectual conversations—whether on the train, in the car, at the gym or at home. Listen at Pomona College Sagecast or look us up on the podcast sites of Apple, Google or Spotify. Here’s a look at season 1: