Articles from: 2017

From the Archives

June 28, 2017 by Staff Comments Off

Old News

Pomona’s student newspaper, the oldest in Southern California, was first published by the College’s two literary societies in 1889 as The Pomona Student. In its first year, it was a four-page monthly, financed by student subscriptions that sold for 75 cents per year. The name of the publication changed to The Student Life in 1893. Today it is published weekly by the Associated Students of Pomona College and covers life across the five undergraduate institutions of The Claremont Colleges.

ITEM: Three copies of the student newspaper of Pomona College
DATE: 1891, 1898 and 1924
COLLECTION: The Student Life

If you have an item from Pomona’s history that you would like to see preserved in the Pomona College Archives, please call 909-621-8138.

Heard on Campus

June 28, 2017 by Staff Comments Off

U.S. SEN. BRIAN SCHATZ ’94
ON OPPORTUNITIES TO DO GOOD:
“Every day will give you a chance to change the world.
But it’s not always super clear when your moment arrives. I mean, life isn’t a Marvel movie, when your opportunity for courage and leadership presents itself in an obvious way, when the bad guys show up with ominous music. What do you do when human rights and civil rights are undermined during your comfortable life, sliver by sliver, minute by minute? What do you do when the sea levels rise millimeter by millimeter? What do you do when you see injustice, but your life is becoming more successful by the day? You do whatever you can with whatever you have. That is your responsibility as of today, as of your graduation from Pomona College. You have done very well. Now you have to do good.” (The U.S. senator from Hawaii spoke at Commencement 2017.)

MYRLIE EVERS-WILLIAMS ’68
ON COMING TO POMONA COLLEGE:
“IT HELPED, IN A SENSE, TO BRING
together the different parts of a shattered body, of a shattered mind, of a shattered family, and bring hope, when there was really no hope, that my children and I could survive and not only survive, but thrive here on this campus.” (The civil rights leader spoke at Alumni Weekend 2017.)

JUDGE RICHARD TARANTO ’77
ON WORK THAT MATTERS:
“THERE IS NOT MUCH THAT’S MORE
satisfying than being able to exercise a craft well, which takes a lot of work, and if you can be
excellent at work that you have come to believe, at some moral or philosophical level, is worth
doing, the combination can be wonderful.” (The U.S. appeals court judge spoke at Alumni Weekend 2017.)

BRIAN TUCKER ’67
ON MOTIVATING PEOPLE TO PREPARE FOR DISASTERS:
“A HIGH-CONSEQUENCE, LOW-PROBABILITY
event is pretty unmotivating. But we have found, in all the cities we’ve worked in around the world, if you talk about the safety of the parents’ children, that motivates them. As some of us say, this is the ‘gateway drug’ to disaster reduction—to talk about schools.” (The founder of GeoHazards International spoke at Alumni Weekend 2017.)

PENNY DEAN ’77
ON TRAINING DISTANCE SWIMMERS:
“IN THE POOL, YOU’LL PASS THAT
barrier, that pain threshold, and you’ll feel it in your side, and if you just say, ‘Oh great—here’s the pain. Now go faster. Go harder. Go harder now.’ And you’ll get through it. You’re on top of the world.” (The record-breaking swimmer and former Pomona College swim coach spoke at Alumni Weekend 2017.)

Object Lesson

June 28, 2017 by Mark Wood Comments Off

What’s in Your Desk Drawer?

We asked three members of the Pomona College campus community to show us the strangest or most interesting object in one of their desk drawers and to tell us the story behind it. Here’s what we found.

Daodejing

(1) Samuel Yamashita, the Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, reaches into the bottom drawer of his desk, which harbors intriguing artifacts of every shape, and pulls out a bound volume of bamboo strips, each bearing a vertical row of tiny Chinese characters. It is, he explains, the famous Daoist classic called the Daodejing, which translates to “The Classic of the Way and Virtue.”

He found and purchased this beautiful reproduction in the bazaar in Turfan, an old Silk Road town in western China. Probably written by several different individuals between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, he explains, the text also contains some archaic passages that may date from the second millennium BCE.

“I started reading it in the original Classical Chinese when I got to Pomona in 1983 and spent one to two years going through the 81-chapter text, passage by passage, word by word,” he says. “I still can recite passages from memory. I tell my students it is the perfect desert-island book, since it is complex, mysterious and allusive, and its meanings are inexhaustible—or perhaps infinite.”

“Last Tour to Endor” pin

(2) Brenda Rushforth, assistant vice president for human resources, says she has been a Star Wars fanatic ever since 1977, when she begged her mom to take her to the first movie for her birthday. She then passed the obsession along to her son, buying him his first light saber at Star Wars Celebration IV in 2007.

All told, the family has attended six Star Wars conventions—one in Los Angeles, one in Anaheim, three in Orlando, Florida, and one in London. Along the way, she has met a veritable who’s who from various Star Wars productions, including original director George Lucas and actor Mark Hamill. The commemorative “Last Tour to Endor” pin that she keeps in her desk drawer is a memento of a special event by that name held at Disney Hollywood Studios in Orlando in 2010 in honor of the ceremonial closing of the Star Tours ride. The attendees had an opportunity to enjoy the ride one last time before the original version was shut down for refurbishment.

small rubber stamp

(3) Eleanor Brown ’75, the James Irvine Professor of Economics, paws through a couple of desk drawers, pulling out occasional odds and ends: a couple of bills in Kenyan currency (“Students returning from study abroad often bring samples of currencies along with their many stories”) and a CD titled “The Slippery Noodle,” (“Indiana’s oldest bar and a great place to listen to the blues”). Finally she settles on a small rubber stamp. “In my early 40s, I did a three-year tour of duty as an associate dean,” she explains. “One of the great pleasures of the job was working with the office staff. Jane Arnal and I had offices at one end of the suite, and one of her many artistic outlets was making ink stamps. This one was a gift to me during the time I was the sexual harassment officer of the College.”

Milestones

June 28, 2017 by Staff Comments Off

Commencement 2017

Class speaker Dominique Curtis ’17 brings her capped-and-gowned daughter with her to the stage to accept her diploma from President David Oxtoby.

U.S. Senator Brian Schatz ’94 of Hawaii delivered the principal address at Pomona’s 124th Commencement exercises on May 14, 2017, as a total of 372 graduates stepped forward to receive their undergraduate degrees. Other speakers and honorary degree recipients were researcher and educator Sarah C. R. Elgin ’67, P’05; human rights lawyer and activist Gay McDougall; and philanthropists Frederick “Rick” P’95 and Susan Sontag ’64, P’95.

The graduation ceremony was the 14th for outgoing President David Oxtoby, who gave his final charge to a Pomona graduating class, telling the Class of 2017, “I call on you to engage politically, and to use your Pomona education for that purpose. It is not enough simply to complain privately about some action being taken. Organize, protest, vote, run for office, and engage in the political world. While some might think ‘politics’ a dirty word, we have heard from Senator Schatz today that it can also be a high calling and an opportunity to help craft solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems. It can be difficult, but sometimes you must compromise, and you must work with people with whom you disagree. In doing so, you may not always accomplish exactly what you want, but you just might move forward the causes you care deeply about.”

Estela Sanchez ’17 sports a unique lei of folded dollar bills.

Announced during the ceremony were 2017 Wig Award winners (from left) Philip Choi, Tzu-Yi Chen, Vin de Silva, Donna Di Grazia, Michael K. Kuehlwein, Pardis Mahdavi, John Alldredge Clithero ’05 and David R. Kauchak.

Rodrigo De Leon ’17 awaits his turn to pick up his diploma.

President Oxtoby delivers his last charge to a graduating class.

During the processional, faculty line the walkway to applaud Eric Montgomery ’17 and the other new Pomona graduates.

—Photos By Carlos Puma

Letter Box

June 28, 2017 by Staff Comments Off

Hidden Pomona

I WAS DISAPPOINTED to see one glaring omission in the item about the 1969 bombing in Carnegie in the spring 2017 issue of PCM. While there were no injuries from the bomb at Scripps, that was, sadly, not true at Pomona. That bomb did not simply explode in the mailbox—it was picked up by a young secretary in the Government Department, and it exploded in her hand. According to the Los Angeles Times, she was Mary Ann Keatley, 20, wife of a CMC student. She had her “left eye ripped open and her right one penetrated by a fragment.” She also lost two fingers on her right hand. While the crime was never solved, there was considerable speculation at the time that the Vietnam War may not have been the motivation. Interested alums can use the research skills learned at Pomona to delve into newspaper archives for more information about the bombing and the turmoil on campus at the time. Both were heavily covered in Southern California, and the bombing made national news.

—Diane Pyke ‘69
Port Charlotte, Fla.

Editor’s Note: Please keep in mind that the sidebar about the Carnegie bombing was a short excerpt from a much longer “Hidden Pomona” podcast. The full podcast covers these tragic facts in detail, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in knowing more about that sad piece of Pomona history.

MY GRANDMOTHER, Katharine B. Hume, was 1904 class secretary. I have letters and class (1904) snapshots of Winston Dickson, Pomona College’s first Black student, who was mentioned in “Hidden Pomona” in the spring 2017 issue of PCM. He founded a law firm in Houston, Texas, that still exists. He never got back to a class reunion—it was too far.

—Katharine Holtom Jones ’61
Alpine, Calif.

Fact or Myth

The Men’s Glee Club of 1932

IN THE SPRING 2017 issue of PCM, in the section titled “Fact or Myth,” I saw the picture of the Pomona College Glee Club and read the story about them winning the National Championship in St. Louis. This was a long-standing story in my family about my father’s participation in the Glee Club. (I believe he is the third person from the left in the front row of the picture.) His name was Richard G. Henderson, and he was in the Class of 1934. I never knew my father because he died when I was 1 year old. After graduating from Pomona in 1934, he went on to St. Louis University Medical School and graduated from there in 1938. During World War II, he was at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md, and was working on a vaccine for scrub typhus, a disease that the American troops were contracting in the Pacific theater. He, unfortunately, contracted the disease while working on the vaccine and died from the disease at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda in 1944.

I have read PCM for many years and really appreciate the excellent quality and informative nature of the magazine.

—William G. Henderson ’65
Denver, Colo.

I ENJOYED READING about “Hidden Pomona” in the spring issue of PCM. The story of the Men’s Glee Club of 1932 in “Fact or Myth” brought back memories to share. Several Glee Club members sent children to Pomona, including John Shelton ‘35, Louis Ronfeldt ’34, Leonard “Agee” Shelton ‘32 and Juan Matute ‘34. The tributes include John’s daughters Heidi ’61 and Lucy ’65 (a soprano), David Ronfeldt ’63, Agee’s children John ’63 and Jane ’65, and Juan’s children Juan Jr. ’63 and Gini ‘66.

Agee was a bass and later a trustee. His son, John, was my close friend from grade school on. Agee told us of the story of the National Championship competition in St. Louis. The Glee Club sang Pomona’s original song “Torchbearers” to win the title, so “Torchbearers” is still the reigning national champion song. Moreover, the judges were impressed that the Pomona Glee Club did not have a director present and yet sang extremely well.

Agee’s daughter, Jane Shelton Livingston, notes that while they were on the train to St. Louis, they sang and sang and sang to perfect their a cappella chops. She added that often-reigning Yale was the school to beat. Also, the Glee Club’s director, “Prof” Lyman, was the guiding force and beloved by all. It’s true he didn’t conduct the singers, but he certainly prepared them and inspired them.

Two more things: First, the 1932 championship was the 17th annual event, not the first. It was the first time in St. Louis, and the prior 16 events were held in New York. Second, the runners-up were (not necessarily in order) Penn State and New York University. Yale is not included in the “Final Three” choruses in the excerpt. It does not tell us who was second and who was third.

There is probably much more to the 1932 Glee Club story. I hope that additional people will write in.

—Robert Benson ‘63
Davis, Calif.

OUR FATHER, Juan Matute ’34, arrived at Pomona College a few years after he had come to Claremont from his birthplace in Guadalajara, Mexico. He had yet to master academic English. Imagine how thrilling it was for him to travel across the country with the Glee Club. It was an experience of his lifetime and one that he treasured throughout his life. We still have his scrapbook and the memorabilia he collected from the tour, including matchbooks, napkins and pictures.

He was the first musical director for the Mexican Players of Padua Hills. He also played piano, guitarron and bass. He not only was the musical director but, as well, acted and produced many of the plays and musical concerts there. He met his wife, Manuela ’35, at Padua Hills, where she was a singer, dancer, actress and waitress. Manuela sang in the Women’s Glee Club at Pomona.

When our father died in 1992, we played “Torchbearers” in honor of what Pomona College meant to him.

—Gini Matute-Bianchi ’66
Aptos, Calif.
and Juan Matute Jr. ’63
Claremont, Calif.

IN “FACT OR MYTH” from the spring 2017 issue, the writer has added a new myth, that of the flightless sage grouse. While it has a chunky body and does not migrate, it is decidedly not flightless. It can fly up to 50 m.p.h on short local flights of up to five or six miles. As a bird photographer, I have watched their leks during mating displays many times, and I can personally debunk this one before it goes any further.

—Mary Jane Gibson ‘68
Edmonds, Wash.

Cecil 1.0

THERE’S AN ARTICLE in the spring PCM about Cecil 3.0, where the writer mentions not knowing the origin of the first Cecil costume. I can help with that. The costume was made in the summer of 1980. Laura Stiteler ’82 was working in the athletics department and was assigned to (or maybe volunteered to) get a mascot costume for the fall.

I’m sure the budget was generous: The head was very sturdy and professional-looking, and the rest of the costume was far superior to Cecil 2.0. It was a high-end costume, made at the time that the San Diego Chicken was a celebrity. Laura and I had gone to the same San Diego high school, where I’d been the mascot. So toward the end of my freshman year, she asked if I’d be Cecil. I said yes, and I was Cecil for the next three school years, until I graduated.

Laura had ordered such a high-end costume that one part couldn’t take the kind of abuse I gave it. (I got beat up in it twice: once at a football game at Occidental, and once at a football game at CMC. Both times it was my fault; I provoked the other team’s fans.) The orange leather duck feet that it came with started falling apart, so Bob, the equipment manager in the gym, dyed some sweat socks orange and had somebody whip up some more resilient orange feet. I still have the original leather feet in a box somewhere.

The photo (above) is from an ad for the old Coop Store, and the other people in it are Aditya Eachempati ’83 and Liora Szold Houtzager ’83. When I graduated, Dave Peattie ’84 took over being Cecil, and when he graduated, it passed to Allison Sekuler ’86.

For the first year or two that I was Cecil, the dean of freshmen, Elizabeth Chadwick, called herself Cecily. She put out a newsletter authored by Cecily and had a pair of feathers, one blue and one white, that she kept in her office. When she left Pomona for her next job, she gave me the feathers and said now I’d be both Cecil and Cecily. So Cecil was both genders, or no gender, or something along those lines, way back in the 1980s.

Chirp.

—Dennis Rodkin ’83
Highland Park, Ill.

Marine Zoology

IN RESPONSE TO the short article in the spring PCM on the end of the marine zoology program 50 years ago, I took Marine Zoology and Ecology with Professor Willis Pequegnat the summer of ’51. (There was also an advanced course for pre-meds.) The boys slept on the roof under a big blue tent, but girls had to find accommodations in town, so not many girls took Marine Lab. I was lucky that my family home was in Corona del Mar, two blocks from the Marine Lab, and I even kept my summer job (cutting back on hours). Our textbooks were Animals Without Backbones and Between Pacific Tides. We had occasional field trips to local tidepools and a little outboard motorboat to travel in. It was a great experience! Why did it stop in ’67?

—Perdita Myers ’54
Idyllwild, Calif.

Wrenching News

PCM HAS ALWAYS been a good read—a welcoming and dreamy trip to my Pomona past—but also a reminder of Pomona’s vibrancy long after I scooted through the halls of Harwood. But it is wrenching trying to process the devastating news that one of my dear Pomona friends, Marylou Correia Sarkissian, was taken away from her children, family and friends in December.

Any of us who crossed paths with Marylou knew we were spending time with a capital “E” extrovert. Back in 1985, I was a sophomore transfer and had a lot of introvert in my DNA. It was probably a good thing that Marylou was my Harwood neighbor. She drew me out and introduced me to her friends. In a matter of weeks, I already felt like I had a home in the Sagehen roost. Marylou simply had that quality of making most anyone comfortable in her presence.

She’d often come by my room to announce we were going “somewhere” in her white Chevette. A fast-food joint. The gym. Just a cruise down Foothill Boulevard. It didn’t really matter where. We had a great time hanging out and just chatting about life.

Our last semester, Marylou and I both attended a job fair at a hotel near the Ontario airport. I wasn’t entirely sure of my next step post-Pomona, but Marylou was determined, focused and chock-full of résumés for the HR recruiters. I can’t be 100 percent sure—let’s call it 99 percent—but she left that job fair with more interviews lined up than any other attendee. Prestigious hospital and pharmaceutical firms. I can sadly admit, I was a touch jealous on our drive back to campus.

It’s kind of crazy how certain people leave such an impression on your life. Friendships from those formative years bake into your memory. Then one evening, an awful piece of news, and all those memories come flooding back. We are reminded of the special people we knew, and how much pain their families are going through with their loved ones taken away.

I wish Marylou’s children and family all of the possible strength they can muster. Words may not provide tremendous relief at this point in their lives. But they should know she touched a lot of lives in so many positive ways.

Until we may meet again, dear friend.

—Matt Gersuk ’88
Fair Oaks, Calif.

Which Side of History?

I HAVE LONG feared that the path of political correctness that Pomona College has chosen over these last several years would lead to a deterioration of my alma mater and the values it used to represent. The editorial titled “The Right Side of History” in the spring edition of PCM, which actually celebrates this decline, has confirmed my fear and provoked me to take pen in hand.

In March of 2004, a CMC professor named Kerri Dunn told Claremont police that her car had been vandalized and spray-painted with racist and anti-Semitic slurs. The Claremont Colleges immediately erupted in self-righteous indignation and a frenzy of predictable PC actions, including canceling classes; organizing rallies, demonstrations and sit-ins; wearing black shirts; and chanting slogans of “pro-diversity, anti-hate.” When the facts came out, the Claremont Police Department and the FBI determined that Dunn had vandalized her own car and spray-painted the epithets herself, thereby creating a campus-wide hoax.

A student reportedly said of the Dunn affair: “I’m not concerned whether it’s a hoax or not.” Really? Do facts and the historical record not matter anymore? Any historian who was trained, as I was, by mentors such as Vincent Learnihan, John Gleason, Jack Kemble and Margaret Gay Davies, would be horrified by such w anti-intellectual nonsense. Has Pomona College learned nothing since 2004?

I believe that the proper definition of a college is “a community of scholars in search of the truth.” I have difficulty understanding exactly what Pomona College has become, but it is certainly no longer a community that includes me or any other like-minded alums who care about history.

Editor Wood: You, sir, are actually on “The Wrong Side of History,” and you are taking my college down with you.

—Mark Shipley ‘66
Las Vegas, Nev.

IT WAS WITH interest and dismay that I read your column, “The Right Side of History,” in the spring 2017 issue of PCM. You note that “climate change is likely to top the list” of issues that “will seem so ethically obvious that people will wonder how on earth anyone could have gotten them wrong.” First, let me state my belief—and the belief of many others—that climate change is not settled science. The climate-change lobby has trampled on the scientific process in the myopic pursuit of its political and economic objectives and has shown little interest in contemplating the impact on its “research” of legitimate discrepancies in data and its mediocre adherence to the scientific process. The facts are far from conclusive, and the purported remedies even less so.

The more important issue, however, is the event that occurred on the CMC campus on the evening of Thursday, April 6—the intimidation of, and attack on, scholar Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute. Is it not part of the mission statement of Pomona College that, “through close ties among a diverse group of faculty, staff and classmates, Pomona students are inspired to engage in the probing inquiry and creative learning that enable them to identify and address their intellectual passions”?

That hardly seems to be the case any more, given the events of April 6 and the administration’s lack of response. I was unable to find any mention of the Mac Donald event on the College’s website, much less a forceful statement from President Oxtoby supporting Ms. Mac Donald’s rights, the students’ obligations to respect those rights and the College’s intention to punish the aggressors.

So if ever there was a moment for the Pomona community to determine which side of history it wanted to be on, this would surely be it.

—S. Matthew Katz ’98
Bronxville, NY

I OPENED AN Internet site that reprints news articles from around the country this morning. First on today’s list: “Geology professor accepting students into her course based on race and income.” Thinking as I called it up, “What dumb liberal college is getting its five minutes of fame while destroying our educational system?” I saw these words: “Pomona College.”

My school. My beloved Pomona College. Why am I dumfounded, after our reunion two years ago featured confusing signs regarding who could or couldn’t use every public bathroom on campus, and where the alma mater is no longer allowed to be sung, nor a beautiful song that won our Glee Club a national championship long ago? Political correctness over “liberal arts” education (in the outdated definition of those words). Professor McIntyre, what has happened to your department and your school since you retired?

Our culture is declining so fast, this kind of abuse of authority on campus is honored by school administrators almost everywhere, as is violent agitation against free speech by anyone not parroting liberal tenets. The only people allowed to be offended without reprisal are constitutionalists, who don’t carry billy clubs and fire sticks. I no longer contribute to the decline. Nor will I, while the mind-twisting continues.

—Patricia Yingling White, ’66
Colorado Springs, Colo.

Ocelots Where?

HMMM. MIGHT BE a gratuitous detail in the intro, p. 37, of the spring PCM that just arrived: ocelots in Uruguay? Hmmm. No more mention of this in the body of the fine article. But I live in Uruguay several months a year. Ocelots? Never heard of them there. Maybe my ignorance. I do vaguely remember an ocelot (I think) as the subject of a fascinating Kafka-like story by one of (neighboring) Argentina’s greatest 20th-century writers: Julio Cortázar. But in Uruguay? Hmmm.

—Bill Katra ‘68
La Crosse, Wis.

Wonderful Alchemy

I WAS RECENTLY back at Pomona for my 25th reunion. It is hard to say why Pomona friendships remain resilient after so many years—because this was a formative time in our lives? Because of the particular people Pomona attracts? Was it the institution itself that molded relationships in a certain way? Or was it simply a surfeit of sun? It’s a strange and wonderful alchemy.

I am grateful for all of your efforts with PCM. Whether I was in Myanmar or Laos (or Vietnam or India or Hong Kong before that), PCM has been a wonderful means of learning and staying connected. I always feel grateful for being part of the Pomona community after reading an issue.

—Chris Herink ’92
Clifton, Va.

Number 47

HERE’S ANOTHER STORY about the number 47. I will be going with my classmates to see the sun eclipse in August, and they have been kicking around the number 47 with a couple of professors from Pomona. What they have been talking about is far beyond me since my field was theology.

For five and a half years, I did business for the United Methodist Church in 47 languages. I would leave Los Angeles on the first of November, flying west, and hopefully arrive back in Nashville, Tenn., for Christmas. It included large groups like Cantonese and Mandarin and small groups like the Kuki and Meitei tribes in Burma. Some interesting travels and stories.

—Bob Wood ’65
Franklin, Ind.

Kudos

KEEP UP THE good work with PCM. You and your staff are doing an excellent job in my opinion. You have had a number of very good articles in recent issues.

—John H. Davis ’51
Carmel, Calif.

CORRECTION

In the story “The Magical Bridge” in the spring 2017 PCM, the name of Olenka Villarreal’s husband should have been listed as “Robert” instead of “Richard.” Our apologies to the Villarreal family for this uncorrected error.

Stray Thoughts: “I Do Belong Here”

June 28, 2017 by Carla Guerrero ’06 Comments Off

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO this summer, I was nervously anticipating my big move to Pomona College. Even though I traveled less than three miles from my home in the city of Pomona to my dorm on Bonita Avenue, I had no idea what to expect. I was the first in my family to go to college, and my proud immigrant parents, who encouraged me along the way, could not guide me further. I was on my own, or so I thought.

My four years at Pomona were bumpy, at times rough. As an introverted, socially awkward, “first-gen” and low-income brown girl, I felt out of place and had a hard time adjusting. But my Pomona experience smoothed out, thanks to the amazing people I met—the faculty mentors, staff and friends who kindly, and at times more forcefully, asked me to stop leaving campus and stick around for the weekends.

The message they kept repeating was that I belonged here—but it took me a while to believe it.

Today, a lot has changed. I now work for the College as an associate director in the Office of Communications (I am on campus more now than when I was a student); I’m a proud member of the President’s Advisory Committee on Diversity (PACD); and I’m a very proud alumna. (If you read this magazine regularly, you know there’s a lot to be proud of in recent years.)

So this past year, when I was able to join my colleagues, the faculty and students in the hiring process for a new president, I did it with a sense of pride and commitment to the College.

When three candidates were brought to campus, there was one woman, our new president, G. Gabrielle Starr, who elicited such a strong and immediate reaction in the staff forum that one colleague—a young woman of color—stood up during the Q&A portion and said, “I love you.” Gentle laughter followed that comment, but I knew what she meant, and judging from the excited chatter in the room, others were feeling it too.

Later that day, PACD had the opportunity to meet with Starr and we heard about NYU’s Prison Education Project, which she helped launch. It was obvious in her trembling voice and the tears that filled her eyes how much the project, and the lives it touched, meant to her. In that short hour we had with her, I saw in her a champion and role model for our students and a leader for our campus.

It was no surprise then when Board Chair Sam Glick ’04 sent us an email in December announcing Pomona’s 10th president as G. Gabrielle Starr, that a palpable sense of excitement—perhaps even jubilation—was felt across campus. At least, that is how I felt.

This summer, as a new class of Sagehens (of which more than 50 percent are domestic students of color) nervously anticipates the big move to campus in late August, they not only enter a much more diverse campus than the one I knew in 2002, but they also enter at an exciting moment in Pomona’s history: our first woman and first African American president will lead the College.

Although the journey will have its bumps and twists, I know the amazing people who teach here, work here and study here will continue to help the College progress, grow and thrive under Starr’s new leadership. More importantly (and a bit selfishly), I believe having Starr lead my alma mater will give other young women of color that confidence to say loudly and boldly, “I do belong here.”

Carla Guerrero ’06 is a guest columnist for this issue.

Big Bridges Hall of Fame

June 28, 2017 by Mark Wood Comments Off

basement of Bridges Auditorium: a long, meandering hallway lined with photos and posters

In the basement of Bridges Auditorium is a long, meandering hallway lined with photos and posters, offering a history lesson about the amazing parade of celebrities who have passed through here since the facility was completed 87 years ago. Among them are international figures, from Winston Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt to the Dalai Lama and Coretta Scott King; explorers like Admiral Richard Byrd and Amelia Earhart; authors like Sinclair Lewis and Thornton Wilder; poets such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl Sandburg and Maya Angelou; comedians ranging from Bob Hope to Lewis Black; performers like Marcel Marceau and Edgar Bergen; such actors as Basil Rathbone and James Earl Jones; and great musicians from every era and musical style, including Vladimir Horowitz, Ray Charles, Andrés Segovia, Marian Anderson, Duke Ellington, Yehudi Menuhin, Dionne Warwick, Fiona Apple and Taylor Swift. The list, like the hallway, goes on and on.

Signed photo of singer Marian Anderson

Poster for polar explorer Admiral Richard E. Byrd

Poster for singer Ray Charles

Photo of Sir Winston Churchill

Photo of aviator Amelia Earhart

Photo of author Lewis Sinclair

Photo of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay

How to Understand the Mind of a Psychopath

June 28, 2017 by Mark Wood Comments Off

With Kailey Lawson ’17
Double Major: Philosophy and Cognitive Science

FOR THE PUBLIC, the term “psychopath” is almost interchangeable with “serial killer,” but Kailey Lawson ’17 believes most people with the personality disorder get a bad rap, and she wants to devote much of her future work in the field of cognitive science to understanding why they think and act the way they do.

“When I tell people that I study psychopaths, they say, ‘Oh my gosh! Why? Those are terrible people!’” she says. “But I think as we understand personality more, we understand that there’s a continuum. You’re not a good person or a bad person—there are all of these things that play together. And psychopathic traits are the same way—there’s a continuum and, you know, everyone falls somewhere on the spectrum.”

In fact, she notes, the traits that mark psychopathy are often present in prominent members of society. “There’s lots of research that high-powered individuals, like CEOs or surgeons, have many psychopathic personality traits. Do you want your surgeon to feel bad when they’re cutting into you? No, you don’t. You want them to be somewhat detached and have a steady hand and not be thinking ‘Oh no, I’m going to hurt him.’”

High-functioning individuals with psychopathic traits haven’t been studied very much, Lawson says, because of the stigma attached to the term. So, in her senior thesis in cognitive science, she tested people from across the spectrum. “I was looking at inhibition, because a core facet of psychopathic traits is disinhibition, a lack of stopping yourself or controlling yourself, even when you might know you should act otherwise.”

What she found was that people who scored higher on the index of psychopathic traits also demonstrated a real deficit in inhibition. “And so I think that illustrates that people with higher levels of psychopathic tendencies don’t have the same abilities that people with lower levels of them do, and they should be treated differently in the legal system, the same way that we would treat people with other cognitive deficits differently.”

And that starts, she believes, with trying to understand them instead of demonizing them.

From an early age, spurn fiction for nonfiction. Fall in love with true-crime books because of your interest in human motives. Aspire to be a criminal profiler until you learn that your image of a profiler is a TV fiction, not a real job.

In high school, follow your mother’s example and get involved in community service, volunteering at a food bank and local homeless shelter. Fall in love with the work partially because you find it fulfilling and have a deep interest in understanding the problems of the people you’re helping.

Know that you don’t want to follow in your brother Nick’s footsteps at Pomona College, but end up deciding it’s the best place for you anyway. And though you’ve always thought philosophy was abstract and boring, take a first-year seminar with Professor Julie Tannenbaum in medical ethics and discover that the field deals with intriguing real-world challenges.

Love your class in forensic psychology with Claremont McKenna College Professor Daniel Krauss so much that you end up as his research assistant. Major in both philosophy and cognitive science because you see them as two ways of understanding human behavior; then spend a summer with Harvard’s Mind/ Brain/Behavior program in Trento, Italy.

Inspired by a lecture by author/activist Bryan Stevenson on mass incarceration, follow his advice about getting “proximate” to the problem. Spend a summer working behind barbed wire at Patton State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in the California correctional system. While there, take an interest in psychopathy, which you come to believe is misunderstood.

As a senior, write two theses on the subject of psychopathy—an examination of the ethical theory of the blameworthiness of psychopaths for your philosophy major, and a study of inhibition deficits in high-functioning psychopaths for your “cog-sci” major.

Conclude that psychopathic traits should be treated as a mitigating factor in both moral and legal domains, and decide you want to study the subject further to be able to influence public policy. Gain admission to a top Ph.D. psychology program at UC Davis with a professor whose research offers opportunities to pursue your chosen work into the future.

Thesis Season

June 28, 2017 by April Xiaoyi Xu ’18 Comments Off

Cinderella and Its Politics illustration

DURING THE SPRING semester, as Pomona seniors made their way through their final classes and prepared to slip into their graduation gowns, most still had one big item left on their to-do lists: their senior thesis.

The senior thesis is a capstone project that may well be the longest paper students have ever written. Intimidating as the project may sound—it normally takes a full semester or, in some cases, an entire year to complete—the consensus among students is that it lies at the heart of Pomona’s liberal arts education, giving them an opportunity to connect knowledge from across disciplines and to delve into a specific topic in depth.

As a rising senior soon to embark on a similar journey and eager to know more, I interviewed seniors from a variety of majors to learn about their experiences and seek their advice. The 10 projects featured here—ranging from a novel about the politics of fairy tales to an ambitious endeavor to teach computers how to dance—offer just a taste of the diversity of inventive work students are producing in their final year at Pomona.

Cinderella and Its Politics
Bianca Kendall Cockrell ’17, politics major

After an angry fairy sends everyone in her castle into an enchanted sleep, Princess Alexis must go to America to retrieve the one item that will break the curse: an apple. She befriends Rumpelstiltskin and a vegetarian dragon and ends up in New York City, a place where democracy reigns supreme…

This may not sound much like a politics thesis, and indeed, Bianca Cockrell’s thesis is anything but conventional. Instead of writing a traditional academic paper, Cockrell wrote a novel about the politics of fairy tales, an idea that she got excited about when she took Professor Susan McWilliams’ Politics and Literature seminar in the spring of her junior year. Over the following summer, she continued her quest with a Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) project titled “Once Upon a Regime,” for which she traveled around several European countries and visited fairy tale centers, museums and universities, where she sought insights from fairy tale scholars.

As part of her overall project, Cockrell also submitted two other papers—a political theory piece about revolutions and nation building in fairy tales, and a case-study analysis of modernism and the idea of America presented in early Disney princess films. She proudly calls her thesis “a three-pronged political-theory, creative-writing and historical-case study.”

Cockrell’s reasoning for using this unique format stemmed from a “practice what you preach” idea: “I wanted to see how using classic fairy tale characteristics like ambiguous characters and clichéd storylines contributes to the success of the story and the successful transmission of the ideas and values in the story.” Through this process, Cockrell was able to explore fascinating questions, such as whether Cinderella is a revolutionary, whether too much freedom is good or bad and the role of fairy tale as a democratic vehicle.

Uber, Lyft and the Environment
David Ari Wagner ’17, environmental analysis (EA) major

Uber and Lyft, the “unregulated taxis” that are putting traditional taxi companies out of business, are expanding quickly and changing the landscape of urban transportation. David Wagner’s thesis analyzes the environmental impacts of such companies, particularly in California, with respect to travel behavior, congestion and fuel efficiency. The literature on these topics is new, which Wagner says was one of the most challenging and exciting aspects of this project. His analysis suggests that in several major urban areas, fuel-efficient taxis are being replaced by less fuel-efficient Uber and Lyft vehicles.

Wagner selected the topic while interning at UC Davis’s Sustainable Transportation Energy Pathways program, which focuses on three revolutionary developments in transportation: shared, automated and electrified vehicles.” Like the EA major, Wagner’s project is interdisciplinary, utilizing economic, statistical and political analyses, all of which he believes are essential to an understanding of environmental issues. EA can be an emotional topic, he notes—which is why it is both hard and necessary to approach it rationally.

Wagner considers it a good idea to write a thesis as an extension of another project. He also suggests that students who are about to embark on this journey treat it as seriously as they would treat a job, eventually aiming to send the completed product to employers in hopes of making a real contribution.

Estimating the Unknown
Benjamin Yenji (Benji) Lu ’17, mathematics and philosophy major

Benji Lu is a math and philosophy double-major interested in going into law or doing data science and statistical research. For his thesis in mathematics, he developed a method of enhancing the predictive power of a commonly used machine-learning algorithm known as “random forests.” His research seeks to quantify the degree of confidence associated with random-forest predictions in order to make them more meaningful and actionable. To do so, he has been working to increase understanding of the statistical theory behind the algorithm itself.

Lu’s interest in integrating statistics with machine learning began his junior year, when he took a course on computational statistics with Professor Jo Hardin. His thesis grew out of a subsequent SURP project with Hardin, during which he also worked with an applied-mathematics research group at UCLA. Over the course of his SURP project, Lu met daily with Hardin, who encouraged him to write daily reports on what he had learned, what he had done and what he still did not understand. Once the academic year began, they met weekly to continue the project as his senior thesis.

Lu says he has enjoyed working with an expert in such a close setting and applying knowledge from his classes to research. For him, mathematical reasoning can be fun, creative and exciting, and it connects well with philosophy, the other half of his double major. Both subjects, he explains, involve rigorous, purely logical argumentation that can yield both elegant theory and practical results.

So You Think You Can Dance?
Huangjian (Sean) Zhu ’17, computer science (CS) major

Sean Zhu got the idea for his unique thesis a couple of years back while playing Dance Central, a game that scores the player’s dance moves using motion capture. A computer science major and a member of the Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Company, Zhu thought it would be cool to combine the two interests by teaching computers how to dance.

But how does a machine learn dance steps?

“The computer learns from past data,” Zhu explains. “In this case, the data would come from past dance movements.” Using Kinect, the same device that Dance Central employs, Zhu was able to generate and input dance-movement data to his program.

“Computer creativity is a rising field of research,” says Zhu. “We may tend to think that computers cannot be creative, as creativity is a capability that is typically thought to be exclusive to humans. This project challenged me to think about what creativity is and ways to approach this question.”

The Philosophy of Political Control
Matthew Daniel Dahl ’17, politics major

While studying in China during his junior year, Matt Dahl took a Classical Chinese class that exposed him to many original texts in the literary language of ancient China. That’s when the politics major, specializing in political theory, began to question the usual interpretation of the writings of China’s most famous philosopher.

While contemporary scholars assume that Confucius was most concerned with the cultivation of benevolence, Dahl challenges that conclusion through a close reading of the Analects. His thesis argues that the true message of the text concerns methods of political control and the maintenance of power. His contention is that Confucius supports rule by the so-called “gentlemen” not because they are benevolent but rather because they know how to be crafty in their speech. In fact, Dahl claims, “gentlemanliness” is not at all coincident with any of the traditional tenets of Confucian ethics.

Such a reading has been neglected, he suggests, because scholars have overlooked the possibility that Confucius wrote the Analects in the same esoteric manner that Plato wrote the Republic. By applying new interpretive procedures, Dahl believes he has revealed some of the original, radical political teachings that Confucius subtly sought to impart.

Exploring the Pilgrimage to the Holy Land
Ana Celia Núñez ’17, late antique medieval studies (LAMS) major

Ana Núñez’s yearlong thesis examines six early Latin Christian pilgrim itineraria—the ancient equivalent of road maps. Using sources in both English and Latin, Núñez w sought to understand the ways pilgrims experienced the Holy Land as a landscape of blurred temporal boundaries between the biblical past and the pilgrim’s own present.

She recalls that she first came across LAMS in her sophomore year of high school, when she was a prospective Pomona student and happened to attend Professor Ken Wolf’s Medieval Mediterranean class. Now, with her thesis completed and her Pomona diploma in hand, she is heading to the University of Cambridge for a master’s of philosophy in medieval history, after which she aims to return to the U.S. for a Ph.D. and a career in academia.

Núñez says she found the thesis experience memorable and rewarding, and she has one bit of advice for students yet to embark on the journey: “Trust yourself, and it will get done.”

The Screen, the Stage and Beyond
Jaya Jivika Rajani ’17, media studies and environmental analysis major

Napier Award recipient Jivika Rajani spent her senior year working on two nontraditional theses, each with a uniquely creative focus.

For her media studies thesis, she curated a multimedia experience dubbed MixBox, transforming a section of the Kallick Gallery at Pitzer College into a multimedia installation that guided participants through an interactive conversation with a stranger. The catch was that they were separated by an opaque curtain and would never see the person they had just gotten to know. Rajani then filmed debrief interviews in which her participants reflected upon the experience of making connections with strangers when they couldn’t rely on snap judgments based on appearance.

For her environmental analysis thesis, Rajani drew on her background in theatre to write a play rooted in identity politics and environmentalism. After reading other environmental plays and researching works written about the Indian diaspora, she developed her three main characters to represent different schools of environmental thought, from deep ecology to ecofeminism. As one of five winners of Pomona’s 10-Minute Play Festival, Rajani had an opportunity to direct and act in an extract of the play with some friends. She is also working on adapting her work for the screen.

Reflecting on the process, Rajani said that “juggling two theses at once was definitely hard, but I really enjoyed it because I was always working on something that I was genuinely passionate about and felt that I owned from start to finish. I also couldn’t have asked for better advisors—they’ve been very supportive of my plans to continue developing my work beyond Pomona, so I definitely see my projects as much more than just graduation requirements.”

Exploring the History of Labor and War
Jonathan Richard van Harmelen ’17, history and French major

Jonathan van Harmelen’s yearlong thesis on Japanese American history during World War II focuses on the relationship between labor and the war effort. His research began while he was interning at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where he worked under Noriko Sanefuji on an exhibit titled “Righting a Wrong.” He has also worked with Professor Samuel Yamashita through a number of history seminars.

The project involved working with public historians, collecting oral histories of survivors, reviewing newspaper articles and statistics and making site visits. Though numerous historians have examined this subject, van Harmelen believes further understanding such forgotten narratives is now needed more than ever. He notes that “the subject of Japanese-American incarceration during World War II is one of the darkest chapters in United States history. While I am not Japanese-American, understanding this crucial subject is a step that all Americans should take, and is now very timely given our unstable political climate.”

For his semester-long French thesis, Van Harmelen focused on the Algerian War and memory as represented through Alain Resnais’ 1963 film Muriel.

An Environmental Perspective on Local Issues in Claremont
Frank Connor Lyles ’17, environmental analysis (EA) major

Frank Lyles, inspired by the thesis of a 2015 EA alumnus, focused on local climate change, groundwater and water-rights issues by reviewing planning documents in Claremont.

Lyles saw the thesis, accompanied by “lots of caffeine” and many a fun conversation, as an awesome educational opportunity and took an interdisciplinary approach, applying the skills he learned from his history, geology and statistics classes to complement his work in EA. He says he thoroughly enjoyed working with Professor Char Miller, who provides feedback on all EA majors’ papers, as well as with Professor W. Bowman Cutter from the Economics Department.

During his final semester at Pomona he took an econometrics class and decided to use what he was learning there to expand his thesis. Part of the challenge was tracking down relevant people and generating interest among stakeholders.

As a Pomona College Orientation Adventure (OA) leader, Lyles likes to think about how EA changes the way he views everything: He stops looking at mountains as just mountains and now understands them as dynamic things that are constantly changing.

Law, Public Policy and Technology
Jesse Solomon Lieberfeld ’17, philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) major

Jesse Lieberfeld’s yearlong, in-depth investigation focuses on the relationship between the Fourth Amendment and modern communications, especially how laws that were developed long before the emergence of modern technology should be interpreted today and in the future. As a PPE major, Lieberfeld approached his research question from both legal and philosophical perspectives, poring over a range of U.S. Supreme Court opinions, articles on privacy, law review papers and interviews.

One of the challenges with this thesis project, says Lieberfeld, was that “there is a gap between studies that focus on law and public policy and those focused on technology; many are experts in one of these fields, but not all.” Lieberfeld’s thesis attempts to bridge this gap.

In particular, Lieberfeld says he enjoyed the interdisciplinary nature of this project and is grateful for The Claremont Colleges, since the politics and philosophy departments at each school have different specialties. He says he also appreciates the fact that Pomona does not have too many core requirements, allowing him to take a lot of niche classes.

April Xiaoyi Xu ’18 is a junior majoring in politics and minoring in Spanish.

Saying No to the Olympics

June 28, 2017 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

No Boston Olympics
How and Why Smart Cities
Are Passing on the Torch
By Chris Dempsey ’05
ForeEdge 2017 | 232 pages | $27.95

YOU COULD SAY David slew Goliath in Boston—in an Olympian-scale triumph. Christopher Dempsey ‘05 was one of the leaders of the No Boston Olympics campaign that successfully shut down the Boston 2024 Olympics bid. It is a story of how a scrappy grassroots movement beat a strapping, well-armed initiative. In the book he coauthored, No Boston Olympics: How and Why Smart Cities Are Passing on the Torch, Dempsey tells the tale and offers a blueprint that shows how ordinary people can topple extraordinary giants.

Pomona College Magazine’s Sneha Abraham interviewed Dempsey. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

PCM: Can you unpack the conventional argument that the Olympics are good for a city? What is hosting supposed to do for a city? What’s the myth, and if you can call it that, the romance behind it?

Dempsey: The International Olympic Committee has often had some success telling cities that hosting the Olympics is an opportunity for them to be seen on the world stage, and to enter an exclusive club of world-class cities that have hosted the Olympics, and to leave a legacy from the investments that are made by Olympic hosts to support the Olympic Games. The reality is that the International Olympic Committee is asking cities, in the case of the Summer Olympics, to spend somewhere between $10 billion and $20 billion in costs for a three-week event. And that event brings in revenues that are typically around $4 billion or $5 billion.

The host city and the taxpayers have to make up the difference. And, at the same time, economists have not found any evidence that the Olympics boosts your city’s economy in the long term, that it makes you a more attractive trading partner, or a place for a future business investment, or that you’re really benefiting your city in any sort of long-term way. So the actual reality of the Olympics is that they’re a very expensive and risky proposition with very little benefit. But, traditionally, the IOC has had some success getting Olympic boosters focused on some of those more ephemeral benefits to get them to ignore some of those costs.

PCM: When did it crystallize for you that you were going to co-helm this grassroots movement?

Dempsey: We came together in the fall of 2013, six months or so after there were initial reports in the media in Boston that a powerful group of people was coming together and forming to try to boost the games. What you saw in Boston, similar to the bidding groups in many cities, is that the people that formed that group were people who stood to benefit personally in some way from hosting the games. So the best example in Boston is that the chairman of the bidding group for Boston 2024 was also the CEO of the largest construction company in Massachusetts. Obviously, the Olympics would have been great for the construction industry in Boston because of all of the venues and stadiums that needed to be built for the games.

But there was a very powerful group of people that included the co-owner of the Boston Celtics, the owner of the New England Patriots, Mitt Romney (the former presidential candidate and former governor of Massachusetts). It eventually included the mayor of Boston himself. So it was a very powerful group of people, and a lot of the institutions in Greater Boston and Massachusetts that would typically ask some tough questions of the bid and be skeptical of a really expensive proposal like this pretty much stayed silent. And we saw that was going to be the case because it turned out that many of the people that were pushing the bid were also people that were on the boards of directors or donors to a lot of these institutions that would typically be the financial watchdogs.

So we saw that this was a real juggernaut, and we also saw that opposition was going to have to come from the grass roots because there was not going to be much institutional opposition. Seeing that, we said, “We think there’s a very good case to make that this is a bad idea for our city’s future. We don’t want to see this region become focused on a three-week event at the expense of some of our long-term goals as an economy and as a society. And so we should form a group to start to raise some of those questions and some of those arguments against the bid.”

PCM: When did the momentum start taking off for you in terms of gathering support?

Dempsey: The high-water mark for the boosters was in January of 2015, when they were victorious in a process that the United States Olympic Committee had run to determine which city would be the U.S. bid. Boston 2024 beat out Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; and San Francisco.

There was a lot of excitement in Boston about the fact that the United States Olympic Committee chose our city. In fact, the polling in January of 2015 showed that support was around 55 percent, and opposition was only around 35 percent. So we had some pretty daunting odds at that point. I’ll always remember that day of the announcement, President Barack Obama tweeting his congratulations to Boston on winning the USOC bid. That was the kind of influence we were going up against.

Up to that point, the boosters behind Boston 2024 had shared very little information about what the bid entailed and about what the contract with the International Olympic Committee would require. Residents were just hearing the basic talking points that Boston 2024 put out, things like promises about no taxpayer money and glossy photos and images of what the bid would look like.

And that’s very typical for Olympic bids: boosters focus on these happy, positive moments. But over time the boosters were forced, by us and by others, to start sharing more information about the budget and the costs, and the contract with the IOC. And it was a death by a thousand cuts for the boosters—as more and more information came out, Bostonians liked the bid less and less.

As residents got more educated on the pros and cons, they determined that this was not a good idea for our city’s future. And so by February, the polling was pretty much split, where support and opposition were both around 45 percent. And then by March we had successfully flipped the numbers from those January numbers. From there on out, support for the bid hovered between 35 and 40 percent for the remaining life of the bid.

PCM: How were you mobilizing support?

Dempsey: Probably what we did best as an organization was work with the media to make sure that they were telling both sides of the story, arming them with facts and quotes and numbers about what was really going on with this bid.

It was very much a grassroots movement. We had an average contribution size of about $100, compared to Boston 2024, whose average contribution size was north of $40,000. They spent about $15 million on the bid. We spent less than $10,000. A lot of our organizing was social media, where we were able to build communities of supporters. But it was also old-school campaign tactics, such as holding organizing meetings and rallying people to attend a series of public meetings on the bid.

Sometimes it was as simple as making sure that we passed out signs to people at those public meetings so that they could express their opposition to the bid. The cover of the book became kind of the iconic image of Boston’s Olympic opposition—regular citizens expressing their concerns. Our brand became that of representing regular people, whereas Boston 2024 was seen as a group of very wealthy, successful and powerful people who lacked public support.

PCM: Did you find that there’s something unique about Boston citizens?

Dempsey: I don’t know if we’re unique, but I do think we have a proud history of being engaged in these types of civic debates. It is a part of the DNA of the city and the people who live here. The very first public meeting, that became the cover of our book, was held in a building that’s across the street from where some of the patriots of the American Revolution are buried. It’s part of who we are; we have that proud tradition of standing up for ourselves and not being afraid to take on some powerful forces.

So this is just one story in a long line of stories in Boston’s history where people have done that.

PCM: Was there a turning point in the campaign? There were 200 days from when the governor was inaugurated to when the bid was canceled, is that right?

Dempsey: Exactly 200 days. Which was fast, but it wasn’t sudden. Probably our most important talking point centered on the taxpayer guarantee. The International Olympic Committee requires the city that is bidding on the games to sign a contract that says that the city taxpayers are the ones who are responsible for any cost overruns.

And that fact contradicted the promises that the Boston 2024 boosters were making—that there were no taxpayer dollars needed for the games. So we kept hammering that point. It was a constant drumbeat and no single day or event. Just an educational process over many months.

PCM: You dedicate the book in part to Boston’s journalists. Why, and what was their role in this process?

Dempsey: They really are heroes in this story. This is particularly true of some young reporters who were ambitious and hardworking and willing to dig in on the details of the bid and make sure that the other side of the story was being told. Boston 2024 was spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on media and PR consultants to get their story out there. If journalists listened only to the powerful and connected, then our side never would have been able to get its message out. But because we were taken seriously, because journalists were doing independent research that uncovered some of the drawbacks and errors of the bid, the public could make an informed choice.

Here’s a specific example of the press’s impact. WBUR, which is one of the two NPR public radio stations in Boston, commissioned and published a monthly poll surveying residents about their opinions of the bid. That meant that we—and the USOC and IOC—could see support declining. We didn’t have to wait a year for a referendum or another opportunity for the public to be heard. It wasn’t cheap for WBUR to commission those polls, but it had a tangible impact on the debate—that’s great journalism.

We really feel fortunate that the media was so robust here. I think we would have had a very different outcome if it weren’t for those newsrooms.

PCM: Is there a way the Olympics can be made more egalitarian and more affordable?

Dempsey: If you think about the International Olympic Committee’s business model, it essentially started in 1896 with the first modern games in Athens. It probably made some sense in the 19th century to move the games around to different cities because that was the only way that people could experience the Olympics. It was based on the model of the World’s Fair, which was quite successful in the 19th century. But since 1896, humanity has invented the radio, television, the Internet, Pomona College Magazine, air travel. There are all these different ways to communicate and interact now that didn’t exist in 1896.

Today you beam the activities to billions of television sets. And people who want to see the Olympics in person could get on a plane and have not more than one or two airline connections to get to wherever it is, whether it would be Los Angeles or Athens or London or somewhere else. There’s a strong case to make for a permanent location or a small number of semi-permanent locations that would host the games.

Unfortunately, I’m very pessimistic about the International Olympic Committee’s willingness to change. The IOC is composed of roughly 90 people who are self-appointed. Many of their positions are hereditary, so it includes people like the princess of Lichtenstein and the prince of Monaco and the prince of Malaysia. These are fabulously wealthy people who are not used to hearing “no”—they’re used to getting their way. And as long as they still have one or two cities bidding every cycle, they’ll perpetuate this model no matter how inefficient and wasteful it is for the host cities.

I wish that I were more optimistic about the IOC changing, but as long as they stay undemocratic and unregulated, it’s hard to see them really having the right incentives to change.

PCM: Did you get a lot of push-back personally? Did anyone accuse you of poor sportsmanship for spearheading this campaign?

Dempsey: Early on, we were called cynics and naysayers—if not much worse. It was important for us to be clear that we loved Boston and that we thought Boston could host the Olympics, but that we shouldn’t because it put our city’s future at risk. And by reframing the question away from it being a kind of competition about who has the best city and instead turning it into a much more sober public-policy choice about whether this is a good proposal for us to embrace, we got people to move beyond the question of pride in your city and instead into the question of priorities. Did people want our elected leaders focused on the Olympics or on more-important challenges in transportation, education, health care, etc.?

Eventually we became seen as the scrappy underdogs—and thankfully, a lot of people root for underdogs.

PCM: What are a few things in your blueprint for citizens who want to challenge Olympic bids in their own cities? What is the advice you’d give to the powerless who are seeking to advocate for their greater, best interest?

Dempsey: First, when it comes to Olympic opposition, the facts are on your side. The boosters of an Olympics do not have a very good track record to run on, and they don’t have a lot of good data and information on their side. So you’re starting from a good place there, even though you’ll never have the power and resources that Olympic proponents will have. Second, the International Olympic Committee is truly out of touch with what regular people w want and need, and the more that you can expose the IOC as a selfish, short-sighted, opaque institution, the more you’ll help your cause, and you’ll expose that what’s best for the IOC is often the opposite of what’s best for host cities, and vice versa.

The cost and complexity of organizing citizens has come down. Underdogs and outsiders can really still make an impact on the debate—and that impact can be amplified on Twitter and Facebook. We often bemoan the negative impacts of those platforms, but they can also be powerful tools.

PCM: What is the broader significance of the story you tell for citizens who will never have an Olympics bid in their cities?

Dempsey: Olympic bids raise a lot of questions around how public resources are used to advance common goals. We should always be challenging and questioning public expenditures to make sure we’re getting the impacts and results we need as a society. Many cities decide to give public subsidies to stadiums, arenas or convention centers when those public dollars would be much better spent on education, transportation or health care.

PCM: Do you have any thoughts on the LA bid decision that’s coming down in September?

Dempsey: People in Southern California have very warm memories from the 1984 Olympics, and that is driving a lot of the support for LA’s bid for the 2024 Games. which replaced Boston’s bid in 2015. I think Angelenos and Southern Californians are forgetting that 1984 was a unique situation. For the 1984 games, there were only two cities that bid. The first was Los Angeles, and the second was Tehran, Iran. And Tehran actually had to drop out of the running on the eve of the Iranian Revolution. So that left Los Angeles as the only bidder in the IOC’s auction.

As anyone knows, when you show up to an auction and you’re the only bidder, you get a really good price. And so Los Angeles in 1984 was able to say to the IOC, “We’re not going to build new venues. We’re not going to sign the taxpayer guarantee. We’re going to negotiate the television contracts, and we’re going to get the profits from those.” Los Angeles today is not in the same position, because Paris is also bidding. In fact, Mayor Garcetti had said that he will be signing the contract that puts Los Angeles taxpayers on the hook. That’s a fundamental difference from 1984.

That’s something that Garcetti doesn’t want to talk about and the boosters behind LA 2024 don’t want to talk about, but it is a reality of what they have agreed to with the IOC.

I give LA 2024 credit because they are creating a plan that uses a lot of existing and temporary facilities, but they are still fundamentally proposing a risky deal. Imagine a corporation that wanted to locate in Southern California and said, “We want to move here and we promise to add some jobs, but if we’re not profitable as a company, we want LA taxpayers to make up the difference.”

That would be an outrageous demand for a private business to make. But that’s essentially what LA 2024 is doing, and the mayor is going along with it. I think the LA region deserves more of a discussion around what the pros and cons are here and whether this is truly a good deal for the city or whether they’re sort of coasting off of the warm feelings and warm memories that people have from 1984.

PCM: So some city somewhere needs to host the Olympics, right? Is there a place you think would be a great fit?

Dempsey: For me it’s more about the model. If you were going to choose a permanent location, I think you could make a case that Los Angeles would be a good one. LA is good at putting on TV shows, which is what the Olympics is more than anything else. Obviously Athens, because of the history with Greece, would be another interesting location to consider. Or maybe London. I don’t know what the answer is there, but I think the most important thing is that we try to make cities aware that, around the world, there are a lot of drawbacks.

Since Boston dropped out, Hamburg, Germany; Rome, Italy; and Budapest, Hungary, have all dropped their bids for the 2024 Olympics. And they’ve all pointed to Boston and said, “Boston made a smart decision here, and we’re going to make the same decision to drop out. We have other things that we want to spend our time and limited taxpayer dollars on.”

So you are seeing fewer cities bid. LA and Paris are going ahead for 2024, and we’ll see kind of what the bidding landscape looks like in years ahead.

PCM: So the romance is fading, right?

Dempsey: I think that’s true. The IOC has been greedy in a sense. They’ve extracted all of these concessions out of prior hosts, and potential host cities are realizing that the contract that they are being asked to sign is just not a reasonable one for most democracies. You’re seeing a narrowing to a couple of cities that have hosted before and feel like they have the venues in place, and then you’re seeing dictatorships—places like Russia and China that don’t care about popular opinion and are doing it for the spectacle or to glorify their autocratic leaders.

PCM: Do you have a favorite Olympics event?

Dempsey: I was about 10 years old when the Dream Team played in Barcelona, so I’d go with that. It’s also fun to watch the quirky and obscure events that you see only every four years. At No Boston Olympics, we always said the three weeks of the Olympics would be fun. But you have to look at the long-term costs, not just the party.

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