Articles from: 2017

Looking Back

April 10, 2017 by Staff Comments Off

50 YEARS AGO

Pomona’s Marine Laboratory, 1913–43

Marine Zoology Program Ends

Pomona’s summer marine zoology program, which dated back, with a few interruptions, to the early part of the 1900s, ended in 1967. From 1913 until 1943, it took place in a College-owned marine biology laboratory in Laguna Beach. After the facility was sold, it continued as a six-week summer program at a rented facility, Caltech’s Kerckhoff Marine Lab in Corona del Mar, until 1967.

75 YEARS AGO

Escaping Internment

In April 1942, just days before all Japanese Americans in the Claremont area were due to be interned, President E. Wilson Lyon arranged with President Ernest Wilkins of Oberlin College in Ohio for Pomona junior Itsue “Sue” Hisanaga ‘43 to transfer there. The next day, President Lyon, Dean of Men William Nicholl and a crowd of Pomona students accompanied her and her brother, Kazuo “Casey” Hisanaga ‘42—who would be allowed to graduate in May despite his April departure—to the train station, where the College band played for them. “Everybody cried,” one student later told Dean of Women Jessie Gibson. After completing her work at Oberlin, Sue was awarded her degree from Pomona in absentia during Oberlin’s commencement. (See “Farewell to Pomona” on page 35.)

100 YEARS AGO

The Cosmopolitan Club

The year 1917 saw the first appearance of the Cosmopolitan Club, a college organization created to help grow the number of students from beyond Southern California. Membership in the club was restricted to students who were from Northern California or out of state. Club members were given literature about the College to distribute to friends, in an effort to “broaden the local atmosphere and bring in students with new ideas and new and different viewpoints.”

For more tidbits of Pomona College history, go to pomona.edu/timeline.

Slow Art

April 10, 2017 by Arden Reed Comments Off

Slow art isn’t a collection of aesthetic objects, as you might suppose; rather, it names a dynamic interaction between observer and observed. Artists can create the conditions for slow looking—think of James Turrell ’65 Skyspaces like Pomona’s “Dividing the Light.” But what about viewers? How can we do our share?

In a given year, more Americans visit art museums than attend any one professional sporting event. They want and expect to take pleasure, learn and share positive experiences with each other and perhaps with their children. Too often the result is otherwise. Despite massive arts education programs, many visitors still arrive at a museum feeling confused or disadvantaged about how to navigate the place—where to go first, what to look at in any given gallery, how to connect with what they find. (There is a particular disconnect for people 40 and under, on whom museums will increasingly rely for support.) As a Jeffersonian populist, I believe that everyone who passes through a gallery ought to feel enfranchised. Everybody, I believe, can have meaningful, maybe even transforming experiences looking at artworks. Whether or not we possess any particular talent, training, art education or technical vocabulary, we all bring the sole necessary requirements: a set of eyes and lived experience. The playing field is level. But how to look is not self-evident.

How? My answer will come as no surprise: pacing can make a world of difference. Magic may happen when you give yourself over to the process and attune yourself to the artwork, listen to what it asks from you. “Notice how with two or three lines I’ve made this thatched roof,” says a Rembrandt drawing. “Look at how the shadows under the plane trees turn purple,” says a Van Gogh landscape. Give a painting time to reveal itself, I’ve said, and it turns into a moving picture—the experience can be that eye-opening. Over time, you will perceive more and more elements of the image, things that you literally never saw before. However closely you attend, you will never absorb an object’s every visual detail or nuance. There will always remain more to see. In fact, this inexhaustibility is the sign of art itself.

How, then, to slow down? There are many possibilities, old-fashioned (docent tours, audio guides) and newfangled (smartphone apps, iPads on gallery walls, online learning sources like the Khan Academy). The scores of museum-goers who use them testify to a widespread need for guidance. Each of these options may work. Here, I limit my suggestions to rugged individuals, unwired visitors who follow neither audio tour nor app. Or better, take advantage of any external aid—rent an audio tour because you know nothing about Mughal art—but take time also to shut off the devices and linger.

1 / Believe that you already come equipped with everything you need—those eyes and that life experience. Trust that something surprising can come of the encounter, or simply that the experience might be fun.

2 / Don’t go alone. In another’s company you’ll have more stamina and notice more. (More than three people looking together may prove too many.) Best is a viewing partner who is open-minded, prepared to be patient, receptive to being taken aback. Also, somebody you feel free to disagree with. “Opposition,” said William Blake, “is true friendship.” Some of my best experiences have come out of seeing things differently from my companion.

3 / Remember that museums are like libraries. Why do people assume that they need to look at everything on display in a gallery when they would never pull every book off a shelf? Be selective. Once I interviewed the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s longtime director, Philippe de Montebello. I asked him about navigating art spaces. “My wife loves going to museums with me because I tell her: ‘In this room, we will look at X and Z.’” “If we happen not to be your spouse?” I asked. “Head first to the museum shop. The postcards will tell you which works the place prizes most highly. Second, say you’re in a gallery with many objects clustered together and another given its own vitrine. Choose the latter. Finally, whatever the guards say, you have to get up close.” I would add: start by scanning the room to see if anything calls out to you. Don’t even think about pausing before every object. One or two items in a gallery will be enough or more than enough. Don’t worry if your pick is not among the postcards; trust your taste.

4 / Grant your chosen object time—how much is tricky, I acknowledge. If, after a spell, nothing clicks, move on. This is a no-fault game. You are nobody’s student; there are no should’s. Eventually you and your companion will find something that you agree is intriguing, striking, ravishing, perplexing, disturbingly unfamiliar—what that thing is hardly matters.

5 / Now let yourself go. Get close, back up, shift from side to side, squint. Notice the surround: does the installation lighting create hot or dark spots unrelated to the artwork? Let yourself wonder about what might seem trivial. Why do Cézanne’s tables tilt up? Why do mountains look stylized in medieval depictions of deserts? What is that strange detail on the curving side of a glass vase, in a still lifepainting of flowers? Might it be light reflected from a four-paned window in the imaginary room? And why is a caterpillar munching on that leaf? Why does one window in an Edward Hopper painting behave differently from its neighbors? There is no telling where seemingly naïve questions may carry you. Remember that frustration is part and parcel of engaged looking; an artwork that doesn’t offer resistance may not offer much at all.

6 / Let images “tell you” how they want to be seen. In my experience, they will do so if you “listen to them” with patience.

7 / Don’t be in a hurry to speak. Start by letting your eyes wander freely. Then zero in on what seems meaningful, or looks to be part of a pattern, or perhaps is an anomaly. Toggle between focused and unfocused looking. Test what you’ve registered by closing your eyes and asking yourself what you recollect. Then look again to compare.

8/ Don’t screw yourself to the spot. A surefire recipe for distraction is to insist that you concentrate on some work for X minutes. You are sure to chafe. Genuine viewing is always a mix of engagement and withdrawal, and as I’ve said, some degree of boredom is integral to the experience of slow art.

Dieric Bouts, Annunciation, J. Paul Getty Museum

9 / Say you are looking at a Renaissance painting of a sallow-faced woman whose reading has been interrupted by a man with Technicolor wings. It’s enough to begin by attending to the physical details: the crisp folds of the red linen hanging behind the bed, or the mosaic pattern on the floor, which seems to repeat the design of a stained glass window in the recess at the left. Under the bedchamber’s barrel vault a half lunette appears to float above the bed canopy—like a moon, or the book’s open clasp. It’s good to begin in mystery, because not knowing rouses curiosity. Questions prompted by the act of looking motivate us to learn about the image’s content and about its social, aesthetic, political, historical contexts. By contrast, front-loading information—in a slide lecture sandwiched in with a hundred other images—is likely to generate little interest and leave but a fleeting impression. So studies of museum education repeatedly conclude.

Now—and not before—is when the wall label should come into play: what Dieric Bouts painted between 1450 and 1455 is the Annunciation. Wondering what that refers to—I am assuming no specialized knowledge—brings your smartphone app into the picture. You learn that the Angel Gabriel has just told the Virgin Mary—that is, he has announced—that she is to be the mother of God (Luke 1, 31). His message accounts for her expression, a mix of bashfulness (she refuses to return the angel’s gaze), shock, humility and fear that she will not satisfy the job requirements. Perhaps Gabriel’s words also explain the placement of her hands, which simultaneously express astonishment and are about to meet in prayer. Pursuing your inquiry will teach you that the cloth bundled up at the left-hand corner—a gorgeous, realistic, seemingly gratuituous detail—also symbolizes the great event yet to unfold but already being prepared. This bundle is a visible, external double of Mary’s womb. But what of the single pillow propped up on the bed, square between Gabriel and Mary? Another symbol? On the Getty’s website you can see Bouts’ underdrawing, detect traces of animal glue seeping through the linen, and spot vermillion pigment, thanks to X-ray and ultraviolet analysis. Speed and distraction aside, there has never been a better time to look.

10 / You will get better with practice. You and your interlocutor will become comfortable with each other’s rhythms and styles. You will build up categories to scan for: color, composition, mood, atmosphere, form, depth, quality of brushstrokes—fine or broad, insistent or invisible; awkwardnesses, conventional narratives; stylistic changes over time; political controversies. Over time you will amass episodes of close looking and build a mental library of images, a backlog of aesthetic experiences that will serve as points of reference or comparison.

11 / You will experience a range of pleasures: eye-candy, puzzle-solving, meditative or spiritual moments. You will have fun.

… she thought she’d somehow only now learned how to look.

—Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

Arden Reed is the Arthur M. Dole and Fanny M. Dole Professor of English at Pomona College and author of the forthcoming book, Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell.

Jason Alexander (On Life and Art)

April 10, 2017 by Staff Comments Off

Jason Alexander “There is no bad opportunity. There is no wasted effort. There is no wrong turn. Your worst day, when the boyfriend or the girlfriend leaves you, and your parents don’t believe in you, and the teachers flunk you out of a course, and you don’t have enough money to pay for the semester, and you have that sick, horrible feeling in your gut of disaster and failure and no self-worth—you’re gonna use the crap outta that one day. So sit with it, suck it in, enjoy it and go, ‘Yeah, this is gonna be so good 10 years from now.’”

—Actor Jason Alexander P’18, speaking on campus on Feb. 18 during Family Weekend 2017.

Matters of Honor

April 10, 2017 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

Lucy Ferriss ’75 is the author of 10 books, most recently A Sister to Honor, a novel about Afia Satar, the daughter of a landholding family in northern Pakistan who attends an American college. Over and against Pashtun tradition and family dictates, Afia loves an American boy. Photos of the two of them together surface online, and her brother, entrusted by the family to be her guardian, is commanded to scrub the stain she left. In the book, Ferriss explores two contrasting worlds and entangled questions of love, power, tradition, family, honor and betrayal.

Ferriss talked to PCM’s Sneha Abraham about the conception of the book, cultural stereotypes and risk-taking in the writing life.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and space.

PCM: How did you get the idea for A Sister to Honor?

Ferries: Well, Trinity College, where I work, has the best squash team in the collegiate world. Nobody in the United States plays squash, so if you’re going to have the best squash team in the world you have to recruit internationally. So you have people from Catholic cultures and Hindu cultures and Muslim cultures, and they all come to this little college in New England.

Virginia Woolf explores the notion of: “What if Shakespeare had a sister?” So I sort of applied that to my big interests in the squash team. I thought: “What if one of these guys, particularly from one of these countries with fairly rigid social mores, had a sister who came here?” I Googled: “Where do the best squash players in the world come from?” And they came from the Pashtun area of Pakistan. Which is also where the Taliban comes from.

So people always ask me, “How did you get interested in Pakistan?” I wasn’t interested in Pakistan. I was interested in something much closer to home. But it occurred to me that that would be a really pretty interesting situation for a young woman to be coming into. And so I read everything that I could read about that culture. But I continued for a long time just to be kind of looking at it from the American point of view. Looking at it in terms of: How would you come to understand somebody who is coming from this other place, and so forth? So the coach in the novel was originally my only point of view, and it wasn’t going anywhere. I called my literary agent and I said, “You keep telling me that I should write it from the point of view of the young man and the young woman, but I can’t do that unless I go Pakistan.” And he said, “Well, you have to go to Pakistan then.” So I went to Pakistan. And then the story kind of came to life.

PCM: Sounds like it was a series of what-if questions that led you.

Ferriss: Yeah, very much so. What if she came here? She’s 19, 20 years old. What if she falls in love? What if she falls in love with a Jew? And then I also was trying to understand. As the mother of an athlete, I was interested in the question of honor. I spent a lot of time with coaches. And I noticed that they would talk always about being a good sport and behaving honorably and calling the line honestly and so forth. Only one thing that they wanted more than all that, and that was to win.

When I started looking into this in other cultures, honor basically lay between a woman’s legs. And that was sort of a two-sided question, too. So then I had to think—we hear in this country about honor violence, but what is that really? What is it masking? What else would be going on behind the scenes? So those questions kind of drove me.

PCM: It’s an interesting side-by-side when you look at honor and athletics and honor in Pashtun culture. Did you see any parallels or striking contrasts? They’re two very different kinds of honor, I would imagine.

Ferriss: Very different kinds of honor. But in both cases I felt as though somebody would say, “There’s nothing but good about being honorable.” But then, when you hold honor up as this thing, as your kind of lone star and the thing you’re aiming at, then all kinds of things go wrong. So that in the end, for the coach the honor is really winning. That’s really what’s behind a lot of that. And you compromise a lot of things for that. And obviously, when you have this kind of tribal honor, human affection and human emotion and human fallibility fall by the wayside. So they both have this veneer of something that we want. We want to live with honor. We want people to see us as honorable people. Think about that speech by Mark Antony: “Brutus is an honorable man.” But it’s always got a kind of dark side.

PCM: Do you see places where honor plays a role in Western culture besides athletics?

Ferriss: I absolutely do. In fact, the way I came to understand honor violence was—I looked at a lot of the court cases, and I spoke with a wonderful woman named Hina Jilani in Lahore, who is on the Supreme Court in Pakistan and is also on the U.N. Council of Elders. She and her sister are the two people in Pakistan who are really reaching out to help young women who are at risk of honor violence. So she talked about how, by calling a crime a crime of honor, then you can almost always get the perpetrator of that crime either off the hook entirely or with a lighter sentence. And so, I tried to think, “Well, what is the similar thing in the United States?” And of course, we have what we call crimes of passion. If a crime of honor is basically killing your daughter or your sister, a crime of passion is murdering your partner or your spouse. And really, crimes of passion are usually there because someone’s honor or sense of, usually, himself is threatened because someone has betrayed him—loved somebody else or whatever—and he can’t hold his head up. He’s been cuckolded. And so we call these things crimes of passion. And if somebody says it’s a crime of passion, it’s not so bad as a brutal murder. So yes, I think we do have other places. We don’t like to think that we do, but absolutely we do. Not to mention that it wasn’t that long ago, like 100 years ago, if a daughter in a family was pregnant out of wedlock, that was curtains for that family in terms of their honor in society.

PCM: You’ve received praise for talking about some tough situations in your book, but there have also been criticisms from others, saying it’s promoting stereotypes. How do you walk that fine line between working on compelling topics and cultural questions?

Ferriss: It’s a very good question. And believe me I held my breath. My husband first learned what I was writing about, and he said, “You can’t write that. You just can’t. There’s too much anti-Muslim feeling in this country. You just can’t go near that topic.”

There’s no publishing industry in Pakistan, but it’s come out in India, which has very strong honor cultures of its own. And I was really nervous at the thought of a Western woman daring to write from the point of view of a South Asian. And I was really afraid that it would just get torn to pieces. And thus far, the reception of it in South Asia has been very positive, which is a big relief. And I also was very concerned about my Pakistani friends, because I forged a lot of bonds when I was over there, and I’m trying to write about individuals—I’m trying to write about characters—but they’re going to be seen as representative. And I did not want my Pakistani friends and contacts to feel that I had exploited them or represented anything falsely, given how generous they had been with me.

I have no doubt that I got some things wrong. I’ve gotten interesting reactions from my Pakistani friends, but they did not accuse me of engaging in stereotypes. There was one guy in London who said what he couldn’t find credible about the book was that people in the United States would be so ignorant of the kind of family values and points of honor that would be important to Pakistanis. He said, “That’s just ridiculous. I’m here in London, and I know all about it.” And I thought, “Yeah, well, but you’re not in Western Massachusetts. You may know about it in London, but in Western Massachusetts they have much broader stereotypes already in place.” So it is a fine line. You have to expect that you’re going to get some things wrong, and all you can say is that you did your damnedest to get it right.

PCM: In regards to issues over immigration in general and attitudes toward Muslims from the Middle East or Pakistan, we’re in a particular cultural and historical moment in our country. What do you think is the significance of stories like A Sister to Honor at this time?

Ferriss: I can’t say for sure, but what I would hope is that first of all people would come to understand the meaning of family. w Because it seems to me that one of the troubles that we have is we think of family so differently in this country from the way it’s thought of in many other parts of the world—the absolute importance of belonging to a family, of being reunited with your family, of being true to your family. We are a very individualistic culture. And I’m brought up in that culture. I tend to think in terms of the rights of the individual. But there are a lot of cultures that don’t. They think in terms of how important it is that you belong to a family. And so, I feel like if I’ve gotten a little bit of that across, then I may have chipped away at some of the misunderstandings that we have about the people who come here. For instance, nobody could understand how it was that Pakistan hadn’t given up Osama Bin Laden. In Pakistan, one of the primary tenets of that culture is that if a stranger comes among you and needs your help, you must protect him. And probably, if we understood that, we would have gone about it a little bit differently from the way we went about it.

PCM: How long were you in Pakistan?

Ferriss: Not that long. Actually, long enough because the ISI, which is their version of the CIA, was on my trail…

PCM: Really?

Ferriss: I left, I mean not for any good reason, but because it was very weird that I was there. And I’m not sure that I would have been allowed to stay a minute longer. I was only there for three weeks.

I went to the Pashtun area, where the capital of that province is Peshawar, a city of two million people. And Peshawar was once the crossroads of the Silk Road. It was once this incredibly cosmopolitan city—everybody knew where it was and everybody went there. The level of culture was really high and so forth. Now, of course, it’s just fallen on its knees in the dirt. So even for Pakistanis in other parts of the country, they say, “Peshawar? You’re going to Peshawar? Why?” It’s considered sort of the edge of the frontier. If you go on from there you end up in the frontier provinces, which is where the Pakistani government doesn’t even have any control.

It’s a large city, and there was a moment where this guy came running up to me and my host in the middle of the market square. I thought he was going to set up a suicide bomb because he came at it so intently. But he told me that I was the first Westerner he has seen in that city in five years. And so, in a city of two million people, you can imagine how bizarre it was for me to be there.

PCM: No wonder ISI was on your trail.

Ferriss: They learned pretty quickly that I was there. And we also did go driving out to see into the villages in the country and stayed in the villages. Because I didn’t want the family I stayed with to be from Peshawar. I wanted them to be from somewhere a little more remote. And I would never have had the access that I had to all that if I had not had a host family.

PCM: How did you find your host family?

Ferriss: Well, I learned that Peshawar was a city of two million people. I thought a city that big has to have a university. So I Googled Peshawar University and I found the University of Peshawar. And since I have an academic address, I found—it was not a very good website, but I found a department of language and literature. And I wrote to them and said just that I was an American academic coming to do research in their area. Was there anybody that they could put me in touch with to help me? Shazia was teaching at the university. There are women who teach at the university, though many fewer than there used to be, and with not very good working conditions for them. But she was teaching there, and she happened to come into the office as the secretary was looking at this email, trying to figure out where she should send it. And Shazia looked at it and said, “Tell you what—why don’t you send that to me?” The next thing I knew she was telling me that I had to stay with her, that she wanted to learn about my book, that her family would take me all around, etc.

PCM: You open the book with the proverb, “Woman is the lamp of the family.” What does that mean to you?

Ferriss: Well, it ties in with another thing which I did not put in there, which—because it’s not as poetic—is that a woman carries the honor of her family. That’s what the lamp is, I think. It is the light of the family, the honor of the man; she carries that honor. Ironically, a woman cannot have honor. There’s no such thing as an honorable woman. What a woman has is shame. So you are the lamp of the family, but you don’t light it. You have in that sense the responsibility without too many of the privileges. That’s why I wouldn’t choose it. Because from a very early age you learn that it is on you. But there is nothing that you can do to have a position of honor. You just have to make sure that the family’s honor is carried by you. So that’s what it means to me. It’s a kind of utility.

PCM: Looking at your bibliography, your books run such a gamut of topics. You said with A Sister to Honor the genesis was a series of what-if questions. Is that your process for books in general? Or what’s a day in the life of your brain? How do you connect?

Ferriss: I would say what connects all my books is they’re all a little edgy. When I teach, I tell my students that writing that takes no risk is probably not worth writing. And you can take various kinds. Different writers take different kinds of risks. I tend to take risks with my subject matter.

So a day in the life of me is sort of like: How far can I push this envelope? For instance, in A Sister to Honor, one of the issues—and this is the kind of question that comes up for me in the writing process a lot in terms of how far do I push the envelope—was whether or not I was going to include any sex scenes. Because on the one hand, you had a young healthy woman, college age in the United States, with a boyfriend. And on the other hand, I had the sensibilities of Pakistanis to think about. I go ahead and push that envelope. It’s the one thing that upset my Pakistani friends—why I had to include that scene. But for me, it would not have been realistic without it.

So that’s the kind of question that I tend to have at the forefront as I’m writing—that there are all of these quiet signals that we give ourselves all the time, and so we don’t go there. That’s too tricky to write about; you don’t know if you could pull it off; somebody will be offended—that kind of thing. If you do go back, I think all my books have that tension in them.

PCM: Do you have any trepidation or a moment of fear before something goes public because you’re taking such risks? Or do you feel like that’s just ingrained in who you are by now?

Ferriss: No, I always have trepidation. I actually don’t believe any writers who say that they don’t.

The book before this was based on the news in the 1990s about young people of a good family who had been found to be leaving corpses of babies in dumpsters. I don’t know why that was making the news, but it was. Anyway, so I opened the book with an account of a teenage boy and girl basically still-birthing a child. It’s quite graphic. And I thought that, on the one hand, everybody is going to hate this, and on the other hand, this is where the story starts. And I guess if people get past it, then they’re the kind of readers who want to read the rest of the book. And if they don’t, I guess they just don’t like me. So I always feel some trepidation.

The Magical Bridge

April 10, 2017 by Vanessa Hua Comments Off

Olenka Villarreal ’85 with the Magical Bridge playground in Palo Alto, Calif.

Photos By Robert Durell

Children crowd onto the wheelchair-accessible spinning dish at the Magical Bridge playground.

ON A SUNNY WINTER morning, Olenka Villarreal ’85 is appointing kindness ambassadors, handing out smiley-face stickers to children taking a break from spinning on a giant dish at the sprawling Magical Bridge in Palo Alto, the accessible, socially inclusive playground that she founded.

Boys and girls reach out their hands, exclaiming “I want blue!” “I want red!”

“Will you be extra kind on the playground today?” asks Villarreal. They nod, promising yes, yes. After weeks of rain and chill, the playground is packed with visitors of all ages: a beaming Asian grandmother swings on a disc, and a father shouts “3-2-1, blast-off!” and sends his son in a cardboard box down a slide.

When Villarreal’s 14-year-old daughter Ava arrives, she skips and claps. Though non-verbal, her joy and excitement are clear. Villarreal hugs her daughter, who stands taller than her, and strokes her soft, fine blonde hair.

Magical Bridge, which opened in 2015 at a cost of $4 million, is the only local playground where Ava can run—elsewhere, she trips over the sand or is too big to get onto the equipment sized for younger children. She loves dashing across the bridges that connect the playhouse to the slide mound. “At any other park, she towers over everybody, but when you design for everybody, no one stands out,” Villarreal says.

Now, after hearing from people in Taipei, Greece, and from across the country, she has her sights set on creating Magical Bridges around the world through her new foundation. “I was ready to take a break, but then I received an avalanche of emails and calls. I can’t physically get to everyone who asks questions, so my goal is to create a model that is far less expensive and easily replicable.”

Villarreal’s project has now become her calling, one that began when her daughter was born in 2003. As a baby, Ava struggled to sit up and stand and did not start walking until she was three years old. Eventually, at the advice of doctors, Villarreal started taking her daughter to expensive indoor occupational therapy sessions at a center located 45 minutes away, where Ava could work on improving her balance and coordination. The center was so booked she could only schedule a session for her daughter once a week, and she wanted to go somewhere daily where they lived, in her hometown of Palo Alto.

Families take advantage of a beautiful day at the Magical Bridge in Palo Alto.

At local playgrounds, she searched for swings, with their therapeutic vestibular w (back and forth) movement, but Ava lacked the strength to sit up in bucket seats or hold onto the swing chains. Frustrated, she met with the city’s director of parks and recreation, hoping he might be able to direct her to a playground that met the needs of Ava and children like her. She learned that the city’s playgrounds were all ADA compliant, but that the guidelines center around access for individuals in wheelchairs and other mobility issues, with ramps and paved walkways; they aren’t designed for children with impaired hearing and vision, developmental, sensory, cognitive or autism spectrum disorders.

Olenka Villarreal ’85 is joined at the playground by her two daughters, Ava (center) and Emma.

One in five Americans has a disability, and one in 45 is on the autism spectrum, which has led to a growing push for playgrounds designed for people of all abilities. As Villarreal soon discovered, parents have often led the charge, motivated by their child: Tatum’s Garden in Gilroy, Matteo’s Dream in Concord, and Shane’s Inspiration in Los Angeles.

The city struck a deal with Villarreal. If she raised money for the playground’s design and construction, the city would donate almost an acre of land in Mitchell Park. “I was grateful for the land. Around here, land is gold,” she says. “Maybe I was naïve, but I thought, we’re in Silicon Valley, how hard can it be to raise money? I didn’t know how much it would cost, or what it would entail.”

She launched her grassroots campaign, recruiting co-founders Jill Asher, to work on public and media relations, and Kris Loew, who designed the logo, flyers and other marketing materials. She also drew upon the support of her family: her husband, Robert, donated wines from his collection for her volunteer meetings—“You have to keep the board happy!” she says—and their older daughter, Emma, came up with the playground’s name while sitting in the back seat of the car, scrawling down ideas in her notebook. Anytime someone crosses over the bridge leading into the playground, they would find themselves in a magical place where barriers to play no longer existed, thus bridging the gap between those living with and without disabilities.

Because Villarreal knew donors might hesitate to write checks to a brand-new group, she joined the board of the Friends of the Palo Alto Parks, a trusted local nonprofit that acted as a fiscal sponsor to collect the contributions. “When the board saw the magnitude of my project, they thought I was a cockeyed optimist,” Villarreal says with a laugh. “But they were willing to stick it out, to see how far I could get.”

After a career in sales and marketing in Silicon Valley, she was returning to an interest in civic engagement first kindled at Pomona, where she had studied public policy and economics. As she embarked on fundraising, she deepened her research into inclusive playgrounds to incorporate into the design.

Physical access allows children to get around the playground and get into close proximity to play activities, while social access emphasizes how children can play together. “From a very young age, so much of play is a social experience,” says Keith M. Christensen, a play and accessibility specialist who advised Villarreal. “When you are participating equally, you are able to use your abilities and your strengths without the need for assistance or adaptations that might draw attention to differences rather than to similarities.”

Within two years, Villarreal and her volunteers raised about $600,000, but they lacked a detailed set of plans to win over bigger donors. When she despaired, she pictured returning the hundreds of individual donations if she gave up. She also knew people were counting on her. “As my husband said, ‘If we don’t get this park, we’ll have to move out of Palo Alto!’”

She was also dealing with the challenges of caring for Ava, who sometimes had seizures at school while Villarreal was hosting volunteer meetings. “I’d have to rush her to the ER, and I’d tell them to just to continue,” she recalls. “You know that stage when your child is one year old, when they’re getting up once or twice a night, they’re in diapers, and you’re feeding them? I’m still in that.”

Palo Alto stepped up with money to pay for plans and assigned a landscape architect, Peter Jensen, to help shepherd and advocate for the project. “That was a huge leap forward,” she says. After that, they hit their fundraising goal within a year and a half.

Villarreal brought a personal, passionate touch to her pitches, according to Asher, a co-founder. She asked a mother of a child with special needs to make chocolate chip cookies that they brought to every donor meeting.

“We leave them munching on cookies,” she told Asher. “Every time they put a cookie in their mouth, they’ll think of us.”

Added Loew, the other co-founder: “She’s hard to say ‘no’ to—she finds a job for you, and it feels really good to help. She makes everyone feel special.”

At the Magical Bridge, Villarreal makes visitors feel special, too, chatting with the helpful, bustling air of an innkeeper. “You like it here? Do you know the story of this place?” she asks a curly-haired dad leaning against a wall as his toddler rattles metal bells shaped like flowers that stand as tall as him

“It’s my first time here,” he says. “I read a little bit about it online. My son loves the bells.”

The playground is divided into seven play zones: swing and sway, slides, spin, music, tots, a kindness corner picnic area, and playhouse/ stage. Grouping the activities together helps visitors of all abilities navigate the Magical Bridge, which also stands apart from other playgrounds because of how it showcases innovative artists.

Jen Lewin’s interactive laser harp sculptures have been featured at Burning Man, the desert arts festival popular with tech workers. The sculpture—which senses user movement, speed and tempo—is irresistible, inviting people to twirl and hurl their limbs and their bodies under the arch.

“If it’s approachable to everyone, then it’s successful,” Lewin says. “My mission has been to make public art that engages the community.”

George Zisadis’s motion sensors trigger audio recordings: the squishy suck of mud, the slosh of puddles, crunch of autumn leaves, and quacking ducks. You can’t help but run through it again and again, trying to figure out how it works. “It’s been great seeing the installation become part of the daily experience of the playground,” he says, “offering moments of delight.”

Barbara Butler—a custom builder of luxury play structures, whose clients include actor Robert Redford and singer Bobby McFerrin—designed the whimsical, wheelchair-accessible, two-story playhouse and lookout built around a stony pine.

As Villarreal makes her way through the Magical Bridge, she greets friends and newcomers alike. “Many years from now, when we’re no longer here, I hope that people will know Ava’s story, and will say hello to her,” she says. “She loves when people say hello.”

For many families like Villarreal’s, Magical Bridge has become a welcome routine. Every week, a van transports medically-fragile children to the playground. A mother takes her 35-year-old son; in the past, she had to wait until night fell to bring him to playgrounds so people wouldn’t stare and ask questions. A girl in a tiara and a wheelchair—dubbed by Villarreal as the “Princess of the Playground”—is another regular.

Because not every family can get to the Magical Bridge, Villarreal is trying to bring it to them. She and her co-founders formed a nonprofit foundation to replicate two Magical Playgrounds in neighboring cities. If the city makes a financial commitment, the foundation will help raise the rest. Redwood City was the first to join forces with the foundation, and if fundraising stays on track, the next Magical Bridge will break ground late this year or in early 2018.

A wall around part of the playground bears messages of kindness and encouragement.

In late February, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors voted to set aside $10 million to go toward at least five inclusive, accessible playgrounds. Groups such as the Rotary Club and the Magical Bridge Foundation would raise matching funds. “It’s great not only for Santa Clara kids and families, but it also demonstrates to other parts of the nation that this is something people can do,” said Supervisor Joe Simitian, who co-sponsored the proposal. “If we each take a little piece of responsibility, we can do something extraordinary. That fits very well with the Magical Bridge approach.”

With each playground, they gain expertise, Villarreal says, learning how to bring down costs, and exploring different equipment options. By the time the foundation finishes its third playground, she aims to sell packages of construction drawings and components that can be customized to work in a variety of terrains, spaces and budgets at parks and schools, spreading the magic of Magical Bridge. “This has been a transformative journey. Doing this type of work is so fulfilling,” she says. “We’re doing something for families. It makes me want to do more of it, to get out and leave our little mark on the planet.”

New Knowledge

April 10, 2017 by Carla Guerrero '06 Comments Off

Thinking in Black and White PSYCHOLOGY: Assistant Professor Ajay Satpute

Thinking in Black and White

When people are asked to describe their emotions in black and white terms, it actually changes the way they feel, according to a new study published in the journal Psychological SCIENCE by lead author Ajay Satpute, assistant professor of psychology at Pomona College, and principal investigator Kevin Ochsner, professor of psychology at Columbia University. Given only two extreme answers to choose from with no gray area to ponder, participants’ feelings in turn shifted to whichever extreme they were hovering closest to. The research has implications for everything from the legal system to daily social interactions.

To function in society, it is important for people to be able to perceive and understand emotional experiences—both internally (for example perceiving if you are feeling good or bad) and externally (perceiving if someone else is feeling calm or angry). This emotion perception helps inform our decisions and actions. And according to Satpute, that emotion perception is actually changed when we’re nudged to think categorically.

“If you think about your emotions in black and white terms, you’re more prone to feeling emotions that are consistent with the category you select,” says Satpute. “Extreme thinking about emotions leads to emotions that are more likely to be extreme.”

In one experiment, participants were asked to judge photographs of facial expressions that were morphed from calm to fearful in two ways. In one set of trials, participants had to choose either ‘calm’ or ‘fearful’ to describe each facial expression. In the second set of trials, participants had a continuous range, with ‘calm’ and ‘fearful’ as anchors on a graded scale. Results indicated that categorical thinking (either calm or fearful) shifted the threshold for perceiving fear or calm. In essence, when a person has to think about something categorically it changes how they feel about it—pushing them over the edge, in a manner of speaking—if they didn’t have strong feelings about it beforehand. These shifts correlated with neural activity in the amygdala and the insula, parts of the brain that are considered important for orienting attention to emotionally salient information and responding accordingly.

“While these findings were observed when judging another person’s emotions, they were reproduced in a second study in which participants judged their own feelings in response to aversive graphic photographs,” Satpute explains. “So black and white thinking not only affects how you perceive others’ emotions, but also how you perceive your own.

“You could think of it from an optimism perspective but with a twist,” he adds. “Our results suggest that if you say that the glass is half empty, the water may actually lower, so to speak.”

He explains further in his paper, “Our findings suggest that categorical judgments—especially when made about people, behaviors, or options that fall in the gray zone—may change our perception and mental representation of these targets to be consistent with the category selected.”

Consider a juror who must decide whether a police officer on trial acted out of fear or anger when shooting a suspect. Such a judgment involves thinking about emotions in “black and white” terms rather than in shades of gray. Evidence presented in a trial will lead the juror to make a determination: Did the officer act out of anger or objectively reasonable fear? (Fear of imminent threat to their life or others’ lives or serious bodily harm?) The categorical nature of the decision helps determine how justice is meted out.

Or think of faces. They move in gradations, says Satpute, but people typically talk about these expressions in categorical terms, calling them expressions of “fear” or “calm,” for instance. Similarly, when people perceive their own emotions, their bodily signals may vary continuously, but they often talk about feeling “good” or “bad.”

For a lighter example, consider the 2015 computer-animated movie Inside Out. In the film, each emotion is personified into a character: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. There is little room for gray areas—hardly any mixing of emotions—the protagonist is either sad, angry, fearful or happy. The film effectively makes young viewers think about emotions categorically, and thus, may change how they experience emotions.

Satpute is a psychologist and neuroscientist studying the neural basis of emotion and social perception. His research is focused on revealing how people categorize subjective experiences, particularly evaluative categories like good and bad or hedonic categories like pleasant and unpleasant or emotions such as fear, anger or happiness. A long-term goal of his work is to use neuroscience to enable predictions for the kinds of categories people use to describe experience.

HISTORY AND CHICANA/0 LATINA/0 STUDIES: Associate Professor Tomás Summers Sandoval

Vietnam Veteranos

Pomona College Associate Professor of History and Chicana/o Latina/o Studies Tomás Summers Sandoval is working to bring the stories of Latino veterans of the Vietnam War to the stage. The project is a continuation of his multi-year research, collecting and documenting oral histories of the veterans and their families. Summers Sandoval is one of eight humanities scholars from across the country awarded a 2017 Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship. The $50,000 grant will fund “Vietnam Veteranos,” his storytelling theatre project to premiere in spring 2018.

The Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship is a new humanities program for faculty members pursuing projects to engage directly with the public beyond the academy.

“Vietnam Veteranos: Latino Testimonies of the War” takes root from Summers Sandoval’s previous research documenting the oral histories of local Latino veterans who served in the Vietnam War.

This new project centers on the oral histories of these veterans that have been curated by Summers Sandoval. The oral histories will be presented as a staged performance read by some of the veterans themselves as individual historical monologues, also known as “testimonios” in Spanish.

“I feel honored to receive the support of the Whiting Foundation. It’s a humbling thing for me to be part of a cohort of such amazing and engaged scholars,” he says.

Summers Sandoval has worked on the topic of Latinos and the Vietnam War since 2011 and is currently working on a book that delves into the social history of the “brown baby boom” and how the war in Vietnam serves as a prism into the experiences of Latino veterans in the 20th-century U.S. “This project is based on that work, an opportunity for me to connect people to this history in an accessible way as well as a deeply personal one,” he says.

The project “Vietnam Veteranos” will also draw from the expertise and support of Rose Portillo ’75, lecturer in theatre and dance at Pomona (see story on page 42). As a collaborator on the project, Portillo will draw from her experience translating oral histories into theatrical monologues. She will also direct the production and oversee a team of professional actors to serve as coaches for the veterans.

The performance will be staged at Pomona College’s Seaver Theatre and an East Los Angeles-based venue in spring 2018. In addition, Summers Sandoval plans to produce a video and accompanying print and digital publication to be shared with a wider audience.

The topic of the Vietnam War is more than academic for Summers Sandoval, who also serves as chair of Pomona’s History Department.

“My father is a Vietnam veteran,” he says. “His brother, my uncle, are Vietnam veterans. Most of the males I knew growing up were also Vietnam veterans. This work is deeply personal for me. In many ways, it’s a way for me to bring my skills as a historian to better understand not only why Latinos made up such a significant share of the combat troops in Southeast Asia but, as important, how the war framed a long-term impact on their lives and the lives of their communities.

“At a moment when political leaders portray Latinos in the United States as criminals, and as economic and cultural threats, I hope work like mine can serve a purpose,” he adds. On one level, histories like these humanize Latinas and Latinos. It’s both troubling and sad that this is even a need in the 21st century, but it is. The humanities help us understand people within the context of their own complex lives, filled with hopes and desires as well as struggles and contradictions.

“I hope my work presents this generation in this way, as human beings seeking lives of dignity. Perhaps more importantly, Latinas and Latinos represent the future military personnel of the United States. Because of that, I think it’s vital for us all to recognize and better understand the enduring impacts of both military service and war.”

In the past five years, Summers Sandoval has collected more than 50 oral histories of Latino veterans of the Vietnam War and their families. Two years ago, he received a $10,000 grant from the Cal Humanities California Documentary Project for a youth-centered, community history project in partnership with The dA Center for the Arts in downtown Pomona, Calif. The project trained local youth and Pomona College students to conduct oral histories of local Latino veterans and their families.

A free exhibition of that earlier project, “Voices Veteranos: Mexican America and the Legacy of Vietnam 2017,” was to run from March 11 through April 15 at The dA Center for the Arts in downtown Pomona.

Bleeding Pomona Blue

April 10, 2017 by Mark Wood Comments Off

AS HE RETIRES from the Board of Trustees this spring after a tenure of almost 30 years, including nine years as chair, Stewart Smith ’68 has found himself doing a few calculations. Between his father, the late H. Russell Smith ’36, and himself, he estimates that the Smiths have been active members of the College family—as students, engaged alumni and trustees—for roughly two-thirds of the College’s 130-year existence, including more than half a century with at least one Smith on the Board of Trustees and a grand total of 27 years as chair. And that family history remains open-ended since he’s also the father of two Pomona graduates—Graham ’00 and MacKenzie ’09.

“So it runs really deep in the family,” he notes with a wry smile. “We bleed Pomona blue—there’s no question—and for many, many, many, many decades.”

It’s a connection, however, that almost didn’t happen. “My dad had applied to Pomona, and was admitted, but realized that he could not afford $300 tuition, plus $400 room and board, so he set out to drive to the University of Redlands to accept its offer, which included financial aid,” Smith says. “On the way he stopped at Pomona. Trustee Clarence Stover happened to be in the Admissions Office at the time, and overheard Dad explaining that he needed to withdraw his application because he couldn’t afford Pomona. On the spot, Mr. Stover offered Dad a job as a carpenter’s assistant and, based on that generosity, Dad entered Pomona. A lot of things might have been different had this chance encounter not occurred. For example, it was in Claremont several years later that Dad met R. Stanton Avery ’32, and one consequence of that partnership is the Smith Campus Center.”

It’s perhaps ironic that Smith will be the first trustee to leave the board because of the mandatory term limits that he proposed and succeeded in passing some years ago—but he also believes it is fitting. When asked how he feels about leaving the board after so many years of service, he quotes Pomona’s seventh president, David Alexander: “The essence of Pomona College is constant renewal.”

It’s a perspective, he believes, that comes with the long view of Pomona’s history that he’s been privileged to gain over the years. “We come here. We do the best we can for the College. We try to provide it with additional resources and improve it in whatever ways we can. And then the wheel turns, and we move on. And others now, other very competent trustees are in place. And it’s a process that is far bigger than any one trustee, even with 30 years of service.”

While he was growing up, Smith was aware of his dad’s deep affection for his alma mater, but he says he never felt any pressure to attend Pomona himself. In 1964, however, after a visit to campus, he decided to apply for early admission. “I can’t remember any thought process I had at the time,” he says. “It just sort of happened.”

But he has much clearer memories of what happened after he arrived. “I’m an example of someone who was an insecure high school student when I came here, and I was able to find outlets,” he says. “I was class president and chair of the student court and some things that I wouldn’t have thought were in my wheelhouse coming into college. And I graduated with considerably more self-confidence and self-assurance, as well as a very good education.”

In particular, he remembers how Professor of Politics Hans Palmer, now emeritus, took him aside and pushed him to do his best. “He wasn’t letting me off the hook—a B-plus wasn’t good enough if I could do better—and that was one of the best things that could have happened to me,” he recalls. “I ended up realizing that I had an obligation to myself—if I’m going to spend the money to come to Pomona, I should maximize what I get out of it.”

It was after graduation, when he went on to Harvard Law School, that Smith would realize just how much he had gotten out of his Pomona education. “It boosted me on to a really great law school where I found the work to be less intensive than it was here at the College,” he explains. “So I certainly did well there, and it’s also served me throughout my life.”

In fact, looking back, he attributes his extensive volunteer service in a number of wide-ranging fields to the breadth of his Pomona education. Pomona, he says, left him conversant and interested in a variety of areas beyond his economics major or his law degree. “I’ve served as chair of an art museum, a college, a university library, chair of the Huntington Library,” he says. “I’m on the board of a dance company and a theatre company. I was president of a children’s museum and of the Little League. I’m missing a couple, but the point is that they’re varied. It’s a perfect example of the liberal arts making everything more interesting throughout your life.”

He doesn’t recall who asked him to join Pomona’s Board of Trustees in 1988, but he assumes it must have been President Alexander. What he does remember clearly is that he was “flabbergasted that they would ask me to do such a thing. I’d been involved in Torchbearers and so forth, but I didn’t think of myself as a trustee. But I instantly accepted. And I’ve certainly never regretted it.”

During the ensuing three decades, he’s seen lots of changes, not only at the College but on the board itself. “The board used to meet downtown,” he recalls. “We met 10 times a year—eight of them not on campus. Now we always meet here on campus. Somehow, just that change seems symbolic—that this is really all about the College and how we’re doing, rather than having trustees off in their own world.”

Asked what he’s proudest of from those years, he pauses to think. “The things that jump out at me are the truly transformational activities that the board was able to support,” he says finally. “Policies on diversity and sustainability, for example. Or on accessibility to the College and the financial resources to ensure that, like the no-loan policy. Or the decision that faculty salaries should be competitive with the best in the country. Or decisions around the endowment—our role was just supportive, but the growth of the endowment has been impressive. I think it was $230-something million when I joined the board, and today it’s over two billion and obviously has helped bring the College to the very forefront.”

Most recently, Smith helped add to that total as chair of the highly successful Daring Minds Campaign, which concluded at the end of 2015 with a total of more than $316 million raised.

During those 30 years, he’s worked with only three presidents—two of whom he helped to hire. “That was a particular privilege,” he says, to have the opportunity to participate in those two searches. And we came up with two really great presidents, I believe, so it was all quite worthwhile.”

On a more personal note, he remembers the pride and pleasure he took in presenting two of his children with their Pomona College diplomas, though he also recalls some nervous moments leading up to those events. “One of the roles of the board chair here, unlike many other institutions, is to personally sign every diploma,” he says with a laugh. “And in the early days, we used a fountain pen, or kind of a quill pen. And when you’re not used to using that kind of pen, it can be very difficult. You would get halfway through somebody’s name, and it would run out of ink. Or you had too much ink, and it would get really bloody. And you’ve got 300 of these to sign. So when I got to sign my son’s diploma, I was a nervous wreck. I’m sitting and I’m looking—‘Graham Russell Smith’—and I somehow have to sign with this pen with just the right amount of ink and without my hand quivering and so forth. So when my daughter came through, I resolved that I would just sign them and I wouldn’t look at the names so that when I signed hers, I wouldn’t be aware that I was about to sign my daughter’s diploma.”

The story also prompts a confession from an earlier phase in his life. “When I graduated from Pomona,” he says, “the board chair was—who? I’ve forgotten. But it wasn’t my dad. But several years later, he became board chair, and so—I’m ’fessing up here—I informed the College that I had lost my diploma. I hadn’t, actually, but I said I had and asked if I could have another one. They said, ‘Of course—we have a procedure for that.’ And so, I ended up with a diploma signed by my father, and it’s hanging on the wall of my office. If you were to open the frame of the picture, you would find behind it my actual, original diploma, but the one that you can see is the one signed by H. Russell Smith.”

Staying Inspired

April 10, 2017 by Feather Flores ’17 Comments Off

Sefa Aina

SEFA AINA IS UNABLE to sit still. When he thinks, he taps his fingers on his leg; when he listens, he nods along intently; when he speaks, his face breaks open in a smile as his hands paint vivid pictures in the air around him. Being around him is invigorating, but he asserts just the opposite: for Aina, being here, at Pomona College and surrounded by “students who actively want to take leftover dining hall food and feed it to people, or go mentor low-income kids, or spend their summer working for the PAYS program” is how he stays inspired.

A prominent activist and educator in the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, Aina came to Pomona from his alma mater, UCLA, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in history and went on to serve as both a counselor and instructor at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. He recalls his time at UCLA fondly, but remembers being taken aback as a new student by the beautiful buildings, nice statues, fancy food and proliferation of squirrels.

“It’s these sorts of things that make you feel a little awkward,” he explains. “You wonder whether or not you belong. [These universities are] beautiful, wonderful places, but some people aren’t going to feel comfortable or adjusted to the space. There’s privilege. There’s hummus! You don’t feel quite like you fit.”

It’s this feeling of not belonging that Aina sought to alleviate when he became Pomona’s director of the Asian American Resource Center (AARC), and that he continues to work against as the interim director of the Draper Center for Community Partnerships. Aina describes the space he sets out to create for students as one where they can step back from the pressures of school and society and just take a deep breath. “However, it’s important to me that we always become proactive,” he stresses.

Taking identity struggles and turning them into concrete action is at the core of Aina’s activism. During his time at UCLA, the AARC, and now the Draper Center, Aina has established and overseen countless outreach programs in the communities of both Los Angeles and the Inland Empire. In addition to his full-time work at the Draper Center, he also serves as the executive director of the research and advocacy nonprofit Empowering Pacific Islander Communities (EPIC), which breaks down the “AAPI” category and focuses on supporting Pacific Islanders specifically.

This may seem like a lot for one activist and educator to juggle, but it’s nothing for Aina. After all, he was selected from a pool of 25,000 candidates as one of 20 appointees to President Obama’s Advisory Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islanders, on which he served from 2010–2014. The experience, he says “was surreal. I’ve always considered myself someone who would stand outside the White House with a picket sign, and there I was eating the snacks,” he laughs.

At the same time as he was working with the AARC to support AAPI students and advance local social justice activism, Aina was also advising President Barack Obama on the ways his policies were impacting AAPI communities and how his administration could do better. “You have to be able to sustain yourself,” he admits—something he often reminds the budding student activists on Pomona’s campus.

Now that Donald Trump is in the White House, Aina asserts that our collective responsibility is to stay vigilant and active. “We need to understand that the things we do here impact the lives of people around the world,” he says with a firm gesture to the room at large. “The amount of waste and carbon pollution we emit here means that people on islands like Tuvalu, my people, are losing their homeland. They’re environmental refugees. We need to understand the connectedness of things, so that when policies come out, and you say, ‘Oh, that’s not relevant to me,’ you understand that it is. It’s you. It’s your neighbor. We have to always feel empathy and connection to people.”

And for Aina, there’s no better place to start than at home, in the communities. that surround Pomona’s campus. “I have always believed in the power and necessity of engagement, especially for college students. A lot of people applied to get into these desks and these seats,” he says.

Grinning, but eyes serious, he extends a pointing finger. “You got a seat. How are you going to make your seat matter for other people?”

Letter Box

April 10, 2017 by Staff Comments Off

Memories of Virginia Crosby

When our daughter Beatrice [Schraa ’06] was applying to college, she received a brochure saying Pomona professors often formed lifelong friendships with students. That was certainly true of Virginia. I took French 51 from her in the fall of 1968 and several classes after that, including a wonderful seminar on the French Revolution, co-taught with Burdette Poland. My wife, Louise [Schraa ’72], remembers her as one of the friendly and accessible professors whom everyone knew. We kept in touch after graduation, and I was working in Paris when she moved there and acquired the first in a series of tiny but exquisite and wonderfully located apartments. We saw her regularly after that, especially in Paris and then when we lived in Brussels.

For Beatrice, Virginia was literally a lifelong friend. Virginia was at her christening in Paris and, although she couldn’t attend Beatrice’s wedding earlier last year, we had lots of interested emails and calls with good wishes and requests for details and pictures. When she was only 95, Virginia was able to attend the wedding of our daughter Eugenia and spent the evening charming new people and dancing.

You might have thought she would be an honorary grandmother to our girls. Although they certainly knew her better than my mother, that was never the case. Rather, she was always, in the best professorial fashion, an adult friend, even when they were little tykes. Our whole family always looked forward to seeing Virginia, with her interest in all kinds of things, insightful conversation, good humor and fresh outlook, even in very old age. She avoided the old person’s tendency to reminisce, but very occasionally something would prompt a perfect anecdote, about the time she saw Hitler, about her one and only deer hunt, about her radio program with her husband, etc. Very occasionally, in the most discreet and subtle way, there came a nugget of advice or guidance as well. We traded articles, political comments and book recommendations with her until shortly before her death. I owed her a book report every year on the annual winner of the Prix Goncourt.

Everybody who knew Virginia remarks on what an extraordinary person she was and what a rich and varied path she had found through life. Louise, Eugenia, Beatrice and I all felt knowing her enriched our lives. We will miss her a great deal.

—David Schraa ’72

New York, N.Y.

***

Virginia and I article I received my Pomona College Magazine yesterday, opened it this morning to the last page and came unglued to see Virginia Crosby’s beautiful smiling face.

All the memories of a long, wonderful friendship came flooding back. Virginia and I met when we were both completing our B.A. in French in the early ’60s. I was a single mom with two young sons and little money for a babysitter, so I would take them with me to Virginia’s house, and the two of us would study for exams—particularly those of our favorite professor, Leonard Pronko. I went on to earn a teaching credential in French at CGU, while Virginia got her Ph.D. and—as we all know—became a professor at Pomona.

We kept in contact over the many years, either in Claremont or Paris. In April of this year, I flew down to Ontario to visit friends and learned that Virginia had been diagnosed with brain cancer. I was able to visit her a few days before she died. As I was leaving after the second visit, I whispered good-bye in French. She whispered back in French, “I love you and am so proud of what you have done.” I will forever hold those last words in my memory, along with the many others of our 50-year friendship.

My thanks to Mary Schmich for her article.

—Réanne Hemingway-Douglass ’63

Anacortes, Wash.

***

Thank you to Mary Schmich ’75 for her article about Virginia Crosby, which I enjoyed and which inspired these memories.

In the fall of 1967, I tested into Mme. Crosby’s fourth-semester French class (French 62), which I survived with a generous B. However, I then had the audacity to sign up for her “Renaissance French Literature” class the next semester (spring ’68). Here I was: (1) the only boy (as a callow 18-year-old, I wouldn’t say “man”); (2) the only non-language major (I did economics-math); (3) the least prepared student. However, it was obvious that I was there for the love of the subject, so again, she was generous with my grade.

Toward the end of the semester, an older student (I was still only 18) helped me buy a bottle of red wine, “La Bourgogne de Cucamonga.” I had a silver chalice; so to celebrate Rabelais, we brought this to class, quite against the rules. Mme. Crosby took us off campus across Harvard Ave. and we celebrated: one bottle for about 8 people didn’t get us too drunk. I know she got a chuckle out of the silver chalice.

A couple of years later, she invited my girlfriend and me to her home in Padua Hills to play our “Glory of Gabrieli” (E. Power Biggs) record on her husband’s state-of-the-art stereo system, and for a very pleasant afternoon on her deck overlooking the valley.

Around 1970, Zeta Chi Sigma voted Mme. Crosby as a member. Not a faculty advisor. Member. (At this same time, we also voted several women students as members.) All of this was against the rules, but in the spirit of the times, we didn’t ask.

Did she share with you her story of how she got into writing radio soap-operas while living in a Chicago apartment with “a prostitute in the apartment above and an abortionist in the apartment below”?

I tried looking her up when I was in Claremont a few years ago, but was told that she wasn’t doing well.

Let me end with some verses from a poem we studied in her class (Ronsard: “A Cassandre”):

Las! voyez comme en peu d’espace,

Mignonne, elle a dessus la place

Las! las ses beautez laissé cheoir!

Ô vrayment marastre Nature,

Puis qu’une telle fleur ne dure

Que du matin jusques au soir!

Thank you for the article, and thanks for letting me share.

—Howard Hogan ’71

Owings, Md.

Anguished Father

I am an anguished father, white and privileged, who may lose his adopted, undocumented sons to deportation. My heart is shattered.

—David Lyman ’66

South Pasadena, Calif.

Shining Example

Thank you for the inspiring story in the summer 2016 PCM about Judge Halim Dhanidina, who has steadfastly exhibited the courage to promote the values and enforce the laws of our country in the face of the prejudice and fear engendered by the 9/11 attack on WTC. I’m sure I would not have his courage to do the same. He is a shining example of the values and vision we believe Pomona instills in all graduates. His life is (or should be) an inspiration to all Americans.

—Mike Hogan ‘69

Black Forest, Colo.

Another Cane

Another Cane “The Cane Mystery” article in the PCM summer 2016 issue was interesting and reminded me of the cane which I now have. The cane belonged to my father, Robert Boynton Dozier (1902–2001), Class of ’23.

The cane has the same dimensions as those mentioned in the article: 35 inches long, with a five-inch curved handle. Attached about 29 inches above the base is a 3/4–inch sterling band which is engraved: “R.B.D. ’23” (see photo at right).

As I recall the story my father told me many years ago, the freshmen class men beat the sophomore men in the Pole Rush competition. The challenge: Which team could have a man reach the top of the pole the quickest? He felt that the freshmen had done so well because they had a plan as to where the men would be positioned and who would climb where and when. The award was a cane. I do not know how many other men received and kept a cane.

My father really enjoyed having that cane as a special memento of Pomona College and kept it on the umbrella stand in his home. He also found it to be a useful walking aid when he was in his late 90s. I am pleased to have the cane in my living room, though I have not yet needed to use it.

—Bobbie Dozier Spurgin ’49

Carlsbad, Calif.

Memories of a Friend

I’m writing to share a few thoughts about the passing of my friend, Richard E. Persoff ‘49 (see Obits). These are perhaps of more interest to Pomona undergraduates than to alumni, partly because there are few of us left from the 1940s, and partly because the present students are now grappling with the same questions that Persoff faced in the aftermath of WWII: “Is liberal education, including the humanities, relevant to those who look forward to careers in technological fields?”

Persoff used his undergraduate work to learn how to think. And because of that, he was able to continue applying his mind in several areas. That luxury is as pertinent today as it was in the 1940s.

At Pomona, he studied hard and then played hard. Once, emerging from his books after midnight, he roared at me from across the room: “Andrews! Let’s go to the snow!” We then exited the world of academia temporarily for some improvised adventure, and then returned with renewed energy to our studies.

He could be critical, but outside his field, he was a champion of tolerance. He liked to strike up conversations with the immigrant workers of the local gravel pits and try to absorb their views on lives so different from ours. He befriended the college gardener, a family man who cared for the plants on campus with as much responsibility as an ancient shepherd might tend to his flock. Richard once visited the hobos who cooked their haphazard dinners on open fires in their “jungle” down by the railroad tracks. In our college days, the Great Depression and World War II were recent history. We knew songs from nations victimized by the war, as well as some older songs collected by the poet Carl Sandburg—songs that reflected man at odds with society, but whose protagonist could still recognize life’s gifts, for castaways often seek community in strange places.

One night, we decided to see what it was like to ride a freight train. We crouched by the tracks as locomotives came by. We felt the earth shake, heard the deafening mechanical sounds and felt the blast of the glowing firebox passing only a foot or so from us. We ran along next to the slow-moving train, hoping to grab hold somewhere and swing aloft into an empty box car. We quickly realized that if we leapt and missed, we might fall under the wheels, and we wisely postponed our plan indefinitely, but we never stopped searching for the answers of that odd life and the freedom that it symbolized

I was taken by surprise when good old Dick phoned me to say, “This is the last word you will have from me.” We had given each other the unqualified friendship that holds much of the world together. Thinking of him as I tried to adjust to the loss of his steadfast support, it occurred to me that Dick had finally gotten a grip on his freight train and was just riding off to another great adventure.

With appreciation of Pomona’s contributions, past and present…

—Chris Andrews ’50

Sequim, Wash.

Andrus Remembered

I was saddened to learn that my senior thesis advisor, Professor William Dewitt Andrus, had passed away (PCM fall 2016). Under his able direction, my thesis topic was a study of a unicellular algae, Dunaliella salina. This prepared me for my Ph.D. dissertation on photosynthesis at the University of Bern, Switzerland, in 1966. Prof. Andrus was a brilliant experimentalist and had a sense of humor.

—Katherine J. Jones ’61

Alpine, Calif.

Thank You

Last year a note in PCM suggested that we in the community that appreciate the quality and effort that this amazing publication delivers can say “thank you” by sending in a “voluntary subscription.” The latest example, featuring the Oxtoby years, is such a stunning keeper that I am finally moved to action. So, I wish to add my voice to the cheering throng—PCM is an enormous credit to Pomona. We are flattered and fortunate to be on the mailing list. Thank you!

—Joe Mygatt P’13

Stanford, Conn.

CORRECTION

Our apologies to Eric Myers ’80, whose name was misspelled in a class note in the fall 2016 issue of PCM. —Editor

Alumni, parents and friends are invited to email letters to pcm@pomona.edu or “snail-mail” them to Pomona College Magazine, 550 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Letters may be edited for length, style and clarity.

The Right Side of History

April 10, 2017 by Mark Wood Comments Off

History can be complicated, and institutions that span centuries are lucky if they don’t find themselves on the wrong side of it on occasion. So I suppose it should come as no surprise that a lot of American colleges and universities are struggling today with the moral implications of their complicated pasts.

In 1838, the priests who ran the Jesuit college that eventually became Georgetown University sold 272 slaves to sugar plantations in Louisiana for the modern equivalent of $3.3 million. That now-infamous sale—which saved the institution at the cost of condemning 272 enslaved men, women and children to even greater suffering—illustrates the conundrum institutional leaders face today as they look back at times when their predecessors failed to rise above the ethical blind spots and moral outrages of their times.

The history of institutional involvement in slavery is, perhaps, the most extreme example of this. In his 2013 book, Ebony and Ivy, Craig Steven Wilder argues that in addition to church and state, America’s early colleges were “the third pillar of a civilization based on bondage.” In recent years, institutions like Harvard, Brown, Princeton and Emory have also investigated and publicly acknowledged their own historic ties to the slave trade.

Since you can’t change the past, institutions that find themselves on the wrong side of history have to find ways to atone for it today. Georgetown has announced a number of real and symbolic reparations, including a monument to the slaves who were sold, preferential admissions for their descendants and the renaming of buildings in their honor. Similarly, Yale recently decided to rename the residential college that has been, since its construction in 1933, named for John Calhoun, known as slavery’s most forceful political advocate.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from all this, it’s probably that it would be far better to avoid such situations to begin with. But how do you do that? It’s tempting to say: Just do the right thing, even when it’s hard. And in the final analysis, there’s probably no better advice to be found. But at the same time, you only have to look at today’s heated debates over a range of questions to see that culture and self-interest cloud our ethical vision, and people on both sides of an issue can feel morally righteous. Today, it’s almost impossible to imagine how anyone could have ever defended such a barbaric practice as slavery, and yet, we know that in the first half of the 19th century, the topic was angrily debated in this country and became so deeply divisive that it eventually led to civil war.

So what are the divisive issues of our own time that, at some point in the distant future, will seem so ethically obvious that people will wonder how on earth anyone could have gotten them wrong? And what will be the final verdict of history, once time has peeled away the layers of self-interest, political animosity and cultural bias that trouble our ethical sight today? These are questions we probably should all ask ourselves from time to time.

For my part, I think climate change is likely to top the list. Someday, I believe, when the disruptive realities of a warmer world are indisputable facts on the ground, the denial and inaction of many of today’s leaders will be viewed as criminal acts of willful blindness. Philosopher Miranda Fricker suggests that people of all eras should be judged according to “the best standards that were available to them at the time.” By that standard, I think climate deniers will have a lot to answer for someday.

My list doesn’t end there, however. It would also include such things as LGBT rights and the treatment of refugees and undocumented immigrants in this country—which I would argue are the civil rights issues of our time.

In all of these issues, I’m proud to say that the college that employs me to create this magazine puts its money and its people power where its values are. I feel confident that Pomona’s efforts to do the right thing—including its commitment to carbon neutrality by 2030, its sustained efforts on behalf of the LGBT community on our campus, and its leadership in the fight for the undocumented students known as “Dreamers”—will, on these issues, at least, put it very much on the right side of history.

«‹4 567 8 ›»