Articles from: 2024

Ignacio López Day in the City of Pomona

June 18, 2024 by Staff Comments Off

Mural by Thundr One. Photograph courtesy of López Urban Farm

March 19 was Ignacio López Day in the city of Pomona by proclamation of the city council.

The date marked the 116th anniversary of the birth of the late journalist and civil rights champion Ignacio López ’31, who fought discrimination against Latinos in the region for decades, publishing his influential El Espectador newspaper in Pomona from 1933 to 1960.

His name lives on through both Pomona’s Ignacio López Elementary School and the López Urban Farm, a partnership between the local nonprofit Community Partners 4 Innovation and Pomona Unified School District. The farm provides people in the community with access to locally grown food and also educates youth on sustainable agriculture practices. Among the murals at the farm is one depicting López.

KSPC Radio Rocks On

June 18, 2024 by Staff Comments Off

DJ Comet and DJ Moon were a natural fit for KSPC 88.7 FM, the station of The Claremont Colleges, which celebrated 68 years on the FM airwaves in February. (KSPC was preceded at Pomona by the AM station KPCR.)

DJ Comet was supposed to be a placeholder name until Anaelle Roc ’24 found another. But the moniker—a play on her last name and love of space—fit perfectly at the station often known as The Space. Pomona classmate Emily Gibbons ’24 christened herself DJ Moon on the same theme.

Roc and Gibbons represent a senior class whose introduction to college came via Zoom during the early months of the pandemic. While remote in 2020, Gibbons worked as a music director at KSPC, reviewing albums and music. Roc became a production director, learning how to edit shows and write promotions and community messages. Once they were on campus as sophomores, KSPC’s secluded headquarters awed them both.

“The Space is a time capsule,” Roc says. “There are posters there from the ’80s, photos there from the ’50s when it became an FM station. I was instantly hooked.

“People ask, ‘Why do radio? Radio is dead,’” Roc says. “We have Spotify, the internet, AI DJs who can find you the perfect song. But people are really attracted to The Space. It’s a beautiful space with all this history. We want to be part of that legacy.”

Gibbons, a philosophy major and host of In the Clouds with DJ Moon, plans to attend law school, with dreams of becoming an attorney for a band or music label.

“I would love to get involved in the radio station of whatever law school I go to if they would have me,” she says.

Roc, a physics major, is so invested in mastering the craft she says she only applied to astrophysics graduate programs with established radio programs either on campus or in the community.

“Live music is something I can’t live without,” the host of cathartic destruction says. “I’m tied on a soul level to radio now.”

Letter Box

June 18, 2024 by Staff Comments Off

The Liberal Arts for Life

I was pleased to see your Pomona College Magazine article devoted to the value of liberal arts (Spring 2024). As one whose four years at Pomona included courses in over 20 departments, a semester in India, a history major, completion of pre-med requirements and evenings spent hanging around the music department, I loved the breadth of opportunities that Pomona provided. And, yes, some of those “non-career-prep” courses did help me in my work—for example, giving me tools to author successful textbooks and edit a scientific journal.

But the real value of my liberal arts education was that it made the non-work aspects of my life much fuller and more enjoyable. So I wish that your article had said more about this side of liberal arts.

I understand that our society these days tends to define return on investment in terms of dollars and cents, but the older I get the more I realize that it’s what makes you happy that matters, and Pomona’s contribution to that aspect of my life was squarely in the liberal arts opportunities it provided.

—Philip D. Sloane ’72
Professor of Family Medicine and Geriatrics
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

**Praise for PCM, Aid for Middle-Income Students**

Congrats on the “Value” issue (Spring 2024).

I think the cover is exceptional—eye catching, artistic, clever with math, musical and DNA symbols. The diamond representing “value” was quite creative.

The article about supporting the financially mid-level students is timely in my opinion.

Keep up the good work.

—Ron Smith ’63
Newport Beach, California

A ’60s Activist’s Take on Politicized Campuses

The subject of your piece is obviously of great interest, and I appreciate your effort to cover the waterfront in the limited space at hand. That said, I was disappointed that what strikes me as by far the most compelling issue driving the turn against liberal arts colleges—the politicization of the campus—is mentioned only briefly in your editor’s letter.

FYI, I was a political activist at Pomona in the 1960s, and having in the course of my career as a journalist moved to the right, I look back on the changes wrought by radicals like me at places like Pomona with regret and shame. It was a truly diverse intellectual campus when I arrived in 1966, far less so when I left in 1970; and on the basis of everything I see, a frighteningly narrow place today. And it’s a good guess a fair number of my fellow elderly grads feel the same. This is hardly unique to Pomona, of course, or even to colleges. My kids went to Fieldston in New York, and while it’s always defined itself as a progressive place, I’d be horrified if my grandkids were there today. And, alas, reading of the evident near-uniformity of thought in Claremont on issues of race, gender and now the Middle East, I feel very nearly the same way about Pomona.

Yours is an alumni magazine, and I understand you are not in the business of stirring the pot. Still, it’s unfortunate that as an interested alum I have to go to The Claremont Independent to find [other news coverage of campus].

—Harry Stein ’70
New York

Closer Look at Classroom Photo

Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies Aimee Bahng, right of the podium, leads a discussion in her Race, Gender and the Environment class.

It was with great anticipation that I turned to your cover story on “The Value of the Liberal Arts.” Over a lifetime, Pomona’s liberal arts education has served me well both personally and professionally.

I was briefly thrown off by reference early in the story to “the gender and women’s studies class” since it is one of the newest and least established parts of the liberal arts curriculum. This mention felt a bit like the tyranny of political correctness (pc). But I continued to read until I took a close look at the photo of a class on gender studies, which covers the top of the right-hand page in this feature article’s two-page spread. Of the 19 people seated around the table, 17 or 18 are women and only one or two are men.

Those who seek to demonize gender studies charge them with being militant feminism, a.k.a. reverse sexism in disguise. Yet they have the potential to be of great value at a time when surveys show a larger divergence in life attitudes among young women and men than in the past. The big question is whether gender studies bridge this gap or widen it. The class photo is not encouraging in this regard. It suggests Pomona is not marketing gender studies to students in a way that is equally inviting to men and women, and thus is not inclusive.

That Pomona’s magazine could overlook the glaring implication of this photo suggests it is in the grip of an ideology regarding the need to promote gender studies as the new flagship of liberal arts. In this case, PC has fallen into the trap of being pc. Please take a closer look at such messaging.

—Glenn Pascall ’64
Dana Point, California

Arrest of Protesters on Campus

First, my bona fides. My great-grandfather, Edwin C. Norton, was Pomona’s first dean. My grandfather, Ralph Lyman, put Pomona on the map by introducing European classical music to Southern California and mentoring Robert Shaw, later mentored by Arturo Toscanini. Shaw was the greatest choral conductor of his time in America.

Now the war has come to us. No surprise that. The question faced all over our country is how do those in power deal with student unrest.

I am beyond appalled by how President G. Gabrielle Starr chose to militarize her response.

—David Lyman, ’66
South Pasadena, California

Editor’s note: Read more on the April 5 arrests of 20 people, including seven Pomona students, during a masked protest in Alexander Hall.

Correction

The article “A New Community Space in the City of Pomona” on page 8 of the Spring 2024 issue incorrectly referred to David Armstrong ’62 as deceased. Armstrong, founder of the American Museum of Ceramic Art on Garey Avenue in Pomona, still visits the museum almost daily as it undergoes a major remodel. At 51,000 square feet, it is the largest such ceramics museum in the United States. Pomona College Magazine regrets the error.

Write to Us at PCM

Pomona College Magazine welcomes brief letters to the editor about the magazine and issues related to the College from the extended Pomona community—alumni, parents, students, faculty, staff, donors and others with a strong connection to the College. Write to us at PCM or mail a letter to Pomona College Magazine, 550 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Letters should include the writer’s name, city and state of residence, class year for alumni and contact information. With rare exceptions, letters should be no more than 400 words in length. Letters are selected for publication based on relevance and available space and are subject to being edited for brevity and clarity.

Stray Thoughts: Leaving Campus

June 18, 2024 by Robyn Norwood Comments Off

Working on a college campus lends itself to looking back on your own college years.

With this issue of the magazine, I think again about how I never considered studying in another country while I was in school.

For one thing, I assumed it was too expensive because the only students I knew who did seemed to be alumni of New England boarding schools and I was from a public high school, one of four children in my family headed to college and already paying out-of-state tuition.

For another, this was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Michael Jordan and Kenny Smith were my contemporaries. I didn’t want to miss any basketball games.

Only when I went to Europe the winter break before my final semester with a friend who was already working and generous with his frequent flyer miles did I see how much more actually using the language I had studied, seeing the art and architecture I had written about and standing in the places where history happened made me want to learn more.

After that—and once I was earning my own frequent flyer miles—I spent a lot of my 20s and 30s traveling to Latin America, various countries in Europe and later to Australia, each time coming back more interested in the literature, languages, history and current-day politics of those places than when I’d left.

Studying internationally already is much more part of the culture at Pomona than it was at UNC then, with about half of Pomona students studying away from campus, either internationally or in a domestic program.

One of the goals of the Global Pomona Project that inspired this issue is that every Pomona student will meaningfully engage with global learning, whether from abroad or here in the U.S.

What’s more, global education on campus is going to get a huge boost in coming years with the announcement of planning for the Pomona College Center for Global Engagement.

As for study away from campus: To ensure equal access for all students, financial aid transfers 100% for students participating in study away through Pomona College during the academic year. In addition, national and program-specific scholarships are available for fall, spring, academic year and summer study away from campus.

Think of that: A student reliant almost entirely on financial aid has as much chance to study internationally as one whose family goes to Europe on vacations.

Simply the awareness that it’s possible for any student to study in another country or another part of the U.S. means so much. I hope scanning the list of countries and cities on the list at the Office of International and Domestic Programs and its website will become as common as looking at the catalog to pick classes for upcoming semesters.

Thinking about all the opportunities Pomona students have starts to make me want to travel again after years of being worn out from traveling for work. Which brings me to personal news: My six-plus years at Pomona are coming to an end as I take early retirement to spend some vital years with people I love—and maybe do a little freelance study abroad, too.

I’m thankful for my time at the College and the privilege of working on these pages and getting to know so many alumni, students, professors and colleagues who have given me enjoyment, taught me things I didn’t know and kept me feeling younger than I am.

With gratitude,

—Robyn Norwood

The Failures of Facebook

March 13, 2024 by David Silverberg Comments Off

Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets by Jeff Horwitz ’03.

To understand exactly what has happened at Meta with its lineup of products such as Facebook and Instagram, ask Jeff Horwitz ’03. The investigative journalist for The Wall Street Journal has been on the Meta beat for more than four years with the goal of revealing the inner workings—and management failures—within Facebook’s Silicon Valley walls.

Horwitz tracked how often Facebook chose growth over quality by ignoring misinformation on the site and by lack of moderation, resulting in the investigative series The Facebook Files for the WSJ in 2021. He added additional reporting for his newly released book, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets. In it, Horwitz also looks at how Instagram managers ignored warning signs that the platform seriously damaged body image perceptions for teen girls around the world.

Journalist David Silverberg spoke to Horwitz for Pomona College Magazine to learn more about his yearslong process in investigating Meta, his view on Mark Zuckerberg’s role in the company’s missteps, and why he warns parents to be extremely careful about how their children use social media.

Headshot of Jeff Horwitz ’03

PCM: Technology reporters have been writing that those who run Facebook haven’t learned from the mistakes they made in 2016 and beyond. What’s your take on that?

Horwitz: One of the really fascinating things that came out of the book is that there was a period of time where Facebook invested really heavily in safety and in understanding its product. Then those people made recommendations on how to change the product in ways that would certainly mitigate a lot of the harms from its product, such as misinformation, the formation of massive groups like QAnon, conspiracy movements. There were approaches to fixing this that these folks developed but the problem was they came at the cost of engagement and usage of a platform. Meta and in particular Mark Zuckerberg were not willing to accept that. So the company has actually laid off a lot of the people who are doing this, partly because they aren’t interested in pursuing the work, and partly because they view these people as a fifth column inside the company that is more loyal to their sense of public good than to their sense of what is good for Meta.

The problems of 2016 and 2020 have by and large not been addressed. The ease with which any motivated entity can trick the algorithm into spewing out spam or political content hasn’t fundamentally changed.

PCM: Your book found that Zuckerberg’s role in how his company chose growth over content moderation was a stark contrast to how some other CEOs and founders run their companies. How so?

Horwitz: Everything flows from Mark, and that’s why he’s kind of an anomaly in the tech space at this point. The other big founders tend to step back or work on side hobbies such as Twitter—look at Elon Musk—and with Google and Microsoft, those founders have moved along in their lives and Mark hasn’t. And I think one of the things that’s really striking is he is often describing the open internet where anyone can write what they want but he neglects to discuss what Facebook became, which is an extremely powerful content recommendation engine that will recommend literally anything that will keep people on the platform more often.

No one understood that introducing a reshare button was going to actually produce higher levels of misinformation on the platform because the more times a thing gets shared, it turns out based on the company’s internal research, the less likely it’s going to be true and more likely it’s going to be sensationalist.

PCM: What I also found compelling about the book, and The Facebook Files, was how you established a relationship with Frances Haugen, the famous whistleblower and ex-manager from Facebook who ended up testifying to the U.S. Senate about how the company knew about the potential harm they were causing to both adults and children. What did you think about what she did for you and the investigation?

Horwitz: Frances is an extremely unusual human being in the sense that most whistleblowers burn out first and then they quit in a huff or they get laid off and then they decide they want to talk. I think it’s very unusual for someone to begin at square one and that she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t do her best to bring [Facebook’s issues] to the world’s attention.

This is somebody who was breaching the confidence of their employer for a very valid purpose and I think she had a lot on the line.

PCM: Before you delved into writing about Meta, you also wrote about other businesses for The Associated Press when you worked there between 2014 and 2019. How did your stint at AP help you with your career?

Horwitz: I was hired for their Washington investigative team and Donald Trump’s candidacy sort of ate my career there. I think because I had a business focus, I was originally put onto it in 2015 as, oh, hey, here’s another flash-in-the-pan candidate. We’ve seen many of them like that. Every cycle has some sort of Herman Cain-type figure who appears briefly on the horizon and then disappears. And I think that was originally the assumption about Donald Trump’s candidacy as well. Obviously that never happened.

So it was a really interesting time in terms of the work. But at the same time—I get into this a little bit in the book—it was kind of a depressing time because it really became apparent in 2016 that the only way news could get traction was if it appealed to partisans on either side and, in particular, if it appealed to partisans on Twitter.

I think one of the ways I ended up covering Facebook for The Wall Street Journal is I wanted to figure out that if the news and information ecosystem is permanently broken, then what’s going to replace it? And maybe I should be writing about that. So that’s how I ended up covering Meta.

PCM: How would you characterize the time you spent at Pomona?

Horwitz: One of the best things that happened at Pomona College for me was I got David Foster Wallace when he was teaching creative writing.

I also got into journalism via the student newspaper, and my first ever story for them was covering Professional Bull Riders Association events in Anaheim. It’s not like bull riding is a thing that I am deeply passionate about, but to have my press seat next to ESPN’s was pretty fun.

I began to feel more like an investigative reporter when I wrote on issues at the school, such as when I broke a story about grade inflation at Pomona while I was there. In 2000, The Student Life also reported on a very nasty fight over dining hall unionization and what we saw as some of the labor-busting tactics that the school undertook. I’m grateful to Pomona for a lot of things, but one of them is it kind of turned me on to questioning institutions.

Editor’s note: Pomona’s dining hall workers have been unionized since 2013, and the most recent collective-bargaining agreement provides a minimum wage of $25 an hour for all dining and catering workers by July 1, 2024.

PCM: Lastly, what’s your social media usage like these days? I assume you’re more careful than most considering everything you know about Facebook and Instagram.

Horwitz: I like cat videos as much as the next guy, but I’ve never been a super-heavy user.

So while I don’t have kids, I will say that I have been pretty damn strenuous in telling friends that it’s a good idea to be, shall we say, conservative with how much social media children use for a whole bunch of reasons. [Editor’s note: Since the interview, Horwitz has reported on Meta’s struggle to prevent pedophiles from using Facebook and Instagram in violation of its policies against child exploitation.] An interesting part of the book was revealing how the company really did define what was good for users and whatever made them use the product more. In other words, they must like it if they’re using it more, right? Not so fast.

Books and More Books

March 13, 2024 by Staff Comments Off

Several readers wrote to note that the tradition of a common book for first-year students to read together began before 2003 (“The Full Stack: 2003-2023,” Fall 2023). Among earlier selections were Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Julia Alvarez’s Yo, Gregory Williams’ Life on the Color Line, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Naguib Mahfouz’s The Palace Walk.

Ann Quinley, Pomona’s dean of students from 1992 to 2007 and an emerita professor of politics, led the first-year book selection for some time with a committee of students and faculty, often reading 20-plus books a year and planning accompanying talks.

“It was my favorite project that I looked forward to every year,” Quinley says, noting that the effort was once the victim of a prank.

“One year, a student—I don’t remember who it was and I don’t think I’d tell you if I did—managed to get hold of the list and add another book. It was one of those bodice-rippers, and then I began to get calls. Students, they are just so creative.”

As for future nominations, Elizabeth Pyle ’84 writes to suggest H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald, The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal and a classic, Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion.

Incoming first-year Sophie Park ’28 is excited to find out what her class might read. “I’d like to suggest A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace as my class’s orientation book,” she writes, calling the title essay “one of the most profound yet accessible pieces I know.” She adds: “Even if the essay collection isn’t chosen as the orientation book, ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ is short and an incredible standalone and I would cry if I came to school with all my classmates having read it.”

Bookmarks Spring 2024

March 13, 2024 by Staff Comments Off

Studio of the Voice: Essays

In Studio of the Voice: Essays by Marcia Aldrich, Marcia Aldrich ’75 serves up intense personal essays, often reflecting on her relationships with her mother and daughter.

One Day This Tree Will Fall

One Day This Tree Will Fall, a nonfiction picture book by Leslie Barnard Booth ’04, invites readers to celebrate the life cycle and afterlife of trees.

Quiet Voice, Awesome Power

Amanda Edwards ’96, in Quiet Voice, Awesome Power, guides readers in communicating with spirit, defining their spiritual path and living with power and purpose.

How Much Are These Free Books? True Tales from the Book Nook

How Much Are These Free Books? True Tales from the Book Nook by Judy Schelling Hoff ’62 reflects on Hoff’s bookstore in Schenectady, New York, through 19 years of its existence.

Learning and Teaching Creativity

In Learning and Teaching Creativity, Dan Hunter ’75 details steps to improve student and teacher creativity through imagination.

The Saplings Think of Us as Young

The poems in The Saplings Think of Us as Young by Kim Kralowec ’89 explore the intimacy of living in close relationship with extremes of beauty and distress.

Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning

Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning by Amy Lyford ’86 is a study of the artist’s life and creative output as well as the history of Surrealism.

Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny

In Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny, Jesse Spafford ’12 articulates and defends social anarchism, staking out a number of bold and original positions.

The Improbable Tales of Baskerville Hall

Ali Standish ’10 reimagines Arthur Conan Doyle’s early life in her boarding school mystery novel, The Improbable Tales of Baskerville Hall.

New to the Catalog

March 13, 2024 by Staff Comments Off

The Pomona College catalog is ever-evolving, with new and revised courses continually introduced. Among the dozens of fresh offerings this academic year were Medical Ethics, taught by Associate Professor of Philosophy Julie Tannenbaum, and Negotiating the U.S. Policyscape, taught by Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics Sean Diament.

Associate Professor of Philosophy Julie Tannenbaum’s Medical Ethics class explores topics such as gene editing and euthanasia.

Associate Professor of Philosophy Julie Tannenbaum’s MedicalEthics class explores topics such as gene editing and euthanasia.

Tannenbaum’s course touched on topics people will likely face at some point, such as whether euthanasia is permissible and how to respond to health-care practitioners who conscientiously object to providing this and other kinds of medical services.

Many individuals have already weighed in on such debates: “Voters, for example,” Tannenbaum says, “sometimes directly determine whether certain medical procedures, such as assisted suicide or abortion, will be legally permitted.”

Some medical advances seem to raise new questions—as is the case with Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR, which can be used to eliminate impairments in living organisms and as an enhancement in both embryos and adults.

While the question of how to use such emerging medical technology is pressing, this type of issue isn’t new by any stretch.

“Long before CRISPR,” Tannenbaum says, “people were exercising control over what their children would be like, via abortion, embryo selection post-IVF and many other methods. Many of the moral issues with those choices are applicable to CRISPR.”

Diament’s policy class examines how public dissatisfaction with politics combined with politicians running against government culminate “in a particularly self-destructive expression of politics and consistently underwhelming policy provision system.”

In a political realm where perception is often black and white, Diament’s course encourages students to find and explore the gray.

“There is very little coherent logic to the American state, both in politics and especially in governance,” he says. “Our system is the product of centuries of snap decisions based on contemporary issues, that are then left on the books and continue to inform and restructure American politics.”

Visiting Assistant Professor Sean Diament, right, introduced a new politics course called Negotiating the U.S. Policyscape.

Diament’s expertise in the field includes the politics of poverty, political inequity, power and conflict, and American political development, among other emphases.

Beyond the political realm, to understand the policyscape, Diament says, is to understand the professional world.

“Coordination is difficult. Problem solving even more so,” he adds. “But another key lesson is to recognize that incremental progress is still progress, and that small modifications to a business, nonprofit, or governmental body can have profoundly positive effects on individual lives.”

Above all, the politics professor adds, Negotiating the U.S. Policyscape sets out to explain how “governing even in the best of times is extremely hard, even without considering a form of toxic politics that makes it that much harder in the contemporary era.”

Here’s one mailing list you might want to be on: Professor of Art Mark Allen turns personal cards and letters into things of beauty, embellishing the outer envelopes with all manner of designs and decorative flourishes. His exhibit From the Desk Of last fall in the Chan Gallery at Pomona’s Studio Art Hall featured prints, posters, zines, pop-ups and a wall of envelopes that once held missives to various friends, faculty, staff, students and alumni. Take a look.

Cultivating Care

March 13, 2024 by Staff Comments Off

Plants on a table

The long winter break provides a respite for students each year, but it can pose a few complications.

For one, how will the plants that make a residence hall room a home survive untended for weeks on end?

Diana Castellanos ’24, a student from Los Angeles, was approached in late 2022 by friends looking for someone to plant-sit before they left campus for break. A known “plant parent” who planned to take her collection home for the holidays, she considered taking her friends’ monsteras, orchids and succulents too, but thought wiser of stashing so many plants in her parents’ living room.

Person sticking something on a plant

Instead, she asked Pomona faculty and staff for a hand. To her surprise, about a dozen people volunteered to care for students’ plants over break—the founding members of the Plant Babysitters Club.

Castellanos, a biology major on a pre-med track, asked faculty and staff for help again this winter, and a tradition took hold. Whereas the previous year the 21-year-old coordinated the drop-off, distribution and pickup of around 75 plants, about 125 were left the second time around. Fortunately, the number of plant-sitters nearly quadrupled, ensuring every pothos, herb and calathea had a caretaker.

After caring for about 20 plants last year, Title IX and Cares Office Associate Director Abby Lawlor volunteered to do it again.

“Plants really add a lot of life and character into anywhere, and there are some studies that show they have stress-reducing and healing properties,” Lawlor says.

Multiple plants on a table

Over two days, Castellanos and some of the EcoReps—students who promote sustainable practices on campus—collected and organized the multitude of plants being dropped off for supervision. They included an ornamental pepper, a tiny succulent in a giraffe planter, and Eric the moss ball.

Before they bid their plants adieu, students taped care instructions—watering frequency, light exposure—to each pot and added their contact information and plant inventory to a Google doc for recordkeeping.

Aimee Bahng, associate professor of gender and women’s studies, took care of five plants the first year and upped her responsibility to eight this time around.

“I like to think about the worlds these plants otherwise inhabit,” Bahng says. “Maybe they bring students some joy during stressful times, some grounding when the world around them feels so unmoored. And maybe I get to play some small role in keeping that ember of joy alive, even when the odds often feel stacked against us.”

Pomona’s Piano Man

March 13, 2024 by Staff Comments Off

Hudson Colletti ’27 sitting next to a piano

While visiting Canada the summer before his first year of high school, Hudson Colletti ’27 sat down at a piano one day and began tickling the ivories.

In town with family for the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the Pennsylvania teen wasn’t on stage playing for a capacity crowd inside a palatial concert hall or cozy auditorium.

He was on a street corner.

Within minutes, the sounds echoing through the neighborhood drew passersby, many quick to record the young pianist’s impromptu performance.

“I loved that,” Colletti says. “I thought [playing in public] was a really cool way for me to share something I love. I thought, ‘Why not bring that opportunity back home?’”

Colletti—a first-year student who plans to study economics and computer science, founded Free the Music at 14, not long after returning from Canada. In the years since, he has collected unwanted pianos and provided them to local visual artists as canvases. These customized pianos have found second homes in restaurants and apartment buildings, as well as on various street corners, around Colletti’s hometown of Sewickley, Pennsylvania—population 3,900.

“A lot of people want to learn how to play piano,” he says, “or know how to play but don’t have access to a piano because of how much space they take up or how hard they are to move into a house.”

By placing pianos in public, Free the Music is giving others a chance to fall in love too.

“One of the pianos we placed in town,” he says, “was originally given with nothing inside of the bench, and after four or five months over summer, the bench was filled with books and sheet music from people learning how to play and having lessons there.”

As successful as Free the Music’s initiative has been in his home state, Colletti sees no reason he can’t continue his work elsewhere.

“Music brings people together and brightens our mood,” he says. “It’s a great reminder after finishing a song when people gather around because they have a love of music.”

To see—and hear—Colletti playing one of the painted pianos, check out the video at pomona.edu/hudson-colletti-piano.

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