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.
Hello Sagehens!
With just a handful of months left in my term as Alumni Association Board president, I’ve been reflecting on my time as a board member these past several years. One of the best things about my involvement has been the opportunity to connect with so many of you. I continue to be awestruck that Pomona grads really do blanket our globe. And whether it’s been chatting with alumni at College events, catching up with classmates at informal gatherings, or a random meeting with a fellow Sagehen after spotting a Pomona T-shirt, it reminds me every time of the broad and unique community we have. We often talk about the Pomona experience referring to our time as students, but it only begins there. Meeting up with each other through events, work or chance encounters reminds us that the Pomona experience extends beyond the Gates and throughout our lives.
With this in mind, I am truly thrilled to see the revival and growth of our regional alumni chapters over the last few years. These chapters have been an important part of our post-pandemic reconnection and ongoing Pomona experience. I’m grateful to our chapter leaders for the many hours spent meeting, planning and coordinating meaningful and fun events for alumni to gather in Northern California’s Bay Area, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Southern California’s Orange County, the Puget Sound region of Washington state and in Washington, D.C. They have organized beach cleanups, trips to museums and a Major League Baseball game, alumni speaker presentations, casual meetups, meals—and the list goes on. My thanks to my fellow board members past and present, and especially to Julie Siebel ’84 and Andrew Brown ’77, for their dedication and leadership in relaunching and helping to rebuild our alumni chapters.
If we haven’t crossed paths already, I hope to meet you at a chapter event or at one of the many other alumni events planned for this spring. The Alumni Board and I will be at Alumni Weekend in April as well. Please stop and say hello when you see us!
Until next time … chirp!
Alfredo Romero ’91
Alumni Association Board President
Find information on alumni chapters and get involved at pomona.edu/alumni-chapters.
Register online now through April 15. Walk-up registration will be available at AW Registration Check-In during Alumni Weekend. Find additional information and register at pomona.edu/aw-registration-info.
Share your Pomona story with us in the Alumni and Families Pulse Survey. Check your inbox for the survey link. Curious to see the results of our previous survey?
Visit pomona.edu/afas-survey.
Read alumni, student and faculty Sagehen stories on the newly launched Stories of Sagehen Impact website. Learn about Professor April Mayes ’94 P’26 and her longtime involvement with the Draper Center, Alumni Association Board member Robi Ganguly ’00 and the remarkable startup company that resulted from a chance meeting with fellow alumni, and many more stories of Sagehens making their marks in the world.
Visit pomona.edu/stories-of-impact for news about Sagehens bearing their added riches in their own neighborhoods and across the globe.
Written predominantly during the pandemic, this second edition of Reflections by Marjorie Harth, emerita professor and director of the former Pomona College Museum of Art, updates and expands the scope of the first, published in 2007. Like the first edition, this 292-page book documents and reflects upon the campus of Pomona College as an architectural entity and visual expression of the history and identity of a great academic institution. Many of the original entries and essays have been edited and updated, as have the photographs. Among new entries is Scott Smith’s essay on landscape architect Ralph Cornell.
These stunning photographic strolls through campus and poignant essays recount the exceptional transformation of Pomona from desert patch to a “college in a garden.” Would you like to add this special keepsake to your book collection? Copies may be purchased at pomona.edu/reflections-book.
First-year Coach Amber Williams, right, with Assistant Coach Emma DeLira, says, “I’m working with great people.”
Pomona-Pitzer Coach Amber Williams’ path to the 2023 Division III men’s cross country championship and national Coach of the Year honors began a decade ago in Indiana, at her alma mater, Ball State.
There, the former Division I student-athlete cut her teeth as a track and field coach after a gilded collegiate career. Williams spent four years at Ball State before successive stops at Division I programs Colgate, Cleveland State and Columbia.
Last June, Pomona-Pitzer hired her to coach men’s cross country and track and field.
“I’d been lucky enough to know about the program here through other coaching friends,” Williams says. “I’d heard nothing but good things and glowing reviews.
“You feel at times you never get a utopia,” she adds, “but here felt pretty doggone close.”
While not her first time taking over a men’s athletics program, Williams still wondered how a female head coach would be received at Pomona-Pitzer—even with Emma DeLira, an assistant coach and invaluable piece of the program, already on staff.
“You never know how a men’s team will react” to having a female coach, Williams says, “but they were so warm and so open to the opportunity. It speaks volumes to who they are as people. … When it comes to those guys, they knew at the end of the day, the mission was to try to get another championship.”
Introductions behind, Williams and the Sagehens set out on a bounce-back season.
“There’s a tradition of competitiveness and a winning culture here,” Williams says. “You feel that prestige when you come through the doors. After what happened last year, we hoped we could bring it back.”
Despite coming up short in 2022, Pomona-Pitzer returned five of seven athletes who competed in the national meet and began the campaign ranked highly in Division III. But injuries, illnesses and lackluster performances in the latter part of the year tanked the Sagehens’ ranking heading into the postseason.
With adversity, however, came perspective.
“Being the underdogs, you wonder how a team will take that, how it’ll react when something doesn’t go their way,” Williams says. “Some athletes feel the path has to be perfect, and if it isn’t, nationals is out of reach. These guys figured it out every week, every meet. You saw them believe the good races were coming and uplift each other, care about each other.”
As they had the year before, the Sagehens captured conference and regional championships on their way to nationals.
But typically, Derek Fearon ’24 says, teams ranked outside the top three heading into the title race have little chance to win. Pomona-Pitzer had fallen to No. 8.
“I didn’t wake up in the morning thinking we were going to win,” he says. “All I knew is we had to run the best race.”
They did, winning by the narrowest of margins.
Williams also made history, becoming the first female head coach to win a Division III men’s cross country championship.
“For a lot of the guys, there’s more ownership of this championship compared to 2021,” says Colin Kirkpatrick ’24.
“Two years ago, we didn’t really know what it would take to win. But this year, we knew exactly what it would take, how hard it would be and how unlikely it was.”
In the days following the team’s historic win, Fearon, Lucas Florsheim ’24, Kirkpatrick and Cameron Hatler ’25 earned All-America honors. For Fearon and Florsheim, the distinctions were the third of their careers.
Additionally, Williams was named national men’s cross country Coach of the Year for Division III—the first female and third Pomona-Pitzer coach to receive the honor.
While it is an individual coaching award, Williams is effusive in her praise of DeLira, a tireless leader.
“I’m working with great people, in a great space, in a great environment,” Williams says. “I hope we can continue to do great things for a long time.”
Photos by Carrie Rosema
Westward lies the Pacific, but Joshua Tree National Park—about 100 miles to the east of Claremont—is another place Pomona College students go to experience the grandeur and beauty of California. It is 800,000 acres of rugged and often lonely terrain where one can see a sudden wildflower bloom in spring, climb on massive rocks or stay after sunset to behold the expanse of the Milky Way.
The desert also is a place of inspiration. In September, poet Jodie Hollander ’99 led several workshops in Joshua Tree as part of her Poetry in the Parks project, an ongoing series in national parks and other National Park Service sites. Hollander, second from right above and at far right in opposite photo, led Joshua Tree sessions on landscape poetry, the poetry of grief and healing and narrative poetry. The author of two well-received collections, My Dark Horses and Nocturne, she has been the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities grant.
When an unexpected rain fell in the desert during the landscape workshop, it stirred new creative directions and brought to mind lines from Hollander’s earlier poem, “After the Storm”:
Later that night I lay there in darkness
wondering about the storm, and what
I had seen unfurl in such violent release,
then wondered, too, what I really knew
of myself, and my own dark moorings.
Pomona College once again is a welcoming presence in the city of Pomona after the 2023 opening of a new community center in the city where the College held its first classes in September 1888.
The Pomona College Community Engagement Center in Pomona’s vibrant downtown Arts Colony builds on longstanding ties between the city and the College, which was founded in a cottage near downtown Pomona before moving to Claremont the next year after a hotel building was offered to house the new school.
The Pomona College Community Engagement Center at 163 W. Second St. in Pomona held its opening last fall.
The Pomona College name stayed, however, and over the decades the college built relationships with its former city through tutoring and arts programs in schools, service programs for teens, and faculty members’ research and engagement in the community.
With the opening of the Pomona College Community Engagement Center at 163 W. Second St. near Garey Avenue in Pomona, the College is building programs that will offer after-school activities for teens such as games, art projects, tutoring and workshops on college access, wellness topics and more. Last fall, a six-session series helped high school students learn about college options and guided them in applying to University of California and California State University campuses as well as to private colleges and universities.
Pomona College will continue gathering input and ideas from community members about what they would like to see at the center. Future plans call for Pomona faculty to hold some classes at the center, which also will host workshops on topics such as identifying and writing grants, college access and financial aid. In time, offerings will expand to provide help for nonprofit organizations to conduct community-based research in the city.
“We are here to serve and strengthen our ties with the people of Pomona, particularly the youth,” says Sefa Aina, the College’s associate dean responsible for community engagement. “We want this to be a place that builds community, supports learning and serves nonprofits and other Pomona organizations.”
Architectural drawing of Ayer Cottage, a small house in the city of Pomona where Pomona College held its first classes in 1888 in exercise of its charter granted October 14, 1887.
Municipal boundaries aside, Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr says the center is a tangible example of the College’s commitment to its namesake city. “Pomona College aims to expand opportunity in education and for society as a whole, and we see this center in the Arts Colony as a natural place to partner with the community to promote learning, creativity and a sense of connection.”
The location is particularly fitting since the Pomona Arts Colony was co-founded by Ed Tessier ’91, who also helped launch the nearby School of Arts and Enterprise. The College is renting the space from Tessier’s firm, Arteco Partners.
“The College moved to Claremont in 1888, but the Pomona College family always remained engaged here, making a difference,” says Tessier. “Those efforts will only grow in ambition and impact now that scholars, residents, visionaries and volunteers can work together in one space.”
Assistant Director of the Draper Center Rita Shaw, left, Ed Tessier ’91 and Director of the Draper Center Sefa Aina at the opening.
City-College connections abound. About five blocks to the north of the center stands Pilgrim Congregational, the church that founded Pomona as a nonsectarian college. The American Museum of Ceramic Art, started by the late David Armstrong ’62, is even closer. A nearby downtown mural depicts scientific pioneer Jennifer Doudna ’85, the first Pomona College graduate to win a Nobel Prize. The late civil rights champion Ignacio Lopez ’31, who fought discrimination against Latinos in the region from the 1930s to 1960s, published his influential El Espectador newspaper from his Pomona home less than a mile from the center. And nine or so blocks southwest of the center stands a plaque marking where the College held its first classes in Ayer Cottage.
“Pomona is in our very name,” says Aina. “We are proud to be back in Pomona in this new way.”
Students applying to Pomona College will no longer be required to provide standardized test scores for admission, with the pandemic-era policy to remain in place for all future applicants. Though students still may choose to submit SAT or ACT scores, test scores are not required for first-year or transfer admission after Pomona faculty voted last fall in support of making this policy permanent.
The College initially adopted test-optional admissions for first-year and transfer students applying for entry in fall 2021, as did many other U.S. colleges and universities during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pomona’s policy previously had been extended through fall 2024.
With test-optional admissions now cemented in place, Pomona’s selection process will continue to be thorough and comprehensive, says Assistant Vice President and Director of Admissions Adam Sapp: “It has always been our goal to admit students who we know will flourish at Pomona—making this test-optional policy permanent does not change that,” Sapp says.
“At Pomona, test scores are just one factor out of many to help admissions understand the academic preparation of the applicant. Other components include grades, rigor of curriculum, recommendation letters and exam scores such as AP scores, in addition to factors like extracurricular activities and essays to help understand who applicants are outside of the classroom.”
The College’s admissions and financial aid committee, which was instrumental in leading the conversation around Pomona’s testing policy, will review the impact of the College’s move to test-optional in five years, in the academic year 2028-29.
The Pomona-Pitzer women’s soccer team lost only one game all year: a 1-0 season-ending setback in the second round of the NCAA tournament to Cal Lutheran, the eventual Division III national champion.
Until then, the Sagehens were 16-0-3, going unbeaten in the regular season for the first time in program history. They tied Cal Lutheran for the SCIAC regular-season title and then claimed the SCIAC tournament title with a 1-0 victory over their conference co-champions—only to fall to the same team in the second round of the NCAA tournament.
Led by strong defense and goaltending, the Sagehens gave up only seven goals all season. Among numerous postseason honors, midfielder Ella Endo ’25 was named first-team All-American by United Soccer Coaches and defender Spencer Deutz PZ ’25 was chosen to the second team. Endo was the SCIAC Offensive Athlete of the Year and Jen Scanlon led the SCIAC Coaching Staff of the Year.
Pomona’s Class of 2024 Commencement ceremony on May 12 will feature four distinguished speakers: former Chief Justice of California Tani Cantil-Sakauye, economist and nonprofit leader Cecilia Conrad, Occidental College President Harry Elam and medical geneticist Emil Kakkis ’82. In addition to addressing graduating students, the speakers will be conferred honorary degrees by the College.
Tani Cantil-Sakauye
Cantil-Sakauye is president and CEO of the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that works to improve public policy in California through independent, objective, nonpartisan research. Before joining PPIC, she served 32 years as a jurist, with the last 12 as the chief justice of California.
Cecilia Conrad
Conrad is founder and CEO of Lever for Change, which assists donors in finding high-impact philanthropic opportunities and has helped distribute more than $1.7 billion for social good. She previously led the MacArthur Fellows program. An emerita professor of economics at Pomona College, Conrad also served as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the College, and later as acting president.
Harry Elam
Elam, the president of Occidental College, has positioned Occidental as a cutting-edge liberal arts institution and demonstrated visionary leadership in complex national higher education issues. He completed the most successful comprehensive campaign in the college’s history and has led transformative initiatives to advance Occidental’s renown for education that values social impact. A pre-eminent scholar of playwright August Wilson’s works, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Emil Kakkis ’82
Kakkis is CEO and president of Ultragenyx. Known for his work to develop treatments for rare and ultra-rare disorders, Kakkis has identified or developed 11 approved treatments for rare genetic diseases. After earning a B.A. in biology at Pomona College, he received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA. He began his research career at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where he worked on developing an enzyme replacement therapy for the rare lysosomal storage disorder MPS I. Kakkis also founded the nonprofit EveryLife Foundation for Rare Diseases.
Information for commencement weekend can be found on the Commencement webpage. A live broadcast of the ceremony will be available.
You learn a lot at high school sports events, and not just about which parents will yell at the refs or snipe about their son’s or daughter’s playing time.
Sitting in the stands at our son’s water polo games and swim meets a few years back, I’d listen as people talked about their children and college. The University of California schools dominated the conversation along with occasional Ivy League or military academy aspirations, and sometimes the firm conviction that community college was the smart way to go.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the anti-college sentiment. There was a dad who had earned a nice living and built a good family life while working as a manager somewhere in the vast port complex along the Southern California coast. For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why his son wanted to go to college to study finance when he could set him up on the waterfront. But it was another father’s comments that stopped me cold. What he wanted for his son was “anything but college,” an attitude I’ve shortened in my mind to ABC.
I didn’t know him well enough to know if his attitude was tied up in the political divide over higher education, with some on the right viewing colleges and universities as places only for those on the left. Perhaps it reflected his own experience: He must have done well without college, building a business in construction, I think, so why did his son need to spend four years and tens if not hundreds of thousands looking for another way?
Education as the route to a better life is deeply entrenched among many lower-income and immigrant families, often convinced that having a doctor in the family is the way to success. High-income families with a tradition of college-going value education, too—perhaps for itself, perhaps as a way for their children to be able to match the standard of living they have attained, or perhaps as a matter of pride or prestige.
But among middle-income families, it has become more hit and miss. While the national conversation about what colleges can do to enroll low-income students has grown louder over the past decade, it’s safe to say that the conversation about what’s being done for middle-income families largely has been sidelined. Although Pomona meets the full demonstrated need of all students who are eligible for need-based aid—and without loans—many middle-income families don’t look past the published tuition number.
When I ran into a woman I know and learned her daughter had just been awarded a Fulbright after graduating from a small liberal arts-focused university in the Pacific Northwest that offers merit aid, I congratulated her and mentioned that I work at Pomona. “We looked at Pomona but didn’t even apply after we saw the price tag,” she told me. I felt a sting, but it was too late to urge her to run the MyinTuition calculator (myintuition.org), which also can be found on Pomona’s Admissions web pages.
As Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr writes on page 40 in introducing our Middle Income Initiative, Pomona is taking a new approach on financial aid. We will continue our longstanding financial support for lower-income students and expand support for students from middle-income families to make Pomona more accessible to students from a full range of incomes.
That’s because while we proudly reflect the array of races and ethnicities in this country, we do not reflect the full economic spectrum.
Let’s see what we can do about that.
Playing as Shelley Keeler at Pomona, Whelan won three NCAA Division III doubles titles, a singles title and a team championship.
She was a three-time NCAA Division III doubles champion, the 1992 Division III singles titlist and led the Sagehens to the 1992 Division III national championship.
In recognition of her extraordinary career, Shelley Keeler Whelan ’92 will be inducted into the Intercollegiate Tennis Association Women’s Collegiate Tennis Hall of Fame on October 5, 2024, in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Known as Shelley Keeler during her collegiate career, Whelan was a four-time first-team All-SCIAC player and two-time SCIAC Player of the Year. She qualified for the NCAA championships each year in singles and doubles and swept the championships her senior season, sharing the doubles title with teammate Erin Hendricks ’92, claiming the singles title and anchoring the Sagehens’ national championship, Pomona-Pitzer’s first team title in any sport.
A two-time All-American, Whelan was inducted into the Pomona-Pitzer Athletics Hall of Fame in 2002, along with the entire 1992 team.