The center will be a place where disciplines are interwoven in surprising ways, problems are confronted from fresh angles and people from all over the world come together to ask big questions and discover new answers. The center will facilitate and strengthen ties between our faculty and students—through academic inquiry, research and creative endeavors—as well as to communities both close to home and around the globe.
The Center for Global Engagement will connect our campus community in Southern California to the world. Encompassing a residence hall, a dining hall, language study and flexible academic spaces, the newly imagined center will enhance learning across languages, cultures and disciplines. It will be located where the Oldenborg Center for Modern Languages, built in the 1960s, now stands—but the project represents far more than simply swapping out one building for a newer one. The new center will be a completely novel living, breathing liberal arts laboratory.
With a fundraising goal of $50 million, the 111,000-square-foot global center will be one of the most ambitious and complex construction projects at Pomona in many decades, and the College is taking the time and effort to get it right. Once key steps in planning, design and fundraising are met, construction is scheduled to begin in summer 2026.
The center will support the College’s larger effort to ensure that every Pomona student will meaningfully engage with global learning, whether from abroad or here in the U.S.
For more information, preview the Center for Global Engagement, follow the links for the full video and additional details on planning and design, as well as the larger effort of the Global Pomona Project.
Oldenborg Memories
Did you live in Oldenborg? Have other memories of Pomona’s language-themed dining and residence hall? In coming years, the new Center for Global Engagement will rise on the site where Oldenborg Center has stood since 1966, when it was considered the first facility of its kind to combine a language center, international house and coeducational residence hall in a single building. As Oldenborg nears the end of its days with construction on the new center to begin as soon as 2026, Pomona College Magazine will pay tribute to Oldenborg. Send your thoughts to our writer Lorraine Wu Harry ’97.