Articles Written By: emae2021@pomona.edu

Who Decides Who’s a Terrorist?

Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Terrorists cover

Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Terrorists
By Colin J. Beck
Polity, 2015 / 208 pages / $22.95

Pomona College Professor of Sociology Colin Beck says the genesis of his recently released book, Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Terrorists, can be traced back to a student’s question during his course of the same name. “I’m just wondering why some groups get labeled as terrorists and others don’t?” asked Emily Miner ’12, an English major who was a sophomore at the time.

An excellent question, as there had been no large-scale case studies on how those designations were made, says Beck. So he, in collaboration with Miner over the course of two years, looked at organizations listed as terrorist groups by the U.S. and the European Union, and then compared it to a dataset on terrorist events that occurred.

Policymakers and those responsible for the designation of “terrorist,” seize on certain markers, Beck says. Beck and Miner couldn’t find clear geopolitical interests at play, but they did find that the labels weren’t given based on activity. Threat markers that landed groups on the terrorist list included whether they attack airplanes or U.S. and E.U. allies, and whether they are Islamic or not—just by virtue of ideology, not whether they had necessarily engaged in many or high-profile terrorist acts.

“What I concluded was that this is basically done in an ad hoc fashion. There’s not a shadowy cabal of government experts sitting around with lots of information,” says Beck, who calls that finding astounding.

“Looking through the terrorism lists, my sense was that most of the groups you’d want to designate are on there. But there’s also a number who really don’t make sense to receive sanctions when other similarly sized active organizations do not. Basically, it appears to be the irrationality of using markers—such as whether a group attacks airplanes or is an Islamist organization—that drives the results at the margins,” Beck says.

Beck believes this calls into question many of the justifications for the continuing “War on Terror.” This focus on a few markers that signal terrorism—especially the post-9/11 focus on Islamist organizations—suggests that governments are not well equipped to perceive and respond to emerging threats, he says. “The Islamic State was quite downplayed during its initial formation, as was Boko Haram, etc. Like in matters of grand military strategy, it seems that governments are always preparing to fight the last war rather than the next one,” says Beck.

Beck and Miner wrote a paper about their findings, which was published in the journal Social Forces. Miner, who is now an English teacher in Los Angeles, says of her work with Beck, “Researching together was an amazing opportunity; even though I felt vastly underqualified in comparison, Colin very deliberately involved me in every step of the process, and the study and paper felt completely collaborative. I learned a lot about the different pieces of sociological research, from data collection to analysis to publication,” she says.

So how do you know who’s a terrorist? Beck points to three aspects that are key to making the designation: First, whether or not the perpetrator is a legitimate wielder of violence—per international norms, governments are the only entities permitted to use violence, and so violent non-governmental actors are usually illegitimate, says Beck. Two, whether their violent action is routine or not routine; terrorism is non-routine violence, not actions during wartime. Finally, who is the intended target of the action? “If you just want to hurt the person, that’s murder, that’s not terrorism.”

In Beck’s “Radicals, Revolutionaries and Terrorists” course, students study groups and personalities from Che Guevara to Al Qaeda to Weather Underground. This semester, Beck will include ISIS and the Arab Spring in the curriculum. Beck says the class discussions and feedback from students gathered over the years were integral to the development of his book. “They were the first audience as well as the inspiration,” says Beck.

In his book—which critics have called “sweeping and powerful”—Beck examines eight questions about radicalism, including its origins, dynamics and outcomes. He points out that terrorism is not a new phenomenon. There was a wave of terrorist activity around the world starting in the late 19th century through World War I, when more heads of state were assassinated than at any other time in history, he says. Then as now, there were sharp increases in telecommunications technology and international trade, ups and downs in global economic cycles and demographic pressures, says Beck.

Beck says the impact of globalization is one factor that sets our current era apart from past ones. “Globalization gives movements a stage and a target. International connectivity makes it more likely that contention in one place will become contention in another,” he says.

ISIS is a fascinating case, says Beck, and its rise is no surprise, as it developed in ungoverned spaces left by the American invasion of Iraq and the Syrian civil war. They are here to stay for the near term, he says, but in the long term, “when radical groups tend to seize power, they tend to either do themselves in by becoming either more radical or moderate over time.”

Beck hesitates to make predictions, but he says the question is whether ISIS will change as other revolutionary movements have over time, like the Tamil Tigers or Hezbollah or Hamas. He says ISIS’s endgame is still unclear and he questions what their objectives are, despite their stated aims.

“What is important is to look behind their actions,” says Beck, “because the first wisdom of sociology is that things are not what they seem.”

Bookmarks

Working Through the Past Labor and Authoritarian Legacies in Comparative Perspective coverWorking Through the Past
Labor and Authoritarian Legacies in Comparative Perspective

Coedited by Teri L. Caraway ’89 with Maria Lorena Cook and Stephen Crowley, this collection of essays examines the clash of labor movements and authoritarian governments. ILR Press, 2015 / 296 pages / $27.95

 


Global Families A History of Asian International Adoption in America cover
Global Families
A History of Asian International Adoption in America

Catherine Ceniza Choy ’91 looks at the complex history and impact of Asian international adoption in the United States. NYU Press / 244 pages / $25.00

 


Straights Heterosexuality in Post-Closeted Culture cover


Straights
Heterosexuality in Post-Closeted Culture

James Joseph Dean ’97 explores how straight Americans make sense of their sexual and gendered selves in a time of dramatic change in societal attitudes. NYU Press, 2014 / 320 pages / $26.00

 


 Hitler’s Money Trail How He Aquired It, How He Squandered It cover
Hitler’s Money Trail
How He Aquired It, How He Squandered It

David Green ’58 fills a gap in 20th-century history by investigating the financing of Adolf Hitler’s dramatic makeover of the German economy and war machine.CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015 / 294 pages / $16.95

 


Two Women Against the Wind A Tierre del Fuego Bicycling Adventure cover


Two Women Against the Wind
A Tierre del Fuego Bicycling Adventure

Réanne Hemingway-Douglass ’63 recounts her 300-mile bicycle journey across the southern tip of South America, one of the most remote and beautiful regions on the planet. Cave Art Press, 2015 / 130 pages / $12.95

 


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Faust, Parts I and II

This curatorial version of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s masterwork, intended to bring the tragedy back to the theatre, was translated into English by Douglas Langworthy ’80 and trims the 21-hour work to only six. Richer Resources Publications, 2015 / 247 pages / $18.95

 


Supporting the Dream High School-College Partnerships for College and Career Readiness cover
Supporting the Dream
High School-College Partnerships for College and Career Readiness

Charis McGaughy ’91 and Andrea Venezia ’91 offer educators a guide to cross-system partnerships to support college-bound students. Corwin, 2015 / 152 pages / $28.95

 



Frederick Law Olmstead
Plans and Views of Public ParksFrederick Law Olmstead Plans and Views of Public Parks cover

Coedited by Lauren Meier ’79 with Charles E. Beveridge and Irene Mills, this lavishly illustrated volume reveals Olmstead’s design concepts for more than 70 park projects. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015 / 448 pages / $74.95

 


Driving Hungry A Memoir cover


Driving Hungry
A Memoir

The author of the cult blog “Taxi Gourmet,” Layne Mosler ’96 takes her readers on a delicious tour from the back seat of taxis in Buenos Aires, New York and Berlin. Pantheon, 2015 / 320 pages / $24.95

 



Southern California Mountain CountrySouthern California Mountain CountryPCMfall2015_Page_24_Image_0011 Places John Muir Walked and Places He Would Have Loved to Know cover
Places John Muir Walked and Places He Would Have Loved to Know

Photographer Glenn Pascall ’64 provides a delightful visual tour of the high country of Southern California, using the words of John Muir to tie the photography together. Sierra Club Angeles Chapter 2015 / 106 pages / $24.99

 



Interstellar CinderellaInterstellar Cinderella cover

This futuristic retelling of the classic tale, in a new picture book written by Deborah Underwood ’83 and illustrated by Meg Hunt, gives Cinderella a fairy godrobot and an unladylike knack for interstellar mechanics. Chronicle Books, 2015 / 40 pages / $16.99

 


On Betrayal cover
On Betrayal

In his second book and first novel, Reuben Vaisman-Tzachor ’88 offers an intricately woven tale of betrayal and redemption spanning generations, places, cultures and languages. CBH Books, 2015 / 266 pages / $24.99

 


 Impunity, Human Rights, and Democracy Chile and Argentina, 1990-2005 cover


Impunity, Human Rights, and Democracy
Chile and Argentina, 1990-2005

Thomas Wright ’63 traces a triumph for human rights—the erosion and collapse of the impunity of former repressors in Chile and Argentina. University of Texas Press, 2014 / 206 pages / $55.00

 


Ideas With Consequences The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution cover
Ideas With Consequences
The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution

Assistant Professor of Politics Amanda Hollis-Brusky shows how a network of lawyers, judges, scholars and activists worked successfully to push American constitutional law to the right. Oxford University Press, 2015 / 264 pages / $29.95

 


From Trafficking to Terror Constructing a Global Social Problem cover
From Trafficking to Terror
Constructing a Global Social Problem

Associate Professor of Anthropology Pardis Mahdavi challenges the anti-Muslim panic surrounding two socially constructed conflicts, the “war on terrorism” and the “war on trafficking.” Routledge, 2013 / 106 pages / $18.42

Letter Box

Dreamers

I found the Summer 2015 issue very interesting and informative, which has been increasingly the case over the past few years. The “American Dreamers” feature got me thinking about a great use for this issue once I’ve finished it. In the past old issues have found a home on a coffee table shelf before they were recycled. This issue is bound for the waiting room of my physical therapist’s office where it may be browsed by an undocumented immigrant or someone who knows such a person, who in reading the Dreamers feature may use this information. Keep up the good work!

—Steve Lansdowne ‘ 71
Austin, Texas

 

I don’t believe I’ve ever missed a year donating to Pomona College since I graduated in 1976. My reasoning was that since someone paid for half my education, it was up to me to pay that back, and forward. But I have to admit a few years ago I did ask a Pomona fundraising person why I should still be donating, as Pomona has such a large endowment already. I never felt I really got a good answer until I read an article in The New York Times earlier this year, which I believe listed Pomona as having the fourth most economically diverse student body in the U.S. That was very gratifying.

And now I have a second reason—the Dreamers, as profiled in the recent issue of PCM. I love that my money is going to supporting these great young adults in their quest for high quality college education. As someone who has a conservative/libertarian bent, I am appalled at the racist and xenophobic immigration laws enacted in the last 130 years or so. From my perspective, these young adults are Americans in every sense of the word, so I’m proud to read that Pomona College feels as I do.

P.S. In a bit of irony, my conservative/libertarian political views were largely defined after taking a political science course from the late Dr. Krinsky, whose views were far to the left of where I ended up. When I hear people decry the liberal viewpoints nominally espoused in the typical college curriculum, I think they undersell the typical student’s underlying curiosity and convictions. I spent the semester arguing for Dr. Krinsky’s positions, as students often will, but in the end, I was not convinced. However, although Dr. Krinsky was a true believer in leftest ideals (the benevolent dictator), he invited a group of young libertarians to come speak to the class. He wanted us to hear opposing views, and for me it was a truly pivotal moment in my Pomona education.

—Steve Rempel ’76
Los Gatos, Calif.

 

The elegantly written piece, “American Dreamers,” expresses the highest aspirations of our College’s founders, of whom my great grandfather was its first dean. Investing in our future leaders, and in this matter, of our immigrant youth, is a passion I share. I am “invested” in this enterprise as a matter of carrying “our riches to all mankind” and have done so in teaching and adopting four of these immigrant kids.

—David Lyman, ‘66
South Pasadena, Calif.

 

Hurray for Introverts

There are many reasons I am happy to be a new Sagehen mother, one of them being the wonderful Pomona College Magazine. When my daughter Natalie McDonald ‘19 read your essay “The Power of Quiet,” she exclaimed with delight, “Yet another reason I am so excited to be going to Pomona College!” We had so many conversations about Susan Cain’s book, and I even wrote a post about our dinnertime conversations about it. We found it liberating and, as you observed, “reassuring” to understand and appreciate the special gifts of being introverted in an extroverted society. And then I read your recent essay “Stories Matter,” and all I could say to my husband Bill and Natalie was: “Wow…”

—Pamela Beere Briggs P’19
Los Angeles, Calif.

 

Memories of Little Bridges

Thanks for Professor Beeks’ wonderful tribute to Little Bridges. I was especially interested in his note that 1962 marked the beginning of annual collaborations between the choir and orchestra. In April 1962, I had the honor of performing as concertmaster of the orchestra in the very first such collaboration. Under the baton of Professor William Russell the combined forces of orchestra and chorus performed Brahms’ A German Requiem (in English, interestingly enough) for a full house in Little Bridges. As noted by Professor Beeks, we actually had to build an extension of the stage to accommodate all the musicians for that concert, but Bill Russell had the vision to make it happen and to continue the tradition thereafter.

My other favorite memory of Little Bridges and of Bill Russell is from the concert presented in the same year by the band. Professor Russell wanted to do a program for winds, and I suggested that he include the Second Suite for Military Band of Gustav Holst. This piece includes the “Song of the Blacksmith,” featuring a part for (what else?) an anvil. As a violinist, I didn’t normally play in symphonic bands, but Professor Russell invited me to sit in on anvil for this concert. Once we located an actual anvil for the purpose it turned out neither of us liked the sort of clanky sound it made. Then he remembered that he had a 3-foot length of railroad rail at his house. We hung it from one of those beautiful side balconies over the stage, and I rendered my first (and only) performance with concert band using a large hammer on the stage of Little Bridges Hall of Music. What a glorious, ringing sound it was!

Thanks again for the memories, and Happy Centennial to Little Bridges.

—Paul Bent ’65
Long Beach, Calif.

 

I found this most recent issue of PCM a particularly good and interesting one. I recall Graydon Beeks leading the tenors and baritones/basses of the choir to learn the new music. This was 1982–1984; 1985–1986, when I sang tenor in the P.C. choir. (The choir director Jon Bailey assisted the sopranos and altos to learn their parts.) But when I read Beeks’ article, that opens the issue, I was really pleased to find that his organ teacher was Doc Blanchard, because my mother, Margaret Lindgren (née Fuller), a Pomona alumna, has often told me the (true) story of Doc Blanchard, who was organist of the Claremont Methodist Church, having to leave in the middle of the Sunday morning church service to go put out fires as he was on the Claremont Fire Brigade!

Especially meaningful to me in this issue, however, is the large section on undocumented students, including the as-yet unpassed DREAM Act and DACA, which President Obama pushed through and still stands, allowing undocumented individuals, under specific circumstances, to remain in the Unites States with full legal protection and renewal every two years, even though they are not granted U.S. citizenship. Citizenship is what the President would really like to see, but cannot without the full backing of the Congress. This act is truly bipartisan, with both Democrat and Republican Congressmen originating and voting for it.

Finally, I thank you for posting my most recent volume, The Wood of Green: Poems, Stories, and Studies. You have done a good synopsis except, I think, regarding the studies or essays. There are only several studies that are of a philosophical nature. Most are human-experiential studies concerning human and divine. I do understand the difficulty to bring all this into focus in such few words.

I enjoyed reading this entire issue; it is one of the best I have read since I began receiving PCM many years ago (over 25 years).

—Alan Lindgren ’86
Culver City, Calif.

 

More Walton Memories

Thank you, Judy Bartels, for your letter about Jean Walton. In my time at Pomona she was important to women for her skill and caring as dean of women and because she was a rarity, a female professor (mathematics). Mark Wood tells us that stories are important, so I want to share one. One day Dean Walton joined a group of women students for coffee in the village and we began to talk about math and how puzzling it was for many. Dean Walton enjoyed the conversation and began answering questions. I mentioned that I had noticed dividing by whole numbers yielded smaller numbers while dividing by fractions did the opposite. She gave a simple, elegant explanation that differed so from my experiences in math classes that I was charmed. I pondered this for some time and 20 years later, when I decided to teach, I chose secondary math. I hoped to open the door for others that Dean Jean had opened for me. I am retired now, but in my community I am often introduced as “the math teacher” because, I hope, I was able to discover ways to do that for my students. Teachers often have no idea of their impact, and Dean Walton never knew about my teaching, but if I was able to open some doors, I think she would be pleased.

—Frances DuBose Johnson  ‘54
Newbury Park, Califirnia

[Alumni 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.]

New Knowledge

An orange

Nutritional Prejudice

Is Vitamin C better for you than an orange? Are omega-3 fatty acids more important for your diet than the fish they come from? This may sound like topsy-turvy nutritional logic, but a new study from Cornell University and Pomona College found participants judged individual nutrients as healthier than the whole, natural foods that contain them.

Published in the Journal of Health Psychology, the study by professors Jonathon P. Schuldt of Cornell University and Adam Pearson of Pomona College was sparked after the research partners read Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food, in which the author speculates about an effect he dubs “nutritionism.”

Schuldt and Pearson devised a study to put this idea to the test: Two groups of research participants read an identical description of a moderately-healthy young man, but one group was told he made sure to include a variety of healthy foods in his diet, like bananas, fish, oranges, milk and spinach. For the second group, those foods were replaced with nutrients associated with those foods: potassium, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin C, calcium and iron.

The group that read about the nutrients considered the man to be at significantly lower risk of developing a number of leading chronic diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, cancer and stroke—and study participants who described themselves as diet-conscious or who had higher SAT/ACT scores were even more inclined to do so. The results aren’t surprising, Pearson said, in a society where people are constantly bombarded with health claims about nutrients and supplements. People who are more diet-conscious may be especially attentive to and influenced by these claims.

“It points to the insidious ways that the marketing of nutritional information can actually be harmful,” Pearson said. “If we are biased toward privileging the low-level properties of a food, we may overlook the many other healthy aspects of eating whole, natural foods.”

City of Trees

A tree

For their capstone project, a group of graduating seniors in Pomona College Professor Char Miller’s Environmental Analysis 190 class went out on a limb last spring and sought to map all of the public trees in the city of Claremont, sometimes called “The City of Trees and Ph.D.s.” The result is a convenient online guide mapping more than 24,000 trees and serving as an educational resource for the community.

Ben Wise of the Tree Action Group of Sustainable Claremont, a local nonprofit, contacted the Environmental Analysis (EA) Program and proposed that a team build a digital inventory and guide to city street trees. Wise’s aim was for people to see a tree in Claremont and then have a way to find out more about it.

So together, Alison Marks ’15, Naomi Bosch ’15, Nadine Lafeber SC ’15 and Sydney Stephenson CMC ’15—with help from geographic information system (GIS) specialist Warren Roberts at Honnold/Mudd Library—developed a website called Claremont Urban Arboretum (claremontsurbanarboretum.wordpress.com ) complete with an interactive GIS map and information on many of the life histories and origins of the tree species lining Claremont streets.

Environmental Analysis majors must complete two capstone projects: one individual and one group. “EA 190 is a group initiative defined by a real client with a real problem that must be resolved by the end of the spring semester,” says Miller, director of the EA Program. The aim is to push students to synthesize all they’ve learned over four years and translate that knowledge into action, he says.

Miller says public awareness about trees is a live issue, especially these days. “Claremont, the self-described City of Trees, has had a long love affair of the arboreal. But the current and crushing drought has made it essential that the community know more about the trees that are rooted into our stony soil,” he says.

Once Upon a Time in the Cambrian

Rendering of Yawunik kootenayi

Once there was a lobster-like predator with two pairs of compound eyes and large, toothed claws that prowled the Cambrian seas. After its death, its fossil lay waiting in a place now known as Marble Canyon—a newly discovered part of the renowned Canadian Burgess Shale deposits—for more than half a billion years before a team of researchers, including Professor of Geology Robert Gaines, brought it to light once more.

In a paper published last spring in the journal Palaeontology, Gaines and his co-authors announced the discovery of this strange new creature, named Yawunik kootenayi. Gaines was also part of the team that discovered the Marble Canyon deposits last year.

What Is the Hive? (And Why Is Everyone Buzzing About It?)

bee hive
Students discuss at a desk at the Hive

Photo by Mark Wood

What is creativity? How does it happen? Is it inborn or can it be taught? How does such an intangible ability—or should I say capacity, quality, or maybe mindset?—fit into the structure of a liberal arts education? The faculty, staff, students and advisors who organized the launch of the new five-college Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity this fall don’t pretend to have all the answers, but they do share a strong belief that collaborative and creative thinking across disciplines will be essential to solving the problems of the 21st century.

“There’s already plenty of opportunity for creativity within your discipline,” says Associate Professor of Physics Dwight Whitaker, who, along with Harvey Mudd College Professor of Engineering Patrick Little, is serving as co-director of the Sontag Center until a national search for a permanent director is completed. “If a student is truly passionate about physics, they can get an awesome experience working in our research labs, doing creative, cutting-edge stuff that no one else has done before. They can really develop their creative chops as a physicist. We’re already doing that, and I’m confident every department does that very well.”

What’s missing, he believes, is the opportunity to develop those “creative chops” in collaborative settings that bring together experts from different fields to tackle problems that resist disciplinary definition.

“The really messy, important problems that we face are ones that don’t fit into a discipline,” Whitaker says. “I think if you look at the environment, the really messy problems like end-of-life issues, creating an inclusive space for all Pomona students on a local level, these are not going to have a solution that lies within any department. I think the way that these problems are going to be solved is going to be people with vast expertise truly collaborating, getting in the intellectual muck together and doing the messy business of working out mindsets. Being generative and appreciating that their mindset approaches the problem differently than your mindset. That’s a really hard skill to develop.”

So how do you go about developing the creative skills involved in cross-disciplinary collaborations in an academic setting dominated by its distinct disciplines? That was the problem Rick and Susan Sontag—1964 graduates of Harvey Mudd College and Pomona College, respectively—sought to address with their $25 million gift to create the new center that bears their names.

But that remarkable gift was just the start. To help get this innovative new program off the ground, the colleges turned to design experts Tom Maiorana and Vida Mia Garcia of Red Cover Studios, who devoted a big portion of the last year to helping the center’s planners develop a conceptual framework and bring those concepts to life in the form of actual programming.

The result is a work in progress, but a very busy work in progress. Already nicknamed “The Hive” for the buzz of creative thought and collaborative activity it is designed to foster, the new center occupies renovated spaces inside what was once Pomona’s Seeley G. Mudd Science Library, with Pomona serving as lead campus. A chalkboard sign out front invites passersby inside to see what it’s all about. A new website (creativity.claremont.edu) invites students to: “Take chances. Mix things up. Make mistakes. Learn from them.”

That theme of risk-taking is central to the Hive’s purpose. Garcia says students have heard all the familiar clichés about the importance of exploring fearlessly and learning from failure, but the stakes for students at a place like Pomona are just too high to risk failure in anything that counts. The Hive, she says, offers a place where students can take risks in “a low-stakes way” and develop the kind of intellectual resilience that allows them to see that failure is just part of the learning process.

“Intellectually, they understand that, yeah, sure, you need to fail to learn, but where are they going to do that?” says Garcia. “There are precious few venues for that in life, but especially here at the 5Cs, because everybody is so overachieving and everybody sees that in everybody else. So how do we give them that safe space? We heard that over and again in the student interviews, in the ethnography at the outset, and we wanted to bake that into the ethos of this place.”

Those interviews with students and faculty also brought to light another significant concern: time. “They want chances to explore and fail,” Whitaker says. “They want chances to be experiential rather than just critical and writing papers. But then we also definitely heard from both groups, the students and the faculty alike, that, “Yes, we want to do all that. But we have no time.”

With that in mind, the Sontag Center’s programming has been designed to offer a range of activities, with a sliding scale of time and commitment required—from mini-workshops to pop-up courses, guided explorations and full-credit courses.

“I think there are some people who will make the time, and there are some people who will want to just dip their toes in the water,” Whitaker says. “That’s what the workshops are really good for. I think the hope for those is that it sparks something. If it sparks something, then you will carve out the time and you will make the commitment. But I think unless you get in the door, u unless you start to get exposure to these ideas and these mindsets, you’re never going to carve the time out.”

This year’s mini-workshops have ranged in topic from an introduction to improv theatre to empathetic listening to shoemaking. In the latter, students use plastic wrap, a hair dryer and tape to create a prototype of a shoe. Of course, the final products of that workshop will never make it to the shelves of your local shoestore. In fact, you’d barely recognize most of them as shoes. But that’s not the point.

“There are few disciplines where you are expected, if not required, to be a maker, right?” explains Maiorana. “You’ve got engineering, possibly physics, studio art. So those students are going to have some level of comfort and facility with making. But the vast majority actually might not, or might not do it on a regular basis.”

The point, he says, is to demystify the creative process, which is loaded down with preconceptions and misconceptions, and to give people a taste of what it feels like actually to make something. “It’s really rudimentary, but it doesn’t feel rudimentary,” he adds. “Creating physical objects is a way to have a very visceral experience of the lessons we’re trying to impart.”

However, that example also illustrates one of Whitaker’s concerns, not about the center itself, but about how it might be perceived.

“Prototyping is one of the great tools of designers,” he says. “That’s just one of the great tools of creativity, having an object that you can play with. But the kind of low-resolution prototyping we use is pipe cleaners and construction paper, so definitely there’s a danger that it can look like preschool. People walk in and say, ‘This is an academic center? You’re doing design-thinking? You’re just playing with toys.”

But in truth, the playfulness inherent in the program is an essential part of the design. “One of the challenges we have is that the approaches to creating a new mindset, a creative mindset, tend to involve ignoring the rigor to some degree,” Whitaker says. “Because in that early stage, it’s not about the details yet. It’s about forming the question. So you need to create a generative space where everyone feels valued and all ideas are good before you start critiquing them.”

Rigor comes later in the creative process, and there’s plenty of it to go around at the upper end of that sliding scale of activities, which includes project-based learning. That’s where teams of students and faculty take on daunting problems in the real world, a prospect that Co-Director Patrick Little of Harvey Mudd College finds particularly exciting, both for the experience the students will receive and for the potential to make a real difference in the world.

“One of the open-ended problems we’re just in the process of getting started looking at is reimagining certain parts of the health care experience for patients with cancer,” he says. “And if you think about that, if you put that in any kind of a disciplinary framework, what ends up happening is that you necessarily limit the ways you can imagine that. So if it’s an engineering program, it wouldn’t make sense to talk about this in non-technical solutions, because you’d be moving away from the very thing you’re good at. Or if you were to think of it in the context of a computer science program, you would normally be thinking: ‘How can we provide software or applications?’ The beauty and, I think, the power of the Sontag Center is that it can start by dealing with the question of ‘What are the needs?’ rather than ‘What are our capabilities?’”

It might be surprising to think of college students helping to solve some of the world’s big, messy problems even before they earn their diplomas, but Little thinks they may be particularly well suited to this sort of cross-disciplinary, out-of-the-box thinking. “They haven’t yet been told these problems are beyond them,” he says. “They haven’t yet been told they have to stay in their silo. And as a result—whether you’re talking about something that’s really playful like making shoes or whether you’re talking about something practical, like the work that’s being done right now to reimagine the design of the GIS facility over at the library or whether you ask them about one of these large global problems—they just bring incredible energy.”

As its reputation spreads, the center has also begun to attract groups from across the 5Cs that want to make use of its creative resources and ethos. For instance, Pomona’s Quest Scholars recently met there for a brainstorming session. “We came to the Hive to brainstorm in groups and kind of figure out what we want out of our Resource Center,” says Ashley Land ’16. She goes on to add: “The space is just so great for being creative and being able to take an idea and make something bigger out of it, or take no idea and make an idea.”

Indeed, the ultimate success of the Sontag Center may be the influence it has on the rest of the five campuses. Gail Gallaher ’17 hopes that students will carry a little of the ethos of the Hive back into the rest of their college experience. “You’re always thinking about how you can grow and how you can learn, even from mistakes and failures. You’re not afraid of challenges because you know you’re going to learn from them. I think the whole 5Cs could benefit from that spirit.”

Flocking Together

Members pose in front of Seaver House

Members of the Alumni Association Board include: (from left, front row) Emma Fullem ’14, Jared Mathis ’94, LJ Kwak ’05, Onetta Brooks ’74,Cathie Moon Brown ’53 P’75, Kyle Hill ’09, (second row) Jahan Boulden PZ’07, Jon Siegel ’84, Guy Lohman ’71, (third row) Anne Bachman Thacher ’75 P’07, Diane Ung ’85, Mac Barnett ’04, Nico Kass ’16, Maggie Lemons ’17 (intern), Mary Raymond, (fourth row) Lisa Phelps ’79 P’12, (fifth row) Roger Reinke ’51 P’80 GP’14, Emma Marshall ’14, Jordan Pedraza ’09, Brenda Barnett ’92, Matt Thompson ’96, Professor Lisa Beckett, (sixth row) Ward Heneveld ’64 P’92, Craig Arteaga-Johnson ’96 and Taziwa Chanaiwa ’95 P’17. Not pictured are: Conor O’Rourke ’03 and Peggy Olson ’61.

The Alumni Association Board held its first meeting of the year, led by Alumni Association President Onetta Brooks ’74, on October 4. President Oxtoby shared an informal “State of the College” and members were joined by parent and student guests for the following committee meetings:

  • Athletic Affinity (alumni co-chair Jared Mathis ’94)
  • Alumni Career Services (alumni co-chair Matt Thompson ’96)
  • Young Alumni Engagement (alumni co-chair Emma Fullem ’14)
  • Giving/Service Days (alumni co-chair Lisa Phelps ’79 P’12)
  • Current Matters of Concern (alumni co-chair Cathie Brown ’53 P’75)

To nominate someone for the Alumni Association Board, email alumni@pomona.edu.

Winter Break Parties

Celebrate the new year with a Pomona College Winter Break Party, coming to a city near you January 2–15, 2016! Held while students are home for winter break, this Pomona College tradition is one of the best ways for alumni to connect with students in their hometowns and to meet fellow Sagehens living nearby.

2016 Winter Break Parties are currently being planned for Boston, Chicago, Kansas City (Missouri), Los Angeles, Menlo Park, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Don’t miss out—check out our listings at pomona.edu/alumnievents for details and updates about the Winter Break Party nearest you.

4/7 Celebration of Impact

Civic-minded Sagehens: Make sure you are part of Pomona’s second Celebration of Sagehen Impact, scheduled for April 7 (yes, 4/7), 2016. Last year, more than 150 Pomona students and alumni flooded the College’s Alumni Facebook group and Instagram feeds with pledges, shout-outs and stories about the many ways Sagehens are “bearing our added riches” on campus, in our neighborhoods and around the globe. Organize with fellow Sagehens or find your own ways to contribute your time, talent or treasure to the causes that mean most to you. Our community will be ready to celebrate your good work on April 7.

Budenholzer Heads List for Hall of Fame

Mike Budenholzer poses with Coach Charles Katsiaficas.

Mike Budenholzer ’92 with Mens’ Basketball Coach Charles Katsiaficas.

National Basketball Association Coach of the Year Mike Budenholzer ’92 and former Athletic Director Curt Tong were among the honorees when the Pomona-Pitzer Hall of Fame inducted six new members this fall. Also honored during the 58th annual induction ceremony were Scott Coleman PO ’05 (soccer); Joy Haviland PZ ’03 (water polo, swimming); Kevin Hickey PO ’99 (baseball); Lucia Schmit PO ’03 (water polo, swimming). Budenholzer was inducted as an honorary member (basketball) and Tong was honored for his years of distinguished service as athletic director.

Want to keep up with our sports teams and engage with the Athletics community? Follow @Sagehens on Twitter and like “Pomona-Pitzer Sagehens” on Facebook.

Ladd Named Inspirational Young Alumna

Jessica Ladd portrait

Jessica Ladd ’08

Jessica Ladd ’08 has been selected as the recipient of the 2015 Inspirational Young Alumni Award. Ladd, who was featured in the summer 2015 issue of PCM, is the founder and CEO of Sexual Health Innovations (SHI), a non-profit dedicated to creating technology that advances sexual health and wellbeing in the United States. At SHI, she spearheaded the creation of the STD partner notification website So They Can Know, the STD test result delivery system Private Results, and the college sexual assault reporting system Callisto.

Before founding Sexual Health Innovations, Ladd worked in the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, as a Public Policy Associate at The AIDS Institute, and as a sexual health educator and researcher for a variety of organizations. She also co-founded The Social Innovation Lab in Baltimore and a chapter of FemSex at Pomona College. Ladd has also recently been recognized as a Fearless Changemaker by the Case Foundation, an Emerging Innovator by Ashoka and American Express, and as the Civic Hacker of the Year by Baltimore Innovation Week.

Video Corner

Daring Minds Talks 

Tune in to a series of thought-provoking online lectures withmembers of our alumni community, including James Turrell ’65, EdKrupp ’66, Mary Schmich ’75, Bill Keller ’70 and Gabe London ’00. To find the Daring Minds playlist, and for more inspirational speakers and enriching stories from campus, visit youtube.com/pomonacollege and click “Playlists.”

Travel/Study

From Angles to Angels: The Christianization of Barbarian England

A green pasture with a stone wall

With History Professor Ken Wolf
May 18–29, 2016

The eighth in a series of alumni walking trips with a medieval theme, this is the first involving the United Kingdom. Its purpose is to appreciate the fascinating history (captured by the Venerable Bede) of the conversion of the barbarian conquerors of England, starring the Irish and Roman missionaries. In Scotland, you will visit Kilmartin, Dumbarton and Loch Lomond; in England, Lindisfarne, Hadrian’s Wall and Durham Cathedral.

For more information, contact the Office of Alumni and Parent Engagement at  1-888-SAGEHEN or alumni@pomona.edu.

Joe’s Big Idea

Joe’s Big Idea: Long-time NPR science correspondent Joe Palca ’74 had an idea —A big idea. what if he stopped trying to identify the important science stories and focused exclusively on the interesting ones?

Joe Palca at the radio microphoneJoe Palca’s cubicle in NPR’s Washington, D.C., headquarters is strewn with bicycle gear from his daily commute, assorted piles of books about science, and random objects: a can of mackerel, a leaf-shaped bottle of maple syrup. From this cluttered perch, the longtime science correspondent has the power to shape what becomes news. If Joe Palca ’74 decides a story is worth putting on the air, roughly a million listeners hear it. And if he misses a story, well, some of those listeners may never hear about it.

In 1996, Science magazine published a study on a novel approach to treating cancer. Immunologist James Allison and his co-authors reported that they had successfully treated malignant tumors in mice by blocking molecules on immune system cells that act as a brake on immune response. Palca didn’t cover the study. “Nobody covered that paper,” he shrugs. “Everybody has cured cancer in mice.”

Two decades later, Allison’s immunotherapy methods have led to the first effective treatment for advanced melanoma. Patients used to die in less than a year; with treatment based on Allison’s research, some now live more than a decade. Allison has won dozens of prestigious awards for this work in recent years, including the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, often a precursor to the Nobel.

Someone, it seems, ought to have reported on that initial study. “If news is to tell you about the things that are important,” Palca says, “that’s the paper I should have been telling you about.” But out of all the promising studies published that week, Palca could not have known which one would make history. Reporters rarely do. “None of us in science journalism is smart enough to know which are the really important papers,” he says. “No one is.”

Nevertheless, the media generally presents scientific findings as if they were breaking news. As a result, Palca says, studies that will later prove inconsequential get the limelight, sometimes simply because they lend themselves to sexy headlines. Meanwhile, reporters inadvertently ignore research that, in hindsight, they ought to have covered (like that 1996 immunotherapy study). So a few years ago, after two decades as an NPR science correspondent, Palca had an idea. A big idea. What if he stopped trying to identify the important science stories and focused exclusively on the interesting ones?

Three years later, Joe’s Big Idea is going strong. The series tells the stories behind innovations: what drives scientists and inventors, how they come up with their ideas, and how they implement them (or try to). Palca has produced pieces on soccer-playing robots, ant traffic patterns, and a phone app that checks photos for eye disease. He’s followed efforts to end dengue fever, the search for life on Mars and the passionate quest for the perfect toothbrush. He hopes that by focusing on what’s intriguing about the scientific process, listeners will come to share his fascination. As he recently told an audience, “I want people to know there’s a joy and a delight and a beauty in science.”

The key to conveying that beauty is often the researcher. “You can’t tell a really moving story about a nanoparticle,” Palca says. “But the person studying the nanoparticle can be pretty interesting.”

Pediatric oncologist James Olson is a case in point. Olson developed a paint that makes brain tumors glow, helping surgeons to locate and remove them. While the story of the paint itself is fascinating—it’s derived from scorpion venom—the profile of the man behind it got the most emotional response of Palca’s career. It turns out Olson is a practicing physician. This is what drives his tumor research: He’s tired of telling parents their children are going to die. He’s “sick of seeing the devastation on people’s faces,” Palca says in the piece, “sick of feeling helpless.” Yet Olson has the rare ability to cast a child’s cancer prognosis in a bearable light. One parent tells him her 7-year-old’s death to cancer “was as beautiful as her birth” because he helped the family see it that way. Here’s a man who is not only trying to cure pediatric brain cancer; he’s helping parents part with children who’ve succumbed to it. A hundred listeners left grateful comments about the story online. “I had colleagues coming up and hugging me, telling me they were sitting there sobbing,” Palca says. ”And I understand it because it still makes me tear up.”

Joe Palca standing at his cubicleOf course, not all subjects have such inherent drama. Still, Palca says, scientists are not the cold-blooded, calculating creatures they are often presumed to be. “I’m sick of the caricature, of the white lab coat. The lab coat says ‘I’m an expert, not a person.’”

Palca’s irritation on this subject is personal. An animated guy with a mischievous streak and a penchant for tangents, he is himself a trained scientist. He has a PhD in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he studied human sleep physiology. Remember Jim Allison, the immunologist? Palca worked for him as a lab technician, his first full-time job out of Pomona College. (He also happens to be married to a molecular biologist, a deputy director at the National Institutes of Health.) Palca decamped for journalism immediately after earning his degree. Research was tedious to him. “You have to have a long attention span to be a scientist,” he says.

Palca’s attention span may not have served for years of lab work, but he has covered some impressively arcane research as a reporter. A giant hand-painted bowl in his office is proof. He received the bowl for delivering the 24th annual Ullyot Public Affairs Lecture to the Chemical Heritage Foundation. It was titled “Covering Complex Science, or How I Explained a Frank-Kasper Phase in Sphere-Forming Block Copolymer Melts to a Radio Audience.” Palca really did produce a story on a study by that name. In fact, he chose it precisely because it was so daunting. “I said I’m going to pick the most obscure thing I can find and do a thoughtful, serious story about it just to prove I can,” Palca says. (One charming detail from the piece: the researchers used marshmallows and coffee stirrers to model the molecules they studied.)

Palca claims no research is too obscure to make for an engaging story. He travels around the country giving lectures to scientists about how to couch their research in compelling terms. The trick, he says, is knowing what to leave out. Sometimes it’s the very detail the researcher is most fixated upon. Scientists tend to focus on what is new in their fields, he says, a habit that only perpetuates the media’s tendency to do the same. “A lot of the time scientists think that the ‘news’ is the new thing, which of course it is,” Palca says. “But in fact, the new thing may be pretty tedious.”

Take adaptive optics. This technology has been used in astronomical telescopes for several decades. It unblurs the blurring caused by the atmosphere. “So if you say you want to do a story about adaptive optics, well, the scientist will tell you about how they’ve tuned the laser and how the signal’s getting better and the interferometry,” Palca says. “And you say, ‘Wait a minute! You can do that? You can unblur the atmosphere?’ That’s where scientists get lost. They know about adaptive optics. It doesn’t occur to them that nobody else does.”

That’s because it’s easy to get lost in the details as a researcher, Palca says. The work can be monotonous. Palca recalls reporting on the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep in the mid-1990s, an event that spawned headlines the world over. Scientific findings too often overshadow the work it took to get to them, Palca says. So his reporting focused on the tremendous effort it took to clone just one sheep. Palca did. “It took months of failure, months and months and months of boring, tedious, awful, discouraging failure to get one successful birth,” he says.

By interesting the public in the fits and starts that characterize scientific research and the personal drive that keeps researchers forging ahead, Palca hopes to convey a truer picture of how science really works. He says that the alternative, focusing on dazzling findings and reporting them as breaking news, gives the public the wrong idea. “I think it contributes to a sense of science lurching from breakthrough to breakthrough,” rather than as a continuum with incremental steps along the way, he says. It may also engender mistrust. “I wonder if the need to do more and more and more big science stories, the really exciting stories, has set science up for a fall,” Palca says. “Water on Mars? Wait a minute, I thought you figured that out already. Why are we still hearing about it?”

In the end, Palca hopes his own enthusiasm for science, and that of the people he talks to, is contagious. “The passion that people have and the desire to make a difference, it’s fun to listen to that,” he says. As he told an audience recently: “Not every study is going to lead to Teflon or Tang, but we’re going to learn something about the natural world. That’s got to be worth something in our culture.”

Honor a Daring Mind

Daring Minds portrait collage

Who stands out when you think of Pomona’s daring minds? Over the years, many of them have been featured in the pages of this magazine—the array of portraits at the top of this page serves to remind us of just a few. But there are many, many more than we have pages in which to feature them.

That’s why, as Campaign Pomona: Daring Minds draws to a close, we are inviting you to join in Pomona’s celebration of the extraordinary Sagehens whose ideas and actions reflect the spirit of this historic campaign.

All you have to do is visit pomona.e
du/hdm to see who is being recognized and to make sure the Pomona professor, student, sponsor, coach, staff member or friend who inspires you most is listed among those being honored.

Here are a few recent honorees:

Martha Andresen
Sefa Aina
Lisa Beckett
Eleanor Brown ’75
Debby Burke
Betsy Crighton
Jo Hardin ’95
Rick Hazlett
Sid Lemelle
Susan McWilliams
Pat Mulcahy ’66
Jose Luis Ramirez
William Russell
Monique Saigal
David Foster Wallace
Frank Wells ’53
Dwight Whitaker
Wig 1 Back Hall Sponsor Group ’07

You can also help keep the spirit of daring inquiry and innovation alive for today’s Pomona students and faculty by making a gift in honor of your favorite Sagehen. Gifts received before the Campaign closes on Dec. 31, 2015, will be matched dollar for dollar by the Daring Minds Fund, doubling your gift in support of the daring minds of the future.

Honor your daring mind at pomona.edu/hdm.

Honor a Daring Mind banner

The Making of The Martian

astronaut on mars

A still from The Martian

When producer Aditya Sood ’97 came across writer Andy Weir’s self-published book The Martian in 2013, it was selling on Amazon for 99 cents a download. Sood read the book and knew he had found something incredible—this is part of his job: find great, new material and projects to turn into movies.

The film The Martian, starring Matt Damon, opened on Oct. 2 and is now a box-office hit making nearly $100 million worldwide on opening weekend.

“When I read The Martian, I was blown away,” says Sood. “It is one of the best books I have ever read. I hadn’t seen anything like this, it’s a warm, human book which is so rare in science fiction, which can be a cold and distant genre.”

Sood, who is the president of Genre Films, brought the story to his company partner Simon Kinberg, and soon had Twentieth Century Fox behind it. With an incredible screenplay written by Drew Goddard, they were able to get Matt Damon and director Ridley Scott on board.Aditya Sood portrait

“We gave the script to Ridley Scott on a Friday and by Saturday, he called us to say he was in. Six months later, we were in Budapest starting filming,” recalls Sood.

Many of the positive reviews of the film highlight the accurate science and meticulous research that makes The Martian so good.

“More than anything, I’m just happy that we were able to translate Andy’s book into a movie that captured all of its values,” says Sood. “I wasn’t a science major at Pomona, but I’ve always loved science, and I get frustrated when movies don’t get science right but The Martian does. It tells a story that is entertaining and scientifically accurate—we used science to tell the story.”

Sood did major in Philosophy, Politics & Economics (PPE) at Pomona, but he took it upon himself to pursue his passion of films, signing up to receive the Hollywood Reporter in his school mailbox, and interning at New Line Cinema and Dreamworks. Sood passed over film school to come to Pomona and valued what the liberal arts had to offer.

“The greatest thing about Pomona was taking classes in any field. I’d always wanted to be an astronaut for the first 12 years of my life and so I took Bryan Penprase’s astronomy class my first year, which was great,” says Sood.

But Pomona holds a fond spot in his heart for more than academics. It was at Pomona that as a sophomore he met Becky Chassin ’98, his future wife.

“I was a sophomore with a terrible room draw, so my friends and I got doubles in Lyon. She was in a sponsor group right next door to us,” remembers Sood. “We introduced ourselves and became good pals. We were good friends through college and it wasn’t until many years later that we started dating. We got married three years ago.”

Along with the success of The Martian, Sood also recently celebrated the birth of his son, who he says “will hopefully be Pomona class of 2037.”

Sood has some advice for students wishing to make it in films: “Read everything you can—things that are movie-related, screenplays, books about the business, blogs, trade papers.”

He also tells students to find a group of like-minded friends who are into the same thing, friends who you can share information and experiences, and network with.  That’s where 5C Claremont in Entertainment and Media (CEM) comes in. CEM recently organized a special screening of The Martian with a Q&A with Sood open to CEM and Pomona alumni.

“It’s incumbent upon students to figure that part out. It only helps you when you’re sharing experiences and information, that’s really valuable.”

Founders Day at the New Millikan

Founders Day 2015 was a celebration of mathematics, physics and astronomy, centered around the dedication of the rebuilt Millikan Laboratory and renovated Andrew Science Hall. The day featured a range of family-oriented activities, including Planetarium shows, physics and astronomy demonstrations, math lectures and music.

President David Oxtoby examining the model

President David Oxtoby examining the remains of a model atom “smashed” by a couple of bowling balls during the Millikan dedication.

A visitor looking at a cube-type-structure with soap bubbles

A visitor studying minimal surfaces in the Math Commons using soap bubbles on zome structures

Children sitting in a circle and passing around a ball

Children learning about forces while attempting to play catch in a rotating reference frame.

Student demonstrating microscope

Ian Descamps ’19 demonstrating the Hitachi SU 70 Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope in the new Microscopy Center.

Professor Ami Radunskaya  singing into the microphone

Mathematics Professor Ami Radunskaya singing with the Millikan Family Band.

Physics Professor Philip Choi, his, and students laughing

Angela Twum ’18, Physics Professor Philip Choi and his son Phineus Choi watching a musical performance.

Portrait of Peter Staub with face paint

Math student Peter Staub ’18 showing off his academic passion.