The new Millikan Laboratory is still home to the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
The Fletcher Jones Foundation Planetarium
Students at work in the Harry Mullikin Math Commons
The open and light-filled floorplan of the new Millikan
A research lab with Physics Professor Richard Mawhorter
A class in the John C. Argue Auditorium.
As Bridges Hall of Music celebrates its centennial, many Pomona alumni look back fondly at the place where they said “I do.” The Little Bridges Wedding Register is a historical record of marriages that took place in the building, starting with Howry Warner 1912 and Mary Roof 1912, married June 1, 1916. Compiled in the early 1970s, the register was maintained and updated through 1992 and includes the names of 453 couples.
ITEM: The Little Bridges Wedding Register
DATE: 1916–1992
COLLECTION: Pomona College Books and Periodicals Collection
DESCRIPTION: 29-page handwritten book (16” X 12” X 1”), registering the names of all the couples who were married in Mabel Shaw Bridges Hall of Music between 1916 and 1992.
ORIGIN: The book was created by the College to list couples who were married in Little Bridges and kept for many years at the Alumni House (Seaver House).
If you have an item from Pomona’s history that you’d like to see preserved in the Archives, please call 909-621-8138.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in the fact that Pomona-Pitzer’s new athletic director has hit the ground running. Lesley Irvine has been moving fast ever since she was a child—first as a multi-sport athlete, then as a high-profile coach and finally as an athletic administrator. At Pomona, she has assumed a newly created full-time position as chair of Pomona’s Physical Education Department and director of the joint athletic program of Pomona and Pitzer colleges.
“I wanted to be at a place that was striving to be excellent both athletically and academically—a place that knew and believed that those things go hand in hand and support one another,” she explains in a clipped British accent softened at the edges by 16 years in the United States. “I also wanted to be at a place that was really striving to improve and be aspirational.”
Since her arrival, Irvine has been visible all over campus as she acquaints herself with every aspect of Sagehen sports—from intramurals to varsity—and begins to plot a course for the future. “As I think about the vision for Pomona-Pitzer Athletics, I think about broad-based competitive excellence,” she says. “I think about providing an experience that is at the highest level for our student-athletes. And I think about the visibility and connectivity of athletics on the campuses here.”
Grow up in Corby, a steel town in central England where most people are of Scottish descent and speak with a Scottish brogue. Develop into an active child, always sporting a scraped knee. Get involved in athletics with the encouragement of your dad, an avid soccer player, coach and fan.
Join a track and field club at the age of 9 and, since you excel in a range of athletic events, specialize in the heptathlon. In high school, find yourself playing almost every sport, from basketball to volleyball to soccer. Discover the game of field hockey and fall in love with it.
Accept an invitation to play on the English junior national field hockey team at the age of 16, while also competing internationally in the heptathlon. Play for England in a victory over Scotland in the Six Nations field hockey tournament and have to explain to your teammates why your dad, a proud Scot, is rooting against you.
Become the first member of your family to go to college, playing field hockey at prestigious Loughborough University. While there, win five national championships. During your second year, teach tennis at a summer camp in Maine (though you’ve never touched a tennis racquet before) and find yourself at home in American sports culture.
After graduating, come back to the U.S. for graduate school, attending the University of Iowa and playing competitive field hockey for one more year, scoring the only goal in a 1–0 victory over Stanford University in your first trip out West and leading your team to a Final Four appearance. Earn your master’s degree in health, leisure and sports studies.
Return to Stanford as assistant women’s field hockey coach. Discover that you love working with committed student athletes who love sports as much as you do. After two years, succeed the retiring head coach and spend eight years at the helm of Stanford’s elite program, guiding them to three straight NorPac championships.
Leave Stanford to enter sports administration, spending five years at Bowling Green State University and rising to the rank of senior associate athletic director. Decide the job at Pomona-Pitzer is a perfect match for your abilities and your desire to help build something special for talented and motivated student-athletes while promoting wellness for a whole community
The Pomona College Board of Trustees has a new chair and three new members. Samuel D. Glick ’04 took over the gavel this summer from Jeanne Buckley ’65. Joining the Board for the first time were Matthew J. Estes ’88, Nathaniel “Nate” Kirtman ’92 and Xiaoye “MD” Ma ’11.
Board Chair Samuel D. Glick ’04
Samuel D. Glick ’04 first served on Pomona’s Board of Trustees as the young alumni member from 2007 to 2011. He was elected to his current term in 2012. Glick is partner and San Francisco office leader at Oliver Wyman, where he advises the nation’s leading healthcare organizations on business strategy. At Pomona, he earned his bachelor’s degree in economics, with a minor in classics. As a member of the Board, he has served as chair of the Advancement Committee and as a member of the Finance Committee, Facilities and Environment Committee, Educational Quality Committee, Student Affairs Committee, Wig Fund for Teaching Committee and Honorary Degrees Committee.
Matthew J. Estes ’88
Matthew J. Estes built four companies in China during the past 24 years. He was founder & CEO of BabyCare Ltd., which manufactures and sells nutritional supplements via a chain of BabyCare Centers and a direct sales force of over 200,000 people in China. He was also founder of Yaolan New Media Ltd. (yaolan.com), a leading Chinese language parenting website with more than 11 million registered families. He sold BabyCare and Yaolan to U.S. companies. Previously, he was with Wella Cosmetics (now part of Proctor & Gamble) and Smithkline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline PLC). He served as Vice Chair of the American Chamber of Commerce in China and is currently focusing on healthcare- and internet-related venture capital.
Nathaniel “Nate” Kirtman III ’92
As senior vice president of corporate PR for NBC Entertainment, Nathaniel “Nate” Kirtman III ’92 oversees the network’s corporate communications initiatives, media relations, charitable contributions, operations, events and digital communications efforts. His previous roles at NBC included overseeing publicity for late-night programs such as The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, talent relations and events. Earlier, Kirtman served as manager of marketing communications at GE-Aviation and led the corporate digital team at GE’s corporate headquarters. A government major and star athlete at Pomona, Kirtman was a ninth-round pick of the Dallas Cowboys. He is also chairman of the California State Lottery Commission and has served on Pomona’s Alumni Association Board.
Xiaoye “MD” Ma ’11
Xiaoye “MD” Ma ’11 is the new young alumni trustee. Ma is a senior manager of business intelligence at 5.11 Tactical, a firm that innovates tactical gear for global special force operators, first responders, and outdoor enthusiasts. Prior to taking on this role, he was a management consultant at Deloitte Consulting. Graduated magna cum laude from Pomona, Ma was an economics and media studies major, freshman class president, ASPC commissioner of communications and RHS staff. Between high school in Singapore and Pomona, he spent part of his gap year as an actor in a Chinese television drama about firefighters.
If you are ever offered a tour of the new Millikan Laboratory and Andrew Science Hall with David Haley as your guide, take it. A 21-year veteran of physics departments, he has an enthusiasm for his subject that is nonstop and infectious. Completely at ease in the corridors of Millikan’s new underground laboratory, he misses no opportunity to point out the fascinating creations of Pomona students and faculty.
“This one is a sonoluminescence project,” he says, referring to one of the many capstone projects he’s kept over the years. “It uses sound to compress a bubble, which produces light. And this—” He gestures to a nearby rolling chair contraption. “—Is a fire-extinguisher-propelled rocket cart. You sit on it and you squeeze the handle and you launch yourself down the hall. It’s for talking about Newton’s laws.” Before exiting a workroom, he pauses to flick on a homemade air hockey table, explaining: “I’m trying to convince one of the students to create 3D shapes that we can print and use to teach conservation of momentum.”
Haley, who has been working at Pomona since the summer of 2001, describes himself as a “physics roadie.” As the senior lab technician of the Physics Department, he is primarily responsible for handling the equipment for labs and the lecture demonstrations, in addition to supporting faculty research and student projects. “One of the nuances of my job is making the process more streamlined and straightforward for students, so they’re less worried about how things work and more focused on the concepts behind the lab,” he explains. “If I do my job right, you’ll rarely know I was there.”
Haley graduated with a B.S. in physics from Kansas State University, after which he spent seven years working as a lab technician at New Mexico State University before moving to California. Luckily for Pomona, he was informed of the open position by chance, after contacting a former coworker who happened to attend the same summer meeting of the Physics Instructional Resource Association (PIRA) as Pomona Professor of Physics David Tanenbaum. “I didn’t really realize the caliber of Pomona when I first got the job,” Haley confesses. “It was just a name to me. But once I started working here, I realized what a special place this is. It makes me believe in karma.”
If good karma is a reward for good deeds, Haley deserves a lot of it. He recently gave a presentation to the Southern California chapter of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) detailing the Pomona College Lending Library of physics equipment, which he manages. Composed of experiments ranging from electricity and magnetism to mechanics to superconductivity, the library serves physics teachers from around Southern California, who can request to borrow experiment kits for their lessons once they’ve attended a Pomona faculty-run workshop. “This is part of Pomona College’s mission,” says Haley. “We’re obligated as educators to help teach not only our students here at Pomona, but the general populace. I like that I can use what I do, and the equipment I have, to get people interested in science and the world around them.”
Since Haley is an enthusiast for science in general, you’d think choosing to focus in only one field would have been tough for him, but this isn’t the case. “I like the applied nature of physics,” he says. “The world is a very beautiful place, and I want to understand it better. Why do objects have mass? Why is there gravity? The more evidence you get to support a theory, the more you believe it’s accurate, but you can never really take it as truth. But that’s what I like about physics. It’s always a reiteration.”
And yet despite the reiteration, Haley’s job is never boring. Particularly exciting for him was the opportunity to use his many years of experience to help design the new science building. The Physics and Astronomy Department seized the opportunity to reorganize their space, implementing prep rooms between labs and behind lecture classrooms.
His favorite parts of the building also include the new student research project space, which was absent in the old Millikan. And new perks of the job include selecting items for Millikan’s first-floor display case. Haley is eager to point them all out: “These are Lichtenberg’s figures; they’re basically electric sparks encased in acrylic. This is a laser-etched glass figurine. This is the Milky Way galaxy, and this is a large-scale galactic structure. Those are some of our antique Gessler tubes from the 1920s. Those are all meteorites. And here’s a 3D-printed figurine of a student wearing a hat.”
Below ground again, as Haley enthusiastically indicates each of the projects that live in the basement of Millikan, he tells the stories of their creators. The student who created a rail gun as his senior thesis is now working at Los Alamos. Another student started his own software company.
Haley keeps all of his thank-you notes in a special place of honor on his desk. Smiling to himself as he goes through each one, he remarks, “It’s easy to come to work when you have things like this. To work with people like this is amazing. Plus, I get to play with soap bubbles and Tesla coils and shoot balls across the room. It’s really—can you see the colors in the film now?”
He gestures toward his workbench, where he has set up an old junior project, a soap film encased in a clear box. “The colors have to do with the thickness of the film. It’s an interference of light demonstration, pretty much the same idea as an oil slick on water.
“Here—let me show you.”
Suzanne Thompson, professor emerita of psychology at Pomona, conducts research on how people react to personal threats, particularly those with delayed consequences. She and her undergraduate research group are investigating a variety of ways in which different perceptions of threat influence the processing of threatening information and guide health and safety behaviors.
PCM: As a psychologist, how do you see the role of “what if” thinking in human affairs?
Suzanne Thompson: The theme that you’ve chosen is especially interesting because “what if” or “if only” thinking is such a basic part of human cognition. And there seem to be good evolutionary reasons for that. It has helped us develop the ability to control things, to anticipate—if I do this, what’s going to happen?—and then to carry that several steps down the line.
Or looking back, it allows us to analyze what has gone before and play out these little scenarios of what else could have happened, which is full of information about causes and effects.
PCM: What kind of research has been done in this area?
ST: When thoughts like these refer to the past, they’re usually called counterfactuals, and when they refer to the future, we call those anticipatory factuals or prefactuals. I would say most of the work has been done on counterfactuals, or what’s sometimes called “cognitive undoing.” There are two basic types—upward and downward counterfactuals. An upward counterfactual is when we undo what did happen and imagine a better outcome. For example, if I’m a student who got a C on a test, and I imagine, “If only I had skipped that party and studied hard, this could have been a B or an A.” Alternatively, we can imagine a worse outcome—a downward counterfactual, such as, “I’m glad I at least covered that material or it could have been a lot worse. This could have been a D or an F.”
The two kinds of counterfactuals have very different effects and different advantages and disadvantages. Imagining something better tends to lead to unpleasant emotions—regret or maybe self-blame. And if it involves other people’s behavior, we might blame them. That’s the downside, those negative emotions and reactions.
But the upside is that there’s a lot of information there about what we can do to change things in the future, and people can use that. One study asked college students about the kinds of counterfactuals they were making for their grade on the first big exam. Then the researchers followed them for the rest of the semester, and found that the students who had made upward counterfactuals felt more regret and blame, but also tended to have a stronger sense of control and got better grades over the course of the semester. That gives support to that idea that upward counterfactuals are very useful.
In contrast, the downward counterfactuals—“it could have been worse”— led to more positive emotions, but were not as instructive. They didn’t have useful information about how to change your behavior to get a better outcome.
PCM: So no pain, no gain?
ST: That’s right. Research has also looked at what we “undo” in a counterfactual. We tend to look mainly at our own behavior, maybe because we have more control over that or it’s more useful. We also tend to undo things that happened fairly close to the event. And if something unusual happens—if you had a break in your routine or took a different route to work and then got into an accident—that’s what’s going to pop out as something to undo.
PCM: What about people who get obsessed with their “what if” thoughts?
ST: Yes, it can get pushed too far. There are people who get immersed in “what if” and “if only.” For people who have gone through some traumatic event, like losing a loved one in an automobile accident or to disease, it’s very common initially to do this kind of counterfactual thinking. It seems useful early on, but if people are still doing it years later, it’s a sign of not coping very well. It is better to get your information, and then get out and not get stuck in the “undoing” side of things.
PCM: Are there certain kinds of situations that tend to provoke counterfactual thoughts?
ST: Research has shown that near misses are particularly powerful. There’s a classic example that I use with my classes. Mr. Crane and Mr. Tees are going to the airport and they both get there a half hour late and miss their plane. When Mr. Crane gets to the airport, he finds that the plane left on schedule, a half hour before. When Mr. Tees arrives, he finds that his plane was delayed, and he just missed it. Almost everyone recognizes that Mr. Tees would feel worse, even though the situations are identical in terms of what happened to them. But emotionally, psychologically, we pick up on the fact that it could have so easily have been different, and that has a big impact on us.
Another good example comes from an article that was in the L.A. Times maybe 10 years ago about a guy playing the lottery who always played the same number again and again, and then one day he doesn’t and his number wins. And we all understand what that would feel like—that near miss. In fact, the Oregon lottery uses that as a slogan in some of their ads: “What if your number won without you?”
PCM: Have you thought about how counterfactual thinking connects with your own research about possible threats somewhere in the future?
ST: In a 2002 study, I examined people’s reactions to 9/11 a year after the event. And I found such amazing variety—from people who weren’t fazed at all to people who were highly sensitized to danger because of the event and were never going to fly again. That got me interested in individual differences—how we don’t all think about threats and the future the same way.
We all know people who are very sensitized to threat and also people who just brush it off, easy deniers. It is possible that those who have a great sensitivity to future threats are using anticipatory counterfactuals, and anticipating bad outcomes that could happen. For others who are not so sensitized to threat, the possible negative outcomes just don’t occur to them. A little bit of anticipating threats is a good thing, but a whole lot of thinking about every possible future threat—“if I do X, this bad outcome could happen”—can be paralyzing.
People who get more anxious about threats are more likely to protect themselves, which is good, but they may not be as discriminating about what really is necessary. You can see this play out in society sometimes. Around the time when AIDS was first identified, we didn’t know a lot about it, but medical researchers did know that it wasn’t easily spread. You can be in the same room with someone, even touch them, but not be at risk. But many parents wouldn’t let their kids go to school with another child who was identified with AIDS or had a relative with HIV or AIDS. Sensitization to threat can lead to that type of over-reaction.
It is easy to see how this ability to play things out and anticipate outcomes allows you to identify more negative things that could happen, and that can heighten anxiety and lead to over-reactions. My research has not yet tied threat hypersensitivity to counterfactuals, in particular, but now that I have talked with you about this, it is something I want to do. Does the hypersensitivity to threat come from being very prone to counterfactuals and especially prone to ones in which you play out the scenario to a negative ending?
PCM: There’s one aspect of “what if” thinking that we haven’t discussed yet. That’s the fact we also do it for fun—like in this issue of the magazine. We read counterfactual stories. And we play games, like chess, that are all about pre-factual scenarios.
ST: Chess is a good example. You’re following a line of thought with all the branches and possibilities. What chess masters can do—thinking many moves ahead—is an amazing ability. Because counterfactual and prefactual thinking are such important abilities from an evolutionary viewpoint, it makes sense that we find them rewarding. The fun is our incentive for practicing these very useful ways of thinking.
On August 14, 2015, Burt Johnson’s 1916 sculpture “Spanish Music,” was reinstalled on the fountain in Lebus Court. The sculpture, which was a gift to the College from the Class of 1915, had remained in place in the courtyard until earlier this year, when a section of the fountain collapsed. Based on photographs of the original fountain, the fountain was rebuilt, and the College took the opportunity to have the statue restored and its broken flute repaired.
Is there any question more characteristically human than one that begins with those two little words? They may be spoken with excitement or with regret, with curiosity or with fear, but they’re always spoken with the brain in high gear—doing what human brains were meant to do: look beyond the way things are to how they might be.
In psychology, such speculations are known as “counterfactuals” or “prefactuals”—the “what-ifs” and “if-onlys” that plague us or motivate us as we reflect upon past events or try to imagine a better future.
In philosophy, they’re part of a long line of epistemological thought reaching all the way back to Aristotle.
In linguistics, they’re those strange and wonderful parts of grammar that we use to describe things and events in precise detail while acknowledging that they have not yet (and may never) come to pass.
In science, they’re the basis of all hypotheses. As such, they are arguably the foundation from which all scientific knowledge springs, and indeed, upon which the whole modern world is built.
In fiction, there’s some sort of “what if” at the heart of every work—sometimes philosophical (What if a mother had to choose which of her two children to save from the gas chamber?), sometimes scientific (What if a lone man were stranded on Mars?), sometimes historical (What if the Nazis had won the war?). There are, as you probably know, whole novels exploring each of these intriguing possibilities.
But one of my personal favorites in the “what-if” realm of literature isn’t a novel at all—it’s a nonfiction book called What If the Moon Didn’t Exist? by astronomer Neil F. Comins. The book is a series of essays, the first of which asks the question in the book’s title. (Spoiler alert: There would probably be no life, or at the very least, no life as we know it.) He goes on to address a series of other questions that would likely result in a dramatically changed world. What if the Moon were closer to the Earth? What if the Earth had less mass? What if the Earth were tilted like Uranus?
Comins concludes his book, however, with a “what if” question that crosses the boundary from intriguing speculation into scary fact: What if the Earth’s ozone layer were depleted? The picture he paints in his essay is graphic and frightening and all too probably in the process of coming true before our eyes.
As Comins notes, “the ‘what if’ process is an essential part of our ability to consider the long-term effects of our actions before we take them.”
Or in other words, the world would be a better place if more of us would pause to ask: “What if?”
In person, Dan Weinand ’16 is a polite, soft-spoken Pomona College senior. But put him onstage and he is someone else altogether. He’s a hostile loudmouth being interrogated for a crime. He’s a laidback traveler with a Jamaican accent. He’s a TV show host who waxes poetic about the wonders of trash.
He is all of these things in a recent performance by Without a Box, the improvisational comedy group composed of students from the five Claremont Colleges. Their improv shows are a long-running tradition: Pitzer College student David Straus formed the group in 1989. Team members graduate each year, but the group endures, adding new students to the mix.
Without a Box performs about once a month during the school year, at various locations on the five campuses. Weinand, a double major in math and computer science, says it’s a kick to perform in front of fellow students—especially the Claremont crowd, who share a certain frame of reference. “I just love that only on the 5Cs can I make a linear algebra joke,” he says.
The group generally consists of anywhere from five to 10 students. However, when the 2015–2016 school year starts, Without a Box is down to three: Weinand; Lauren Eisenman, a Scripps College sophomore majoring in neuroscience; and Matthew Roberts, a Pitzer senior and history major.
Despite the small number, the crew is in fine form at the September show, held at Pitzer’s Benson Auditorium. More than 100 people are in attendance, and they look to be having a blast. The three performers wear blue Without a Box shirts, and stage props consist of little more than two chairs.
There are topical references (the Pope, Donald Trump), pantomimed actions (smoking, using a cell phone), and a spirit of play throughout. Audience interaction is a big part of the show, with members suggesting scenarios and providing snippets of dialogue. In one skit, two volunteers jump onstage to join Weinand and Roberts.
Here’s the twist: the two students move the bodies of the two performers, as if manipulating human puppets, and the dialogue flows from the movements. The scene starts with Weinand and Roberts facing each other, then Roberts is turned in the opposite direction, to which Weinand cries, “Don’t leave me!” A lovers’ spat emerges, and limbs fly every which way.
Like all good improv performers, Without a Box members embrace the “Yes, and … ” principle: the idea that you accept whatever your scene partner throws your way, however far-fetched, and build on it. As they set up the show’s final scenario—Weinand and Eisenman are co-hosts of an early-morning public access program; Roberts is the guest—they ask the audience to select a name for the TV program. The winner: “Garbage Connoisseurs.”
The two hosts gush about thrown-away toys in trash bins, exquisite finds like the tossed bodies of Barbie dolls. In comes Roberts, an authority on discarded Transformers. Then, a change of direction: the expert is uncovered as a fraud, a betrayer of garbage dreams.
Audience members eat up the show’s quirky, quick-shifting action. “It’s cool that it’s unpredictable and different,” Jonah Grubb, a Pomona senior, says afterward. “With improv, you never know what you’re going to get.”
Weinand, Eisenman and Roberts say they’re not just winging it onstage—they hone their skills through rehearsal. The group practices three times a week, doing exercises in improv game-playing, physical humor, and character work. “Doing improv might be scary if I didn’t feel comfortable with the other performers,” says Weinand. “But I totally do.
“Trust is a really big part of it,” adds Eisenman.
Growing the Group
The trio knows that Without a Box needs to get bigger to be at its best, so a week after its September show it holds auditions for new members. Eighteen students show up on a Saturday at Scripps’ Vita Nova Hall. Then that group is winnowed down to nine students invited for callbacks the next day.
Among the hopefuls is Pomona sophomore Zach Miller. In one exercise, he is asked to stand outside while Weinand, Eisenman and Roberts set up a scene with three of the students. Each is given a character feature. One is a ghost, another has a tail, and the third one’s foot is on fire. Miller comes back inside. His task: to guess what distinguishes each of the three, all of whom he is hosting at a party.
Miller is an agile performer. By the end of the scene, he has figured out each one’s crazy feature. Guessing the ghost mystery, he quips, “Say hi to Casper for me.”
Weinand says Without a Box selects performers based on their comedic abilities, physical skills, character range and “how well they keep scenes feeling real.” The group also wants a diverse mix of students who are passionate about improv, he adds.
The Schumer Effect
Another aspiring member is Cassie Lewis, a junior at Claremont McKenna College whose parents are both Pomona alums (Kara Stuart Lewis ’88 and Gordon Lewis ’87). During a lunch break, she talks of how she discovered the edgy comedy of Amy Schumer over the summer, a revelation that has inspired her to pursue a career in stand-up comedy. Cassie, the vice president of CMC’s theater group Under the Lights, says she saw Without a Box perform a while ago and was “blown away by how they came up with really funny jokes.” So here she is, eager to become part of the group.
“You can’t be a comedian without doing improv,” she explains.
In one exercise during callbacks, Cassie plays off of Marisa Galvez, a CMC freshman. The setting for their scene is a motel continental breakfast. The two verbally spar as Lewis’s character steals apples and stuffs them into her pants.
Both young women are confident and creative. For most people, speaking off the cuff is daunting. A script provides a security blanket. Yet Lewis, Galvez and the others seem fearless, perfectly comfortable to perform without a net—or a box, if you will.
Galvez says she follows the motto of the improv company Upright Citizens Brigade: “Don’t think. Just act.”
Most of the students have previous experience with improv, evidence of its growing popularity. Many high schools now have improv teams or clubs. There are improv-based companies like The Second City, Upright Citizens Brigade and ComedySportz, and TV shows such as Whose Line Is It Anyway?
Stretching their improvisational muscles serves students well even beyond the stage. Morgan Blevins, a Harvey Mudd freshman who is a bright light at the callbacks, was on her high school’s improv team and says, “I’m so glad I did improv before I did my college interviews.”
Decision Time
A couple of days after callbacks, Without a Box taps its new members. Miller is selected, as is Lewis, Galvez and Blevins. Also chosen are Pomona sophomore Sean Gunther and Pitzer first-year Eli Fujita.
Miller says he’s excited about performing and “bringing the audience into the absurd scenes that we invent.”
Weinand, who has performed in Without a Box since his freshman year and will soon be applying to graduate schools, echoes the sentiment. “I love making people laugh,” he says. “That makes me really happy.”
Photos by Carrie Rosema
The stretch of Foothill Boulevard near the corner of Osborne Street in the northeast San Fernando Valley has been infamous for nearly 25 years. It was there in 1991 that Rodney King was brutally beaten by Los Angeles Police officers after a high-speed chase that ended with the unemployed 25-year-old parolee being kicked, tasered and battered with batons, all captured on videotape by a nearby resident. One year later, the officers’ acquittal sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots that left 53 dead, 2,300 injured and caused $1 billion in property damage.
Today near that spot, children roam the striking, angular modern building that houses the new Discovery Cube Los Angeles, a hands-on museum aimed at teaching young people about science, technology, engineering and math, often referred to by the acronym ‘STEM.’
Inside, Kafi Blumenfield ’93, executive director of the year-old museum, kneels to join a small child sweeping his hands through the sand of an interactive exhibit that displays the resulting changes in topography on a digital map.
To Blumenfield, this is about more than science. She sees the museum as a catalyst for change in the community, a way to build a better Los Angeles by starting near the place known for the traffic stop that changed the history of a city.
“We are in a neighborhood that is full of kids with potential but lacking in resources,” Blumenfield says. “So many of our kids go jobless. They’re strong, eager, talented kids, but they’re jobless. Overlay that with the fact that we have a gap in our pipeline of young people who are ready and willing and able to enter the STEM jobs. So this is a natural fit. If we can provide these kids with additional educational support to encourage them to enter these types of jobs, it will not only make their lives and their households better, but this whole region better.”
Running a children’s science museum might seem an unlikely role for a vibrant, well-connected civic leader whose first job after majoring in politics at Pomona was as a White House intern. (She served in the Clinton Administration two years before the most famous intern in history arrived in Washington.) After earning a law degree from UCLA and working at various jobs related to such issues as housing and the environment, Blumenfield’s most recent role was president and CEO of the Liberty Hill Foundation, an L.A. nonprofit that gives about $5 million a year in grants to grass-roots organizations promoting social causes.
She has strong political ties, both professionally and personally: Her husband is Los Angeles Councilman Bob Blumenfield, a former member of the California State Assembly whose West Valley council district includes Woodland Hills, where the couple lives with their two elementary-aged children.
It was one of Blumenfield’s personal/political connections that led her to Discovery Cube LA. She was having lunch last fall with Wendy Greuel, the former Los Angeles City Controller who ran for mayor against Eric Garcetti in 2013. Greuel, then a consultant for Discovery Cube LA and now vice chair of the board, suddenly envisioned a match between the museum and Blumenfield, who had planned to take a year off to reflect on the next step in her career after leaving Liberty Hill.
“As we were talking about life transitions and things to do in the future,” Greuel says, “I heard how she cared about kids and about how to make a difference in their lives at this age, around elementary school. So I said, ‘Would you ever think about this?’ Because it was outside the box.
“But as she met with the team, you saw that she saw it as more than a building and more than a children’s science museum. She saw it as a way to train teachers to teach science, and a way to excite young girls about science. She sees it as part of a way to seek social justice. She frequently talks about this being the corner where Rodney King was beaten. I’m inspired by her when she gives those tours.
“She gets it. She gets that it’s transformative, not only for the kids who come in, but for the neighborhood. This is a community that wants to be known for something more than where Rodney King was beaten. This is something that’s a spark.”
Among the sparks for Blumenfield were conversations with her daughter, now 9, and her 6-year-old son.
“I was shocked when last year my daughter told me that she was not good at math and science,” Blumenfield says, even though the family had a tradition of outings they called Science Saturdays. “I said, ‘Why do you say that?’ She said, ‘Well, there are not a lot of girls in my class that like math and science.’ We hear that all too often. She was a big part of this project because we really want to see more young girls engaged in science, as we do with young boys.”
Her son, though, “sealed the deal,” Blumenfield says, when the family visited Santa Ana’s Discovery Cube Orange County, the well-established older sister of the two museums. (Together, the museums drew 631,045 visitors in the last fiscal year. About 220,000 have visited Discovery Cube LA since it opened last November, including 34,500 students on field trips.)
“He was 5 at the time, and I couldn’t get him out of the building,” Blumenfield says. When she cautiously broached the topic of going back to work sooner than planned to head Discovery Cube LA, her son’s response was emphatic. “‘We are in!’ he said,” she remembers with a laugh. “So they’re here a lot.”
Despite the STEM focus, Discovery Cube LA is about more than academics and career-related science. It has an additional emphasis on environmental stewardship and healthy living issues of particular importance in the San Fernando Valley, where air quality and aquifer contamination are significant concerns.
The “Aquavator” is an exhibit that simulates descending deep into the earth’s crust in a special elevator to view geological layers while learning about underground water aquifers.
In “Race to Zero Waste,” visitors stand alongside a moving conveyor belt, trying to correctly sort recyclables from other waste to divert trash from landfills. “Look, it’s the trash game,” a woman says as a child runs up to it.
Elsewhere in the museum, a faux market offers healthy local produce, green cleaning products and an opportunity for children to “shop” and check out with their selections.
Another exhibit features a portion of a built-to-scale California home, complete with solar panels. Visitors can go on a sort of scavenger hunt using handheld devices, seeking out opportunities to save energy and water. They find home computer monitors left on when not in use, becoming “energy vampires” that waste power. A kitchen faucet is programmed to intermittently drip, and observant visitors can hear the sound of the bathroom toilet running too long. (Eventually, museum staff found it necessary to screw down the lid. “You can imagine, with a bunch of potty-trainers,” Blumenfield says with a laugh.)
Playfulness aside, “we’re trying to address some of the problems of the day but do it in a very affirming way that allows people to see how they can actually effect change,” Blumenfield says. “I think that’s really important because some of the problems we’re faced with, particularly from the kids’ vantage point, it can all seem so overwhelming. They really don’t know what they can do in their little lives to make a difference. So here, they get to see it in some very practical ways.”
On the job since last August, only a few months before the November opening of a museum that earlier had stalled because of financial issues, Blumenfield is clearly in her element. She oversees a budget of about $5.3 million as well as a staff of 67 full-time and part-time workers, plus a large group of volunteers who range from teenagers to retirees. Walking the museum, she greets visitors brightly and calls workers by name.
Touted as the first major museum in the San Fernando Valley, an area with a population of more than 1.75 million, Discovery Cube LA is a new anchor in the Lake View Terrace neighborhood, a demographically diverse community with large Latino and black populations. The most visible landmark has long been the Hansen Dam Recreation Area, with its large sandy-beach manmade pool.
“It’s both very urban in ways you would expect an urban community to be, and at the same time, there’s some—I don’t know—country living, right outside our doors,” Blumenfield said. “Summer camps are tending to come here for half a day, and then they go to the pool for half a day, so it’s a great combination of science and nature.”
The community has moved on from the notoriety of the Rodney King incident, though it will be the subject of retrospectives as the 25th anniversary approaches in March. Two of the acquitted officers later served prison time after being convicted of violating King’s civil rights in a subsequent federal trial. King himself died in a backyard pool in 2012 at the age of 47.
Almost a quarter-century later, children inside the Discovery Cube museum learn about the solar system or earthquakes or how the ice on a hockey rink is made. For Blumenfield, instead of putting the funding into social change, now she is putting the fun into it.
“For me, it’s all the same thing,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if I’ve been in a legal organization, a social services organization or here, an education center, or a foundation. My career has been dedicated to providing opportunities to those who don’t have the same resources as those who have more. And to try to help people succeed, no matter if they live in downtown L.A. or here in the beautiful northeast San Fernando Valley. I think every child deserves the absolute best education, and there are many ways to go about that.
“So I don’t see the different stations that I’ve been in life, I don’t see them being that different. The beautiful thing about this place that is different, though, is I get to walk the halls, and I get to see the people that we are trying to serve. That lights me up. It gives tremendous meaning to see, every day, people who want to succeed.”