Articles Written By: emae2021@pomona.edu

The Art of Surprise

March 8, 2014 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

Mowry Baden’s art has deep Pomona College roots. He started here as a student and then came back to campus later as an art professor, department chair and gallery director from 1968 to 1971.

Long based in Victoria, B.C., Baden ’58 is known for his large-scale kinesthetic sculptures. “Dromedary Mezzanine,” on view at the Pomona College Museum of Art through April 13, is a tall, platformed bicycle that a museum visitor pedals to reach four wall-mounted tents containing tools—an effort that is both exercise and meditation for the participant. Baden’s body-oriented, interactive works have impacted generations of Pomona students and garnered him wide respect.

baden1 Q: What’s the philosophy behind moving sculpture?

A: Almost all of my working life as a sculptor I’ve dedicated my energies to capitalizing on the physical energies of the period. So often people ask me, “What is your medium?” I say, exertion. Not my exertion but the exertion of the viewer, and this involves so often intercepting their habitual habits, gestural habits; intercepting those habits and sending them in unexpected directions.

So the viewer makes a discovery, or several discoveries, about the way their mind and body collaborate—and we call that kind of event an illusion, a phantom. This sculpture [“Dromedary Mezzanine”] capitalizes on the viewer’s energy. To ensure that the viewer engages with the work as long as possible, I’ve put these little destinations, chambers, high on the wall and each chamber contains a tool. When I acquired the tools I didn’t know their function; they’re very old, they’re out of use. So old are they, we have no idea how to put them into use, so that each is a mystery. This sculpture tries to do two things at once, exertion and the pausing and pondering of these mystery objects.

What do you find most compelling about this kind of work?

A: The central objective is to get into the sensory, to get in behind the external of the viewer, to surprise her with her own perceptual habits, which she thinks she knows from A to Z, but she doesn’t. So the sculpture opens a window into that internal space and she is surprised. Then another layer consists of the signaling that goes on between her and the other people in the room. So she comes, she engages with this, her friend or a stranger watches her and waits her turn. But sometimes her friend is too timid, sometimes her friend is too self-conscious, sometimes

her friend is inappropriately dressed. No matter, because just the act of watching this activity is something her friend’s brain pays acute attention to. In her brain, what are firing are synapses called mirror neurons, and we all have them. In more conventional language, we would call the firing of your neurons empathy. Then there’s another layer: gossip. She comes, she engages with the sculpture. She came alone. But she sees her friend at Starbucks and tells her what happened. Her friend comes to experience the same things, but the curious thing is she doesn’t experience the same thing. Because the two people are different. So really, that’s why I emphasize the particular, because no two people are the same. Generally the same, but particularly not. Another layer is institutional. There’s a lot of code breaking going on here. The first code is, don’t touch the art. So [a work like this] circumvents that code and invites the viewer to do something that she shouldn’t do in this no-touch world of the museum.

The fifth layer has to do with collaboration. If you come sometime to this space and watch people come in, you know how best to manage this apparatus, but they don’t. Each person engages with it unsuccessfully, but those people who view that person interacting with the sculpture take it a step further when it is their turn.

Q: How did your Pomona experience at those different stages—first as a student, then a professor, then as a gallery director—impact your art?

A: In this group of exhibitions, the museum is presenting drawings and paintings by my old teacher Frederick Hammersley…back in 1954-58. He would have us sit at our drawing places and he would say, “Put your pen right there.” [Baden tosses tissue to the floor signifying the movement.] “Now send it around.” So the idea was to keep your eye out there on the object and keep your pen traveling along its perimeter as you drew on the paper in front

of you. It could take a long time to get the line all the way around the object and often the results were startling, but they were always very physical. So your eye and your hand and your body all engage with trying to make this mark significant. He was a very good teacher and you can see how through a kind of filter it surfaces in the kind of work that I do. Then later when I taught here, then ran the department and then was gallery director, I had the good fortune to meet and work with a lot of students and with the gallery director who were more than ready to embrace the engagement of the body as an active component of a work of art. So I had wonderful colleagues like Guy Williams and David Gray in the studio program, later on Lewis Baltz. I had wonderful students like Chris Burden ’69 and Michael Brewster ’68, and I had maybe the best gallery director of the period… Hal Glicksman. So it was really, truly a golden moment in the history of this institution and I was very privileged to be a part of it.

Q: What drives your art?

A: Boredom. Just wanting to entertain yourself, right? I’ve been an artist since I was 8 years old; I don’t know how to do anything else really. At least nothing that chases boredom away so conclusively. I’m also the son of an architect, so almost all my work is larger-scale, body-size, even mini-architectural scale. And even one of my sons is an architect. So I guess in a way it kind of runs in the blood of the family. My mother was a poet. I’m just an art brat.

This interview has been abridged and edited.

Team Player

March 8, 2014 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

Matt O’Connor ’15 wanted two things out of college—rigorous academics and the opportunity to play football. As a starting linebacker and double major in theatre and the interdisciplinary field of philosophy, politics and economics, Matt says he found both at Pomona, along with something else he considers just as important: fellow students who are collaborative, open and involved. A native of Louisville, Colo., Matt also competes in the shot put and participates in musical theatre and the Pomona College Choir. He founded Claremont Christian Athletes and is active in Nourish International, a student-run nonprofit that works to fight global poverty.

Teamwork
“Choir is like a football practice in a way; you go through songs over and over, crafting what you’re doing and perfecting it to get the best product in the concert, just like you do in practice when you run plays over and over again to get the best product on the field. When you’re doing a musical, you’re in a much more intimate setting; it’s more of a family environment. We’re in this together, you have people you can rely on as your family, people you really grow close to and get really deep connections with just like athletics.”

A Conversation about Faith
“I’m very active in the faith community, and Claremont Christian Athletes was a route for me to open up a conversation about religion in an athletic environment. It’s very refreshing to see how open people at a secular school like Pomona have been, and how wildly successful the organization has been in its first year.”

Three Professors Who Made a Difference
“Three professors who’ve had an impact are Lorn Foster, who is like my father away from home and one of the smartest people I’ve met; Fernando Lozano, who was the first professor to really engage me at Pomona and make me feel comfortable; and Art Horowitz, who has such passion for teaching and for each of his students. Art drove all the way to Occidental to watch me and another of his students compete in a track meet. He climbed up what seemed like 10,000 freakin’ stairs to cheer us on. All three are wonderful professors, but way more important, wonderful, wonderful human beings”

Breaking the Mold
“Sometimes American higher education tries to make students fit a certain mold. We’re told to think a certain way in order to achieve a certain societal status and get a certain job. Pomona doesn’t put you in a box; it puts you in this un house of intellectual stimulation and encourages you to get outside your comfort zone, to craft your own path. That’s what I think really defines the idea of Daring Minds. I’ve opened my eyes to the fact that success is not defined by a paycheck or resume but instead how I use my talents to make this world we live in a better place.”

A Valentine’s Day Serenade
“We had a fundraiser for Nourish International on Valentine’s Day, where I serenaded random people in the dining hall for $3 each. We raised over $70 in two hours. My voice was completely gone by the end of it, but it was extremely fun, and I think people either really enjoyed it or were really uncomfortable but applauded to diffuse the tension. One of the two. Or both.”

Why I Sing
“In my Theatre for Young Audiences class, we go to the city of Pomona and work at Fremont Academy. We’ve talked with the students about things that make you feel like you’re flying, and I think that gets to the root of music for me. Singing makes me feel whole, it makes me feel like I don’t have a care in this world, and to remember to smile and laugh and live a little. I can let go of all the frustrations of my day and just feel. That’s why I’m always singing.”

Acclaimed authors have new books out in India

March 4, 2014 by Emma Paine '14 Comments Off

Two of Pomona College’s most prominent alumni authors, Vikram Chandra ’84 and Ved Mehta ’56, have new books out in India.

chandracover1 The latest from Chandra, author of the bestseller Sacred Games, is Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letter and Code, which explores computer coding and novel writing and the connections and trajectories of the seemingly opposing methods of expression.

Mirrored Mind will be released in the U.S. in September as Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software. Chandra, who has spent years as a computer analyst and years as an acclaimed fiction writer, creates a work described by the publisher as “part literary theory, part tech story, and part memoir.” The book ranges from discussions of the Silicon Valley coding culture to an analysis of the writings of the fourth century Sanskrit grammarian Panini to an examination of his own relationship to Western literature.

The Telegraph (U.K.) called it “a delight to read and never prescriptive… a thought-provoking set of linked essays that are part memoir, part analysis of geeks, part aesthetic treatise.” Meanwhile, Chandra’s bestseller Sacred Games may become a TV series.

mehtacover1 Ved Mehta ’56, the author of 27 books and many articles, has released The Essential Ved Mehta. The book contains excerpts from almost all of his nonfiction writings, beginning with his first novel Face to Face, published in 1957. Mehta was a staff writer at the New Yorker from 1960 to 1993, writing prolifically during his tenure. The Essential Ved Mehta contains Mehta’s published pieces that include his many writings on India and politics, as well as family stories and personal memoirs that delve into living with blindness since the age of 4.

Mehta also offers personal commentary that he wrote specifically for this collection as a reflection on each piece. In an interview with WWD, the author “says that he feels that the U.S. and India have equal weight in his consciousness, and that he thinks of himself as belonging to neither of the countries as a writer. Rather, he’s a ‘rootless writer,’ he says, adding that good writing should not be limited by geography.”

Both The Essential Ved Medhta and Mirrored Mind are published by Penguin India.

The Atomic Art of Millikan Hall

November 6, 2013 by Daniel Gould Comments Off

milliikanatom

Aging Millikan Hall, built at the dawn of the Space Age, is being torn down and rebuilt to state-of-the-art standards over the next two years. But the iconic atomic artwork on the west facade of the building will be preserved and prominently displayed on the new building.

atomsideview Commissioned for Pomona College’s new math, physics and astronomy lab back in 1958, the bronze atom sculpture facing College Avenue was designed by noted sculptor Albert Stewart, whose work adorns civic buildings nationwide, including the U.S. Mint in San Francisco. Before his death in 1965, Stewart created counterparts for the atom for the facades of Seaver North and South, with an image of cell division for biology and an array of particles for chemistry.

Stewart got his start in the 1930s as an artist for the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. In 1939, he was named a professor of fine arts at Scripps College, and he soon figured in a group of prominent regional artists that included Sam Maloof and Millard Sheets. Stewart also designed and donated the Pegasus relief on Stover Walk, (though Steve Comba, associate director of the Pomona College Museum of Art, points out that the current piece is a recast from the original, apparently stolen back in the ’70s).

Today the atom sculpture on Millikan holds up better as art than as science. Professor of Physics and Astronomy Alma Zook ’72 calls it a “not-very-accurate representation of a lithium atom.” With our present understanding of the atomic and subatomic worlds, the three electrons circling on the atom’s fringes would be more properly depicted as a dispersed cloud, rather than the classical image of a series of orbits, like planets rotating around a sun.

Nonetheless, as Zook herself notes, the design makes for a “nice threefold symmetry.” And once the new Millikan is built, the atom artwork will be returned to its rightful place over Millikan’s doorway to College Avenue as a “historical nod to the original construction,” says Andrea Ramella, project manager for the new building.

Read more here about the Millikan project.

Entrepreneurship & Social Justice

November 6, 2013 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

In Class with Professor Jerry Irish

In today’s small group discussion for the class, Religion, Ethics and Social Practice, six college students and three residents of Pilgrim Place discuss social entrepreneurship, which combines ideas and practices from both the business and nonprofit worlds to solve problems such as poverty and inequality. The group focuses on whether social entrepreneurs, who seek to create social value rather than wealth, are compromising their values by working within the capitalist system.

Miranda: I’m really interested in exploring the debate about whether social entrepreneurships are a Band-Aid, because you’re working within a corrupted system, or are they about trying to change that system and using the tools effectively to do so.

Eleanor: I just heard a woman over at Pilgrim Place earlier this morning, who spoke about being in China. She said she asked one of the men there, who teaches Marxism at the university: ‘Do you think Marxism has a future?’ And he said back to her: ‘Do you think capitalism has a future?’ I think if there is a possibility of envisioning a future for capitalism, it has to do with something like social entrepreneurships.

Karl: I’ve found out from my younger radical community organizing days that there is a place and a need for Band-Aids; there is a need for cooperating with the system at some point, even if you’re not altogether happy with it, and there is a need for trying to find innovative ways to bring things together that seem to be diametrically opposed—like business and community organizing. I think you come to a healthy understanding of what is the best thing to do for the most common good at the time.

Christian: I don’t see it as a Band-Aid at all. I see business and profit-seeking and these sorts of drivers as extraordinarily powerful tools. Some advancements, such as electricity and drugs like penicillin, have come about because of capitalism, because we incentivize them. If you have the motivation from the get-go to do something for the social good, a social entrepreneurship can be a truly amazing tool that can be used in really cool ways. That’s the way I see it, but I come from a family that is very pro-business, very different from a lot of people in this room.

Irish: In Bangladesh, Muhammed Yunus tried a Band-Aid. He found that for $27 dollars he could relieve 42 women stool makers in Jobra of their indebtedness. But just for one week. And then the loan sharks would come right back. It was his idealism about trying to overcome the poverty gap he saw in this village that alerted him to the fact that he needed to go beyond a Band-Aid. He rallied his students and took them to talk to people in the community to see what they needed. That’s when he got the idea that maybe he could leverage the banks. When he discovered he couldn’t, he created his own bank. Do any of you see in either your placements or project proposals the seeds of something like this in the future? Are there ingredients that you could imagine one day that you would employ or work off of as a social entrepreneur?

Christian: My proposal is trying to understand the adherence to medication in Third World companies. One of the major issues is the way the pharmacological system works. Drug companies send HIV and TB medication to Third World countries as window dressing, without any analysis of what’s needed. It’s extraordinarily expensive, especially when you deal with adherence issues, which means the disease becomes resistant and then you can’t use first-line drugs. And these programs don’t even come close to offering second-line drugs.

Becca: This is about the Coronado Garden project I work on with the Draper Center. It’s an organic garden and a curriculum on food justice and environmental justice at Coronado, an alternative high school in West Covina. The teacher has expressed an interest in selling plants, which could be a way to make the whole project self-sustainable. It would also get merged into a small business class. I’m struggling with envisioning this transition.

Mia: Why do you struggle?

Becca: I think it’s the idea that we’ve been very much trying to cultivate the garden as this safe green space and connect food justice and environmental justice with greater societal injustices and connect that with students’ everyday lives, so encouraging them to use the garden as a tool for money—although it would create a self-sustained project, it feels hypocritical to me.

Miranda: I don’t think that is hypocritical because when you’re incorporating funding into a closed loop, self-sufficient system, you’re ultimately benefiting the project for the future.

Irish: You’re changing the definition of investment, that the capital gets invested in a social purpose. What you’re exhibiting are the skills that are entrepreneurial, and I don’t think some of these skills need to be understood simply in terms of a profit. This gets closer to this issue that you brought up in your reflections, a new kind of citizenship and—I hate to bring in my friend Niebuhr (laughter)—the notion of responsibility to a larger social group.

Christian: You have to play it like a community organizer and trust that people will tend to do the right thing most of the time. By allowing capitalism to inject itself into these social entrepreneurships, we worry about becoming tainted, but it leverages all you can do. If you were to talk about Bill Gates in the late ’90s, you’d say he was completely co-opted by the capitalist system, but look at the way he’s leveraged the funds he produced. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a great example; it does really good stuff and is extraordinarily efficient, much more efficient than any other charity or nonprofit group.

Karen: I’m learning a lot from hearing the stories from the elders and the things that we’ve all experienced about having a vision for some sort of project and then having the initiative to do it. I feel I don’t have a full grasp of all of that yet, but I’m definitely learning. I really like the idea that social entrepreneurship is contagious. You start something and then the people you work with are empowered to do their own thing. I feel like I’m catching the bug here.

Changing the Equation

November 6, 2013 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

When he started thinking about college, Johnny Huynh ’14 had two goals—to leave his hometown of Claremont and to attend a large research university. That all changed after a weekend visit to Pomona, where he says he “fell in love with the College.” A first-generation college student and son of Vietnamese immigrants, Johnny balances a demanding academic schedule as an economics and mathematics double major with weekly outings to Pomona’s Organic Farm, where he can practice the gardening skills he learned from his mom.

It All Starts With Lunch
“Before I came here, I thought that having lunch with professors was just a marketing spiel—I figured they had their research and classes and wouldn’t have time to talk to students. I was really surprised. I’ve had lots of dinners and lunches with professors. I think it complements your learning, and because you know them, you’re not afraid to ask questions.”

Digging Deeper
“I was really motivated by a course on labor economics I took with Professor [Michael] Steinberger and approached him about doing summer research. The project we worked on was evaluating a specific conditional cash transfer (CCT) program in Malawi that targets schoolgirls 13 to 22 years old. CCTs are welfare programs, mostly in developing countries, that distribute cash to families to encourage more schooling and to increase test scores. The current literature finds that on average the conditional cash transfers are more effective than unconditional transfers, but what the research hasn’t looked at yet is the heterogeneity—whether some students respond differently than others.”

Changing the Equation
“What we found when we crunched recent data from the World Bank is that the subsidies are more effective at increasing attendance to the 80 percent benchmark if a student is already attending at high rates of schooling, say, 70 percent or more. Raising attendance from 10 to 80 percent is much harder, because so many children from poor families have to work. Giving that up to attend school means a lot of lost income for their families. “One of the things we’re proposing as a way to improve educational opportunities for these students is that the threshold for attendance be lowered from 80 to 50 percent. Another alternative would be to increase the cash subsidy to offset the income these girls would be giving up to be students.”

Learning to Roll With the Punches
“As a researcher, you can’t anticipate what you’re trying to find. If you’re looking through the data or building a theoretical model, the outcome might be different from what you expected, so you have to learn to change gears and roll with the punches. You’re not entirely sure what you’re going to write about because it’s new research, something no one has ever done before. It’s difficult, but it’s really, really rewarding.”

Not Just Theoretical
“Both my parents were immigrants from Vietnam, and neither of them attended high school, let alone college. They both still work for the minimum wage, and our housing is subsidized. Being on welfare affects me personally as well as theoretically, and I think it’s valuable to have a perspective that a lot of researchers don’t have, especially when it comes to public policy programs and finding out which ones work and which ones fail.”

A Message to Pomona
“Thank you, thank you, thank you. That’s the first thing I would say. That dominates everything else. I’m grateful I had the chance to come here, and that Pomona does so much to help students in need. After I graduate, I’d like to somehow help reform the social safety net, so other people can get the help they need to succeed.”

Strengthening Summer Research

Johnny Huynh ’14 was among the more than 220 Pomona College students who spent last summer conducting research on topics ranging from organic solar cells to Joseph Haydn’s keyboard sonatas. About 80 percent of the students were supported by the College’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP), which provides funding for up to 10 weeks of collaborative research in the natural sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities.

Expanding and strengthening summer research is one of the goals of Campaign Pomona: Daring Minds. Since the start of the campaign, the number of students participating in supervised summer research has grown by about 26 percent, thanks in part to 20 new endowed and expendable funds established by foundations, alumni and other donors. The funding is critical to the program, permitting students of all income levels to take part without sacrificing summer income.

Economics Professor Michael Steinberger, who worked with Huynh last summer, says the grants “help brilliant students, like Johnny, to spend the summer producing high-quality research. Instead of trying to find time to research while working another job, Johnny was able to focus entirely on our project. He learned a lot about the process of research, and I learned some new econometric techniques while working with him.”

While much of the research was conducted on campus, students also traveled across the country to work in labs at Tufts University in Boston and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and to conduct research in 14 countries, including Sweden, India, China and Chile.

In September, students lined Stover Walk to present the results of their research to the College community at the 26th annual SURP poster conference. For some of these students, their projects will develop into senior theses or continue on as the basis for co-authored papers with faculty and presentations at local and national conferences.

“Johnny’s supported summer research will be essential to help him get into a high-tier graduate school,” says Steinberger. “I expect our project will place in a top journal, and I’m excited for the real-world policy implications of our findings.”

Coffee with Conscience

November 6, 2013 by Brenda Bolinger Comments Off

nikki

Sociologist Nicki Lisa Cole ’02 carries around an accordion file stuffed with empty, flattened coffee bags she has collected from cafes across the U.S. over the last several years. Each item in her collection, begun when a package of coffee at Starbucks caught her eye, bears imagery or prose that hints at the ethical considerations behind the beans’ journey across the world and into your cup.

As the labels pile up, it’s a lot of information for Cole to parse. And so it is for everyday coffee-drinkers as well. With so many coffee-with-a-conscience practices operating—fair trade, direct trade, organic, shade grown, bird friendly—understanding the different approaches to ethically-sourced coffee, each with pros and cons, would seem to require pursuing dissertation-level research on the topic.

Cole did just that. She became so fascinated with the messages being sent to consumers about ethically marketed or produced coffee that the issue came to drive her doctoral research. Now a lecturer in sociology at Pomona, Cole writes blog posts (21centurynomad. com) on coffee sourcing that are broadly followed, and her expertise has been sought by The Nation, Conducive Magazine and others.

As part of her Ph.D. research, Cole queried 230 coffee drinkers, all of whom identified themselves as regular consumers of some kind of ethically-produced coffee. “Uniformly, people have a very vague, surface-level knowledge of what’s going on,” says Cole. “They tend to recognize the fair trade label, for instance, and know it stands for something good, but most have not done much research.”

With this hazy awareness, the heart of the matter can get lost. Cole wants to remind us why ethical sourcing for coffee is necessary. The reasons include historically low prices that make life a struggle for small producers, fluctuating prices because coffee is traded on the commodities market and price gouging of small producers by large transnational buyers.

So what can coffee drinkers do?

No system is perfect, but Cole says ethical coffee practices do, in fact, make some positive differences around the world. And so her one cup of coffee and one double espresso per day is always fair trade or direct trade. “While I have critiques of all the models out there, I always advocate for picking one that resonates with you and going with it, because it’s better than not,” she says.

The first step: “Ask about the coffee where you buy it: What are the sourcing practices behind this coffee?” Cole says.

The café or coffee shop owner might tell you that they import fair trade certified coffee because they value how the higher price supports community development, or that the certification standards require environmental practices such as minimized use of agrochemicals and water-conserving irrigation systems. Or, you might learn that they happily pay an even higher cost for direct trade coffee (also “relationship coffee”), purchased directly from a grower they trust, as opposed to a cooperative of producers, like in fair trade.

And if they clam up?

“If they can’t tell you what their sourcing practices are, that’s generally a bad sign. It’s probably not the place to get your coffee,” says Cole, a Pomona sociology major who earned her Ph.D. in the same field from UC Santa Barbara. “Most people in the industry who are using some sort of ethical sourcing are proud ofdoing that and want to share that with you.”

Cole points to the transparency of Portland-based Stumptown Coffee Roasters, which practices the direct-trade approach. “They claim ‘our books are open,’” Cole says. Want to learn exactly what price was paid to what producer practicing what methods? You got it.

But even if your coffee vendor provides evidence of ethical sourcing practices, how do you know which system is best? Cole says that depends on what you value. For example, fair trade certification requires a premium be paid on top of the minimum price per pound, which is then used to help workers, farmers and their families through such projects as school improvements, student scholarship provisions or the establishment and maintenance of healthcare clinics. The direct trade model does not provide for this kind of community betterment, according to Cole.

On the other hand, Cole notes, the democratic structure of fair trade cooperatives, where leadership constantly rotates, makes it difficult for buyers to nurture long-term, trusting relationships with producers. Since direct-trade buyers work directly with producers instead of cooperatives, it’s possible to cultivate close, symbiotic relationships in which both parties benefit—buyers pay a higher price for the assurance of high quality coffee, which in turn affords growers a higher level of economic stability.

Also worth considering is Fair Trade USA’s 2012 split from Fair Trade International for the explicit purpose of including large-scale plantations in the fair trade system. When the decision was made, Cole stirred up quite a bit of discussion by declaring “Fair Trade is dead” on her blog, referring to the ramifications of this decision. She still has plenty to say on the matter: “I fear that it’s very bad for small producers, squeezing them out of a market that was supposed to be a fair market.”

Fair Trade U.S.A.officials have defended the move as a way to benefit more farmers and workers, and to allow more consumers to buy Fair Trade products. Cole, though, says there is not nearly enough of a market to support current fair trade coffee production, so adding larger plantations will harm existing fair trade producers.

True to her small-is-good approach, Cole frequents the independent Last Drop Café, located in the Claremont Village just a block or two from campus. “We usually talk about coffee, and it’s been interesting learning about her opinions and insights,” says owner Mike Manning. “Her students have definitely learned a lot from her.”

One thing you might be surprised to learn about Cole, considering the depth of her knowledge and the hundreds of coffee shops she’s visited over the years: She is not a voracious coffee drinker. She is definitely a fan, but has reduced her consumption in consideration of the intense physical efforts that go into cultivating, harvesting and processing coffee beans.

Cole says choosing the higher-priced fair or direct trade coffee, but consuming less coffee overall, is one way to make a difference: “If we change our orientation to the value of goods and to respecting the labor that goes into them, paying a truly fair and just price for those goods, we would see different conditions.”

Caring in the Wild

November 6, 2013 by Daniel Gould Comments Off

Starting this June, Nikki Becich ’13 launched into a year-long journey to pursue her passion for conservation medicine. Over the summer, Becich cared for injured birds at the hospital of the National Aviary, before venturing out on a career-building trip to work and learn at wildlife centers throughout Latin America.

FINDING HER PASSION
Becich had several jobs and internships in zoo and avian medicine under her belt by the time she graduated. She knew she wanted more experience, and found a great match in the National Aviary, an indoor zoo home to more than 500 birds in Pittsburgh, Penn., and where she first volunteered in middle school.

At the Aviary, Becich worked with the center’s two veterinarians as a hospital intern. She helped them with surgeries, medications and daily caretaking, looking after birds brought in from the wild along with the zoo’s regular residents on exhibit.

Becich went into the internship with a focus on treating captive animals, particularly species that are endangered or extinct in the wild. Looking back, she says the experience inspired her to consider the bigger issue of environmental protection.

birdhold GETTING THE BIG PICTURE
Knowing she needed more hands-on training, Becich spent part of her senior year mapping out a trip to practice wildlife care at nature preserves in Central and South America. After graduation, she set off.

“I planned out the trip to apply for the Watson Fellowship, and when I didn`t get that, I decided to blow my savings and do it anyway, because it`s incredibly important for my future career to work and learn abroad,” she explains.

Becich started the first leg of her trek in September as a volunteer at an ecological center in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador. She also is pitching in at Bioparque Amaru Zoo, developing preventative medicine protocols for a new veterinary clinic. In coming months she will intern at wildlife sanctuaries in Peru and Guatemala, helping to rehabilitate injured animals and promote local conservation projects. Becich says her connections from earlier programs were essential in helping her network and make contacts overseas.

She aims to learn first-hand how communities and organizations in the region are coping with threats like oil drilling, which, she says, can contribute to pollution and deforestation. “Meeting real people and seeing for myself what is happening has been extremely informative, but an emotional roller coaster,” Becich says, speaking from Ecuador. “What’s encouraging to see is how there is still protected forest here. We have time. We need serious action, though, and fast, if it`s going to survive.”

THE PATH FROM POMONA
A biology major, Becich mentions Professor Nina Karnovsky as an important mentor who “encouraged me to pursue my love for birds and go after work in conservation.“ She also points to the influence of her semester abroad in a tropical ecology program in Costa Rica, which shifted her focus toward environmental protection.

At Pomona, Becich explored her interests in other parts of the community. She got involved in caring for chickens at the Organic Farm, even raising a few chicks in her dorm in Harwood one year until they were ready to join the flock.

Becich is already looking ahead to her vision of combining medical practice with international research in ecology, with plans to attend veterinary school in the U.S. “I really came into my life’s passion this summer. I am so excited to be here doing what I am doing, and I am so grateful to Pomona for helping to get me there.”

Letter box

November 6, 2013 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

What’s Behind Walker Wall?

I am writing regarding the history of Walker Wall found on the College’s website. That article reports that the wall “remained unadorned until the spring of 1975, when several students painted ‘Free Angela’ on its inner surface, referring to the imprisonment of Black Panther and Communist Party activist Angela Davis after her conviction on murder conspiracy charges.”

As I recall it, Walker Wall comments started two years earlier, during the 1972-73 school year.

My recollection is that one night just before Founders Day someone spray-painted a phrase on Walker Wall near the pass-through to go toward Honnold Library. The phrase was not particularly clever or political, but it was potentially offensive, perhaps scatological. I was an R.A. for Clark V that year and knew that maintenance would not be able to do anything before alumni were on campus, but I did have access to painting supplies from Zeta Chi Sigma, my fraternity. Betsy Daub ’74, also in Zeta Chi Sigma, allowed herself to be enlisted and our quest became covering over the offending text. We used rollers and white paint to neatly block out the graffiti.

What happened next is somewhat lost to me. Somehow we wound up adding our own phrase on the white surface we had created. As I recall, we had each been considered as possible members of the Mufti crew, and in that spirit we came up with the phrase “Veni, Vidi, Vino” and signed it in some way. That comment stayed for some time and others followed. Although I knew several members of the Pomona administration fairly well, I don’t remember any discussion about the wall, and I don’t think Betsy or I was ever questioned about it.

—Jo Ruprecht ’73
Las Cruces, N.M.

Case for the Liberal Arts

President David Oxtoby’s Aug. 7 letter, directed to alumni of the College, brings up the perennial question “Is liberal arts education still relevant in today’s world?” This question requires a perennial answer: Soon after my graduation from Pomona, I found myself locked into a career in engineering, despite the fact that most of my education had been in art and the humanities. Yet that liberal education proved to be relevant in my unexpected career path. If monetary reward is the main goal, and sadly that is often the case, then one is likely to miss the practical benefits of a liberal arts education, as well as the enrichment of one’s quality of life.

“Liberal education” asks more questions than it answers. This can provide some valuable mental equipment, for answers often become obsolete with time. But if the habits acquired in looking for answers remain with you, and the habit of recognizing analogies is developed, you will have acquired a transferable ability which, unlike rigid collections of facts, can go on helping you generate answers to problems in any field.

—Chris Andrews ’50
Sequim, Wash.

All-Star Mistake?

I have to hand it to you. The “Who Did You Get?” article and trading cards in the Summer 2013 edition of PCM are, perhaps, the most offensive thing I have ever seen in the magazine since I graduated in 1972. Quite an achievement.

Please understand, I am not denigrating the achievements of those honored; their accomplishments are noteworthy and deserve praise—but not by implying (if not actually stating) that all the rest of us just don’t measure up.

Not really worthy of calling Pomona their alma mater, and pretty much beneath the College’s concern. Whether you realized it or not—and my sincere hope is that you didn’t—elevating a few graduates to “Pomona All-Star” status relegates the rest of us to just being average. Banjo hitters. Utility players. Minor leaguers. Barely above the Mendoza Line.

That is not how I like to think my college views me. And yet, there it is. At least you deigned to give us the privilege of “round[ing] up a few of [our] Pomona pals” so we can presumably trade cards. I can hardly wait.

Maybe in the Fall 2013 issue you can identify the biggest donors so far in 2013, and the amounts they’ve given. “Who’s gonna come out on top?” “How much did he/she give?” “Can you believe that [fill in the blank] isn’t on the list?” Now I’ll bet that would be a competition the College could really get behind!

—G. Emmett Rait, Jr. ’72
Irvine, Calif.

Baseball and Bytes

Your article on Don Daglow ’74 and his contributions to computer baseball could have been written, without many changes, about me—if I had just been born a few years earlier. Like Don, I loved the All-Star Baseball board game and was an English major. I wrote my first All- Star Baseball simulation using punch cards on an IBM 1620 in my sophomore year of high school in 1974—just three years too late to gain immortal fame!

I also applied at Mattel to work on Intellivision, but here our paths diverge, for alas, I was not hired. However, my All-Star Baseball game did have one last gasp of life—if you can find an ultra-rare copy of Designing Apple Games with Pizzazz (Datamost, 1985), you’ll find a whole chapter, with source code, devoted to a game called Database-ball.

—John “Max” Ruffner ’81
North Hollywood, Calif.

Fraternity Memories

The letter from Leno Zambrano ’51 in the summer issue of PCM surprised me. I knew Leno as a classmate but I had no clue he was homosexual. I have no recollection of Leno seeking membership in the KD fraternity, of which I was president in the spring of 1951. Not all the men at Pomona in those days felt the need to join a fraternity. Some of them were former members of the military and were beyond the need to join a social fraternity. I don’t know if we had any homosexuals among our KD members at that time, but if we did, they kept it to themselves. We had no policy against homosexuals, per se, in our fraternity mainly because it was never one of the factors we discussed during our consideration of prospective members.

—Ivan P. Colburn ’51
Pasadena, Calif.

I was dismayed to learn from the letter by Don Nimmo ’87 in the summer issue that the fraternity/community Zeta Chi Sigma has ceased to exist. When did this happen, and why? I joined Zeta Chi in my sophomore year—freshmen were not permitted to join frats in those days—and my membership was a significant part of the college experience for me, and not only because of playing pool or watching College Bowl every Sunday. I’ve mentioned Don’s letter to other alumni from that era and am assured that I’m not alone in wondering what happened.

—Steve Sherman ’65
Munich, Germany

Alumni and friends are invited to email letters to pcm@pomona.edu or to send them by mail to Pomona College Magazine, 550 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Letters are selected for publication based on relevance and interest to our readers and may be edited for length, style and clarity.

The Launch

November 6, 2013 by Mark Kendall Comments Off

The magazine you hold was born 50 years ago this fall as Pomona Today, when the sharp new publication replaced an alumni newsletter. And while the name has long since changed to Pomona College Magazine, it seems about half of our readers still know it by the old moniker. (Call us whatever you want—just keep reading.)

pomonatoday The pages of the first issue are laden with an early-’60s sense of purpose: men in suits and ties assembled around a cyclotron, a professor exploring the “Frontiers of Science,” a photo showing light—and, no doubt, knowledge—aglow through the glass doors of the newly-built Seaver Laboratory. A Space Age feeling pervades: All that’s missing is a make-your- own Gemini capsule cutout.

Heavy play is given to then-New York Times editorial page editor John Oakes’ commencement address, “Smashing the Cliché,” in which he tells students, “man will soon be searching, not by proxy but in person, the pathways of the stars … in your lifetime you will witness man’s arrival on new planets, his penetration of the outer void, his unfolding of the mysteries of the universe.”

In “The Case for the Liberal Arts College,” Professor W.T. Jones notes that “The fundamental fact of modern life is the acceleration of change—economic change, social change, political change, cultural change. … Indeed, in the physical sciences, the rate of change is so great that theories which are “true” when a freshman enters college are likely to be exploded by the time he graduates.”

My favorite bit of writing from that issue, though, is a short caption accompanying a photo of two pensive-looking classmates that simply reads: “Students in a complicated world.”

Fifty years later, the world grows more complicated and the change keeps coming. But PCM is still here, in print and online. Our circulation has yet to reach new planets; there is no home delivery to the “outer void.” Strangely, the birth of each new issue still feels as heady and fraught as an early-’60s rocket launch. And when it’s over, we editors come crashing back down to Earth, and get to work on the next one.

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