War in Israel and Gaza made for a tense and contentious year on Pomona’s campus, with protests, disruptions, occupations, arrests, a referendum and a debate that did not end with Commencement, which itself was moved to Los Angeles due to an encampment on the quad.

This was all covered through news media and social media from a range of viewpoints as part of a major national story that reached coast to coast, from UCLA to Columbia, and encompassed congressional hearings and global coverage.

Perhaps overlooked in all this was a quieter phenomenon on Pomona’s campus, one that unfolded in the presence of pain, sorrow and division. Starting in November, amid the protests and controversy, the College held a series of academic lectures and panels looking at the conflict and related issues from multiple vantage points.

These academic events were largely well attended—some with standing room only —and took place without disruption, a positive sign for the College’s mission in a difficult year for higher education. As the Mideast conflict tragically continues, Pomona plans for deeper scholarly engagement in these areas in the next academic year.

Among the past year’s events:

• “Contextualizing the Conflict” with Joanne Randa Nucho, chair and associate professor of anthropology and coordinator of Middle Eastern studies, and Mietek Boduszynski, associate professor of politics and former U.S. diplomat.
• “On Nationalism in Its Historical Context” with Gary Kates, H. Russell Smith Foundation Chair in the Social Sciences and professor of history, and “On Zionism in Its Historical Context” by Claremont McKenna Associate Professor of Religious Studies Gary Gilbert.
• “Palestine: Understanding Iran’s Role” by Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Studies Kouross Esmaeli.
• “Contested Past/Contest Present: Understanding the Impact of Interwar British Rule on Palestine” with Associate Professor of History Penny Sinanoglou.
• “Antisemitism” with Oona Eisenstadt, Fred Krinsky Professor of Jewish Studies and professor of religious studies, and “Islamophobia” with Imam Hadi Qazwini, Muslim chaplain for The Claremont Colleges.
• “Ambassador Dennis Ross and Ghaith al-Omari in Conversation.” One of the larger events had former U.S. Mideast envoy Dennis Ross and Ghaith al-Omari, who served in a variety of positions within the Palestinian Authority, discussing the current war and what the path to peace might look like.
• Presented together: “Rome & the Great Jewish Revolt, with Christopher Chinn, chair and professor of classics; “The First Crusade & the Holy Land” with Ken Wolf, professor of classics, John Sutton Minor Professor of History, and coordinator of late antique-medieval studies; and “The British Mandate & Palestine,” with Penny Sinanoglou, associate professor of history.

It’s farewell season, and that includes some faculty as well as students. See a face or name you know? Consider dropping your former professor an email as they embark on life after the classroom. Click on professors’ names to send an email.

Allan Barr
Professor of Chinese
At Pomona Since 1981

Clarissa Cheney
Associate Professor of Biology
At Pomona Since 1997

Tom Flaherty

John P. and Magdalena R. Dexter Professor of Music
At Pomona Since 1989

Fred Grieman
Roscoe Moss Professor of Chemistry
At Pomona Since 1982

Gary Kates
H. Russell Smith Foundation Chair in the Social Sciences and Professor of History
At Pomona Since 2001

Rose Portillo ’75
Lecturer in Theatre
At Pomona Since 2007

Stanislav Vakulenko ’27

Stanislav Vakulenko ’27 has been sleeping better since he arrived at Pomona College from Ukraine last August. When the war started in 2022, he saw a rocket fly by his family’s apartment building in Kyiv. “It was like being in a World War II movie. I could see black smoke, residential buildings burning down,” he says. “What I heard will change me forever.”

Vakulenko is one of six students who enrolled at Pomona this past academic year through the Global Student Haven Initiative because their access to education is challenged by conflict in their home country. Pomona is one of eight colleges and universities in the U.S. committed to accepting and supporting students through the program. The others are Bowdoin, Caltech, Dartmouth, New York University, Smith, Trinity and Williams. The founding members hope more schools will follow suit.

Prince Bashangezi ’27

Prince Bashangezi ’27 came to Pomona from Africa, where he had spent his later teen years in a refugee camp in Zimbabwe near the border with Mozambique. Schools in the camp had scant resources, and Bashangezi says students were “basically doomed to fail” the national exams needed to move ahead. He had to get creative to fill in the learning gaps. Every day he removed the battery from the cellphone he had brought from his home country, Congo. He charged it using a small solar source the United Nations High Commission for Refugees had made available to power lighting in the camp. The phone allowed him to access the internet and its extensive educational resources, and he passed the national exams.

Both Bashangezi and Vakulenko spend several lunch hours each week at the language tables in the Oldenborg Center, Bashangezi speaking French and Swahili (two of the many languages in which he is fluent) and Vakulenko practicing Russian and learning Spanish. For Vakulenko, languages—he can converse in Russian as well as his native Ukrainian—could possibly lead to a future career as a translator. His English is nearly flawless, having been honed not only in school in Ukraine but by watching Cartoon Network as a child. Along with Google Translate, “it helped me increase my vocabulary,” he notes—which amazed his teacher at school.

Neither student has settled on a major. Vakulenko says he is leaning toward politics and a possible second major in Russian and Eastern European studies. Bashangezi is considering computer science and possibly politics.

The Pomona-Pitzer women’s water polo team celebrates another USA Water Polo title by jumping into the pool at the end of the match.

It’s time to call the Pomona-Pitzer women’s water polo program a D-III dynasty after a third consecutive USA Water Polo Division III national championship.

The Sagehens claimed the title with a 15-10 win over Claremont-Mudd-Scripps in the final of the four-team national championship tournament May 5 at Haldeman Pool. Kaylee Stigar ’25 led the way with a hat trick and added three assists and three steals to her three goals to earn the tournament’s most valuable player award.

For the sixth consecutive season—including COVID-shortened 2020—the Sagehens dominated the SCIAC, going undefeated in regular-season conference play. But their 25-10 overall record hints at one of the reasons for their D-III dominance. Each year, the Sagehens take on Division I teams in nonconference games as they test themselves—and prepare for the USA Water Polo championship that was created to provide a competition for D-III teams that otherwise had no option except the single-division NCAA championship dominated by Division I teams.

“We don’t let Division III define us,” says Assistant Coach Alex La, who helmed the team this season with Head Coach Alex Rodriguez on sabbatical. “We define who we are. We always want to take on the best and really see where we stack up.”

Captains Abby Wiesenthal ’24, Madison Lewis ’24 and Namlhun Jachung PZ ’24 took their lumps as younger starters playing against the best programs in the country. But punching above their weight served a greater purpose.

Wiesenthal, a molecular biology major who led the team with 42 regular-season goals, remembers a time two years ago when she and her teammates entered preseason tournaments in awe.

“We have to play USC?” she recalls thinking. “They have Olympians on their team.”

A healthy reverence for top programs fuels the Sagehens’ competitive spirit. In 2023, Pomona-Pitzer knocked off Division I Indiana. This past season, the Sagehens beat Marist College and Brown University twice.

“This year, I think everybody expected to win those games, especially the seniors, who really want to leave a legacy,” La says. “Our program has always been about ‘Who can we knock off? How good can we be?’”

In end-of-season conference honors, Jachung repeated as SCIAC Athlete of the Year while goalkeeper Zosia Amberger ’25 earned her second SCIAC Defensive Athlete of the Year award. La and his assistants received Coaching Staff of the Year honors.

200 freestyle relay champions, from left: Sabrina Wang ’26, Alexandra Turvey ’24, Francesca Coppo ’27 (out of pool) with Valerie Mello PZ ’25 in the water.

The Pomona-Pitzer women’s swimming program claimed its first national title in any event in 40 years when Sabrina Wang ’26, Alexandra Turvey ’24, Francesca Coppo ’27 and Valerie Mello PZ ’25 combined to win the 200 freestyle relay on the second day of the 2024 NCAA Division III Swimming and Diving Championships in March.

Two days later, three of them—Wang, Turvey and Mello—combined with Katie Gould ’24 to win the 400 freestyle relay on the final day of the championships in Greensboro, North Carolina. Before the first of the two relay titles, the program’s last national title was in the 800 freestyle relay in 1984.

400 freestyle relay champions, from left: Alexandra Turvey ’24, Katie Gould ’24, Sabrina Wang ’26, Valerie Mello PZ ’25.

The 2024 Pomona-Pitzer women finished seventh overall in the team competition won by Kenyon College. Turvey, the three-time SCIAC Athlete of the Year in women’s swimming, capped her individual career at the NCAA meet with two national runner-up finishes, taking second in the 50 freestyle as well as the 100 butterfly.

Wrapping up an exceptionally successful spring sports season for Sagehen Athletics, four additional teams sprinted to top-10 finishes in NCAA Division III postseason play. See sagehens.com for full coverage of team finishes plus news of top-five individual track finishers Bennett Booth-Genthe ’24 (second nationally in the 800 meters) and Colin Kirkpatrick ’24 (third in the 1,500).

Women’s Golf Place Third in Nation

Rachel LeMay ’27

Women’s Tennis Top 4 in Nation 

Angie Zhou ’25

Baseball Reaches First World Series

Isaac Kim ’24

Women’s Lacrosse Top 8 in Nation

Chloe Boudreau ’24

Emerita Professor of Religious Studies Margaret “Peggy” Dornish, who taught at Pomona for 32 years, died on December 27, 2023. She was 89.

Dornish attended Smith College from 1952 to 1956, where she majored in English language and literature and graduated magna cum laude. While studying religion at Claremont Graduate School in the late 1960s, she became interested in Buddhism, both on a scholarly and personal level.

“Her dissertation on D. T. Suzuki was a pathbreaking departure from the almost exclusive focus on Abrahamic traditions at the School of Religion at Claremont Graduate School,” says Zhiru Ng, professor of religious studies.

“I find Buddhist philosophy and ethics compelling,” Dornish told Pomona College Magazine in 2001. “I think most people who study Buddhism can’t help being influenced by it.”

She received a teaching post at Pomona College in 1969. When she began at Pomona, Dornish was among a handful of women faculty and the lone female instructor in a building that did not have a women’s bathroom.

For a time, she was the only person at The Claremont Colleges teaching Asian religions. She played a pivotal role in extending the scope and methodologies utilized for the study of religions at The Claremont Colleges. She was extremely proud of the transformation of Pomona College’s Religious Studies Department, which went from what she called “a seminary” to an intercollegiate discipline with an emphasis on religions across the globe.

She also was instrumental in strengthening other programs at the College, including Asian Studies, Women’s Studies and American Studies.

“She was a rock,” said Professor of Japanese Kyoko Kurita. “At Pomona she became a defender of the minority during the days when diversity was not appreciated as much as it is today. I would not be here today if she had not supported me in my early years at Pomona when there was no support system for the starting faculty.”

Dornish regularly taught courses such as Mysticism East and West, Transformation and Utopia, Encounter with Japan (a first-year seminar) and Zen Buddhism. Her trademark lecture was “What is Zen?”

She traveled to Japan roughly a dozen times, encouraging Claremont Colleges faculty, students and staff to attend the Kyoto-based monastery at Tofuku-ji, where her good friend Keido Fukushima served as abbot and ceremonial head over scores of temples.

“Being single, and because of the way I see things from Buddhism, there’s a kind of shape to my life,” Dornish told Pomona College Magazine in 1998. “I don’t lead two lives, as most of my colleagues do. They have their teaching, and they have their family. I only lead one life, so the things I’m interested in personally are the things I’m interested in professionally.”

Ng remembers Dornish as “fearless and frank” and “an amazingly courageous woman with a big heart.”

After retiring from Pomona, Dornish moved to Carlsbad, California, and joined the League of Women Voters in the San Diego area. She contributed a number of articles to their journal and became one of the leaders.

“There are no big choices in my life, just small steps,” Dornish was fond of saying. “No big decision to go this way or that way, just incremental decisions—and lots of opportunities.”