Jerome J. Rinkus

Emeritus Professor of Russian
1938-2023Emeritus Professor Jerry Rinkus, who taught Russian language and literature at Pomona for three decades, died on February 24, 2023. He was 84.

Rinkus arrived at Pomona in 1973 and remained at the College until his retirement in 2003, serving for a time as chair of the Department of German and Russian.

A specialist in 19th-century Russian literature—the era of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Chekhov—Rinkus came of age during the Cold War, studying Russian at a time of critical interest to the U.S. government.

“In a sense, politics has influenced the overall pattern of my life,” he told Pomona College Magazine in 2003. “But it is the love of literature that has kept me going.”

Rinkus was an undergraduate at Middlebury College when the former Soviet Union launched Sputnik, Earth’s first artificial satellite, igniting the space race between the U.S. and the USSR that led to the first moon landing in 1969.

After graduating cum laude from Middlebury in 1960, Rinkus was awarded a National Defense Education Fellowship to continue his study of Russian from 1960 to 1964, earning a master’s degree in Slavic languages and literatures from Brown University in 1962. His doctoral studies at Brown were interrupted when he was drafted during the Vietnam War, serving from 1966 to 1968, after which he returned to Brown and earned his Ph.D. in 1971. He completed his doctoral dissertation on the work of Sergey Aksakov after writing his master’s thesis on Maxim Gorky. Rinkus taught at Bucknell University from 1968 to 1973 before arriving at Pomona.

“If not for Jerry Rinkus, I would not have embarked on the career I’ve enjoyed for the past three decades,” said former student Thomas P. Hodge ’84, now a professor of Russian at Wellesley College. “He made a huge difference in my intellectual life and in the lives of the many other Russianists who passed through the department he lovingly nurtured at Pomona.”

Hodge also noted that in the early 1980s, before word-processing software, it was also difficult to find Russian typewriters. “I vividly recall the way he painstakingly handwrote and glossed entire stories and long poems, then handed out the photocopies to us. He was indefatigable,” Hodge said.

Rinkus also had a policy for students in his beginning Russian class who struggled to find the words in their limited vocabularies to accurately describe aspects of their personal lives in Russian.

“I don’t care if you tell the truth, as long as it’s grammatically correct,” Rinkus told his students. “Every student in the room broke out laughing,” Hodge recalled. “I announce an identical policy for my own students every time I teach Elementary Russian.”

During the early parts of his career, Rinkus told Pomona College Magazine, many of his students learned Russian in preparation for government jobs as translators, diplomats or to work for the CIA.

“If you studied Russian in the old days, you could either work for the government or teach,” he said in 2003. “When the Soviet Union collapsed, interest in Russian dropped 40 to 50 percent. It was almost as if they were studying it to understand our enemy.”

During his long career, Rinkus earned grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation, among other organizations. He traveled to the Soviet Union numerous times during the Cold War when it was uncommon for Americans to do so, participating in teaching exchanges, leading tours and conducting research.

He led a Pomona College alumni tour group to Russia, Siberia and Central Asia in 1978. In 1990, during the era of glasnost under the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Rinkus led a Pomona alumni tour group that visited Tallinn, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Moscow and cruised the Volga River the year before the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Rinkus was the grandson of emigrants from Vilnius, Lithuania. In addition to John Tarin, his partner of more than 40 years and husband since 2015, Rinkus is survived by a niece, nephew and cousin.

The bonds of The Claremont Colleges will become a bit tighter this summer, when consortium alumni take over as presidents of two of the colleges.

Strom C. Thacker ’88.
Reprinted with permission of Pitzer College

Strom C. Thacker ’88, who graduated from Pomona with a degree in international relations, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, becomes president of Pitzer College on July 1. On the same day, Harriet B. Nembhard CMC ’90 becomes president of Harvey Mudd College.

Thanks to conveniently aligned athletic programs, neither one will have trouble knowing which side to sit on when Pomona-Pitzer plays Claremont-Mudd-Scripps in Sixth Street Rivalry games.

Thacker, who has been dean of the faculty and vice president for academic affairs at Union College in Schenectady, New York, grew up in Northern California and came to Pomona with the help of generous financial aid that included a federal Pell Grant. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and become an advocate for college equity, access and the value of a liberal arts education.

Among Thacker’s duties at Union College, by the way: Managing a budget of approximately $47 million. (Chirp.) Welcome home, President Thacker.

Among Pomona’s newly admitted students for 2023-24 are nine refugees with citizenships from Congo, Syria and Ukraine.

The admissions are a reflection of Pomona’s commitment to the recently launched Global Student Haven Initiative, a program founded by eight colleges and universities in response to the war in Ukraine and the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.

Along with Bowdoin, Caltech, Dartmouth, NYU, Smith, Trinity and Williams, Pomona is dedicated to providing a path for students affected by worldwide crises to apply to U.S.-based colleges and universities—and to receive scholarships and other support when they arrive. The initiative seeks to help students continue their education and later to return to their home nations.

“This is about opening doors and helping people through them,” says Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr. “The global disruptions of recent years have tested American higher education’s long commitment to reaching out to the world. We seek to reaffirm our global ties, starting with the urgent needs of students facing the devastation of war.”

Pomona’s effort is supported by an earlier $1.2 million gift from Florence and Paul Eckstein ’62 in honor of his immigrant parents, and a new $1 million gift from the Fletcher Jones Foundation.

Pomona’s 2023 Commencement speakers know about persistence, as do the new graduates they addressed in a May 14 ceremony.

Sherrilyn Ifill is a distinguished civil rights lawyer, voting rights advocate and scholar. A senior fellow at the Ford Foundation, she previously spent a decade as president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the nation’s premier civil rights law organization. She was chosen one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2021.

“We need you in this fight. You have to find time to do your part. While you do your part, hold onto your joy. Joy is part of resistance as well.”
—Sherrilyn Ifill

Penny Lee Dean ’77 set 13 world records as a marathon swimmer, including a 1978 crossing of the English Channel that shattered the men’s world record by more than an hour. She was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1996. A six-time All-American swimmer at Pomona, she returned to the College and coached and taught for 26 years, winning 17 SCIAC women’s swimming titles and guiding the women’s water polo team to a national championship in 1993.

“From my time as a student, I learned to stand up for what I believed in. Never stop believing in yourself.”
—Penny Lee Dean ’77

In addition to conferring honorary degrees on Ifill and Dean, Pomona posthumously honored Trustee Emeritus George E. “Buddy” Moss ’52 with the Trustees’ Medal of Merit. A member of the Board of Trustees from 1995 to 2004, Moss made possible many programs for faculty and students. Among his many contributions, he made gifts to establish the George E. Moss Community Partnerships Fund, the George E. and Nancy O. Moss Professorship in Economics, the Henry G. Lee ’37 Professorship in Poetry, the Peter W. Stanley Chair of Linguistics and Cognitive Science and the Roscoe Moss Professorship in Chemistry.

Professors Margaret Waller and Zayn Kassam have retired after decades of teaching and service to Pomona College.

Waller, the Dr. Mary Ann Vanderzyl Reynolds ’56 Professor of Humanities and professor of Romance languages and literatures, had been a member of the faculty since 1986. A specialist in 19th-century French literature, she also is an expert on gender and power. Her 1993 book, The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel, was one of the first to pioneer masculinity studies in the field of French literature. Waller, known as Peggy, was honored with the Wig Distinguished Professor Award for excellence in teaching in 1991 and 2000.

Kassam, the John Knox McLean Professor of Religious Studies, retired in December 2022 to become director of the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. A professor at Pomona since 1995, her most recent leadership role was as associate dean of the College for diversity, equity and inclusion. Kassam was a three-time recipient of the Wig Award for excellence in teaching (1998, 2005, 2015) and in 2005 was honored with the American Academy of Religion’s National Teacher of the Year Award.