Professor Sandeep Mukherjee in his studio

A glimpse inside three of Pomona’s creative ID1 classes

With any luck, many first-year students will find in their Critical Inquiry seminars what Miguel Delgado-Garcia ’20, president of the Associated Students of Pomona College (ASPC), told those gathered for 2019 Opening Convocation he found in his.

It was “the first of many homes for me” at Pomona College, Delgado-Garcia said as he addressed students in Bridges Hall of Music on the first day of classes.

Known as ID1 courses for their interdisciplinary designation in the catalog, Critical Inquiry seminars give first-year students an introduction to the kind of deep reading, writing and discussion that will be a foundation of their educations at Pomona. ID1 is one of three time-honored traditions (along with Orientation Adventure and sponsor groups) that introduce first-years to small groups of students who share close experiences that help them form early friendships on campus—and perhaps find the first of many homes.

Here’s a look at three of the 30 ID1 courses this year.

I Disagree

It’s little surprise one of the most requested ID1 classes this year considers “the problem of living with difference.” Professor of Mathematics Vin de Silva has taught the class a number of times, but says “what I’ve found in the last couple of years is that I feel that it’s almost inadequate for the much bigger task of rebalancing our public climate.”

De Silva has no illusions of resolving political conflict, but through various case studies students learn more effective ways of communicating. One example is the 1957 movie 12 Angry Men, in which the character played by Henry Fonda slowly changes the minds of jurors in a murder trial. Another comes from Edward Tufte, a Yale professor emeritus of political science, computer science and statistics. Tufte studied the efforts of Morton Thiokol engineers who advised against the 1986 launch of the ill-fated shuttle Challenger. NASA officials pushed back, and the launch went ahead.

“Of course it wasn’t OK,” de Silva says. “So then, the whole question is: If you have some piece of information and some understanding that makes you think that something shouldn’t be done, and there’s still pressure to do it, how do you try to communicate that? The contractors went to NASA and showed them all sorts of complicated figures and then said, ‘We don’t think you should launch.’ That isn’t always going to be effective. Tufte proposes a simplified chart, and as soon as you spend a couple of minutes looking at it and figuring it out, then you realize it’s totally clear that you shouldn’t launch.”

On Fiction

In an era when truth is under scrutiny, where does that leave fiction? Colleen Rosenfeld, an associate professor of English and a faculty fellow this year in Pomona’s Humanities Studio, designed her course to complement the studio’s 2019–20 theme, Post/Truth.

“The question of post-truth was especially interesting to me for fiction because the debate right now is so much around facts. How do we evaluate facts, and is it about trusting institutional sources?” Rosenfeld says. “Fiction has an interesting status because it’s neither truth nor lies.”

Among the readings in this class is the essay “Defence of Poesy” by 16th-century poet Philip Sidney. “Sidney says against the charge from Plato that poets are liars that, well, a poet cannot lie because ‘he nothing affirms,’” Rosenfeld says. “If you don’t make an affirmation, then your speech can’t be held to the question of true or false.”

Other texts include Italo Calvino’s short story collection Cosmicomics and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

“There’s a long tradition which says, “Yes, fiction does involve truth—it’s just truth operating on a higher order,’” Rosenfeld says.

“These questions are old. We’re thinking about them in this political context, but it’s the same set of ideas that people have been using to think through literature and poetry and fiction, as far back as I can read.”

Color and Its Affects

Inside Sandeep Mukherjee’s studio, a work in progress lines two walls in layers of fleshy reddish-brown paint. Hanging from the ceiling are aluminum moldings of tree trunks, sprayed with black and white paint that runs down the metal like rivulets.

Mukherjee, an associate professor of art and recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, says one of the challenges his ID1 students will face is the elusive endeavor of writing about color and its affects. (He draws on affect theory as proposed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.)

“It escapes, because color isn’t a fixed entity,” Mukherjee says. “It depends on what’s around it, where it’s located, space, time, the person viewing it. So when all these factors come together is when color is produced as an experience, and to try and pin it down in language is almost impossible.

Black and white will be examined too, and Mukherjee notes the inadequacy of those terms in describing race or skin tone.

“You’ve got brown, purple,” says Mukherjee, who often assigns self-portraits to beginning painting students. “I have them make the color that is their flesh, their hair, their eyes, their eyebrows. So they understand how much color each of us has.”

More unsettling is an essay students will read by Aruna D’Souza in Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts on the painting Open Casket by Dana Schutz. The painting depicts the grotesquely mutilated face of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black boy who was murdered in 1955 after whistling at a white woman. His mother chose a glass-topped casket to show the world what had been done.

“There was a huge controversy at the Whitney Museum about race and who gets to speak on it,” Mukherjee says, noting that Schutz, the artist, is white.

“The most gratifying feedback I get is, ‘The way I look at the world has changed on the most basic level,’” Mukherjee says. “That’s profound.”

The 2019 recipients of the Wig Distinguished Professor Award, the highest honor bestowed on Pomona faculty, were (from left):

• Stephan Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and professor of mathematics,
• Guadalupe Bacio, assistant professor of psychology and Chicana/o Latina/o studies,
• Valorie Thomas, professor of English and Africana studies,
• Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics,
• Pey-Yi Chu, associate professor of history, and
• Carolyn Ratteray, assistant professor of theatre and dance.

In anonymously-written nomination comments, students offered high praise for the six professors who were honored at Commencement on May 19.

Stephan Garcia

W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and Professor of Mathematics Stephan Garcia is the author of more than 80 research articles, many of them with Pomona students as coauthors. In 2018 he was recognized by the American Mathematics Society for his excellence in research in operator theory, complex analysis, matrix theory and number theory. This is his second Wig Award.

• “Professor Garcia is the best lecturer I have had at Pomona. He is incredibly organized and manages to ensure that all of his students get the most out of every lecture. There has not been a lecture period where I felt that a minute is wasted. Moreover, he cares about bridging disciplines using math. He has a unique ability to put whatever we are learning in terms of contexts that students in other disciplines care about.
• “Professor Garcia is an amazing math professor. I am thoroughly impressed and grateful for his ability to synthesize different fields of mathematics to portray linear algebra topics from a variety of viewpoints. His Advanced Linear Algebra course is unique in that it caters to majors not only in mathematics but also in physics, economics and computer science.”

Guadalupe Bacio

Bacio joined Pomona in 2016 with a double appointment to the departments of psychology and Chicana/o Latina/o studies. A clinical psychologist and researcher, she explores disparities in alcohol and drug use among young people of ethnic minorities. Bacio directs the CENTRO research lab where she and her students combine several research methods including community-participatory research, laboratory-based tasks and large-scale surveys. This is her first Wig Award.

• “Professor Bacio is a professor like no other. She does double the work in her classes as she not only provides the learning content, but also a learning community. Students are driven not only to be invested in their own learning but in the learning of everyone around them. She has very high standards for her students, but her drive, passion and energy gives you every reason to want to impress her.”
• “She teaches from a rich background working on the frontline with the people who are the subjects of our readings. Probably the most ‘real world’ informed professor I’ve had here, which was really refreshing at a point in my time here when ‘the bubble’ was really getting to me.”

Valorie Thomas

Professor of English and Africana Studies Valorie Thomas has taught at Pomona since 1998 and specializes in Afrofuturism, Native American literature, African Diaspora theory and decolonizing theory. Thomas also studies film and visual art, has an ongoing interest in the connections between writing, art and social justice and is a screenwriter. This is her second Wig Award.

• “I’ve had the chance to take two courses with Val Thomas over the course of my college career. Both have been two of the most impactful classes of my entire four years. Val is communicative, encouraging and articulate without sacrificing accessibility. She’s confirmed to me that I made the right decision when I became an English major. Plus, she’s funny. She knows how to gauge the classroom’s level of attention and emotional state, so that the space is always welcoming even when in the midst of heavy discussions. I have the feeling she’ll be one of the professors I reference in my 30s and 40s when responding to the question: Who influenced you?”
• “Professor Thomas is the single most compassionate professor I have ever had the honor of knowing. What she teaches students reaches far beyond any academic instruction; the nurturing learning space that she cultivates enlightens students’ minds and spirits in a way that is unparalleled at Pomona College.”

Susan McWilliams Barndt

A third time Wig Award winner, Professor of Politics Susan McWilliams Barndt currently serves as chair of the Politics Department, where she has taught since 2006. Among her areas of expertise are political theory, American political thought, politics and literature and civic education. She is the author, most recently, of The American Road Trip and American Political Thought (2018).

•  “One of the most brilliant, funny and compassionate professors I’ve ever had. Not only was Professor McWilliams one of the main reasons I chose to major in politics, she’s also one of the people that I trust most on Pomona’s campus. She’s always willing to support students in their academic and personal development, and she provides this support while quoting Plato and James Baldwin.”
• “Professor McWilliams has taught me how to ask questions. It seems so simple to say, but in this, she has changed my life. Skepticism is not easy to come by anymore; it is hard to remain uncertain in a world as fraught as ours today. I would prefer to make simple choice and think simple thoughts. Professor McWilliams shows how inadequate this is, and how incredibly choosing complexity instead can be.”

Pey-Yi Chu

Associate Professor of History Pey-Yi Chu teaches European history focusing on Russia and the Soviet Union. Through her research, she aims to understand the environment and environmental change through the history of science and technology as well as environmental history. Her first book, The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science, explores the history of the study of frozen earth and the creation of permafrost science in the Soviet Union. This is her first Wig Award.

• “ID1 [Critical Inquiry Seminar] is more of a distant memory at this point, but Professor Chu’s Cold Places seminar was a wicked introduction to the writing and creative learning process Pomona so adores.”
• “Professor Chu is committed to empowering her students through the learning process. She has provided pages (single-spaced!) of feedback for every paper draft I’ve submitted and put in hours of work to make sure that I was producing the best work I possibly could. She treats her students as collaborators, considering their ideas with the utmost respect. She is kind, approachable and dedicated to teaching for teaching’s sake.”

Carolyn Ratteray

Actor and director Carolyn Ratteray is a Daytime Emmy-nominated actress who joined Pomona College in 2016 as a tenure-track faculty member. A first-time Wig Award winner, Ratteray has worked in off-Broadway and regional theatres as well as in television and commercials. She’s served as moderator for on-campus speakers such as Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander and has directed numerous student plays during her time at Pomona such as Midsummer Night’s Dreamand In Love and Warcraft.

• “Carolyn has meant more to me than I can say. Her presence makes me feel like being an artist, is attainable, worth it and powerful. And more than any other professor here she has been concerned with helping me find my voice not just the directors. Not to mention her commitment to bringing in relevant guest speakers who have ignited my passions all the more!”
• “Professor Ratteray creates spaces of healing, which is to me, one of the most radical productions of space in an academic setting. In her work as a director for theatre productions housed on Pomona’s stages, and in her classrooms, Professor Ratteray’s pedagogy revolves around centering the voices of people of color, queer and trans folks, and focusing on the imbricated experiences of intersectional bodies. Plainly, she allows us to speak, to move, and to emote in places where the emotional is seen as removed from the work that we must do.”

Shale, a fine-grained sedimentary rock formed from silt or clay particles, holds chemical clues to one of Earth’s most dramatic geological events – when continents first bobbed well above sea level.

Using the Pomona College X-ray Fluorescence Laboratory (XRF), Associate Professor of Geology Jade Star Lackey with Trevor Pontifex ’18 and Christopher “Cal” Neikirk ’19 analyzed the chemical elements of shale rock from around the world – providing an important check on the results gathered by University of Oregon Professor Ilya Bindeman’s research, published in the May issue of Nature. “We’re answering a deep time question about Earth’s behavior with this work,” says Lackey.

“The findings are significant. It puts another piece of evidence of when Earth’s continents stood more prominently above the oceans,” says Lackey, who is chair of the Geology Department. “On a planet that was hot and active and had a vigorous mantle before this, it was hard for continental rock to rise really high.”

Lackey provides an analogy: Imagine dumplings in a pot of stew. They begin as dough that doesn’t have much strength, but nonetheless float near the surface of the pot. As they cook and stiffen, they gain strength and begin to rise up above the surface of the pot. If the stew cools and thickens, in the same way the mantle would have, those dumplings could sit even higher. Tectonics would move the dumplings around, and when several collide—think of this as assembling a supercontinent—they can rise even higher.

The research shows that shale rock sampled from around the world contains a record of the weathering of land that spans most of Earth’s history. The team analyzed oxygen isotopes in samples from every continent to test for fingerprints of the style of weathering that occurred. Lackey explains that the conversion process of land (the dumplings in a pot of stew analogy) to clay minerals in shale is recorded in the oxygen isotopes. “It’s profound to think about, that we’re seeing a different style of weathering start [on Earth].”

Lackey joined Bindeman’s research team in summer 2016, when he and laboratory interns took a look at the bulk chemistry of the shales that were sent to their laboratory.

“The important piece of the story is ‘between 2.2 and 2.5 billion years ago, but to see it, we had to go back and scrape ‘together as many shales as we could find, even the rare stuff, going back to 3.5 billion years ago,” says Lackey, who explains that the shales were hard to find and had to be handled with care in the lab.

The Pomona College Geology Department counts on a number of specialized lab instruments for faculty and student research. The XRF Lab was founded in 2010 and uses an Axios wavelength-dispersive spectrometer which allows analysis of a wide range of elements that make up the bulk of crustal rocks. “We operate with ‘the highest level of research thanks to the ‘College’s support for major equipment,” says Lackey.