Class Acts

New Knowledge

August 3, 2016 by Staff Comments Off

BIOLOGY: Assistant Professor of Biology Wallace Meyer

Fireproof Ants

Even a fire won’t keep a good ant down, according to research at the Robert J. Bernard Biological Field Station (BFS) on the effects of fire on ants. But which plants grow back after fire and drought does affect ant communities.

For her senior thesis, Tessa Adams ’16 was interested in determining if the ant community changed as a result of the September 2013 brush fire that charred 17 acres at the field station and The Claremont Colleges North Campus Properties. Expectations were that the effects of fire would be significant, but it turns out ants are a hardy, fireproof lot. Results show that there was minimal immediate and no lasting impact on the species from the fire, says Assistant Professor of Biology Wallace Meyer, director of Bernard Field Station, a preserve maintained by The Claremont Colleges that protects the rare native ecosystem of California sage scrub.

“It seems like ant assemblages can withstand a fire. And it makes sense—they are this super-organism. … Fast-moving hot fires affect the surface; meanwhile the ants are down below,” says Meyer. Plus, “fire is a natural component of the ecosystem.”

However, Meyer says, following a fire, areas of land can potentially convert from native flora—in the case of BFS, California sage scrub—to nonnative grasslands, which do affect whether ants return. (Rest assured, 22 species of ants are still making their home at BFS.) Drought, too, affects whether sage scrub or nonnative grasses grow back and which species of ants make their home in each type of habitat. In fact, Meyer says, drought—while not as manifestly dramatic—is actually a larger stressor than fire.

Meyer believes this research is significant because the effects of fire on anything other than plants and mammals are largely unknown. For purposes of conservation and biodiversity management, it is important to understand these effects, since fire is going to become more common, especially in light of global climate change. Adams’ research findings will be used in conservation management plans not only at BFS, but by managers throughout Southern California.

What are the implications for conservation management? First, as long as native plant communities recover, no action is required, says Meyer. Second, which types of plants grow back favors certain ant species. Third, effects of extreme drought correlated with climate changes are real and felt, making long-term management difficult.

Thanks to her high school AP Environmental Science class, Adams came to Pomona knowing she wanted to do ecology research. She says when she stepped foot into BFS, she was awestruck by the California sage scrub habitat.

Adams’ awe quickly turned into action. Adams started working on arthropod research at BFS as a volunteer her first year at Pomona and continued through the years, setting up research sites, collecting pitfall traps, sorting specimens that were collected—and she started seeing a wide range of arthropods at the station.

“After taking Professor Meyer’s Fire Ecology in Southern California class last spring, I became interested in how fire can shape an ecosystem, and I realized that there is little research on the effect of fire on arthropods. I decided to focus my thesis on the effect of fire on ants because the lifestyle of ants, which live in colonies, has the potential to be greatly affected by fire,” says Adams.

She conducted her research by pitfall trapping. She buried a test tube in the ground, with the lip of it level with the surface of the ground. The tube was filled about halfway with a preservation solution—either ethanol or propylene glycol. As the insects ran along the ground, they fell into the trap, and the collected specimens served as a survey of the insects present in an area.

But why choose ants? Adams points to the creatures as providing crucial ecosystem services that make them important to study because of their broad impact on other organisms and their value in helping to determine ways to conserve the environment they inhabit.

So in other words, remember the old proverb: Go to the ant … consider her ways.

—Sneha Abraham

CHEMISTRY: Professor Roberto Garza-López

Molecular Origami

Pomona College Chemistry Professor Roberto Garza-López and his research colleagues have developed a new model that studies how protein molecules fold and unfold—work that has more than a few national institutes interested in the implications for understanding the development of diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, Type II diabetes and certain types of cancer.

The research, published in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, looks at the protein called Cytochrome c, focusing on the questions of what happens to this protein’s molecules when they don’t fold properly and how this improper unfolding is linked to cancers and other diseases.

Why does a protein fold and unfold in the first place? Long protein molecules start straight, explains Garza-López, but in order to interact with other molecules, they have to fold. “And they have to fold into a very specific shape,” he says. “If they don’t fold properly, then that’s where negative things occur, especially disease. In the paper we published, we are looking at the opposite effect: we’re looking at the protein that is already folded to see how it unfolds.”

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are providing funding for further research and are interested in what the team’s findings reveal about the early development of diseases. Garza-López is working with Caltech Professor Harry B. Gray and DePaul University Professor John J. Kozak.

In order to visualize the protein molecule’s many folds, students working in Garza-López’s lab create 3-D structures of some of the proteins, like Cytochrome c (pictured here). “Students are very good with computers, at visualizing molecules and doing calculations, but they’re also very good at visualizing what those calculations are doing to those molecules.”

Sabari Kumar ’17, a chemistry major who is working in Garza-López’s lab, was acknowledged in the published paper and is now studying the folding and unfolding of proteins related to disease by performing molecular dynamics simulations.

The research by Garza-López , Gray and Kozak continues, and they’re already finished with another manuscript looking at another protein called Intelectin-1, a protein of the intestines and lungs that is able to distinguish between human cells and the cells of bacterial invaders. “This could underpin new strategies to fight infections,” says Garza-López. He adds: “Proteins are very complex. We start with a simple model and we do a lot with that model and try to understand new things about it. That’s how science works.”

—Carla Guerrero

Wig Winners for 2016

August 3, 2016 by Staff Comments Off

PCM-summer2016text58-web2_Page_17_Image_0003 Each spring, juniors and seniors recognize outstanding Pomona professors by selecting the recipients of the Wig Distinguished Professor Award, the highest honor bestowed on faculty. This year’s recipients are (left to right in the image above):

Pierre Englebert, H. Russell Smith Professor of International Relations and professor of politics, teaches courses like Advanced Questions in African Politics, Comparative Politics of Africa, and Political Economy of Development. He has been at Pomona since 1998, and this is his fourth Wig Award.

Sharon Goto, professor of psychology and Asian American studies, teaches courses including Asian American Psychology, Industrial/Organizational Psychology, and Psych Approaches: Study of People. She has been at Pomona since 1995, and this is her second Wig Award.

April Mayes ’94, associate professor of history, teaches courses on Afro-Latin American History, Gender & Nation: Modern Latin America, and U.S.-Latin American Relations, among others. She is a graduate of Pomona, and has taught here since 2006. This is her first Wig Award.

Kyla Tompkins, associate professor of English and gender & women’s studies, teaches 19th-Century U.S. Women Writers, Literatures of U.S. Imperialism and Advanced Feminist and Queer Theory, among other classes. She has been at Pomona College since 2004, and this is her first Wig Award.

Jonathan Hall, assistant professor of media studies, teaches courses that include Freud, Film, Fantasy; Japanese Film: Canon to Fringe; and Queer Visions/Queer Theory. He has been at Pomona since 2009, and this is his first Wig Award.

Johanna Hardin ’95, professor of mathematics, teaches courses that include Linear Models, Computational Statistics, and 9 out of 10 Seniors Recommend This Freshman Seminar: Statistics in the Real World. A graduate of Pomona, she has taught at Pomona since 2002. This is her first Wig Award.

Michelle Zemel, assistant professor of economics, teaches courses that include Economic Statistics, Advanced Topics in Banking, and Risk Management in Financial Institutions. She has been at Pomona since 2012, and this is her first Wig Award.

Nicole Weekes, professor of neuroscience, teaches The Human Brain: From Cells to Behavior (with Lab), Neuropsychology (with Lab), and Introduction to Psychological Science. She has been at Pomona since 1998, and this is her fourth Wig Award.

New Knowledge

April 7, 2016 by Staff Comments Off

Teeny Tiny Immortals

Biology: Professor Daniel Martinez

Providing the strongest evidence to date that some animals have the potential for immortality, new research released in December confirms the tiny hydra does not age and, if kept in ideal conditions, may just live forever.

In a co-authored paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal, Pomona College Biology Professor Daniel Martínez caps a decade of research into these centimeter-long freshwater polyps with a knack for longevity.

The paper titled “Constant mortality and fertility over age in Hydra” shows hydra could live in ideal conditions without showing any sign of senescence—the increase in mortality and decline in fertility with age after maturity, which was thought to be inevitable for all multicellular species.

Working with James W. Vaupel of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany, Martínez duplicated earlier findings regarding hydra immortality, but on a much larger scale. That scale, Martinez says, is key to the study’s significance, along with the fact that the hydra showed constant fertility over time, defying expectations for most organisms.

The latest study took 2,256 hydra from two closely related species and conducted experiments in two laboratories (at Pomona College and the MPIDR) over an eight-year period, doubling the amount of time from Martinez’s previous experiments showing hydra living for four years.

“I do believe that an individual hydra can live forever under the right circumstances,” says Martínez. “The chances of that happening are low because hydra are exposed to the normal dangers of the wild—predation, contamination, diseases. I started my original experiment wanting to prove that hydra could not have escaped aging. My own data has proven me wrong—twice.”

As one of the world’s leading scholars on hydra phylogeny and the evolution of aging, Martínez in 2010 received a $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for research on the mechanisms underlying lack of senescence in members of the genus Hydra. In 2013, he received a grant from The Immortality Project at UC Riverside to study the implications of hydra’s lifespan on medicine and increasing human longevity.

“Hydras are made of stem cells,” Martínez says. “Most of the hydra’s body is made of stem cells with very few fully differentiated cells. Stem cells have the ability to continually divide, and so a hydra’s body is being constantly renewed. The differentiated cells of the tentacles and the foot are constantly being pushed off the body and replaced with new cells migrating from the body column.”

The project was labor-intensive and, at times, tedious. Each hydra had to be individually fed three times a week. The man-made freshwater in which the hydra lived needed to be changed three times a week. “Many, many hours of work went into this experiment,” says Martínez. “I’m hoping this work helps sparks another scientist to take a deeper look at immortality, perhaps in some other organism that helps bring more light to the mysteries of aging.”

—Carla Guerrero

What’s in a Name?

Economics: Professor Gary Smith

The study landed just in time for the 2014 hurricane season, and it created quite a weather system of its own.

A team of university researchers had found that female-named hurricanes are deadlier, and they posited that this was due to sexism—people didn’t take hurricanes with female names as seriously. They concluded that changing a severe hurricane’s name from Charley to Eloise “could nearly triple its death toll.”

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, drew international media attention. They also drew skepticism from some observers and academics who questioned the methodology.

Economics Professor Gary Smith digs more deeply into those doubts in his new paper, “Hurricane Names: A Bunch of Hot Air?,” published in Weather and Climate Extremes. In addition to questioning the methodology, Smith uses new data to provide the most extensive look at the controversial findings so far. Smith finds the hurricane names conclusion is “based in a questionable statistical analysis of a narrowly defined data set” and does not hold up when looking at a more inclusive set of data or at a fresh set of data.

His skepticism was heightened by the study’s conclusion that there is no female-male effect for less severe storms. If the sexism theory is true, he says, it ought to be most apparent for storms of questionable danger.

“It is implausible that an imperiled public’s response to a potential storm of the century—with catastrophic warnings broadcast by news media that feed on sensationalized reporting—depends on whether the name Sandy is perceived to be a feminine or masculine,” notes Smith.

Smith found that the original study’s conclusions depended on the inclusion of pre-1979 data, a period when all tropical storms were given female names. Hurricanes happened to have been stronger during these years and it is likely that infrastructure was weaker and there was less advance warning. It is more scientifically valid to analyze storms since 1979, when weather officials started assigning alternating female and male names before the hurricane season begins.

Smith also found that the statistical analysis was flawed and that the authors estimated at least a dozen models, which he calls a sure sign of tortured data. Smith tried to replicate the original research by 1) looking at a wider set of data and 2) looking at a fresh set of data.

The original study, Smith notes, excluded tropical storms that did not meet the wind-speed threshold to be labeled hurricanes, as well as storms that stayed off the coast and did not make landfall in the U.S. It also excluding deaths that occurred outside the U.S. When a wider set of data is considered, the study’s conclusions don’t hold up, says Smith.

For a second test, Smith looked at Pacific storms—the original research only considered Atlantic storms—and again found no difference in fatalities from female-named and male-named storms.

The Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona, Smith teaches finance and statistics and pursues research on topics such as housing prices and stock prices. Author of Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics, Smith also has a penchant for looking more deeply at implausible research findings, such as the report (published in the British Medical Journal) claiming that Japanese and Chinese Americans are susceptible to heart attacks on the fourth day of every month because in Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese, the pronunciation of the words for “four” and “death” are very similar.

Smith laments that, “Statistical analyses are indispensable for evaluating competing claims and making good decisions. Unfortunately, the credibility of useful analyses is undermined by studies that torture data.”

—Mark Kendall

Supervolcanoes

Geology: Professor Eric Grosfils

Almost 10 years ago, Geology Professor Eric Grosfils published a scientific paper on the stability and rupture of small magma reservoirs, challenging the current theory behind what triggers volcanic eruptions. One key finding was that magma buoyancy plays almost no role as a trigger. Grosfils’ research today continues to expand upon that work and influence the field of volcanology.

A new study published in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, led by Patricia Gregg of the University of Illinois in collaboration with Grosfils and Shan da Silva from Oregon State University, shows that the same is true for the much larger systems that feed supereruptions.

The long-held idea is that the buoyancy in magma, which has lower density than the rock around it, begins to create pressure and push against the crust until it breaks, permitting magma to move upward and feed an eruption. These pressures, however, contribute in only minor ways relative to other factors. “Buoyancy doesn’t appear to be the trigger for such eruptions as others have argued,” says Grosfils, suggesting that previously identified factors, including external fracturing during roof collapse, remain the critical drivers for supervolcano eruptions. “We know that really big magma bodies accumulating at shallow levels in the crust can feed large explosive eruptions like the past climactic events at Yellowstone or Long Valley,” explains Grosfils. “All of us are interested in discovering what it takes for a system like that, just sitting there happily minding its own business, to begin erupting. What happens in the reservoir and surrounding crust that allows the materials to escape and feed a large, catastrophic volcanic eruption?”

“There are still many aspects to triggering supereruptions that we still do not understand. Our recent investigation helps to rule out one potential eruption triggering mechanism, buoyancy, but there is still a lot of additional work to be done to better constrain the mechanisms that trigger supervolcano eruption,” says Gregg.

Given the additional work left to figure out what sets off supervolcanoes, the opportunities for students to explore and learn are plentiful, and Grosfils’ collaborative nature and mentorship has already inspired some students to continue the work.

Recent Pomona graduate Robby Goldman ’15, is one of those students. He will be working with Gregg the following academic year pursuing volcano dynamic models on a large scale as a graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s geodynamics program.

A geology major at Pomona, Goldman worked with Grosfils and another geology student, Jack Albright ’16, on a project modeling magma chambers in three-dimensional space using the finite-element modeling software COMSOL Multiphysics. The goal of that research was to better understand how the formation of large, cauldron-shaped depressions known as calderas, are influenced by pressure changes in the underlying magma chambers. Their research was presented at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference last spring in Houston.

Goldman is now headed to New Zealand on a Fulbright grant to continue his work in an ancient volcanic system, and he says his work with Professor Grosfils directly influenced his decision to apply for the Fulbright grant.

Adds Gregg, “Working with Professor Grosfils is incredibly enriching. His patience and generosity of time, acting as a critical sounding board as we work through the physics and dynamics of our volcano models, makes doing science together fun and exciting.”

—Carla Guerrero

Man of the World

April 7, 2016 by Anthony Bald '17 Comments Off

Portrait of Adan Amaya

Adan Amaya knows that to travel the world, you don’t necessarily have to go very far. Known for his outgoing personality, Amaya enjoys meeting students, faculty and staff in his daily rounds with Pomona’s mail services team. And when he’s not delivering the mail, he’s at Oldenborg Dining Hall using his passion for language to travel the world himself.

Born in El Salvador, Amaya moved to San Bernardino 35 years ago. His 20-plus years of experience as cook made it easy to find a position with Scripps dining services in 2007, but he was soon ready for a change. He is now in his eighth year at Pomona, where he exercises his love of language every day at Oldenborg.

“Rita Bashaw [Director, Oldenborg Center] approached me one day and invited me. I really was kind of shy because I don’t have experience being around students, but I said ‘I’ll be there.’ I started going, and after that I liked it. I’m always there, every day.”

Amaya speaks four languages—his native Spanish, English, Greek and Italian—with more to come. On Wednesdays, he’s at the beginner Italian table, while on Thursdays, he goes Greek. He spends the rest of his lunches at the Spanish table, helping beginner and intermediate students with their conversation skills.

“I’m committing myself because I love it; it’s my passion to be there with the students because the students really want to learn Spanish, so I can give them a little motivation to practice and have conversations.”

Even before arriving at Pomona, Amaya was exploring his capacity for languages. His first goal upon coming to the United States from El Salvador was to learn English, but then his language learning took a turn. His cooking experience brought him into work with a Greek family as cook, manager, and eventually supervisor in their southern California restaurants. To advance in the business, he says, it became necessary to learn Greek. Between two trips to Greece (once in 1998 and again in 2000) and 10 years of studying, Amaya has mastered the language.

When he left the restaurant business, he didn’t stop there. “I do speak Italian too, but Italian is easier than Greek,” he says. “Italian is very easy because once you master Spanish, you can go ahead and do Italian.” What’s next for Amaya? French, he reveals, and a little farther down the road, Portuguese. “I always have a little space for learning something,” he adds.

When Adan isn’t traveling the world through language, he’s probably, well, traveling. He makes the trip back home to El Salvador twice a year; he has even brought Pomona students along with him, including a Chinese student he met during his Oldenborg lunches.

“He showed up to the Spanish table with his little Spanish,” recalls Amaya. “I said, Bob, do you really want to master Spanish? In order to do that, you have to put some passion into it. I’ve been seeing his improvement over two years, and he took the courage to go with my family back to El Salvador. That’s one of my greatest experiences.”

From his trips to Greece to his travels around Central and South America, Amaya is no stranger to exploration. His next destination: Roatan Island, Honduras. For someone who naturally likes to wander, he was surprised to discover he feels right at home with Pomona’s mail services team.

“I never thought that I would stay for very long. But since I’ve stayed at Pomona and seen how the environment is related to the work, and how you move around with people, I’ve liked it. I’m going to hang out here at Pomona for a long time.”

What Is the Hive? (And Why Is Everyone Buzzing About It?)

December 2, 2015 by Mark Wood Comments Off

Photo by Mark Wood

What is creativity? How does it happen? Is it inborn or can it be taught? How does such an intangible ability—or should I say capacity, quality, or maybe mindset?—fit into the structure of a liberal arts education? The faculty, staff, students and advisors who organized the launch of the new five-college Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity this fall don’t pretend to have all the answers, but they do share a strong belief that collaborative and creative thinking across disciplines will be essential to solving the problems of the 21st century.

“There’s already plenty of opportunity for creativity within your discipline,” says Associate Professor of Physics Dwight Whitaker, who, along with Harvey Mudd College Professor of Engineering Patrick Little, is serving as co-director of the Sontag Center until a national search for a permanent director is completed. “If a student is truly passionate about physics, they can get an awesome experience working in our research labs, doing creative, cutting-edge stuff that no one else has done before. They can really develop their creative chops as a physicist. We’re already doing that, and I’m confident every department does that very well.”

What’s missing, he believes, is the opportunity to develop those “creative chops” in collaborative settings that bring together experts from different fields to tackle problems that resist disciplinary definition.

“The really messy, important problems that we face are ones that don’t fit into a discipline,” Whitaker says. “I think if you look at the environment, the really messy problems like end-of-life issues, creating an inclusive space for all Pomona students on a local level, these are not going to have a solution that lies within any department. I think the way that these problems are going to be solved is going to be people with vast expertise truly collaborating, getting in the intellectual muck together and doing the messy business of working out mindsets. Being generative and appreciating that their mindset approaches the problem differently than your mindset. That’s a really hard skill to develop.”

So how do you go about developing the creative skills involved in cross-disciplinary collaborations in an academic setting dominated by its distinct disciplines? That was the problem Rick and Susan Sontag—1964 graduates of Harvey Mudd College and Pomona College, respectively—sought to address with their $25 million gift to create the new center that bears their names.

But that remarkable gift was just the start. To help get this innovative new program off the ground, the colleges turned to design experts Tom Maiorana and Vida Mia Garcia of Red Cover Studios, who devoted a big portion of the last year to helping the center’s planners develop a conceptual framework and bring those concepts to life in the form of actual programming.

The result is a work in progress, but a very busy work in progress. Already nicknamed “The Hive” for the buzz of creative thought and collaborative activity it is designed to foster, the new center occupies renovated spaces inside what was once Pomona’s Seeley G. Mudd Science Library, with Pomona serving as lead campus. A chalkboard sign out front invites passersby inside to see what it’s all about. A new website (creativity.claremont.edu) invites students to: “Take chances. Mix things up. Make mistakes. Learn from them.”

That theme of risk-taking is central to the Hive’s purpose. Garcia says students have heard all the familiar clichés about the importance of exploring fearlessly and learning from failure, but the stakes for students at a place like Pomona are just too high to risk failure in anything that counts. The Hive, she says, offers a place where students can take risks in “a low-stakes way” and develop the kind of intellectual resilience that allows them to see that failure is just part of the learning process.

“Intellectually, they understand that, yeah, sure, you need to fail to learn, but where are they going to do that?” says Garcia. “There are precious few venues for that in life, but especially here at the 5Cs, because everybody is so overachieving and everybody sees that in everybody else. So how do we give them that safe space? We heard that over and again in the student interviews, in the ethnography at the outset, and we wanted to bake that into the ethos of this place.”

Those interviews with students and faculty also brought to light another significant concern: time. “They want chances to explore and fail,” Whitaker says. “They want chances to be experiential rather than just critical and writing papers. But then we also definitely heard from both groups, the students and the faculty alike, that, “Yes, we want to do all that. But we have no time.”

With that in mind, the Sontag Center’s programming has been designed to offer a range of activities, with a sliding scale of time and commitment required—from mini-workshops to pop-up courses, guided explorations and full-credit courses.

“I think there are some people who will make the time, and there are some people who will want to just dip their toes in the water,” Whitaker says. “That’s what the workshops are really good for. I think the hope for those is that it sparks something. If it sparks something, then you will carve out the time and you will make the commitment. But I think unless you get in the door, u unless you start to get exposure to these ideas and these mindsets, you’re never going to carve the time out.”

This year’s mini-workshops have ranged in topic from an introduction to improv theatre to empathetic listening to shoemaking. In the latter, students use plastic wrap, a hair dryer and tape to create a prototype of a shoe. Of course, the final products of that workshop will never make it to the shelves of your local shoestore. In fact, you’d barely recognize most of them as shoes. But that’s not the point.

“There are few disciplines where you are expected, if not required, to be a maker, right?” explains Maiorana. “You’ve got engineering, possibly physics, studio art. So those students are going to have some level of comfort and facility with making. But the vast majority actually might not, or might not do it on a regular basis.”

The point, he says, is to demystify the creative process, which is loaded down with preconceptions and misconceptions, and to give people a taste of what it feels like actually to make something. “It’s really rudimentary, but it doesn’t feel rudimentary,” he adds. “Creating physical objects is a way to have a very visceral experience of the lessons we’re trying to impart.”

However, that example also illustrates one of Whitaker’s concerns, not about the center itself, but about how it might be perceived.

“Prototyping is one of the great tools of designers,” he says. “That’s just one of the great tools of creativity, having an object that you can play with. But the kind of low-resolution prototyping we use is pipe cleaners and construction paper, so definitely there’s a danger that it can look like preschool. People walk in and say, ‘This is an academic center? You’re doing design-thinking? You’re just playing with toys.”

But in truth, the playfulness inherent in the program is an essential part of the design. “One of the challenges we have is that the approaches to creating a new mindset, a creative mindset, tend to involve ignoring the rigor to some degree,” Whitaker says. “Because in that early stage, it’s not about the details yet. It’s about forming the question. So you need to create a generative space where everyone feels valued and all ideas are good before you start critiquing them.”

Rigor comes later in the creative process, and there’s plenty of it to go around at the upper end of that sliding scale of activities, which includes project-based learning. That’s where teams of students and faculty take on daunting problems in the real world, a prospect that Co-Director Patrick Little of Harvey Mudd College finds particularly exciting, both for the experience the students will receive and for the potential to make a real difference in the world.

“One of the open-ended problems we’re just in the process of getting started looking at is reimagining certain parts of the health care experience for patients with cancer,” he says. “And if you think about that, if you put that in any kind of a disciplinary framework, what ends up happening is that you necessarily limit the ways you can imagine that. So if it’s an engineering program, it wouldn’t make sense to talk about this in non-technical solutions, because you’d be moving away from the very thing you’re good at. Or if you were to think of it in the context of a computer science program, you would normally be thinking: ‘How can we provide software or applications?’ The beauty and, I think, the power of the Sontag Center is that it can start by dealing with the question of ‘What are the needs?’ rather than ‘What are our capabilities?’”

It might be surprising to think of college students helping to solve some of the world’s big, messy problems even before they earn their diplomas, but Little thinks they may be particularly well suited to this sort of cross-disciplinary, out-of-the-box thinking. “They haven’t yet been told these problems are beyond them,” he says. “They haven’t yet been told they have to stay in their silo. And as a result—whether you’re talking about something that’s really playful like making shoes or whether you’re talking about something practical, like the work that’s being done right now to reimagine the design of the GIS facility over at the library or whether you ask them about one of these large global problems—they just bring incredible energy.”

As its reputation spreads, the center has also begun to attract groups from across the 5Cs that want to make use of its creative resources and ethos. For instance, Pomona’s Quest Scholars recently met there for a brainstorming session. “We came to the Hive to brainstorm in groups and kind of figure out what we want out of our Resource Center,” says Ashley Land ’16. She goes on to add: “The space is just so great for being creative and being able to take an idea and make something bigger out of it, or take no idea and make an idea.”

Indeed, the ultimate success of the Sontag Center may be the influence it has on the rest of the five campuses. Gail Gallaher ’17 hopes that students will carry a little of the ethos of the Hive back into the rest of their college experience. “You’re always thinking about how you can grow and how you can learn, even from mistakes and failures. You’re not afraid of challenges because you know you’re going to learn from them. I think the whole 5Cs could benefit from that spirit.”

New Knowledge

December 2, 2015 by Staff Comments Off

Nutritional Prejudice

Is Vitamin C better for you than an orange? Are omega-3 fatty acids more important for your diet than the fish they come from? This may sound like topsy-turvy nutritional logic, but a new study from Cornell University and Pomona College found participants judged individual nutrients as healthier than the whole, natural foods that contain them.

Published in the Journal of Health Psychology, the study by professors Jonathon P. Schuldt of Cornell University and Adam Pearson of Pomona College was sparked after the research partners read Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food, in which the author speculates about an effect he dubs “nutritionism.”

Schuldt and Pearson devised a study to put this idea to the test: Two groups of research participants read an identical description of a moderately-healthy young man, but one group was told he made sure to include a variety of healthy foods in his diet, like bananas, fish, oranges, milk and spinach. For the second group, those foods were replaced with nutrients associated with those foods: potassium, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin C, calcium and iron.

The group that read about the nutrients considered the man to be at significantly lower risk of developing a number of leading chronic diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, cancer and stroke—and study participants who described themselves as diet-conscious or who had higher SAT/ACT scores were even more inclined to do so. The results aren’t surprising, Pearson said, in a society where people are constantly bombarded with health claims about nutrients and supplements. People who are more diet-conscious may be especially attentive to and influenced by these claims.

“It points to the insidious ways that the marketing of nutritional information can actually be harmful,” Pearson said. “If we are biased toward privileging the low-level properties of a food, we may overlook the many other healthy aspects of eating whole, natural foods.”

City of Trees

A tree

For their capstone project, a group of graduating seniors in Pomona College Professor Char Miller’s Environmental Analysis 190 class went out on a limb last spring and sought to map all of the public trees in the city of Claremont, sometimes called “The City of Trees and Ph.D.s.” The result is a convenient online guide mapping more than 24,000 trees and serving as an educational resource for the community.

Ben Wise of the Tree Action Group of Sustainable Claremont, a local nonprofit, contacted the Environmental Analysis (EA) Program and proposed that a team build a digital inventory and guide to city street trees. Wise’s aim was for people to see a tree in Claremont and then have a way to find out more about it.

So together, Alison Marks ’15, Naomi Bosch ’15, Nadine Lafeber SC ’15 and Sydney Stephenson CMC ’15—with help from geographic information system (GIS) specialist Warren Roberts at Honnold/Mudd Library—developed a website called Claremont Urban Arboretum (claremontsurbanarboretum.wordpress.com ) complete with an interactive GIS map and information on many of the life histories and origins of the tree species lining Claremont streets.

Environmental Analysis majors must complete two capstone projects: one individual and one group. “EA 190 is a group initiative defined by a real client with a real problem that must be resolved by the end of the spring semester,” says Miller, director of the EA Program. The aim is to push students to synthesize all they’ve learned over four years and translate that knowledge into action, he says.

Miller says public awareness about trees is a live issue, especially these days. “Claremont, the self-described City of Trees, has had a long love affair of the arboreal. But the current and crushing drought has made it essential that the community know more about the trees that are rooted into our stony soil,” he says.

Once Upon a Time in the Cambrian

Rendering of Yawunik kootenayi

Once there was a lobster-like predator with two pairs of compound eyes and large, toothed claws that prowled the Cambrian seas. After its death, its fossil lay waiting in a place now known as Marble Canyon—a newly discovered part of the renowned Canadian Burgess Shale deposits—for more than half a billion years before a team of researchers, including Professor of Geology Robert Gaines, brought it to light once more.

In a paper published last spring in the journal Palaeontology, Gaines and his co-authors announced the discovery of this strange new creature, named Yawunik kootenayi. Gaines was also part of the team that discovered the Marble Canyon deposits last year.

Retiring But Not Shy

August 3, 2015 by Paul Sterman '84 Comments Off

Rick Hazlett

WHEN ASKED IF PCM could interview him about his retirement, Professor Rick Hazlett suggested that the writer would “have to rappel in to my interview, suspended over a pit of molten lava in a bat cave (or something like that!), where of course I’ll be doing research just for the ‘hell-uvit.’”

He was joking—sort of.

Hazlett is starting his retirement in style: He’s moving to Hawaii. A geology professor at Pomona since 1987, he’s trading Claremont for the Big Island, giving him a prime spot from which to pursue one of his greatest passions: volcano research. u

Hazlett calls the move a “bittersweet denouement” because of his deep affection for Pomona College and its students. But he has a long-running connection to Hawaii, having done many research projects there over the past 40 years, stretching back to the time he was a student.

“In a sense, I’m not really moving to a new landscape or an entirely new social circle,” he says. “It’s a bit of going home, in a way.”

A four-time winner of the Wig Distinguished Professor award, Hazlett chaired Pomona’s Geology Department for nine years. He helped establish the school’s Environmental Analysis Program and became its pioneer coordinator.

Hazlett is moving into a historic house in north Hilo, 30 miles away from the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. His research will likely involve “looking at a prominent fault zone near the summit of the [Kilauea] volcano.”

“That sounds like work, but honest to God, it’s recreation for me,” he says with a laugh.

In addition, Hazlett will be working on two book projects. One is a new edition of a popular textbook, Volcanoes: Global Perspectives, that he co-wrote in 2010. He was also appointed senior editor for a research encyclopedia of environmental science, to be published by Oxford University Press. His focus will be the impact of agriculture on the environment.

“I’m really quite concerned about, and deeply committed to, solving environmental issues that I can impact. I figured this was a great way for me to pursue that mission while moving into retirement.”

Jud Emerick

AFTER TEACHING ART history at Pomona for 42 years, Jud Emerick says he still has as much interest in the field as ever.

“I’ll be doing art history for the foreseeable future,” Emerick writes in an email from Rome, where he’s spending the summer. The current focus of his research, he says, is “how architecture from early Christian and early medieval times in the Euro-Mediterranean world set stages for worship.”

Emerick’s areas of expertise are wide-ranging. As a professor, he taught courses on subjects such as prehistoric and ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Green and Roman art; classical art in the Mediterranean; and painting in Italy during the 14th century.

Emerick and his wife have made Rome “a kind of second home” for the last 46 years. You can sense his passion for the place as he describes attending lectures at landmark sites, eating in local restaurants with friends, and talking art. After all these years, he says, he and his wife “still find that being in Rome is tantamount to being at the center of our art historical world.”

Emerick is also a music buff and says one of his greatest joys is his home music center. (His eclectic musical interests range from American blues to European chamber music to Seattle grunge.) In an age of digital recordings, the self-described audiophile says he hopes to do some online reviewing of new recording formats and equipment.

Honing his language skills is another goal. Emerick says he plans to “learn modern Italian verb tenses (how does one use the subjunctive?), get better at deciphering medieval Latin and even start the study of ancient/medieval Greek.”

Sidney J. Lemelle

AS SIDNEY LEMELLE heads into the future, he’s also revisiting his past. Specifically, Lemelle, a professor of history and black studies, is delving back into his 1986 Ph.D. thesis to expand it into a new manuscript.

His thesis chronicled the history of the gold-mining industry in colonial Tanzania, from 1890 to 1942. Now he’s exploring the post-colonial period, taking the subject up to the present. “I originally looked at gold, for the most part; now I’m looking at gold, diamonds and gemstones,” says Lemelle.

He adds that it’s difficult at times to re-examine his earlier work. “You’re going back to something you’ve written many years ago, and your ideas have changed since then. It takes a little humility.”

Lemelle joined Pomona’s faculty in 1986. A four-time winner of the Wig Distinguished Professor award, he chaired the Intercollegiate Department of Black Studies from 1996 to 1998 and the History Department from 2002 to 2004. His areas of expertise include Africa and the African Diaspora in North America, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Lemelle says he’s also looking forward to teaming up with his son, Salim Lemelle, a 2009 graduate of Pomona College, who is a screenwriter and writing intern at NBC/ Universal. The two plan to collaborate on screenplays.

“I hope we can write historical dramas and that sort of thing,” says the senior Lemelle. “We’ve been tossing ideas back and forth for a long time. Now I’ve got the time where I can actually do it. I’m excited about it, and so is he.”

Laura Mays Hoopes

LAURA MAYS HOOPES is writing a second act to her long career in science: She’s transitioning from biology professor to novelist.

In her retirement, Hoopes plans to put the finishing touches on a novel she penned while earning her MFA at San Diego State University in 2013. The book’s working title is The Secret Life of Fish, and it’s about a girl growing up in North Carolina who develops an interest in science and environmental issues.

“It’s not really autobiographical but it has certain things in common with my life, because I grew up in North Carolina, and I love the beauty of the state,” says Hoopes. “And I know a lot of strange stories about North Carolina history that I was able to weave in.”

Besides exploring the topic of women in science, she tackles issues of ethnicity and Native American identity in the book. There’s also a love story.

Hoopes came to Pomona College in 1993 and served as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college until 1998, when she moved full time to the faculty. She taught both biology and molecular biology. In 2010 Hoopes wrote a memoir, Breaking Through the Spiral Ceiling: An American Woman Becomes a DNA Scientist.

Hoopes is also working on a nonfiction book. It’s a biography of two major female figures in science: Joan Steitz, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine, and Pomona graduate Jennifer Doudna ’85, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The two entered science about 20 years apart—Joan when there was a lot of discrimination against woman, and Jennifer when pretty much all the doors were open and everyone was just enchanted with her,” says Hoopes. “The whole idea is to look at key stages in their careers. It’s kind of a fun project.”

Ralph Bolton ’61

JUST AS HE DID 53 years ago in the Peace Corps, Ralph Bolton ’61 will be spending his post-Pomona years helping impoverished people in Peru.

The anthropology professor, who began teaching at Pomona in 1972, is president of the Chijnaya Foundation, which aids people in poor, rural communities in southern Peru. Created by Bolton in 2005, the organization designs and builds self-sustaining projects in health, education and economic development. Bolton does the work entirely on a volunteer basis.

“It’s extremely gratifying,” he says. “The people are very grateful. Many of these communities where we work are totally abandoned by any other nonprofit organizations or by the government agencies, and it’s one of the poorest areas of South America.”

His powerful connection to Peru first took root when he was a 22-year-old in the Peace Corps. In the small highland village of Chijnaya, he brought agrarian reform to the farming families, improving their lives dramatically. Hands-on service has always been part of Bolton’s approach as an applied anthropologist, whether he’s helping the destitute or advocating for HIV prevention.

His very popular Human Sexuality class at Pomona pioneered undergraduate discussions on AIDS and HIV when he began teaching it in the late 1980s. In 2010, he was honored with the Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology, considered the most prestigious award in his profession.

Bolton says he’ll be spending about half the year in Peru, where he’s also working with fellow anthropologists and helping develop anthropology programs in universities.

“I can barely sign in to Facebook without having a Peruvian student or colleague begin to chat with me. So while I regret the loss of my Pomona students, the slack has certainly been taken up by other students of anthropology elsewhere who are very eager to continue to benefit from whatever I have to offer.”

James Likens

JAMES LIKENS SPENT 46 years teaching economics at Pomona. In his retirement, he’ll focus more on family than finance.

“I’m very big into family history. I have more than 17,000 names in my file,” he says. “Genealogy is fun for me perhaps because it’s so different from economics. Economics is driven by numbers and theory; genealogy is driven by documents and stories.”

Likens also served as president and CEO of the Western CUNA (Credit Union National Association) Management School, a three-year program spread over two weeks each July on the Pomona College campus. Since he joined the school in 1972, its annual enrollment has more than tripled from less than 100 to more than 300.

Likens, a winner of the Wig Distinguished Professor award, chaired Pomona’s Economics Department from 1998 to 2001. He also directed the yearlong celebration of Pomona’s Centennial. Likens has long been involved in community service—he has served on nonprofit boards and task forces—and says that will continue. “I will always be involved with service. I don’t know what it will be, but I will do something. It could be a board, or it could be a soup kitchen.”

He also plans to pursue his many interests, which include traveling, golfing, painting and spending time with his family, especially his four granddaughters. In addition, he’ll be working on a memoir.

“I have mixed feelings, of course, about retiring,” says Likens. “I have been at Pomona a long time, and it’s very much a part of my life. On the other hand, I now have the opportunity to do new things, and I look forward to that.”

Rite of Passage

February 23, 2015 by Kris Dreessen Comments Off

“HAMBA MUTALIA. Haaaaa woyeee. Hamba mutalia.”

Young Humphrey walks into the center of the crowd before his traditional mud-covered home. The metal jingles on the leather strips on his wrist, making a bright snap in the air.

Surrounded by their voices, chanting softly and clapping, he leads the procession, draped in the skin and testicles of a bull sacrificed to mark this momentous change. They make a clearing for him. He stops silent before an elder, who carefully lifts off the skin. More than 100 of the boy’s family, friends and fellow villagers envelope him with whoops of joy and dance.

The next phase of his coming-of-age ceremony has begun.

The ground vibrates as they lift their hands to the sky and dance. “Hamba mutalia … Haaaaa woyeee…”

Michael Diercks, assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science at Pomona, smiles, watching the circle of bodies sway and jump. In an instant, many people reach out and pull him into the fray.

They will celebrate throughout the night, encouraging 12-year-old Humphrey to have courage for morning, when he will go with them to the river to be covered in mud, and run home for the circumcision ritual to become a man.

It is one of the most important events in Bukusu life—a rite of passage that few outsiders ever see. Humphrey’s parents trusted Diercks to share the event, and want to preserve it for future generations.

“I feel like I know more about the world than I did 24 hours ago,” says Diercks in the morning. “We were experiencing something ancient, right in the present, through their rituals and dancing and singing, that are the same things they have been practicing for ages, perhaps even hundreds of years. It was as if we were transported back in time. When you looked up in the sky in the middle of the night, it could have been 100 years ago.”

Such intimate sharing and insight into Luhya language-speaking communities is the result of a multi-year collaborative international research project, of which Diercks is a principal investigator. A team of seven American linguists are studying four small Kenyan languages—Bukusu, Wanga, Llogoori and Tiriki.

The team is supported by several grants, including a prestigious $477,000 National Science Foundation grant. Much of Diercks’ work so far was made possible by the Hirsch Research Initiation Grant from Pomona College. The team includes Pomona Linguistics and Cognitive Science Chair and Professor Mary Paster and Pomona linguistics students, as well as researchers at Ohio State University, Southern Illinois University, the University of Maryland and the University of Missouri.

While there are more than 1.6 million speakers of the four Luhya languages, they are at risk, says Diercks, as everyday life changes to a less forested area and young people move toward English and Swahili for economic advantage. One example is the circumcision itself. More families are choosing hospital circumcision over the traditional way.

“As the community changes, so does the language, and what isn’t preserved may be lost,” says Diercks.

IN THE MOST comprehensive study of each of these languages to date, the team is collecting audio recordings from Luhya speakers and analyzing tone, sentence structure and other characteristics to describe how the language works. They are also collecting folk tales, narratives, songs and many other kinds of oral literature that document language use and aspects of each culture, as well as creating dictionaries for each language. Their research will be available in open-access venues for other scholars, and for Kenyans to learn about their languages.

“In the end, we are producing description and analysis of these languages that will be theoretically relevant and useful to furthering our knowledge of how human languages work,” says Diercks, “but also producing work that will be valuable to communities, whether for its role in preserving aspects of their language and culture, or in providing resources that will be useful in educational contexts, like adult and child literacy.”

So far, the team has collected and begun to analyze more than 100 hours of audio samples by Luhya speakers. Diercks, and phonologist and co-primary investigator Michael Marlo, from the University of Missouri English Department, have spent a lot of time in Kenya fostering the close-knit relationships needed to gain trust and access to different communities.

Diercks has been to Kenya many times. Earlier this year, he spent several months with a Tiriki family, gathering interviews and training Kenyan research assistants Kelvin Alulu and linguist Maurice Sifuna to collect interviews year-round.

Back in California, the students in Paster and Diercks’ Field Methods of Linguistics course are at the center of Luhya work.

“The field methods class is a great opportunity for students to apply their knowledge of linguistic theory to real languages, which are much messier and more interesting than the data sets they see in theory courses,” says Paster. “We try to find speakers of lesser-known languages so that students have an opportunity to break new ground and publish their findings. Our students this year are doing professional-quality research and writing that will be the basis for all of our future work on Llogoori.”

“I’ve been able to have so many experiences that I would not have had at another university,” says aspiring linguist Alex Samuels ’15. “Professors need research assistants. At other places, it would be graduate students doing the work I’m doing. Here, it gets to be me, which is awesome.”

As a Summer Undergraduate Research Program scholar, Samuels also spent the summer researching aspects of Llogoori with Paster. Since there is no published grammar of Llogoori, Samuels’ final paper from the previous semester is this fall’s required reading in the advanced fields methods class. “I was really proud,” he says.

WHAT LUHYA SPEAKERS choose to share is a mixed bag. Linet Kebeya Mmbone spoke about hardships after losing her husband, and raising her children as a single mother without skills. Mungambwe talked about Llogoori history. Retired police officer Benjamin Egadwe spoke about how men used to have several wives, and changes in community since Christianity arrived.

Ultimately, the stories will be shared with community members, along with images and stories generated by a volunteer photojournalist who spent several weeks in Kenya last summer. Together, they help to create an intimate portrait of the communities in which the linguistic team works; a snapshot of who they are and what’s important to them. Back at Pomona, the photographs and portraits are connections to the stories and texts students study, 9,500 miles away.

This summer, Diercks was able to see the pride Benjamin and other Llogoori speakers have in their culture and in the language project, when Alulu organized a celebration of progress so far.

They took motorbike taxis over windy dirt paths through the forest to their village. When they arrived, Mugangwe, Egadwe, and a dozen others ran out to meet them, dressed in their finest suits and traditional kanga cloths, and singing traditional greeting songs. They had walked hours into town for a goat, which they slaughtered for the feast.

“This was a big moment for me,” says Diercks. “We spend so much of our time with individual people and then holed up analyzing the language, we don’t always get to see the whole community come together and celebrate research progress. It’s easy to focus on the academic side of things, but a celebration like this really drives home how intertwined language is with our identity, and how even small research advances matter so much to the community.”

At the celebration, Diercks also got a taste of what the project means to the Luhya speakers who have the opportunity to share. “This is how we teach our current children about how the Llogoori used to live,” says Egadwe. “Children have new customs. We feel it is good to teach them this way. Most of the old people do not remain. We are now the old people, telling our ways. This is a way to preserve our culture. We are taking good care of it.”

Mother and Warrior

September 4, 2014 by Mary E. Marvin Comments Off

thomas-400 In today’s session of Professor Valorie Thomas’s class on AfroFuturisms, the discussion focuses on a painting by Christy Freeman and how the image both represents and challenges our conceptions of motherhood and reflects the blending of African Diaspora spirituality with Christianity.

Thomas: The belief is that when you are born, everyone has a protector, an Orisha who watches over your head, your “Ori,” like a guardian spirit or a guardian angel. You might have relationships with one or more Orishas, and it is within your power as a human being to cultivate those relationships and to learn the lessons that Orisha has to teach you.

There are many Orisha and Catholic saint correspondences as a result of Africanisms encoded within Christianity. If you see images of Mary, and she’s surrounded by stars and is in this archway full of color, and she’s standing on a rock on the sea, all that ideography is consistent with Yemaya, the ocean goddess who is seen as the ultimate protector and great mother figure. So she may be respected as Mary, but the figure will also be recognized and loved as Yemaya.

Each Orisha can have dozens of paths. There’s Erzulie, a Haitian Orisha or Loa, who corresponds to the Yoruba Oshun and is also related to Yemaya. Erzulie is also connected to nurturing and motherliness, but she is the personification of love and the erotic, so she is seductive, flirtatious, loves jewelry, mirrors and sweets and wants to see people happy. But beneath that sweet façade, there’s a formidable persona. I’m going to show you a painting of Erzulie Dantor, a different side or path of this deity. I’d like to have you respond to the image first, and then I’ll tell you what fascinates me about it.

Chloe: In the heart on the crown, the top reminds me of ram’s horns, giving the sense that this is someone who is tender and warm but also can defend herself.

Thomas: Yes, this is reworking stories about the feminine, about gender, about power, breaking some of those conventional story lines that associate romance with sentimentality and weakness and docility. There’s tension that comes through that might, in other contexts, seem diametrically opposed, but in this figure they are combined. The softness and hardness; the love, the heart, but also the dagger.

Sophie: It feels like a lot more emphasis on the mother figure, but then also there’s a protective quality that I don’t think is in Western portraits. Mary isn’t usually actively protecting the baby and wielding a knife or wielding any sort of weaponry.

Thomas: What do we know as viewers about those images that you’re talking about? Where Mary’s not necessarily on watch, on guard; the child is just in his mother’s arms. How does the story end? Those images of Madonna and child, that’s the beginning of the story. We already know the ending. This is a disturbing image in that this Mary is thinking off script. It’s a stance of agency and aggression, a huge intervention on the narrative and on the established, fundamental, archetypal, Christian narrative, even though it’s still framed as Christianity.

Byron: I have a question about her necklace. I wanted to know: what’s the significance of that as a Christian icon?

Thomas: It’s a heart and what else? What is hanging below the heart?

Chloe: It could be a skull.

Byron: It looks like a nail.

Thomas: It’s silver. Is it a nail, are we agreeing that it’s a nail?

Byron: There is also something that looks like a snake.

Thomas: I’m so glad you brought up the necklace. We need to consider all those possibilities. The snake is an ancient Vodun archetype, not evil but representative of life and transformation. What about the line of that little dagger on the necklace? Where’s the line going?

Renata: It’s going right towards him.

Thomas: It’s going right towards him, right? In this case, Mary’s saying, “Well, I have a knife, too.”

Sophie: The stars in the painting also are evocative for me. It’s like faith of some sort, which maybe is nonsensical or unreasonable, because they also have resonance with anti-faith.

Thomas: In a particularly African-American or African diasporic context, how might you come to be thinking about the stars?

Sophie: A star guide for going home.

Catherine: Using the signs of the stars to move north.

Thomas: To move north because?

Catherine: Out of slavery. To freedom.

Thomas: The stars are the liberation narrative, at least back in the day of enslavement when knowing about astronomy was a useful skill in escaping and moving towards liberation. When I first saw this amazing picture it immediately tweaked my understanding of the character Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. She commits infanticide when the slave catchers are on her heels. The controversy, the tension in this story is the question: Is this motherhood? I think the painting also asks that same question. What if the knife ends up being something that is protecting the child by keeping it from the attacker who will certainly dehumanize and obliterate its spirit? Sethe says, “I wasn’t going to let them take that child, wasn’t going to let them make that child go through the monstrosity that I went through.” It redefines the terms of motherhood as not only creator but also potential destroyer; nurturer but also warrior. That’s the ultimate extreme case, extreme scenario, but it does bring the idea of the feminine principle into connection with the highest possible stakes of life and death.

Leaks and Firestorms

March 20, 2014 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

munter1

In today’s class, students discuss the firestorm ignited by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks of top secret documents last summer. Among the questions raised are: who decides what are legitimate targets for domestic and foreign surveillance; why some secrets should be protected; and whether information gathering by corporations like Google and Facebook should be part of a broader privacy debate.

Munter: I was at the Rand Corporation yesterday on a panel about secrecy and privacy. One side, I had an FBI agent, and on the other an ACLU lawyer, and I realized the reason they invited me was to be sure they didn’t rip each other’s throats out. On the domestic side, they talked about privacy and the Constitution. I suggested that many of these issues should not be limited to domestic policy, but should be part of foreign policy. I’m curious what you think of the (Snowden) revelations about spying on the American people.

Ben: If we are truly at war, we are engaged in a war on terrorism, we have a duty to understand the lay of the land; it’s our job to have a complete awareness of exactly where the enemy is, and understand the lines of communication and organization.

Munter: Let me go back to the first thing you said. You guys think we’re at war. Yes, no?

Aidan: I think it’s almost antithetical to democracy to accept that we can be on a constant war footing. Because it is true when you are in a war, democracy affords certain executive powers that are supposed to be temporary. The problem is this war has been going on for more than a decade, and it can do that because it doesn’t affect our daily lives. Mass spying on citizens inside the country and out isn’t even seen as surprising anymore.

Ben: Are you talking more about spying on foreign leaders? I’m talking about domestic spying. Foreign spying in general is kind of an accepted thing.

Munter: So this doesn’t surprise you?

Ben: Not as much, but domestic spying gets me because it’s shrouded in deep secrecy. The way the administration acted after Snowden’s revelations, trying to tarnish the guy’s name and trying to underplay how big the domestic spying programs were. The whole process itself; there is no transparency anywhere. It seems very antithetical to democracy.

Munter: There is kind of a carve-out that in exceptional times you can have exceptional measures. I don’t know if any of you know the state song of Maryland (hums it), and it has the words, the despot’s heel is at thy door/ Avenge the patriotic gore that flecked the streets of Baltimore.

Now the despot in the song is Abraham Lincoln, There were riots against Lincoln. He put the legislature in jail so they wouldn’t secede from the union. So here is our hero Abraham Lincoln who, basically for the period of the Civil War, was unconstitutional. We can say exceptional circumstances, pretty serious times. We can say 9/11 was a pretty serious time.

Jack: When you frame it about taking away constitutional liberties and the Fourth Amendment and stuff, it sounds very serious and it is. But when you contextualize it in the terms that it’s not just government doing this, it’s the private sector as well. And that, honestly, is what scares me more.

Munter: You mean when you search something in Google and it gives you commentary about what you could buy?

Michael: Google’s and Facebook’s whole business model is to own your information and to sell it. And that worries me just as much if not more.

Tom: I guess where I draw the line is that Google and Facebook can’t put you on a watch list, but the NSA can, based on information that might not necessarily be suspicious, like a search history.

Munter: What you’re saying is that we’re getting it wrong if we only worry about constitutional issues, serious or not serious as they might be, because there is something bigger, which is the technological issue, which is both inside and outside government.

Aidan: It’s such a slippery slope that there are going to be abuses and that brings up the question of either you have to have one extreme, no surveillance, or you have to recognize that it will be abused, and I think most Americans aren’t willing to have no surveillance.

Munter: So there is the permanent war footing argument and the violation of civil liberties argument. Obviously, the American public want something in between; they want to be safe and they’re willing to pay a certain price in order to be safe, but they don’t want to lose the essence of what it means to be Americans and have freedoms, which is not satisfying intellectually but pretty realistic.

Charlotte: I was going to say that it’s really a generational thing. My parents are vehemently opposed to wiretapping, domestic surveillance, where most of the people I’ve talked to don’t really care.

Munter: Because they’re used to it.

Charlotte: Yeah, we’ve grown up where everything is totally public. When it comes down to the message Snowden is making about why this is wrong, most people in my generation probably don’t relate.

Munter: There are reasons why we keep secrets. If I’m in Iraq or Libya, people tell you things in confidence, and they tell you things at the risk of their lives, and you keep that confidence because that’s your job.

Ben: When you say secrets are kept for the reason, the question is who is deciding the reason for that. Obviously, in the example you mentioned it’s for national security, people’s jobs, but I think when it strays to things that would portray the U.S. poorly or things that the U.S. is doing that are illegal, then I think that borders the line when secrets should be revealed.

Nick: My problem with Snowden was for him to take this issue into his own hands and to leak it to the public. I think it’s not really up to an individual to make that call.

Munter: Arguing uncharacteristically on Snowden’s behalf, isn’t that what a citizen is supposed to do, to some extent? Isn’t civil disobedience, from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, part of our tradition?

Nick: Unless you have a viable alternative like a legitimate pathway to share that information.

Munter: But is the issue here simply the amount of information we’re gathering? The whole point of 9/11 was that domestic and foreign intelligence had different pieces of intel and didn’t bring it together, which was part of what led to the Homeland Security that we know and love. Now that we have that, is there such a massive amount of material to deal with that no one can pick up his or her eyes and ask where we are going strategically?

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