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Is Gen Z Getting Off the Corporate Ladder?

Is Gen Z Getting Off the Corporate Ladder?

 

Is Gen Z Getting Off the Corporate Ladder?

The old career advice isn’t relevant anymore.

Start in the mailroom. Get your foot in the door. Grab a rung on the ladder and start climbing.

But what if there’s no actual office door, because your colleagues work remotely?

What if that mailroom is merely a metaphor in an age of electronic communications and AI-written emails?

Julianna Pillemer ’09

Julianna Pillemer ’09, an assistant professor of management and organizations at NYU’s Stern School of Business

And as for the ladder, who among us actually still stays at one company for decades, waiting for a gold watch and a pension?

“It’s a totally different landscape,” says Julianna Pillemer ’09, an assistant professor of management and organizations at NYU’s Stern School of Business.

A New Generation of Workers

Young workers inhabit a changed work world, and they bring very different attitudes than previous generations. The last of the baby boomers who dominated workplace culture for decades turned 60 last year and are moving toward retirement. A decade ago millennials became the largest generation in the U.S. workforce, surpassing Gen X. Just two years ago, the boomers were eclipsed by Gen Z, those born from 1997 to 2010.

What do young workers want? Among the key values identified in a 2023 survey directed by Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business was that workers ages 24 to 35 prioritized flexibility and work-life balance.

That rings true to Hazel Raja, senior director of Pomona’s Career Development Office (CDO)—a Gen Xer who encouraged the office book club to read millennial author Lindsey Pollak’s The Remix: How to Lead and Succeed in the Multigenerational Workplace, so that the CDO team could better understand both the job seekers they counsel and their own colleagues.

The Remote Work Revolution

The pandemic ushered in the era of telecommuting, but many young people who experienced the isolation of the COVID shutdown have come to crave in-person collaboration, while also appreciating the versatility of hybrid work options.

“I think there’s this feeling of wanting the best of both worlds, to have days in the office where you can connect with the community but also the flexibility to say, ‘I’m working from home today,’” Raja says.

Even after return-to-work calls following the pandemic, remote work is entrenched in many organizations. Folks with bachelor’s degrees have benefited most: 52 percent of college graduates now work remotely some or all of the time, compared to 35 percent of the overall workforce.

Hybrid jobs offer potential gains for work-life balance. Yet NYU’s Pillemer—who earned a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and studies workplace relationships—says friendships can be key sources of motivation and support at work when managed effectively.

“I think this is often what leads to work feeling like a community, a place where you don’t have to hide who you are,” she says, noting her research on the concept of “strategic authenticity,” which involves finding the right balance between self-disclosure and professionalism at work. “I think there might be a disconnect between how little this younger generation is thinking these relationships matter and how much they actually do matter to their workplace happiness.”

Gen Z workers say they yearn for more in-person connection, but that it doesn’t have to be with colleagues. Now trending: meetup activities such as book clubs and hiking groups, and even platonic matchmaking apps like Bumble BFF.

Cohen ‘81 spoke in her TED talk about how to transition back into the workforce after career breaks.

Still, remote workers may miss out not only on networking and friendships but also on mentoring, says Carol Fishman Cohen ’81, a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and co-founder and CEO of iRelaunch, a career re-entry company.

“To be in the office side-by-side with more seasoned professionals and have informal interactions with people is part of how you learn,” Cohen says. “You stop by someone’s office or walk out together from a meeting, and that’s where relationships are built and knowledge is transferred. If early-stage professionals don’t get to have that experience, it’s going to be much more difficult for them to learn what they need to know.”

Next-Gen Feelings

Liz Fosslien ’09 has spent nearly 20 years creating thoughtful, whimsical illustrations for publications such as The Economist, The New York Times and TIME. Often focusing on the topic of emotions as they apply to professional paths and workplace environments, she co-authored and illustrated the national best-seller Big Feelings and its follow-up No Hard Feelings, as well as helping illustrate Adam Grant’s New York Times bestseller Hidden Potential. Throughout this issue we’ll be featuring some of her illustrations that have resonated most strongly with younger generations, particularly those revolving around “the concept of giving yourself grace during hard times.”

A Sense of Purpose

Work-life balance is no longer something people focus on only once they have kids and a household to run. Many Pomona students are thinking ahead, evaluating career choices by considering their personal priorities—sometimes choosing a city and then finding a job instead of finding a job and moving to that city—as well as by seeking more meaning in their work.

Raja says many students these days are often much more driven by things they’re passionate about, though she notes some students from less-advantaged backgrounds may still feel the need to maximize the financial return on their education.

“Generally, there’s not this aim for a ‘35 years of service’ pin,” she says. “More students are anchored by their values being met and doing work that is personally fulfilling.”

Nate Dailey ’23

Nate Dailey ’23, a high school senior when his family fled Paradise, California, in the early morning hours of the November 2018 “Camp Fire,” is one example of melding professional skills with personally meaningful work. He arrived on campus less than a year after his family’s home was one of nearly 19,000 structures destroyed in the deadliest wildfire in California history.

After majoring in computer science, Dailey embarked on a career in wildfire science as a research analyst for Deer Creek Resources, which helps communities and landowners prepare for wildfire. There he developed a computer model to detect overgrown parcels from roadside imagery that aids in both vegetation management and evacuation planning.

“I was really inspired to pursue something that was connected to the Camp Fire, and also my interest in computers and maps,” Dailey recently told Professor Char Miller in a Sagecast podcast. “Now I’ve been able to put it all together, and I think my Pomona education really helped me with that.”

Another key differentiator for the next generation of workers is that if a job isn’t right for whatever reason, today’s young people are not afraid to move on. While job-hopping once was a resume red flag, Raja and others say that applicants are now more likely to raise eyebrows if they stay too long, potentially suggesting that they don’t have other opportunities.

According to U.S. Labor Department statistics, in early 2024 the median time workers had been with current employers was only 3.9 years—the shortest tenure recorded since 2002. While the average job-stay for older workers was almost 10 years, for workers ages 25-34 it was a mere 2.7 years.

Camille Molas ’21, co-president of the New York City Alumni Chapter with her husband, Diego Vergara ’20, sees that phenomenon around her.

“A lot of people are on their third job already,” she says. “A friend of Diego’s already is on his fourth. Younger people are just more willing to say, ‘I’m out. This is not working for me.’” (See page 27 for more on Molas.)

Seeking Balance Beyond Wall Street

Camille Molas ’21Camille Molas ’21 landed a coveted Wall Street investment banking job before she graduated from Pomona. The entry-level role with JPMorganChase paid her in the low six figures with the potential for five-figure bonuses and a big future.

She left after only a year, jumping to Knowde, a startup focused on building software for the chemical industry.

The reason wasn’t only the famously grueling hours that Wall Street firms expect from young graduates.

“I was learning a lot and it was super interesting, but I felt like I was missing a certain something of actually building stuff,” says Molas, who completed the astrophysics track in the physics major at Pomona and spent her time with JPMorgan covering companies in industries such as aerospace, defense and chemicals. “These are already massive corporations that are no longer thinking about things like how you go from zero to one. I was really drawn to learning, ‘How do you even get things off the ground?’”

As part of the new Gen Z workforce, she also had expectations about balance, flexibility and personally meaningful work.

“I think what moved the needle for me to leave investment banking was that work-life balance,” she says. “It just kind of consumes your life.”

Working 80 or more hours a week is routine, and despite pledges by Wall Street firms to limit demands after the 2024 death of a junior investment banker at Bank of America who had been putting in 100-hour weeks, a Wall Street Journal investigation found some managers continued to pressure junior bankers to hide excessive hours.

“It’s not necessarily that you are working nonstop, [but] that you’re required to be ‘on’ all the time, which is almost worse,” Molas says. “It could be 14 hours one day, then eight, then 12 on the weekend. You’re not able to anticipate when you can be free.”

Don’t mistake her decision to leave Wall Street as a lack of ambition. Her ultimate goal:

“I would like to start a company.”

While working full time, she also has enrolled in a part-time remote master’s program in computer science at Georgia Tech to be able to better translate between the business and engineering sides of a company.

“I’m very big on understanding and being able to communicate, and think it’s important to know the language,” Molas says. “I want to make sure that I have at least the framework of where the tech people are coming from. There are always going to be the businesspeople and the engineers. You really need someone who can talk to both.”

Uncertain Outlook

While younger generations are being given more grace for job-hopping, their prospects aren’t uniformally positive. This year there were many headlines lamenting the job market for the Class of 2025 and, for the first time in decades, unemployment rates for college graduates under 27 have surpassed the overall average. Even the typically staid Economist chimed in with “Why Today’s Graduates Are Screwed.”

Factors include everything from federal spending cuts to the explosive rise of artificial intelligence, which experts say will affect entry-level jobs most because of more replicable tasks such as coding, number-crunching and summary writing. Despite that, Raja says she has seen such admirable adaptability for Sagehen job seekers.

“While it’s nice to be able to get a job at Amazon or Apple or Google, I think students like ours are versatile enough to say, ‘Well, I have these tech skills I could apply to another industry,’” she says. “‘Maybe a lot of the values I have are still being met because I’m not only working in an area that I’m actually interested in, but I’m making the same salary or I’m still building my network.’”

Ultimately, it may be the massive uncertainty in academia brought on by new federal policies that will have the largest impact on Pomona alumni, considering that one in four respondents from Pomona’s Class of 2024 First Destinations Report said they were headed straight to graduate school. In addition, many alumni who enter the workforce right out of college pursue a graduate degree within five years, Raja says.

Federal research grant cuts and wrangling over student visas and policies such as DEI mean some jobs and graduate school opportunities that used to be stable have evaporated, particularly in STEM fields and for international alumni. Proposals to limit federal loans for graduate students could also have a chilling effect, particularly on those seeking expensive medical degrees.

The impact on academia is likely to be felt by more than just graduate students: In Pomona’s 2023 Alumni and Family Attitude Survey, higher education was the number one job sector reported by alumni, ahead of science and medicine (36 vs. 27 percent).

Pillemer says most of her undergraduate business students at NYU remain focused on finance, consulting and tech, though they also are keenly aware of the potential to pursue more independent career paths such as internet content creation, entrepreneurship and gig work.

“As a scholar I’m reckoning with things like how we think about work and how organizations are structured, especially in a future when ‘employees’ could be bots and people are striking out on their own as entrepreneurs or influencers,” Pillemer says. “As students grapple with an uncertain job market and these sweeping changes in the way we work, they’re asking themselves, ‘What do I value?’ ‘What’s meaningful to me?’ And ‘How am I going to get paid to do it?’”

When the Baby Boom Went Bust

When the Baby Boom Went Bust

When the Baby Boom Went Bust

After a long, slow slide that began in the era of petticoats and suffragettes, the American fertility rate recently reached a new nadir. In 2023 U.S. moms birthed 3.6 million babies—about 76,000 fewer than the year before and one of the lowest totals since 1979.

A University of Chicago professor, Heffington ‘09 has written about motherhood and women’s movements for TIME, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

A University of Chicago professor,
Heffington ‘09 has written about motherhood and women’s movements for TIME, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

It was a low-water mark that hinted at a bigger sea change. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center study, between 2018 and 2023 the share of adults under 50 who have no children and say they are unlikely to ever do so rose from 37 to (what else?) 47 percent. Fertility is falling in “basically every county: rich and poor, rural and urban,” says University of Chicago historian Peggy Heffington ’09, who studies contemporary and historical motherhood and reproduction. In 1970, the American fertility rate was about 2.5, above the replacement rate of 2. Today, it sits around 1.6.

Academics and parents themselves agree: this is a remarkably arduous moment to raise a child in the United States. But women opting not to have children is nothing new. In her book Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother, Heffington traces the history of non-motherhood from ancient Roman women who used lemons as ad-hoc diaphragms, through abstinent medieval nuns, and all the way to the present. “It felt important to me as a historian to establish that there is significant evidence of women limiting fertility for a very long time,” she says. “As long as people have been trying to have babies, they have been trying not to have babies.”

Still, many factors make parenting feel particularly difficult in 2025, including economic struggles, gender inequities, climate anxiety, mental health concerns and shifting expectations of community support. These accumulating challenges have been central to an increasingly common choice for young people of parenting age: not to parent at all.

Factor 1: Money talks

More than one-third of respondents to the 2024 Pew survey cited money concerns as a major reason for deciding against parenthood. The financial landscape for young people is tough, to say the least: a 2016 study from the Center for Household Financial Stability found that median millennial savings were 34 percent below what historic trends would predict; in a recent survey by the financial platform Step, more than one-third of Gen Z respondents reported running out of money every month.

Shadiah Sigala ’06

Among the many costs of raising a new human, child care has emerged as especially exorbitant. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, American families pay upward of one-sixth of their median income on care for just one child—as much or more than what most pay for rent or mortgage. As tech entrepreneur Shadiah Sigala ’06 puts it, “You can see how with two or three children the calculus becomes absolutely untenable.”

On top of the cost of child care is its availability: over half of Americans live in “child care deserts,” with low-income rural and communities of color disproportionately impacted. This issue inspired Sigala to found Kinside, which provides a marketplace connecting families to caregivers in their area, helps companies build child care into their employee benefits, and works with local governments to improve larger care ecosystems.

But more accessible child care doesn’t help those who struggle to get pregnant in the first place. Fertility issues afflict many aspiring mothers, and while technologies like in-vitro fertilization (IVF) have opened up many new possibilities, they don’t come cheap, with a single round of IVF costing some $20,000. Heffington argues that, for some, such technologies actually “increase the pain of infertility in offering a promise where previously there was nothing you could do.”

Empathy Across Generations With Prof. Jessica Stern ‘12

By Lorraine Wu Harry ’97

Jessica Stern ’12

This spring a child development paper from assistant professor Jessica Stern ’12 was selected by University of California at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center as one of 2024’s “most provocative and influential findings on the science of a meaningful life.” We talked to Stern to learn more about her paper “Empathy across three generations.”

What is your study’s central research question?

Adolescents get a bad rap. The misconception goes something like this: Teens are self-focused, easily pressured to do bad things by their peers, and lacking mature social skills like empathy. But does the evidence bear this out?

Not really. In our observations, teens are deeply engaged in supporting others, particularly their friends, and peer interactions often encourage them to be prosocial. Our research team wanted to understand: How do teens learn empathy? How is empathy transmitted across generations? And what’s the role of teenage friendships?

How did you collect the data?

The KLIFF VIDA longitudinal study, led by the University of Virginia, began in 1998. We tracked 184 teens from age 13 into their mid-30s, and every year invited teens to the lab with their parents and closest friend, and recorded videos of their interactions. When teens were 13 we observed them talking to their moms about a problem they could use help on, and tracked how much empathy moms showed during that conversation. We looked for things like how emotionally engaged the mom was, whether she had an accurate understanding of the teen’s problem, and how much help and emotional support she provided.

Then, every year for seven years, we observed teens talking to their closest friend about a problem their friend needed help with. We looked for those same types of empathic behaviors in how the teen treated their friends. When some of those same teens were starting to have kids of their own about a decade later, we sent them surveys asking about their parenting behavior and their children’s empathy.

What were your key findings?

We found that teens who experienced more empathy from their mothers at age 13 were more likely to “pay it forward” by showing empathy for their friends in adolescence. For the teens who later had children, practicing empathy with close friends in late adolescence predicted more supportive parenting behavior a decade later. We were able to see how empathy is transmitted across three generations.

Our message is this: if we want to raise empathic teens, we need to give them firsthand experiences of receiving empathy from adults at home. More than lectures or pressure, teens need to feel what it’s like to be understood and supported. This gives them a model of empathy in action.

We also hope [to] give parents peace of mind, knowing that teens’ desire to hang out with friends is a boon for their social development (and perhaps their future success as caregivers). Supporting teens to cultivate close friendships may be important for them to hone their social skills by practicing caregiving for their friends.

Factor 2: Balancing the load

As she discusses the current state of non-parenthood, Heffington cites a Pew survey statistic she finds telling: 45 percent of women said they wanted kids in the future, compared to 57 percent of men. “What we’re seeing is not that women like babies less than they did,” she says. “It’s that they’re very aware of who’s going to be doing the work, whose career is going to take the hit, and who will do the vast majority of mental labor.”

LOW FERTILITY RATES

While the share of millennials who will never be parents is likely to climb to the highest in history, for now the generation with the lowest fertility rates in U.S. history is still those born between 1900 and 1910 who reached their childbearing years during the Great Depression. Amidst deep economic upheaval, a world war and a flu pandemic that killed millions, many women decided that now was not the time to create new life.

In fact, Heffington says that one-half to one-third of Depression-era pregnancies were aborted. “It’s only reasonable that people were looking around and thinking, ‘I can’t feed the kids I have; it doesn’t make sense to bring a child into this situation,’” she says.

That dynamic is familiar to Karen Magoon Pearson ’05, who adopted four children with her husband. As a couple, they seek to be egalitarian in their sharing of household chores, and mostly succeed. But, like many mothers, Magoon Pearson has been tasked with nearly all the intangibles: keeping track of the kids’ schedules and school workloads, planning outings, problem-solving and managing the logistics of a six-person family. “Emotional labor, the mental load; the code hasn’t fully been cracked there, even when both people want it to be,” she says.

Sigala, who now has two children, has also struggled in that arena. She experienced deep postpartum depression after her first child, exacerbated by a lack of support from her then-husband. “Mothers are the nucleus and the electrons; they’re keeping everything together,” she says. “They’re called to be many, many elements in the atom. And they’re just breaking.”

Although the twin concepts of mental load and emotional labor have finally entered the collective conversation, Heffington argues that that awareness is not enough to counter the deeply ingrained expectations that befall mothers. “Women have become more aware of the effect [parenting] will have on their lives, their marriages, their careers,” Heffington says, “and are increasingly thinking that it’s not a good trade-off.”

Factor 3: A hostile climate

The changing climate has also had profound effects on people’s parenting proclivities. In the 2024 Pew study, one in four respondents said their choice to not have children was primarily for “environmental reasons,” while 38 percent cited a slightly broader “state of the world.” (Cue meme of “gesturing broadly at everything.”)

Jade S. Sasser ’97 (Photo by Matthew Reiter Photography)

These choices are not evenly distributed among young people, notes Jade Sasser ’97, an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at University of California, Riverside. Surveys by the Yale Center for Climate Communications consistently find that people of color experience more emotional distress—and suffer from more clinically diagnosable mental health issues—due to climate change. Their fertility decisions are also more likely to reflect that experience. In a 2020 survey, 41 percent of Latino respondents and 30 percent of Black respondents cited climate change as a factor in why they did not have children, compared to 21 percent of white respondents.

This trend was compelling enough to inspire Sasser to write a book about it. Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question explores younger generations’ fear and grief around the climate emergency, the ways that people of color are disproportionately impacted, and the reproductive decisions that result.

One of Sasser’s more surprising findings was that young people are less fixated on the negative impacts their hypothetical children will have on the planet, than on the negative impacts the planet will have on their children. That is, in previous decades people who cited environmental factors in their fertility decisions were usually considering issues like overpopulation and pollution—how bringing a new human into the world would damage their surroundings. Now, the feeling is that the damage has been done, and the fears focus more on how the consequences will affect quality of life for a new generation.

Many people Sasser interviewed wanted children but felt that subjecting new humans to the potential horrors of climate change felt unethical. “If I had kids amidst a catastrophe like a hurricane, I would be worried every day,” one woman told Sasser. Would she be able to keep them safe?

MORE ‘HUMANE’
To Not Create
MORE HUMANS?

In 1969 Mills College valedictorian Stephanie Mills gave a speech eulogizing the children she felt ethically bound not to have: “I’m terribly saddened by the fact that the most humane thing for me to do is have no children at all,” she told onlookers.

In contrast to many of today’s parental-environmental concerns, women like Mills were concerned about the polluting impact and resource-intensiveness of new babies—the impact their children would have on the environment, rather than the impact the environment would have on their children.

The year before, author Paul Ehrlich had published The Population Bomb, predicting dire effects for a runaway population: pollution, starvation, widespread destruction. The book contributed to widespread anxiety among women like Mills, who felt the best choice they could make was to opt out of motherhood and not add to the problem.

Although climate anxiety and grief are common across race and socioeconomic strata, people of color experience them more strongly due to structural inequities, Sasser says. (In her book, she points to one potent example; a report analyzing FEMA records from 1999 to 2013, which found that 85 percent of post-disaster buyouts went to white families.) “Climate change seems to be a threat multiplier,” she explains, “meaning that the other reasons people have for either not wanting children or being ambivalent are compounded by emotional responses to climate change—and that’s worse for young people from marginalized communities.”

Factor 4: The parenting happiness gap

One hot take you won’t hear on Oprah: American parents seem to consistently report feeling less happy than people without children. (Specifically, 12.7 percent less happy, according to a 2016 meta-analysis of adults across 22 countries.) Heffington says that, in the U.S. at least, there is no kind of parent—new parents in the thick of it, empty nesters, step-parents—that is, on average, happier than people without children.

The so-called “happiness gap” is particularly acute for women, which Sigala and others attribute to the true emotional weight of motherhood and the opportunities young women give up by having children. Since full-time child care can often cost as much as a professional woman earns, Sigala says that women around her often feel the “pernicious, intractable” pressure to step away from work and care for their children or families. “You can see how it starts to pile up, and before you know it, women are hugely disadvantaged in their professional lives and their ability to have strength and freedom,” she says.

Still, data from Europe suggests that, while raising children is challenging everywhere, the kids themselves are not the problem. In a meta-analysis, researchers found that in countries such as France, Finland, Norway and Sweden, the gap disappears or is even reversed, with parents reporting that they are happier than non-parents by up to 8 percent. Their results showed that a few simple factors make this paradigm possible: vacation time, parental leave, sick leave, and affordable or free child care. “It doesn’t require massive infrastructure,” Heffington says. “Just dialing down some of the pressure American parents experience could make a huge difference.”

GET THEE TO A NUNNERY

In 1869 Arabella Mansfield was the first woman to pass the bar to become a lawyer. This milestone was a sign of a larger trend: women gaining better access to education and entering the workforce in increasing numbers.

In response, starting around 1900, both private companies and government entities began instituting “marriage bars” that banned married women from the workplace. These bans, which stemmed in part from racist fears around a plunging white birth rate, were common in industries such as insurance, publishing and banking, but in some cases were implemented statewide. A 1935 Wisconsin resolution called working married women “a calling card for disintegration of family life.”

Single women picketing a relief headquarters in Boston, 1935 (Bettmann Archive)

Heffington says that marriage bars were intended to force women to go back to domestic spaces after they got married, which is “often exactly what they did.” But a growing number chose instead to delay marriage or opt out of family life altogether—either to pursue their professional priorities or because they could not afford the economic costs of ceasing work.

 

Factor 5: Losing the village

In writing her history of non-parenthood, Heffington found that she was actually writing a story about the transformation of the American home, a transition “from something deeply embedded in community structures offering support to the isolated nuclear family.” Although the familiar single-biological-unit structure might seem inevitable from our perspective, work from Pomona professor emerita Helena Wall shows that alternative configurations were flourishing in North America as recently as 400 years ago. “Colonial Americans understood the family only in context of community, with women from throughout a community taking active part in raising children,” Heffington explains. “They spent their whole lives passing in and out of each other’s houses.”

But during the 19th century, a major demographic shift found young people flocking from rural to urban areas for factory jobs—away from those support systems and toward the smaller, suburbanized nuclear family so typical today. Heffington sees today’s millennial experience as an extension of that shift. “We’ve replaced community support structures with ones you have to pay for, with relatively predictable results in terms of fertility,” she says.

Indeed, the loss of the proverbial “village” it once took to raise a child is significantly impacting younger generations’ parental reluctance. For example, while a network of relatives and neighbors watched over Sigala during her childhood, as a young adult she lived in a succession of different cities, each time starting anew and alone. “When my friends have grandparents around to take the kids, even one day per week, I’m very envious,” she says. And babysitting neighbors? As extinct as the dinos and the dodos.

Magoon Pearson also struggled with a lack of support after her oldest child’s academic troubles led her to homeschooling; not long after, the pandemic found her at home teaching all four children. “By the end of that year, I just couldn’t do it anymore,’” she remembers. Continued changes to parenting norms only intensified the difficulty. During her own childhood, she often spent time independently at friends’ houses or birthday parties. “It wasn’t like parents were expected to be everywhere all the time, doing everything their kids were doing,” she says. “Now, you kind of are, so you never get a break.”

Missing Community

One of Heffington’s favorite historical examples of non-motherhood comes from French Colonial Canada. Birth records from the 16th and 17th centuries tell a powerful story about the importance of community support in parenting. Demographers studying the era noticed that the farther a woman moved from her mother, the fewer children she was likely to have—up to four fewer children if she lived more than 200 miles away. Those children were also more likely to die early in their lives, while children whose mothers stayed closer to home had better odds of surviving until adulthood.

Heffington sees this pattern as proof of how much impact a woman’s community had on her parenting capacity. “It’s not just about where her mother was but about the community, about how important support networks are for people having kids and for those kids being able to thrive.”

Next steps: should we (population) panic?

Since President Trump started his second term, his administration has taken a staunchly pronatalist approach. Vice President JD Vance has spoken disdainfully of “childless cat ladies” while Trump touts $5,000 “baby bonuses” for mothers-to-be.

Sasser interprets it all as part of a larger, politics-driven “population panic”—and one that she treats with a heavy dose of skepticism.

Indeed, while Magoon Pearson feels some anxiety when she considers a future with fewer children—what will happen to Social Security? Will there be enough young people to keep the gears of society moving?—she rejects the idea that the childfree are inherently selfish, citing family and friends who instead spend their time on other meaningful endeavors. With four children’s lives to manage, and so many places where the world needs help or healing, “I’m bogged down with this anxiety that I’m not doing enough, stuck at home,” she says. “Thank goodness there’s people out there with the time and energy I don’t have!”

Sasser, Heffington and others argue that any supposed population crisis is at best overblown, and at worst manufactured. While some East Asian countries are indeed seeing small towns depopulating and villages with no children, the U.S. has “the privilege of being a place where people want to come to raise their families,” Heffington says.

Zooming out, the larger context is that fertility rates tend to reliably settle under 2 across time and cultures as women get more access to education, contraception and professional opportunities.

Heffington suggests that policymakers could look to the European countries with happier parents for a model of how to make parenting healthier. France and Sweden, for example, have built infrastructures conducive to parenting that include paid and extended maternity leave, prenatal care, free child health care and subsidized daycare. “If you’re forcing women to choose—whether it’s because of professional ambition or economic survival—some are going to choose not to have kids,” Heffington says. “If you make it easier for them to have both, they’re going to have both.”

Alternative Paths

Although they might not have explained their choices in so many words, medieval nuns have their own unique role in the history of non-motherhood. Heffington says that medieval biographies of saints showed these women to be “very clear from a very young age that they do not want to be wives or mothers, and [that] the path they choose is the only other option available to them.”

At that time, girls from good families would have been married off in their teens or younger, with the expectation that they begin birthing heirs soon after. But the convent offered an alternative, respectable path, where teaching and serving God was just as valuable as marriage and family. Many engaged in scholarship and mentorship, and became advisors to kings or emperors.

Their biographies portray this as a valid choice to “spend their time doing other things,” Heffington says. “Some of these women built lives that were clearly very rewarding—and didn’t include motherhood.”

The Kids Are All Right … With Their Feelings

The Kids Are All Right … With Their Feelings

The Kids Are All Right … With Their Feelings

The numbers tell a sobering story. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for 10- to 24-year-olds—a hefty chunk of Gen Z— suicide is the second leading cause of death and has increased more than 50 percent since 2000. Across a range of psychological surveys Gen Z often is found to be the loneliest, most anxious, depressed and heavily medicated generation ever.

Many mental health professionals call it a crisis—but perhaps there is also a crisis of perception.

Gen Z folks—and, to some extent, their millennial elders—have often been slapped with disparaging labels like “the Anxious Generation,” “the Therapist Generation” or even “the Snowflake Generation.” While no one can contest the heartbreaking stats on suicide, loneliness and depression, another thing that can’t be dismissed is Gen Z’s ability to adapt to adversity. They report being sadder, but—based on conversations with several mental health professionals in the field—in many ways they are also braver.

We recently spoke to three experts on the topic:

  • Pomona College Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students for Academic and Personal Success Tracy Arwari
  • Crisis Systems Medical Director at King County, Washington Dr. Matthew L. Goldman ’08
  • Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Clinical Director Jasmine Lamitte ’08 (below), author of The Black Mental Health Workbook: Break the Stigma, Find Space for Reflection, and Reclaim Self-Care

Today’s young adults have had more than their fair share of battle wounds. They were a key casualty of COVID-19, both in actual deaths—approximately 15 million worldwide—and in the wrap-around effects of the pandemic on their mental health. When some of your most formative years are spent communicating via screens, the consequences are sharply felt.

“Psychosocial development was basically stalled for a period of time for a lot of kids,” says Goldman. “The increased use of services, and increased suicidality among youth, suggests that COVID was absolutely a catalyst for worsening the youth mental health crisis.”

Jasmine Lamitte ’08

Jasmine Lamitte ’08, author of The Black Mental Health Workbook: Break the Stigma, Find Space for Reflection, and Reclaim Self-Care

Lamitte agrees, pointing specifically to something she noticed when schools reopened: Young people who had isolated at home had missed key developmental milestones, leading to behavioral challenges and a huge uptick in both social and generalized anxiety.

The social isolation may be exacerbated by increased digital connection. Social media and digital connectivity certainly have their benefits in increasing awareness of challenges that other young people might be going through.

Although Lamitte is encouraged by Gen Z’s growing comfort talking about mental health, she says that platforms such as TikTok have rampant misinformation that can lead users to self-diagnose and feel like they can handle things on their own without therapy.

Tracy Arwari

Pomona College Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students for Academic and Personal Success Tracy Arwari

Arwari says that help-seeking behavior has become much more ubiquitous on campus in recent years, which she attributes to Pomona’s own proactive efforts toward outreach and prevention, as well as a larger societal trend toward being open around mental health and self-care.

“Ten or 15 years ago, you did your best to tread water on your own and you had to have quiet faith that this, too, would pass,” she says.

Experts see a greater willingness among Gen Z to seek therapy earlier and more consistently, versus waiting until things get intensely challenging.

“With my generation, the process started in college or after,” says Lamitte. “Now kids are coming out in high school and exploring trauma they’ve experienced, to not necessarily carry that burden by themselves.”

While some label Gen Z as “the Therapist Generation” with disdain, Goldman considers it a net positive that there’s been such a banishment of stigma, which translates to prioritization of funding for mental health services, not to mention greater receptivity to treatment and more engagement in the healing process.

Lamitte adds that younger generations are increasingly open to exploring different modalities that they may have first encountered on social media, including mindfulness meditation and “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.”

Illustration by Liz Fosslien ’09

The experts argue that Gen Z has gotten increasingly comfortable being vulnerable about everything from anxiety to past trauma.

New Models of Care: What Systems Need to Catch Up

If the youth have caught up with the times, the systems unfortunately have not. Goldman says that the greatest barriers to care are the lack of services plus access. It’s a bind: there aren’t enough youth mental health services in general, much less ones that insurance will pay for. Complicating an already knotty situation is that pediatricians are often the ones prescribing medications for youth, without extra training in mental health or psychiatry.

“They’re doing their best and want to help, but often end up using the tools that they have at their disposal, like medications,” says Goldman. “There is plenty of data showing overprescription of psychiatric meds among kids.”

While many kids absolutely need the meds, data suggests widespread overprescription of antipsychotic medication that’s especially acute for children who are Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), including boys who are involved in a juvenile justice or foster care system. Goldman says that this form of “diagnostic overshadowing”—in which BIPOC folks are more likely to be diagnosed with a psychotic disorder or more serious mental illness—often can mask other diagnoses such as trauma or complex trauma.

Concern regarding mental health among youth in general is appropriately high. In King County, where Goldman serves as medical director for its crisis systems, there will soon be a 24-7 youth crisis facility with both urgent care and higher acuity units.

Given that dedicated behavioral health facilities tend to be much more effective at crisis care than in emergency departments or general hospitals, Goldman hopes that policymakers nationwide see the need to cover the gaps in care and support these crisis stabilization services. He cites Washington state’s requirement for commercial payment, which creates alternatives to sitting in an emergency room for hours or days waiting to be seen, or getting involved in a criminal legal system where people end up unnecessarily incarcerated.

Goldman says it’s also critical to have an outpatient system that can receive people in the aftermath of a crisis. Post-crisis follow-up resources tend to be quite limited. Someone may receive good care during the crisis, but then face a lot of post-discharge barriers to being able to access ongoing support to prevent future relapse.

“There’s a risk of them falling through the cracks again,” says Goldman.

To mitigate that risk, King County is investing in post-crisis follow-up services that are dedicated to the aftermath of a crisis, so that anyone who comes through the crisis centers has access to ongoing care. It’s based on one of the leading national models for youth crisis response, Mobile Response and Stabilization Services, or MRSS, a youth-specific model that comes from Connecticut; it is a field-based, community-based crisis response.

“Your anxiety or despair may sometimes be so overwhelming that you can’t see anything else. But it won’t be like that forever. There can still be lighter times ahead.” —Liz

If a young person or a parent calls into a crisis hotline like 988 or other local hotlines or a teen-specific hotline, and the call taker is concerned that the level of the crisis is more acute or severe than what can be handled on the phone, then they might dispatch a mobile response-type resource. While a lot of places have a general mobile crisis response that serves both adults and youth, the gold standard model is to have dedicated youth-specialized mobile teams, Goldman says.

“They’ll do the initial mobile response, but then they’ll also continue to support that child for six to eight to even up to 12 weeks after the initial mobile response,” he says. “And the idea is that it’s the team that does the initial mobile response that makes that initial bond with both the child and their family and then can continue to support them for that extended period.”

Sometimes that’s all that you need, Goldman says. Long-term outpatient or any other kind of community support isn’t always necessary because if it’s a crisis that’s related to something situational or circumstantial—bereavement, some event that happens—then youth can eventually do really well.

What Gives Us Hope

Gen Z’s crisis overwhelms, but there is hope rising nonetheless. For Lamitte, it’s their early pursuit of healing. For Goldman, it’s young people’s openness and receptivity. And for Arwari, it’s Gen Z’s commitment to kindness, camaraderie and advocacy.

“There is a lot in this world that can feel like doom and gloom at every turn,” she says. “But the thing that gives me hope is witnessing the way that students will hold each other up [and make] a rooted good faith effort to be kind to one another. The kids are all right.”

“It’s easy to equate success with visible achievements like a promotion or a new job. But it’s important to acknowledge and celebrate all growth, especially when it comes to mental health and well-being.” —Liz

SageChat Across Generations

SageChat Across Generations thumbnail

We asked the same set of questions to 3 individual alums from 55, 30 and 5 years ago, as well as 4 couples across multiple generations. Ahead, our super-scientific results.


How did you meet?
Larry Hauser ’64 and Barbara Hauser ’65: We met in 1962-1963 at a “Served Dinner” at Frary Dining Hall, where a vigorous courtship ensued with lots of coffee dates that had to be completed by the 10 p.m. curfew.

Classes of 1964 & 1965

Larry Hauser ’64 and Barbara Hauser ’65 Larry Hauser ’64 and Barbara Hauser ’65

Richard Bookwaiter ’82 and Galen Leung ’82:
We met as first-years when we were both elected to the Freshman Dorm Council representing Oldenborg and Walker, respectively.
Rob Ricketts ’97 and Karla Romero ’97:
We met in January 1996 in Harwood Basement. Rob was a transfer student, and Karla was his assigned sponsor.
Kai Fukutaki ’17 and Sameen Boparai ’17:
While we first met during Orientation Adventure in Sequoia, we didn’t start hanging out until we crossed paths in the social dance clubs, including ballroom dance.


What is your favorite Pomona College
memory together?

Hauser and Hauser: Our “Pinning Ceremony”—the entire Zeta Chi Sigma Fraternity marched down to South Campus and sang a romantic serenade at Mudd-Blaisdell, marking the start of our lifelong journey together.
Bookwaiter and Leung: After the “Survivors’ Party” for students who had made it through the fall, we were the only two who showed up on the cleaning committee.

Class of 1982

Richard Bookwaiter ’82 and Galen Leung ’82 Richard Bookwaiter ’82 and Galen Leung ’82

Ricketts and Romero: Harwood Halloween, where we saw a relevantly unknown opening act called the Black Eyed Peas.
Fukutaki and Boparai: During senior week in San Diego, we put our liberal arts degrees to good use: we won pub trivia, sang karaoke and had our ecology friends help us identify tide pool creatures!


How long have you been together?

Hauser and Hauser: Married 60 years! We just attended Barbara’s 60th Pomona reunion and are forever bonded to this beautiful campus with all of its memories.

Bookwaiter and Leung: 34 years! By the end of our senior year we knew we wanted to be together. We married in August 2008.

Ricketts and Romero: We’ve been together since May 1996, with one brief intermission in 1998-99. We found our way back to each other, and have been inseparable ever since.

Class of 1997

Karla Romero ’97 and Rob Ricketts ’97 Karla Romero ’97 and Rob Ricketts ’97

Fukutaki and Boparai: 9 years! We immediately had to do two years of long-distance after college but fortunately both ended up in Seattle for graduate school.


What is your secret to a successful relationship?

Hauser and Hauser: Patience, optimism and a sense of firm commitment. Per philosopher Brian Andreas: “I’m deciding everything is falling into place perfectly, as long as you don’t get too picky about what you mean by ‘place’. Or ‘perfectly.’”

Bookwaiter and Leung: Our relationship has lasted over 34 years because we are able to communicate with each other.

Ricketts and Romero: Relationships aren’t about being right—they’re about growing together. Also, we laugh a lot. Humor keeps things light even when things get heavy. We don’t agree on everything or spend every waking moment together, but we consistently show up for one another.

Fukutaki and Boparai: Cultivating healthy communities has helped us feel fulfilled and supported so that we don’t depend solely on each other. Staying curious and always learning new things, together and apart, keeps us excited about the world—and each other.

Class of 2017

Kai Fukutaki ’17 and Sameen Boparai ’17 Kai Fukutaki ’17 and Sameen Boparai ’17


What is your fondest memory of Pomona?
Blair: Groups of us would get tickets to classical concerts in Big Bridges, where we’d see Arthur Rubinstein, Van Cliburn, Christopher Parkening and the Romeros, among many others.
Trupin: I think a lot about the freshman seminar, the intramural sports and, of course, both the good friends and the meaningful conversations I had all the time there.

Addo-Ashong: I don’t think I could truly narrow down to just one memory—I look back at dozens of moments spent with my friends and laugh all the time.


Where did you and your friends hang out?

Blair: I developed some of my longer-lasting friendships when I lived in Oldenborg for two years. We hung out in the language lounge for the Russian and Chinese students. I was studying Russian. We studied, we partied and had a great time there.

Class of 1970

Tina Blair ’70 Tina Blair ’70

Trupin: We attempted to study at pools, a lot. Somehow I still passed my classes. We ate a lot of fried food and shakes at the Coop. And we ventured to parties on whatever campus was hosting one.
Addo-Ashong: I could guarantee that you’d see me and my friends in Frary at some point, especially for Snack. My Sontag suite was also a glorified community center my senior year with the number of people that were in and out every day.


The career path you first envisioned in college—is that what you’re doing now?

Blair: I fell in love with the fields of anthropology and education. As a result, I studied at Stanford and received an MA in Education. Although later I studied theology, was ordained a Presbyterian minister and received a Ph.D. from the Claremont School of Theology, I was always using what I had learned at Pomona.

Trupin: I majored in American Studies, so I wouldn’t say I had a planned career path. But I did get to spend a lot of time focusing on youth homelessness at Pomona, including a Watson Fellowship in Latin America. I still work on that today, so the answer, I guess, is yes!

Class of 1995

Casey Trupin ’95 Casey Trupin ’95

Addo-Ashong: I didn’t have one career path clearly laid out, but my current job working in data analysis and research for litigation is a good mix of my public policy analysis and math background. My next steps are to apply for a master’s in similar fields, so in that sense, I think I’m following what I set out to do!


What do you wish you’d known before you came to Pomona?

Blair: I felt instantly at home at Pomona because of the many new students who, like me, had lived outside the United States. I was embarrassed, however, that I had not yet heard of Jefferson Airplane and their music.

Trupin: This is a rare four-year opportunity that you’ll never get again, and you should take advantage of all it has to offer during your time there. A lot of us would come back for another year if we could.

Addo-Ashong: I wish I’d known that the pluses and minuses on grades do in fact affect your GPA, because that was a very rude awakening my freshman fall!

Class of 2020

Victoria Marie Addo-Ashong ’20 Victoria Marie Addo-Ashong ’20


What was your favorite dining-hall food?

Blair: I have little memories of the food. It was better in Oldenborg than elsewhere.

Trupin: Fried mozzarella sticks at the Coop. In the dining hall, maybe the omelet barhow nice it would be to have that in my house now!

Addo-Ashong: My usual breakfast omelet and avocado toast, maybe the tomato/burrata, and balsamic sandwiches and the oatmeal craisin cookies!


What was the best book you read during your Pomona years?

Blair: A book that over the long term shaped me the most was Mysticism, by Evelyn Underhill. I read it for a course I took at Pitzer; we also read Tillich and William James.

Trupin: In the Name of Eugenics by Daniel Kevles stuck with me and stays relevant today as a frightening and helpful exploration of using science to justify racism and every type of discrimination.

Addo-Ashong: I don’t know how many books I read for fun , but I really enjoyed American Hookup by Lisa Wade!


What was your favorite band while you were in college?

Blair: The Beatles, then Jefferson Airplane and the Doors.

Trupin: I have fond memories of seeing No Doubt perform in my dorm. They weren’t my favorite band, and I think my glasses fell into the mosh pit and got crushed, but it still stands out.

Addo-Ashong: I’d say favorite actual band was Glass Animals, and individuals were SZA and Childish Gambino.


What was the first electronic device you ever owned?

Blair: I got my first computer in 1986, when I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation.

Trupin: My roommate and I had a combo tape/record/CD player that I think was the size of half of one of our walls.

Addo-Ashong: My Game Boy Advance.

2025 Commencement

faculty attending commencement 2025
Shark Mutulili ’25 and Fares Marzouk ’25

Shark Mutulili ’25 and Fares Marzouk ’25

Some 447 graduates received their diplomas at Pomona’s 132nd commencement in May. Speakers included Senior Class President Shark Mutulili ’25 (top left), Senior Class Speaker Fares Marzouk ’25 (top right) and the following four recipients of honorary degrees.

W. Benton Boone ’62

As ophthalmology faculty at UCLA and the University of California, Irvine, Boone has published extensive research on advancements in eye surgery and immunology. Certified in the supervision of hyperbaric oxygen therapy, he helped to pioneer the use of hyperbaric oxygen in eye disease.

Louise Henry Bryson

Originally a documentary film writer and public television producer, Bryson later became senior vice president of FX networks and then president of distribution for Lifetime Networks. She is a former member of the board of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the former chair of the Board of Trustees of The J. Paul Getty Trust.

Halim Dhanidina ’94

In 2012 Justice Dhanidina (ret.) was appointed to the Los Angeles County Superior Court, becoming the first Muslim to ever be appointed judge in California. Previously a litigator in arbitration and criminal investigations, an associate justice in the California 2nd District Court of Appeal, he became the country’s first-ever Muslim appellate-level judge.

David W. Oxtoby

A recognized leader in American higher education, Oxtoby was Pomona’s ninth president from 2003 to 2017. He also chaired the board of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and was president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Energy is Unmatched: Fall Return 2025

Pomona College Class of 2029 on the steps of Carnegie Hall during Move-In Day

Pomona College Class of 2029 on the steps of Carnegie Hall during Move-In Day

Move-In Day:

Cars started lining First Street at Columbia Avenue as early as 7 a.m. Saturday, the license plates along the queue as diverse as the Pomona community that the precious cargo inside the vehicles would soon join.

Hundreds of new students moved into their residence halls with the help of dozens of residential advisors and Pomona staff members.

Bailey Williams ’26, a computer science and politics double major from Dallas, Texas, was among the cohort of residential advisors outside Lyon Court offloading suitcases, appliances and furniture by the trunkload.

“The energy is unmatched,” he said. “Everyone’s excited to see the new class.”

With most new students moved in by noon, families shared a meal at Frank Dining Hall before students met with members of the Orientation Team, their resident advisors or their sponsors to make first connections with the Pomona community.

The Class of 2029 took a group photo on the steps of Carnegie Hall in the afternoon, then did the traditional “Through the Gates” walk with President G. Gabrielle Starr.

Starr, who returned to her post last month after a spring sabbatical, addressed the first-years later in the evening, before a “Boba Break” at Harwood Pergola to cap off the day.

In total, 423 first-year students and 30 transfer students are joining Pomona this fall.

For Williams, the hustle and bustle of Move-In Day rekindled fond memories of his first days at Pomona.

“My advice to new students is [that] there’s a lot of things to get into, and you’ll find yourself and your place at Pomona eventually,” Williams said. “So take your time and take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way.”

Orientation Adventure Builds Friendships and Faith

In August 453 new students-first-years and transfers-kicked off their Pomona journey by participating in the annual Orientation Adventure (OA), a three-day experience that allows students to bond in the week before classes start.

A nearly 30-year-old tradition, OA features opportunities ranging from backpacking and surfing to “Quintessential L.A.,” which included taking in the Hollywood sign, Grand Central Market and an Angels baseball game.

The “Pali Retreat” group participated in a variety of outdoor activities that included archery, tomahawk throws, three ropes courses and a 40-foot harnessed drop known as the “Leap of Faith.”

Other excursions included “Farm and Fish” (think fishing trips and urban farms in Pasadena) and “Community Partnerships and Service,” where, among other things, students spent a morning helping the Claremont-based Prison Library Project find books for local incarcerated individuals.

Four years from now, OA friends will cheer for each other again—only this time, rather than being 40 feet overhead getting ready to leap, they’ll be walking across the stage at Commencement.

“This is only my second day here, and it’s already been amazing,” says Isaac Aguirre ’29, who hails from Buena Park, California. “There are great people out there.”

Collegial Creativity: A Faculty Roundtable

Collegial Creativity faculty roundtable

What is the role of creativity in steering the work of dancers, poets, scientists and activists? What follows is a condensed and collated conversation with four Pomona professors from different fields, drawing on themes about the practice and teaching of what it means to create.

Esther Hernández-MedinaEsther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies as well as gender and women’s studies, is a feminist academic, public policy expert and activist from the Dominican Republic.


Jane LiuJane Liu, professor of chemistry professor, is also CEO of BRT Biotechnologies, a small-molecule drug discovery startup she co-founded with fellow Sagehen Greg Copeland ’96.


John PenningtonJohn Pennington, associate professor of dance, is the artistic director of Pennington Dance Group and ARC (A Room to Create) Pasadena after a career as a performer and teacher with the Bella Lewitzky Dance Company.


Prageeta SharmaPrageeta Sharma, Henry G. Lee ’37 Professor of English, is the author of six collections of poetry, including Onement Won, to be published in September. She is a recipient of a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.


Q: Welcome, all. We’re interested in how you think about creativity. Is it innate? Is it a practice, something that can be summoned?

Pennington: I think this has been a question of the ages. You’ve often heard about “the muses descending” and all of these ways that people are creative, and no one can put their finger on it. Over the years, particularly working in a liberal arts college and through my own investigation and curiosity, I’ve found that creativity lies a lot in neuroscience.

There’s the prefrontal cortex; it’s the executive director. There’s also the “fight or flight” response of the sympathetic nervous system. So there’s a saying that creativity comes in the three B’s—the bed, the bath and the bar. If you look at the bed, the bath and the bar, those are three places that you relax and you feel safe, for the most part. The prefrontal cortex kind of shuts off. The “fight or flight” response is not active, either. A lot of artists have said that they have their most creativity before falling asleep or when they wake up, and that’s when the brain is partly shut down.

Q: That reminds me that Paul McCartney [of the Beatles] has said the melody of “Yesterday” came to him in a dream. Have any of you had ideas or solutions come to you that way?

Liu: I don’t know if I’ve solved the problem in my dream but when you’re sort of dozing, something might come in there. I actually will make sure I get up and go write it down. Maybe that’s the key, [since] I’d like to  sleep … I don’t want to stay up and work it out, but I don’t want to forget it, either!

Q: Jane, many of us think first of the arts when we think about creativity. But what is the role of creativity in the sciences?

Liu: Whenever you’re doing scientific research or trying to progress science forward, you’re never doing the same thing someone else did. It always has to be something new. You need to think: What is the question I even want to ask? That requires creativity. Then, how are you going to approach answering that question or testing your hypothesis? You and I could ask the exact same question but take two completely different approaches based on what inspired us at that time, what our background is, what we read that morning or the conversation we had down the hall. So pulling these different pieces together—and then fitting that into progressing science and doing scientific research—that, to me, is a creative process.

Human-Centered Design class visualization lab

A visualization lab from the Human-Centered Design class

Design as Process for Impact

What is The Hive?

The Hive, more formally known as the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity, aims to foster collaboration and innovation for students of the Claremont Colleges.

What does The Hive do?

The Hive is a design and innovation center that hosts courses and activities that are exploratory, collaborative, and experiential, including…

  • full-credit courses in Human-Centered Design and Impact Innovation
  • workshops and events that introduce alternative ways of engaging with the liberal arts
  • makerspaces where students are given access to materials for building, prototyping, sewing, screen printing, woodworking, and music production
  • courses from around the 7Cs

Who does The Hive work with?

The Hive offers human-centered design collaborations with a diverse variety of community partners, ranging from The LA Department of Health to LAist Public Radio and StoryHouse Ventures.

Get your organization involved!

Students at The Hive

Fred Bolarinwa (HMC ’25), Janny Wu (PZ ’25), Michelle Tran ’24, Cece Malone ’24

Q: Esther, what are some of the ways you experience creativity in the social sciences?

Hernández-Medina: The area where I use creativity the most is in my teaching. Especially during the pandemic, I really rethought and retooled all my classes. Pomona’s Information Technology Services and The Claremont Colleges Center for Teaching and Learning had all these workshops, and I took almost all of them. One way is putting together digital books: We use Pressbooks to collect students’ class papers. It makes them feel empowered as authors: “Oh, wait, I am publishing, this is so cool.” Some use the link in their graduate school applications. I also sometimes use the link to their papers in the digital book when I’m writing recommendation letters for them. The students are the ones who come up with the title for the book, the subtitles, the art for the cover. So that’s another way of making them reconnect with their creativity. In some of my classes, the final project is now a podcast about their papers, after learning how to produce and edit podcasts at The Hive.

Q: Prageeta, as a poet, how do you draw out creativity in your students?

Sharma: For me, creativity comes from reading and teaching and community and attachment. What is so much fun for me is this class on the theme of diaries and daybooks that I’m teaching now. My late husband was married prior to me, and he left me his first wife’s diary she had kept for many years in the 1990s before she died in 1998. She was a really stunning person and it’s a beautiful diary. He said, “Please write about her if you feel compelled to.” I also have his writings that he left me, notes for me to read after he passed. So in class we started talking about what diaries mean to us, what kind of writing we find there, and what we hope to imagine for ourselves with private writing. I try to bring questions and subjects and work I’m engaged with to my students, to think and work and share interests together. We nurture, I think, a safe classroom that becomes sacred to our writing and to our ideas of ourselves.

Book, Grief SequenceQ: You’ve been able to keep writing poetry at such difficult times in your life, publishing the collection Grief Sequence following the death of your first husband, Dale Sherrard, to cancer in 2015. You tragically lost your second husband, Mike Stussy, to cancer in 2023, and your upcoming collection Onement Won includes poems you wrote during his illness. It’s so common for people to try to shut everything out. Did you will yourself to continue writing? Or was it a form of therapy?

Sharma: You know, I feel lucky that Mike was so supportive of my writing poetry. He was always trying to make room for it even as we were in a caregiving situation. But I wanted to document my time with him, too. I see poetry as a record, and that it has a dailiness to it that is sacred.

Q: I’m often surprised at how many young people have suffered losses, a parent or a friend. Does sharing your experience bring out things the students may not have fully expressed before?

Sharma: Yes, students have disclosed to me personal loss, and what I hope to do is just to make them feel supported as best that I can. We think about the tradition of the elegy, the eulogy, the ode. We think about poetic forms as holding so much for them.

John Pennington teaches beginner dance students

John Pennington teaches beginner dance students

Q: Several of you have mentioned the idea of a safe place to create, a safe place for students to be in general. John, tell us your thoughts on that.

Pennington: When I am teaching beginners, I know I have to eliminate the fear of them thinking that I’m going to make them dance. That wall is up immediately because they hear “dance” or “movement” and say, “I’m not a dancer.” But the feedback and what they tell other students is that this class is very safe. I know what that means.

I get at beginners through problem-solving, and part of that is improvisation. One of the first exercises is to walk anywhere in the room and then sometimes I guide them and tell them to change directions. Can you walk at a different level? Can you walk high or low? And already we’re addressing part of the art form, and that is space design, motion design and floor design.

You put limitations on that creativity, or what can get produced within that problem-solving. Because what happens in any art form, when you tell people, “Just go do anything you want,” it is frightening. You need entry points and guardrails, and you need to know where you’re headed. Hopefully that becomes something that’s embodied in the students so that they say, “What if I went up or down, or did a turn here?” We’re trying to put a language to movement and identify some of those movements so that they have a toolbox. During the semester, they get more and more comfortable. They know that I’m not going to ask them to put their leg up over their ears.

Q: I’m hearing again and again about safety, community, collaboration. Esther, you’re the co-founder of a group called Tertulia Feminista Magaly Pineda, a monthly gathering of Dominican feminists and activists, and you’re also involved with the work of Josefina Báez, a Dominican artist in multiple genres who developed a method she calls “performance autology.”

Hernández-Medina: Performance autology is a way to harness your creativity in whichever way you express it. It might be as an artist, but it might be as an intellectual or an activist. The output is different, but you are still creating something.

[Báez] also emphasizes that you are creating a work of art with your life, and that includes taking care of your health and taking care of yourself while doing art. Part of the reason she founded the group was because she was very concerned about the fact that many artists are socialized to believe that they should do art despite themselves. It’s this whole myth about having to be the tortured artist to actually be able to create. And she was like, “No, no, it’s the opposite. You need to take care of yourself, so that your art is sustainable, and so that your life is sustainable.”

Michael O'Malley at Chan Gallery during the closing reception of his exhibition.

Michael O’Malley at Chan Gallery during the closing reception of his exhibition.

O’Malley’s “Headless Object” Exhibit

A Professor of Art at Pomona, Michael O’Malley has focused his work on engaging the aesthetics and conventions that shape the built environment. His winter exhibit at the Chan Gallery reflects his belief in art as agency—that we all create from a position in which we “make choices and exert control over the material world.”

 

My exhibit tests out the possibility that, like objects, I am more akin to process: emerging, changing, disappearing. The ‘exhibition’ changes each day. Sometimes a new form is added. Other times a rearranging or a removal. Arrangements of flowers echo this continuum of change as a practice of engagement and witness.”

Q: Jane, what about teaching science students to think creatively and in
a safe environment?

Lane Liu in her laboratory

Lane Liu in her laboratory

Liu: I still am figuring that out, because if you’re just saying, “Just do whatever you think of,” that could cause an explosion.

I think one of the challenges in science is you have to be able to understand some fundamental information first or know how to carry out some techniques. So there is a little bit of, “Know these facts; know how to carry out this protocol,” where I don’t think there’s a ton of creativity there. But you need that first stage to then be able to say, “Now just let your mind wander and be open.” Once you have a foundation, you can start thinking about creativity.

Q: I’m reminded that there is creativity in business, too. Besides being a full-time chemistry professor, Jane, you’re the co-founder of an early-stage startup, BRT Biotechnologies, in the area of drug discovery.

Liu: We are making a very specific class of small molecules called macrocycles. We’re trying to make large collections of these macrocycles to then sell to a pharmaceutical company or another biotech company, so that they can then find the next big thing.

Just being able to talk about and share the vision with others is a very creative process. There’s that 30-second elevator pitch and there’s that 20-minute deep dive you might prepare. There’s the website you might put together. There are all of these different audiences. And it’s constantly this creative process of, “How do I talk about what we’re doing in a way that gets other people excited or understanding what I’m feeling and understanding?” No one thing works. It’s a different sort of pitch if I’m talking to someone who has a background in biotech startups, versus someone who’s just excited about the science., versus someone who has no idea about small-molecule drug discovery,  versus someone who really just wants to know about the return on investment.

Q: Let’s close with a question about everyday creativity. There was a recent book by music producer Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, that was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. You don’t end up on the bestseller list for weeks and weeks because only artists are interested. Is that something you all believe—that everyone, not just the artist, is a creative being?

Pennington: I absolutely do. How do we get through the world without creativity? It’s about acknowledging it and giving yourself time to honor it. I don’t think many people who have been on one track their whole life have given themselves time. You know where it happens? It happens in retirement. All the hostels, all the painting classes, because they didn’t have time or they didn’t think they had time. You look at The New York Times bestsellers, there will be a book about creativity almost every year.

I do believe that everyone is creative, and that there are acts you can take every day. It’s about a moment in improvisation, about a different decision. It’s as simple as driving home a different way and seeing something new. It’s going to call upon a new response in the brain and challenge your senses. It’s stopping and allowing room for something else.

Serena Lin

Serena Lin ’25

With Uplift Notes, this Sagehen wants to counter isolation for seniors—and maybe even slow the progression of Alzheimer’s.


Connection? There’s An App For That

How Neuroscience Research Can Inform Intergenerational Conversation

By Lorraine Wu Harry ’97

In an age of pervasive social isolation, Serena Lin ’25 thinks that cultivating connection through conversation is something that’s still very much in the cards.

Her cards are called “Uplift Notes,” and she’s sold more than 200 boxes of them. A neuroscience major, she tested her deck on several hundred people of all ages, with a particular focus on bridging the generational gap between young adults and senior citizens, a group particularly susceptible to isolation and loneliness.

At Pomona, Lin studies Alzheimer’s disease, which has afflicted both her late great-grandfather and her great-aunt. She says that her work has helped her realize that Alzheimer’s treatment is not just about diet and medication, but social engagement.

During her sophomore year, Lin enrolled in a human-centered design course at The Hive, a design center at The Claremont Colleges (see sidebar on page 24). This class, and the mentorship of Hive executive director Fred Leichter, provided the support to create Uplift Notes to help facilitate more social interaction.

To develop the product, Lin consulted with several neuroscience faculty and alumni experts who gave her insights on the complexity of Alzheimer’s, including her thesis advisor and Assistant Professor Jonathan King, Professor Karen Parfitt and Daniel Gibbs ’73, author of A Tattoo on my Brain: A Neurologist’s Personal Battle against Alzheimer’s Disease. Her ongoing testing of the game has included working with Lyn Juckniess ’74 at Pilgrim Place, a retirement community in Claremont. Uplift Notes also has been used at Pomona’s Alumni Weekend and Bridging the Gap, a program Lin participated in that addresses religious and political polarization.

Uplift Notes game

Uplift Notes game by Serena Lin ’25

Lin is now working on a version of the toolbox specifically for individuals with neurological challenges such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. The 2.0 edition is part of what’s driving her senior thesis on social engagement for Alzheimer’s patients, with a focus on trying to reduce feelings of anxiety and loneliness.

Her ultimate desire is to get the toolbox into the hands of as many Alzheimer’s support groups, hospitals and senior centers as possible. But she also hopes that people of all ages and backgrounds will make use of Uplift Notes as a social engagement tool that’s “good for your well-being, longevity and brain health.”

 

Gaming the System

Joe Osborn and Don Daglow

Don Daglow ’74 has earned much acclaim and multiple awards—including an Emmy—for designing some of the earliest video games in a range of different genres, including arguably the world’s first role-playing game (RPG), the first world-building game, and the first graphical massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Indeed, you can draw a straight line between many of his contributions and blockbuster games like “Roblox,” “Grand Theft Auto” and “Minecraft” that help fuel an industry that rakes in nearly $200 billion in annual sales.

✱ Confused by all the acronyms? See glossary at the bottom of the page.

This spring Daglow jumps onto the SageCast podcast for a wide-ranging conversation with  Pomona Associate Professor of Computer Science Joe Osborn, who—in addition to having an MFA in game design—conducts research on artificial intelligence and its impact on interactive systems like video games.

Osborn spoke with Daglow about some of the design pioneer’s favorite projects and how the medium has evolved to become a catalyst of creativity for hundreds of millions of people around the globe.

(Please note that this interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Joe Osborn and Don DaglowOsborn: Before you got to Pomona, what were some of the earliest experiences that felt “creative” for you?

avatarDaglow: My original goal when I was in sixth or seventh grade was to be a writer, then a novelist, then a playwright. In high school I was writing plays and had some things performed, and was very much set on that goal, so when I came to Pomona I already had a vision of wanting to do something in theatre. As a sophomore I saw a really innovative production of “The Taming of the Shrew” that just made my head explode in terms of what theatre could be.

Osborn: In the last couple of decades there’s been a bit of a moral panic around video games—some educators, parents and members of Congress believe that they stifle creativity and that kids spend too much time in front of the screen and can’t think or imagine things for themselves. How do you feel that video games can inspire creativity in yourself and others?

Daglow: There’s no question that games can inspire creativity in the same way that great writing can. When I was a kid I read Dr. Seuss books and then started writing my own, styled after [him]. I grew up in a family where I was very loved, but also where it got very loud and combative, so retiring away to books and games was part of my defense against the world. It’s a place you can go that can give you comfort and perspective, and open up great wide vistas.

Osborn: This makes me think about some of the specific sources of inspiration you’ve drawn from in your work, including “Dungeons and Dragons” (D&D)—also the subject of moral panic in the ’70s and ’80s. What inspired your interest and embarking on the project of making a “D&D” game while at Pomona?

Daglow: I started out making games by chance. At the time computers were really only accessible to faculty and upperclass students majoring in math and the sciences. But in 1971 [Math Professor] Paul Yale and Jim Cowart ’73 got a grant from the Sloan Foundation and put two computer terminals in the lobby of Mudd-Blaisdell. One morning I walked in and heard the terminals making a clickity-clack kind of sound, and [the folks there] said, “Oh, hi! Want to learn how to use the computer?” You could interact with and play games on it, which [I loved] as a theatre person.

So, before “D&D” came along, I’d been writing games—and plays—at Pomona for several years. For my senior play, Pomona theatre majors had other projects they were committed to, so I had actors join from “Strut and fret” at the other five colleges. Fast forward a year after we graduate, and these actors have fallen in love with this new “D&D” game, and I got a call one day to play. I go, and my brain just explodes [thinking about] all the things this could be. At that point, it wasn’t that I wanted to write the “Dungeon” game. It was that I couldn’t not write it.

Language­—and expression—is how we as individuals take our emotional experiences and translate that into something that registers with someone else.”

-Don Daglow

 

Osborn: There’s a lot of energy right now around large language models (LLMs), but they make content in a very different way from the interactive fiction of the past. How do you feel that [LLMs] compare to the kind of stuff people were doing on computers in the 1980s?

Daglow: I’ve got a fair amount of experience with LLMs, and it’s really apples and oranges. When I was learning to program at Pomona, I actually wrote an early chatbot called ECALA. I treated it like a game [of] trying to fool the player into thinking they’re talking to a real person—and what LLMs do is allow the computer to fool the player much longer than we could. Ask [an LLM] to write a 500-word story … and you can see the standard story-beats it’s trying to recreate. But it feels like it was written by a human being who’s way too self-important and trying too hard.

Compared to what we had 50 years ago, [AI today is] a hell of an accomplishment, and there are certain ways in which it’s been a useful tool that can save a lot of time for people. I think there have been some good examples of games that have been enhanced by AI: if it’s done selectively, you can get some very nice “non-playable character” interactions that add more depth. The problem is business people start thinking that you can take that good idea being dropped into places selectively and start saying “what if I put it everywhere?” And that’s not really how it works. Ultimately the chemistry that goes into human creativity is different, but we should expect machine creativity to continue to improve.

Osborn: There’s always that tension of whether thought prefigures language or language prefigures thought. In the ’70s and ’80s the former paradigm was dominant, and now we’re in a world where it seems like many people
believe that a language machine also knows and understands things. It’s an
interesting debate.

Daglow: This makes me think of my playwrighting advisor Steve Young. He would always say that passion and emotion are what drive our lives and, therefore, our stories. Language and expression is how we as individuals take our emotional experiences and translate that into something that registers with someone else.

He would say, “Give somebody an idea, and maybe they’ll remember it until Monday, but make somebody feel an emotion, and they can’t help but remember it on Monday.” In fact, maybe they can’t stop thinking about it for weeks, months or even years. If you think about movies that hit you hard, or a book that changed how you look at things, that’s because the emotion was translated into language, which conveyed the power and the relevance to an individual. In 50-plus years of leading teams and producing video games of all kinds, that perspective has helped almost every single day of my career, which is why I feel such gratitude to Dr. Young. What a gift.

A brief history of consoles

* Years represent  U.S. release dates

Atari 2600 1977

Atari 2600, 1977

As one of the first systems with interchangeable cartridges that let you play more than one game, made the medium viable for home use (Units sold: 30M+)

Left, NES (1993). Right, Game Boy (1989)

Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Game Boy

Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), 1983

Alongside its 1991 sequel SuperNES, played a key role in kick-starting gaming, with its directional “D-pad” becoming widely adopted by other platforms (Units sold: 62M)

Nintendo Game Boy, 1989

Ushered in the birth of the portable gaming device (Units sold: 119M)

Sony PlayStation and PlayStation 2

Sony PlayStation and PlayStation 2

Sony PlayStation, 1994

Introduced 3D graphics and CD-quality sound, as well as more narrative-driven titles (Units sold: 102M)

Sony PlayStation 2, 2000

Popularized the idea of consoles as entertainment hubs, with a DVD player and internet collectivity (Units sold: 160M)

Nintendo Wii (left), Switch (right).

Nintendo Wii and Switch

Nintendo Wii, 2006

Spearheaded the gesture-based interface, spurring further research in augmented reality and virtual reality (Units sold: 101M)

Nintendo Switch, 2017

Revolutionized the “hybrid console” both for portability and home systems (Units sold: 146M)

Roots of Utopia

Utopia video game

Published eight years before “SimCity,” “Utopia” was developed for Mattel’s 1979 Intellivision console and later recognized by Guinness World Records as the first simulation video game.

Osborn: You can view “Utopia” as a “building” toy—as a way to make little worlds. Kids have played with building toys for millennia. Games like “Minecraft” have over 40 million monthly users who play seven-plus hours a week. (My own son is among them, and I think he’s pulling up the average.) What does this explosion of interest in world-building games say to you about what people are interested in engaging with, and what do you know about how different people have used these games in different ways?

Daglow: It’s a great example of the power of video games, to take established kinds of toys and expand them. When I was a kid I played with my dad’s old Erector set, and then Kenner’s [Girder and Panel] building set, which was basically plastic pizzas that you could fit together to build buildings and bridges with. It’s that continuation of [the idea that] building things is fun.

Just this idea of “what if” is so fascinating: if I do this, what will happen? We face that in real life all the time. If I have the doughnuts for dinner, instead of something with protein and vitamins, what will happen? “Well, I have a good idea, so I think I should have the protein.” That’s a constructive part of our lives—and I think video games have just made that explode in wonderful ways.

Don’s deeds:

A brief timeline of Daglow’s most groundbreaking games

1976

Widely viewed as the first computer role-playing game (RPG) on non-classroom systems, “Dungeon” was based on the “Dungeons & Dragons” tabletop RPG that had launched in 1974. Developed in the tiny computer room in Daglow’s Mudd-Blaisdell dorm, it ran on PDP-10 mainframe computers and represented the first game with “line of sight” graphics pre-dating today’s first-person games.

1981

“Utopia” was a pivotal early sandbox game where two players each control their own island. Arguably the first strategy game to incorporate real-time elements versus being exclusively turn-based, it is often referred to as “Civilization 0.5”—a reference to the 1991 turn-based PC game that itself inspired influential games such as “SimCity” and “Minecraft.”

Racing destruction video game1984

“Adventure Construction Set”* (with Stuart Smith) and its follow-up “Racing Destruction Set”* (1985, with Rick Koenig) represented a fundamental shift toward “game creation systems” in which users can develop their own games. It included seven small “toolkits” that enabled customized tile-sets, maps and objects to create different worlds, plus a complete original game by Smith called “Rivers of Light.”

1991

Neverwinter Nights video gameAnother entry in Daglow’s “D&D”-related productions, “Neverwinter Nights” is widely considered the world’s first graphical massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), spurring a devoted following of users battling monsters in a medieval city. Pre-dating popular games like 2004’s “World of Warcraft,”  in 2008 it was honored with a technical Emmy for its innovation in advancing the field of MMORPGs.

Osborn: There’s also a vein of world-building games where [users] are making the actual rules and encounters. When you were producing “Adventure Construction Set” and “Racing Destruction Set,” what led you to think that these would be interesting in the market, rather than just be tools for game developers?

Daglow: When I joined Electronic Arts (EA) in late 1983, I was teamed up with Stuart Smith, who EA had signed to do another mythological adventure game [“Rivers of Light”] that he had already created and that they had already signed off on. We were talking about his project, and he said that what he had really wanted to do was something like “Adventure Construction Set.” This was aligned with what I had in mind: going back to when I wrote “Dungeon” on the mainframe at CGU, I was thinking “how can we fill all this space [in a game] without having to author everything individually?”

I went back to EA CEO Trip Hawkins and said, “I want to change the game that you all approved.” I was naive and new in the process, coming from this big corporation Mattel to what was then this little startup (EA), I didn’t realize that when you do something like that, you might get the game uncreated. But we made our pitch [to EA] to let people build their own adventures. Stuart would do the adventure game he was planning to do, but he’d build it with this ‘construction set,’ and then we’d have another tutorial adventure that’ll show you all the other things you can do with the game.

Osborn: From a user-creativity perspective, do you have experiences of how people have played world-building games like “Neverwinter Nights” and “Utopia” that have surprised you—ways that players’ creativity has taken you off-guard?

Daglow: Yes! It happens enough that we have an industry term for that: emergent gameplay. People play with our games in ways we never ever could have imagined. I would say that “Neverwinter Nights” is not about writing a story, it’s about the set design. You’re creating a world in which other people can play, and people will think of things you never would have thought of.

[Even] the idea that they would form communities—there are still people today playing the [19]90s versions of “Neverwinter Nights” from AOL, in some cases with people who they’ve been playing with for 35 years. There are groups on social media that I can go visit where these people still get together. Through the community they’ve created a world that’s infinitely bigger and longer-lasting than anything I ever created. If you provide a grain of sand and it builds into something like that over time, it’s just incredibly inspiring.

It can be different ways to play, it can be communities built on top of games, it can be completely new games designed using the same old tools and ways you would never expect. It’s one of the wonderful parts of doing game design, to see amazing things [done] not by professional game designers, but by a high school kid in New Orleans, or a medical assistant in Dubuque. They will come up with these brilliant, creative, innovative twists. It’s just so much fun to see.

Gaming 101: A Glossary

Computing & Gaming Concepts

Chatbots simulate human conversation using preprogrammed responses to user input.

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are a type of AI trained on huge amounts of text to generate natural language responses.

World-building games let players design and shape virtual environments or societies. Role-playing games (RPGs) involve players assuming different characters in fictional settings, while “massively multiplayer online” RPGs (MMORPGs) bring together huge numbers of gamers interacting online in the same persistent world, which continues to exist and evolve while players are offline.

Strategy games tend to focus on planning skills rather than instant action.  The two main types are turn-based strategy (TBS) like “D&D,” where players take turns, and real-time strategy (RTS) like “Warcraft,” where everyone plays simultaneously.

Sandbox games like “GTA” and “Minecraft” generally lack standardized or predetermined goals, leading to a larger degree of creativity. They are often “open world,” lacking traditional levels and borders like walls or doors that limit them to a particular area of play.

Non-player characters (NPCs) like quest givers or shopkeepers are controlled by the computer.

Interactive fiction tools like script generators create written content or character interactions, allowing players to navigate a text-based story by making choices to shape the narrative.

Games & Franchises

“Dungeons & Dragons” (“D&D”): A tabletop game known for storytelling and character customization, that laid the foundation for modern RPGs.

“Grand Theft Auto” (“GTA”): A crime game franchise where players complete missions and explore its vast open world at their own pace.

“Minecraft”: A sandbox game where players build and explore block-based environments. Its open-ended gameplay has inspired countless user-created modifications and worlds.

“Roblox”: A platform where users create, share and play user-generated games. With millions of user-created experiences, it functions as both a game and a development platform.

Sound-Scouting with Def Jam CEO

Tunji Balogun portrait by Ro.Lexx

Tunji Balogun portrait by Ro.Lexx

It’s a Friday afternoon in the middle of January, and Tunji Balogun ’04 is multi-tasking. He has one hand on the wheel of his car and a Zoom call going on his phone, as he navigates to a local In-N-Out Burger for his first real meal of the day. His schedule as the CEO and chairman of Def Jam Recordings does this, sometimes: keeps him busy enough that he can’t fit in lunch until after 3 p.m.

On this particular Friday, though, Los Angeles is still reeling from the spate of wildfires that have burned up tens of thousands of acres of land across the county. The sky is blue, but you can still taste the ash in the air. So as he drives, Balogun is reflecting on his place in the order of things: what it means to dedicate your life and career to creativity when the world is quite literally burning around you.

“I would say I’ve dedicated my career to trying to uplift forward-thinking, cutting-edge artists making Black music,” he says. To him, Black music is a loose and expansive category that cuts across genres, encompassing dance, R&B and pop as well as dancehall, reggae and hip-hop.

Balogun says that the fires that surround his city bring his vision of the power of art into clear focus. “In a chaotic, wild world, people need healthy forms of escape,” he says. “Music is one of humanity’s creations that brings us closer together [and] serves as a healing force. My approach has been to try to do my part and leave a legacy that I can be proud of.”
He’s done plenty of legacy-building in the first decade of his career. Since his first internship at Warner Records, which Balogun landed while still at Pomona, he’s helped launch the careers of artists including Kendrick Lamar, Khalid, Bryson Tiller, Doja Cat and SZA. Now his role at Def Jam means he’s in charge of shepherding the work of hip-hop luminaries such as LL Cool J and Public Enemy’s Chuck D as well as newcomers like Elmiene, who Balogun says has “one of the best voices I’ve heard in my life.”

But becoming one of music’s most influential tastemakers wasn’t the plan when he first got into the business. During that Warner internship, Balogun wasn’t thinking about eventually elevating into the executive suite—he wanted to learn the ropes in order to break through himself as a rapper.

But as soon as he got into the boardroom, Balogun realized that most of the other people there were business majors, not music obsessives. He, on the other hand, was already scouring the internet for up-and-coming acts at a time when that wasn’t yet common. He had an enthusiast’s deep-rooted knowledge combined with a fan’s earnest love of the work. And as Balogun surveyed the landscape around him, it became clear that he probably could have a bigger impact helping facilitate others’ careers than narrowly focusing on his own.

He felt like his liberal arts background made him particularly well-suited to the task. “I’m a studious, well-educated Nigerian-American kid who went to schools like Deerfield and Pomona,” he says now. “I’ve always kind of had dual citizenship. I’m in the creative community, but I also can go into board meetings and talk about quarterly finance projections.” That flexibility made him an ideal “translator” between corporate and creative.

He also felt a responsibility as a Black man in an industry that has historically exploited Black artists. “Something I noticed when I got my first internship was [that] there are a lot of artists who look like me, but not a lot of executives,” he recalls. “So there’s always been a goal in the back of my head to be an advocate and a strong voice for people who don’t really have a lot of people advocating for them.”

Tunji’s Take:

Kendrick LamarKendrick Lamar

I got to work with Kendrick really early in his career. Seeing an artist like him who is such a great example of storytelling and forward-thinking, fearless art from an unapologetically Black American voice—that inspired me. It gave me the goal of, “OK, this is the type of stuff that I want to work on and be a part of throughout my career.”


Donald GloverChildish Gambino

(actor Donald Glover)

He’s a renaissance man. That guy’s talented at everything. He’s a savant. He’s a writer, producer, singer, rapper, dancer, auteur. That dude’s just a “super-creative.” He’s the closest thing we have to a modern-day Sammy Davis Jr. And also the most gracious, down-to-earth, regular person.


H.E.R.H.E.R.

She’s another supreme creative. Singer, songwriter, producer, performer. I think she’s one of the most talented performers of her generation, and someone who has only scratched the surface of her range musically. She broke as an R&B act, but she can really play any genre. I was in the studio when she and Daniel Caesar wrote “Best Part”—one of the greatest songs I’ve ever heard in person. She’s otherworldly.


Doja CatDoja Cat

Doja is a world builder. She’s another one who’s sort of genreless. She broke as a rap act and a pop act at the same time, but she can really do anything. I think she’s underrated as a rapper—her songs are so big that people kind of discount her lyrical ability. She literally went from the fringes of the internet to being one of the most popular mainstream acts. And I love that she retains her “weird”—she’s never homogenized her style, even as she’s gotten bigger.


KhalidKhalid

Khalid was a child prodigy. I think when he debuted people thought he was in his 20s or 30s because his voice was so deep and distinct. But I met him when he was 16, and we put out his album American Teen right after he turned 18. He’s another one whose genius I’ve been blessed to witness in person: I was in the room when he wrote songs like “Young, Dumb & Broke,” and “Talk” with Disclosure. He’s someone who’s wise beyond his years.

He’s been able to do that for many artists over the years—but often at the cost of his own creative pursuits. Dedicating himself to his job means that Balogun rarely makes his own music anymore. So he scratches that particular itch by collaborating with the artists he signs. It doesn’t always happen—Balogun never wants to insert his opinion where it’s not welcome. But “there are artists who I get really close with, and there would be a level of comfort where they knew that I made music, and then I could contribute as a songwriter,” Balogun says.

Sometimes that goes far enough that he earns an official songwriting credit, as he did on K CAMP’s double-platinum hit “Comfortable.” But more often he’s just in the studio spitballing, being part of the give-and-take of making something new. “Most of the time I won’t ask for or take credit,” Balogun acknowledges. “You’re my artist. If you win, I win.”

After his time at Warner Brothers, Balogun found his way to A&R Interscope, and moved from there to RCA, he went on what he calls “a special run of signings,” hooking up with artists including SZA, Childish Gambino and H.E.R. He went on to start his own label, Keep Cool, in 2018. That work earned him the chance to come aboard at Def Jam in 2022.

The idea scared him at first. He had a good thing going where he was, and the idea of taking on more responsibility—particularly on the business side—was intimidating. But ultimately Balogun opted into the opportunity to put his imprint on such a storied label. “Def Jam is one of the last labels that has a mandate to uphold Black music,” he says. “I just felt like I was being called to do the role. Spiritually it’s kind of what I’ve been trying to do this whole time.”

That transition also thrust Balogun from a largely behind-the-scenes role at RCA into a very bright spotlight at Def Jam. “RCA is an amazing label, and I had a great time working there, but no one’s checking that it is living up to the culture of what it’s supposed to be,” he says. “Things at Def Jam are scrutinized. People are checking to see the types of signings I’m making. I appreciate the accountability of it.”

The scrutiny remains intense, but he’s also come to appreciate the pressure. It reminds him of just how much Def Jam’s work matters to people, and the importance of continuous self-growth. “I tell my artists [that] you can’t get comfortable and think nothing’s going to change, because you blink and everything has shifted,” he says. “You have to remain hungry and uncomfortable in order to evolve.”

In addition to the specific pressure of life at Def Jam, Balogun also has to weather the storms of a business model that’s trying to figure out where it stands as album sales figures slump and races for TikTok virality reign. But he insists that he’s not one to chase trends, instead relying on finding good artists who make interesting work, and being patient in helping them find their audience. “I want to work with people who are staunchly themselves, no matter the platform,” Balogun says. “And then they figure out, ‘OK, how do I be myself on this new platform, as opposed to [changing] myself to fit the platform?’”

To that end, he’s less interested in digital dominance and more focused on finding fans wherever they are. “In music right now, success happens when creativity meets community,” he says. “If an artist can actually galvanize people who care about what they’re doing, those people become the ambassadors for their songs, for their albums, for their shows. They help spread your music. They put it on their stories, they run your fan accounts. You usually have to start small, but I find that most of the people who are successful in this era understand that it’s not about reaching the masses first. It’s about cultivating your own little world and double, triple, quadrupling down on it.”

As an example of this kind of fandom-building, Balogun points to rapper Doja Cat, who—long before the pandemic inspired many musicians to perform directly for fans online—was streaming on Instagram Live two or three times a week and making songs in her bedroom. “She really did build a bulletproof community of people who will never leave her, and then layered bigger and bigger songs on top of that.” he says.

It’s clear that as much as Balogun understands a balance sheet, everything he does comes from a deep-rooted passion for music and creativity. But even the hottest passions can burn out, especially when you have to engage with them in a professional setting, day after day. How does he keep the spark alive?

“I have to constantly revert to ‘Tunji the fan,’ and remember that, while all the industry stuff is cool, at the end of the day it’s really about the artist and the fan,” he says. “I have to remind myself not to overthink it. You won’t get burnt out [if] you actually love the stuff that you’re working on.”

When the non-music parts of the job threaten to take over, Balogun makes sure to follow up long days in the office with long nights in his studio staying on top of the latest themes and explorations in music. Some of his breakout picks from his current crop of artists at Def Jam include R&B singer Muni Long and Fridayy, who Balogun describes as a “hybrid artist” mixing R&B, Afrobeat and gospel. He’s also excited about Coco Jones, as well as LiAngelo Ball, whose brothers Lonzo and LaMelo are both NBA players. “He’s gonna have one of the best years in hip-hop,” Balogun predicts.

At this point in our conversation, Balogun has long since picked up his In-N-Out Burger; it’s cooling in the car next to him. More calls are coming through, and texts about an artist’s song leaking. It’s time for him to return to his work: the creative part, the corporate part, all of it. He’s tired, but he seems certain that he’ll be able to keep his compass pointed north, so to speak, even as he faces the challenges of a difficult job in an uncertain industry.

“I’ve been a fan, I’ve been an artist, I’ve been an executive, and all of those different experiences have informed my approach,” Balogun says. “Deep down, I’m still a fan, and still an artist. I’m not putting music together or making records or anything, but I think I have the heart and the soul of an artist.”

Creativity? That’s Child’s Play

Mac Barnett
Mac Marnett

Mac Marnett ’04 (photo by Chris Black)

By his senior year at Pomona, Mac Barnett ’04 knew what kind of stories captivated children.

What he didn’t know was how to write them.

Barnett, an English major fascinated by complex poetry and other pieces of fiction, spent his college summers as a camp counselor in Berkeley, California, reading to preschoolers. One book in particular, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales by Jon Scieszka, kindled Barnett’s love for children’s literature.

“I thought, ‘This is the kind of thing I love and that I study, but these 4-year-olds aren’t going to get it,’” Barnett recalls. “But when I read this book to them, they were getting the most sophisticated jokes. That’s when I figured out that kids were the best audience for the kind of stories that I liked.”

Impassioned his senior year to write for children, Barnett convinced the late author and Pomona Professor David Foster Wallace to let him into his creative writing class. On top of challenging his students to shed their writing habits, Barnett says, Wallace underscored the importance of the writer-reader relationship.

“He had such a focus on taking care of the reader,” Barnett recalls. “Him explaining how you, at a desk alone in a room, should have your audience in mind and consider how a sentence or plot twist is going over with the reader—it just made so much sense, especially for picture books, which are usually read out loud to kids. Consider the adult reading and the kid listening.”

Pomona taught me how to think from different perspectives, to look at problems in different ways, to let go of certainty, which I think is often the enemy of literature.”

-Mac Barnett ’04

Twenty years after graduating from Pomona, Barnett has written more than 60 books for children and won myriad awards.

In February, The New York Times best-selling author was appointed the ninth National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress. During his two-year term, Barnett will travel the country championing children’s picture books as a quintessential American art form.

“Taking children’s books seriously requires us to take children seriously,” he says. “Children are misunderstood, overlooked, dismissed, not listened to—and really caring about the books they read requires us to see them for who they really are [as] dimensional human beings who feel deeply and think in interesting and complicated ways.”

Learning how to think

Barnett wanted to be a writer long before leaving the Bay Area for Pomona in the early 2000s.

He started writing poetry in middle school, then plays and novels as he got older. At Pomona, he wrote sketch comedy and developed an interest in journalism and nonfiction that he once thought would turn into a future in academic writing.

As Barnett pondered his career prospects, he says Pomona professors like Paul Saint-Amour encouraged him to be skeptical, thoughtful and curious.

“Pomona taught me how to think from different perspectives, to look at problems in different ways, to let go of certainty, which I think is often the enemy of literature,” Barnett adds. “I would be a much less interesting writer if I hadn’t gone to Pomona.”

One day his senior year, Barnett mentioned to a Pitzer College friend that in the summer he’d discovered the book Stinky Cheese Man while at camp. The friend was Scieszka’s daughter, who introduced Barnett to her father shortly thereafter.

In 2008, Scieszka was named the first National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. A year later, Scieszka helped Barnett publish his first book, Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem.

Barnett says that, when he left Pomona, he told himself he would take a year and try to write a picture book. If it didn’t work out, he would go back to get a Ph.D. somewhere.

“Even when I got my third book published,” he says, “I didn’t think writing would be a career.”

Mac Barnett holding book

Mac Barnett ’04, seen here at his inauguration as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, draws inspiration from art, music and theatre, and incorporates the complexities of those mediums into his stories. 
(Shawn Miller/Library of Congress)

Writing for young readers

Barnett learned early in his career to listen to children.

Writing for kids and adults is similar, he says, in that both appreciate the great themes of literature—love, jealousy, betrayal, discovery. Barnett hit his stride as an author when he started focusing on concerns children have and asking young readers questions rather than answering them.

In 2017, Barnett published The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse—the picture book he says epitomizes his approach to writing.

“What’s powerful about picture books is that they can go very deep very fast,” he says. “It’s a short form of literature—32 pages, sometimes 40—and not a lot of words per page. But it can get to some of life’s deepest questions, and I feel I did that [with The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse].”

Barnett draws inspiration from art, music and theatre, and incorporates the complexities of those creative mediums into his stories. He says that, because children tend to be insulated from much of the world, children’s books tend to feel cloistered from the rest of literary culture—but that the best ones are sophisticated, thought-provoking and challenging.

“As adults, when we encounter something we don’t understand, we often push it aside because it makes us feel stupid,” he says. “But kids just bravely charge into challenging texts. It’s really inspiring to watch.”

With more than 5 million copies sold and a stop-motion animated series on Apple TV+ based on his and co-creator Jon Klassen’s Shapes series of picture books, Barnett recognizes the responsibility he has in writing for a time in a young reader’s life.

As National Ambassador, he has the platform to enlighten adults on the power of children’s books and the brilliance of the kids who read them. He says that he appreciates living in the space of early childhood, likening it to a train station where kids are constantly passing through.

“I’m sitting there [with my] violin … [trying] to play them a beautiful piece of music that makes sense in that moment,” he says. “Maybe they’ll remember the tune when they get where they’re going, but even if they don’t, all that matters is that I played a good piece while they were there.”