Pomona Today

Archives: The Cain Mystery

August 3, 2016 by Mark Wood Comments Off

PCM-summer2016text58-web2_Page_14_Image_0001 ITEM: Class cane
DATE: 1926
DESCRIPTION: Tapering hardwood walking cane 35 inches long, with a 5-inch curved handle.
ORIGIN: Unknown

The tradition of college canes seems to have been fairly common in the United States during the 19th century and the early part of the 20th. At Amherst College, for instance, freshmen had to wear a beanie, but as sophomores, they could wear a class top hat and carry a class cane. At Dartmouth College, the eagerness of first-year students to gain these status symbols led to a yearly competition called the Cane Rush, eventually banned for the violence it provoked. Today few remnants of that tradition survive. At Dartmouth, during Commencement, graduating seniors still carry canes topped with carvings related to their senior society—such as a griffin or a phoenix. And at Amherst, the tradition had a brief revival in 2003, when the College awarded specially designed class canes to all of its graduating seniors.
At Pomona there are only a few tantalizing references to the cane tradition. For instance, a description of campus activities in 1911 says: “If freshmen won both the Pole Rush and the subsequent freshman-sophomore football game, they got to carry around canes for a few weeks. If the sophomores won, they got to punish the freshmen by making them wear something embarrassing and smacking them with paddles if they refused.”
The cane pictured here is from the Class of 1926, as evidenced by the inlaid metal strip embossed with the totem pole design that was the symbol of that class, also to be found in the pages of that year’s Metate yearbook. Beyond that we know nothing. It was discovered in a closet of the Alumni Relations Office in Seaver House, its provenance and history unknown. If you have information to share about this cane or about the class cane tradition at Pomona, we invite you to contact us.

If you have an item from Pomona’s history that you would like to see preserved in the Pomona College Archives, please call 909-621-8138.

Backstage: Return of the Oaks

August 3, 2016 by Carla Guerrero ’06 Comments Off

PCM-summer2016text58-web2_Page_13_Image_0001

The mesa oak, with its bluish-green leaves and majestic stature, was almost completely wiped out from the landscape of Claremont and surrounding areas more than a century ago. Now Pomona’s bringing this endangered native tree back to campus, thanks to the work of veteran groundskeeper Kevin Quanstrom.

Since 2006, crews have planted about 30 mesa oak trees, also known as the Engelmann or Pasadena oak, in and around the College. Quanstrom, assistant director of grounds and housekeeping, says adding the mesa to the campus’ much larger number—in the hundreds—of coast live oaks helps diversify and strengthen Pomona’s tree population.

More than the bluish leaf color sets the mesa oaks apart: These trees are less susceptible to sudden oak death caused by pests and disease brought on by the ongoing drought, which took its toll on some of the older coast live oak trees that once lined Bonita Avenue. Quanstrom and his team had to remove those damaged trees when the roadway was rebuilt a few years ago, replacing them with the mesa.

“It’s important to understand native plants and to put native plants where you can,” says Quanstrom, who has worked at Pomona since 2004. “When going from nonnative to native plants, you’re always going to save water because native plants tend to be dormant in the summertime. People should care—these trees were part of the ecosystem before we got here, and once the trees are more established, they will help save water.”

With new developments across campus, Quanstrom took advantage of the opportunities to lay down the mesa oak around the Studio Art Hall and Sontag Greek Theatre, along Columbia Avenue and on the east side of Oldenborg Center.

Quanstrom has extensive experience with native habitat restoration, and although the tree is not readily found at local nurseries or big-name home improvement stores, he tracked down a grower in Riverside who could provide them.

Though always outnumbered by the more prolific coast live oaks, mesa oaks were most plentiful up to the mid-19th century, thriving in an area running from Pasadena as far south as Baja California. Then numbers dwindled as a result of logging. “It was very popular for lumber because it’s a very straight oak tree,” says Quanstrom.

At the same time, settlers began to fill the area and citrus trees replaced native vegetation, says Environmental Analysis Professor Char Miller, who notes that the mesa was a key timber used to shore up the new houses and buildings.

“My bet is that some of the College’s earliest buildings may have contained lumber milled from this local tree. The mesa oak largely disappeared from its historic sites by the early 20th century, and its loss is one of the reasons my wife and I planted one in our backyard, a small reclaiming of this area’s environmental past.”

Back on campus, the oak plantings are part of a larger effort to introduce drought-tolerant plants, but Miller finds the return of the majestic trees to be a particular point of pride. “This restoration project is a marker of the College’s sustainability commitments and our willingness to invest in making the grounds less thirsty, more resilient,” he says.

The Purloined Safe

April 7, 2016 by Staff Comments Off

Safe

It sits like an abandoned tank in a basement hallway of Sumner Hall, just outside the entrance to the College Archives—an antique steel safe on rusty wheels, its surface scarred by decades of scratches and random drips of paint. On the front, below the combination lock and an oddly pastoral painted tableau, are the words “From John H.F. Peck Safe Dealer, Los Angeles.”

The only references to the John H.F. Peck company that turn up in a web search are from the 1890s, so it’s a safe bet (so to speak) that the object is as old as it looks. But how did it come to be here? And what’s inside?

The only known mention of a safe in the early histories of Pomona College is from Frank Brackett’s Granite and Sagebrush, in which the founding faculty member tells the story of a safe kept in the Office of the Dean in old Holmes Hall. One day in the spring of 1911, as he tells it, while most of the campus community was away at a picnic in San Antonio Canyon, the safe “simply vanished without leaving a trace.” No one had a clue what had happened until, a few weeks later, a professor noticed a squeak in the floor. Kneeling to investigate, he found that the linoleum had been cut. Pulling back the loose piece, along with the floorboards, which had also been cut, and scraping back the dirt, he discovered the lost safe, which, like Poe’s purloined letter, had been there all along, buried beneath the floor.

So is this the purloined safe that was once buried by pranksters beneath the floor of Holmes Hall? It certainly seems old enough, and it seems unlikely that the College, in its early, penny-pinching days, would have had more than one of these. It also makes sense that the Dean’s safe would have been moved to Sumner Hall when Sumner was relocated in the early 1920s and began to house the College’s administrative functions.

But we’ll probably never know for sure. And since the combination is lost in time, the safe’s contents, if any, are likely to remain a mystery as well.

ITEM: Antique safe
DATE: Late 1800s or early 1900s
DESCRIPTION: Steel combination safe, 41.25” H x 27.75” W x 28.25” D
ORIGIN: John H.F. Peck Safe Dealer, Los Angeles

If you have an item from Pomona’s history that you would like to see preserved in the Pomona College Archives, please call 909-621-8138.

Music Restored

December 2, 2015 by Staff Comments Off

The statue being restored On August 14, 2015, Burt Johnson’s 1916 sculpture “Spanish Music,” was reinstalled on the fountain in Lebus Court. The sculpture, which was a gift to the College from the Class of 1915, had remained in place in the courtyard until earlier this year, when a section of the fountain collapsed. Based on photographs of the original fountain, the fountain was rebuilt, and the College took the opportunity to have the statue restored and its broken flute repaired.

This is Your Brain on Counterfactuals

December 2, 2015 by Mark Wood Comments Off

Suzanne Thompson, professor emerita of psychology at Pomona, conducts research on how people react to personal threats, particularly those with delayed consequences. She and her undergraduate research group are investigating a variety of ways in which different perceptions of threat influence the processing of threatening information and guide health and safety behaviors.

PCM: As a psychologist, how do you see the role of “what if” thinking in human affairs?

Suzanne Thompson: The theme that you’ve chosen is especially interesting because “what if” or “if only” thinking is such a basic part of human cognition. And there seem to be good evolutionary reasons for that. It has helped us develop the ability to control things, to anticipate—if I do this, what’s going to happen?—and then to carry that several steps down the line.

Or looking back, it allows us to analyze what has gone before and play out these little scenarios of what else could have happened, which is full of information about causes and effects.

PCM: What kind of research has been done in this area?

ST: When thoughts like these refer to the past, they’re usually called counterfactuals, and when they refer to the future, we call those anticipatory factuals or prefactuals. I would say most of the work has been done on counterfactuals, or what’s sometimes called “cognitive undoing.” There are two basic types—upward and downward counterfactuals. An upward counterfactual is when we undo what did happen and imagine a better outcome. For example, if I’m a student who got a C on a test, and I imagine, “If only I had skipped that party and studied hard, this could have been a B or an A.” Alternatively, we can imagine a worse outcome—a downward counterfactual, such as, “I’m glad I at least covered that material or it could have been a lot worse. This could have been a D or an F.”

The two kinds of counterfactuals have very different effects and different advantages and disadvantages. Imagining something better tends to lead to unpleasant emotions—regret or maybe self-blame. And if it involves other people’s behavior, we might blame them. That’s the downside, those negative emotions and reactions.

But the upside is that there’s a lot of information there about what we can do to change things in the future, and people can use that. One study asked college students about the kinds of counterfactuals they were making for their grade on the first big exam. Then the researchers followed them for the rest of the semester, and found that the students who had made upward counterfactuals felt more regret and blame, but also tended to have a stronger sense of control and got better grades over the course of the semester. That gives support to that idea that upward counterfactuals are very useful.

In contrast, the downward counterfactuals—“it could have been worse”— led to more positive emotions, but were not as instructive. They didn’t have useful information about how to change your behavior to get a better outcome.

PCM: So no pain, no gain?

ST: That’s right. Research has also looked at what we “undo” in a counterfactual. We tend to look mainly at our own behavior, maybe because we have more control over that or it’s more useful. We also tend to undo things that happened fairly close to the event. And if something unusual happens—if you had a break in your routine or took a different route to work and then got into an accident—that’s what’s going to pop out as something to undo.

PCM: What about people who get obsessed with their “what if” thoughts?

ST: Yes, it can get pushed too far. There are people who get immersed in “what if” and “if only.” For people who have gone through some traumatic event, like losing a loved one in an automobile accident or to disease, it’s very common initially to do this kind of counterfactual thinking. It seems useful early on, but if people are still doing it years later, it’s a sign of not coping very well. It is better to get your information, and then get out and not get stuck in the “undoing” side of things.

PCM: Are there certain kinds of situations that tend to provoke counterfactual thoughts?

ST: Research has shown that near misses are particularly powerful. There’s a classic example that I use with my classes. Mr. Crane and Mr. Tees are going to the airport and they both get there a half hour late and miss their plane. When Mr. Crane gets to the airport, he finds that the plane left on schedule, a half hour before. When Mr. Tees arrives, he finds that his plane was delayed, and he just missed it. Almost everyone recognizes that Mr. Tees would feel worse, even though the situations are identical in terms of what happened to them. But emotionally, psychologically, we pick up on the fact that it could have so easily have been different, and that has a big impact on us.

Another good example comes from an article that was in the L.A. Times maybe 10 years ago about a guy playing the lottery who always played the same number again and again, and then one day he doesn’t and his number wins. And we all understand what that would feel like—that near miss. In fact, the Oregon lottery uses that as a slogan in some of their ads: “What if your number won without you?”

PCM: Have you thought about how counterfactual thinking connects with your own research about possible threats somewhere in the future?

ST: In a 2002 study, I examined people’s reactions to 9/11 a year after the event. And I found such amazing variety—from people who weren’t fazed at all to people who were highly sensitized to danger because of the event and were never going to fly again. That got me interested in individual differences—how we don’t all think about threats and the future the same way.

We all know people who are very sensitized to threat and also people who just brush it off, easy deniers. It is possible that those who have a great sensitivity to future threats are using anticipatory counterfactuals, and anticipating bad outcomes that could happen. For others who are not so sensitized to threat, the possible negative outcomes just don’t occur to them. A little bit of anticipating threats is a good thing, but a whole lot of thinking about every possible future threat—“if I do X, this bad outcome could happen”—can be paralyzing.

People who get more anxious about threats are more likely to protect themselves, which is good, but they may not be as discriminating about what really is necessary. You can see this play out in society sometimes. Around the time when AIDS was first identified, we didn’t know a lot about it, but medical researchers did know that it wasn’t easily spread. You can be in the same room with someone, even touch them, but not be at risk. But many parents wouldn’t let their kids go to school with another child who was identified with AIDS or had a relative with HIV or AIDS. Sensitization to threat can lead to that type of over-reaction.

It is easy to see how this ability to play things out and anticipate outcomes allows you to identify more negative things that could happen, and that can heighten anxiety and lead to over-reactions. My research has not yet tied threat hypersensitivity to counterfactuals, in particular, but now that I have talked with you about this, it is something I want to do. Does the hypersensitivity to threat come from being very prone to counterfactuals and especially prone to ones in which you play out the scenario to a negative ending?

PCM: There’s one aspect of “what if” thinking that we haven’t discussed yet. That’s the fact we also do it for fun—like in this issue of the magazine. We read counterfactual stories. And we play games, like chess, that are all about pre-factual scenarios.

ST: Chess is a good example. You’re following a line of thought with all the branches and possibilities. What chess masters can do—thinking many moves ahead—is an amazing ability. Because counterfactual and prefactual thinking are such important abilities from an evolutionary viewpoint, it makes sense that we find them rewarding. The fun is our incentive for practicing these very useful ways of thinking.

“Here, Let Me Show You…”

December 2, 2015 by Feather Rose Flores ’17 Comments Off

David Haley working with electronics If you are ever offered a tour of the new Millikan Laboratory and Andrew Science Hall with David Haley as your guide, take it. A 21-year veteran of physics departments, he has an enthusiasm for his subject that is nonstop and infectious. Completely at ease in the corridors of Millikan’s new underground laboratory, he misses no opportunity to point out the fascinating creations of Pomona students and faculty.

“This one is a sonoluminescence project,” he says, referring to one of the many capstone projects he’s kept over the years. “It uses sound to compress a bubble, which produces light. And this—” He gestures to a nearby rolling chair contraption. “—Is a fire-extinguisher-propelled rocket cart. You sit on it and you squeeze the handle and you launch yourself down the hall. It’s for talking about Newton’s laws.” Before exiting a workroom, he pauses to flick on a homemade air hockey table, explaining: “I’m trying to convince one of the students to create 3D shapes that we can print and use to teach conservation of momentum.”

Haley, who has been working at Pomona since the summer of 2001, describes himself as a “physics roadie.” As the senior lab technician of the Physics Department, he is primarily responsible for handling the equipment for labs and the lecture demonstrations, in addition to supporting faculty research and student projects. “One of the nuances of my job is making the process more streamlined and straightforward for students, so they’re less worried about how things work and more focused on the concepts behind the lab,” he explains. “If I do my job right, you’ll rarely know I was there.”

Haley graduated with a B.S. in physics from Kansas State University, after which he spent seven years working as a lab technician at New Mexico State University before moving to California. Luckily for Pomona, he was informed of the open position by chance, after contacting a former coworker who happened to attend the same summer meeting of the Physics Instructional Resource Association (PIRA) as Pomona Professor of Physics David Tanenbaum. “I didn’t really realize the caliber of Pomona when I first got the job,” Haley confesses. “It was just a name to me. But once I started working here, I realized what a special place this is. It makes me believe in karma.”

If good karma is a reward for good deeds, Haley deserves a lot of it. He recently gave a presentation to the Southern California chapter of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) detailing the Pomona College Lending Library of physics equipment, which he manages. Composed of experiments ranging from electricity and magnetism to mechanics to superconductivity, the library serves physics teachers from around Southern California, who can request to borrow experiment kits for their lessons once they’ve attended a Pomona faculty-run workshop. “This is part of Pomona College’s mission,” says Haley. “We’re obligated as educators to help teach not only our students here at Pomona, but the general populace. I like that I can use what I do, and the equipment I have, to get people interested in science and the world around them.”

Since Haley is an enthusiast for science in general, you’d think choosing to focus in only one field would have been tough for him, but this isn’t the case. “I like the applied nature of physics,” he says. “The world is a very beautiful place, and I want to understand it better. Why do objects have mass? Why is there gravity? The more evidence you get to support a theory, the more you believe it’s accurate, but you can never really take it as truth. But that’s what I like about physics. It’s always a reiteration.”

And yet despite the reiteration, Haley’s job is never boring. Particularly exciting for him was the opportunity to use his many years of experience to help design the new science building. The Physics and Astronomy Department seized the opportunity to reorganize their space, implementing prep rooms between labs and behind lecture classrooms.

His favorite parts of the building also include the new student research project space, which was absent in the old Millikan. And new perks of the job include selecting items for Millikan’s first-floor display case. Haley is eager to point them all out: “These are Lichtenberg’s figures; they’re basically electric sparks encased in acrylic. This is a laser-etched glass figurine. This is the Milky Way galaxy, and this is a large-scale galactic structure. Those are some of our antique Gessler tubes from the 1920s. Those are all meteorites. And here’s a 3D-printed figurine of a student wearing a hat.”

Below ground again, as Haley enthusiastically indicates each of the projects that live in the basement of Millikan, he tells the stories of their creators. The student who created a rail gun as his senior thesis is now working at Los Alamos. Another student started his own software company.

Haley keeps all of his thank-you notes in a special place of honor on his desk. Smiling to himself as he goes through each one, he remarks, “It’s easy to come to work when you have things like this. To work with people like this is amazing. Plus, I get to play with soap bubbles and Tesla coils and shoot balls across the room. It’s really—can you see the colors in the film now?”

He gestures toward his workbench, where he has set up an old junior project, a soap film encased in a clear box. “The colors have to do with the thickness of the film. It’s an interference of light demonstration, pretty much the same idea as an oil slick on water.

“Here—let me show you.”

New on the Board of Trustees

December 2, 2015 by Mark Wood Comments Off

The Pomona College Board of Trustees has a new chair and three new members. Samuel D. Glick ’04 took over the gavel this summer from Jeanne Buckley ’65. Joining the Board for the first time were Matthew J. Estes ’88, Nathaniel “Nate” Kirtman ’92 and Xiaoye “MD” Ma ’11.

Board Chair Samuel D. Glick ’04

Samuel D. Glick ’04 first served on Pomona’s Board of Trustees as the young alumni member from 2007 to 2011. He was elected to his current term in 2012. Glick is partner and San Francisco office leader at Oliver Wyman, where he advises the nation’s leading healthcare organizations on business strategy. At Pomona, he earned his bachelor’s degree in economics, with a minor in classics. As a member of the Board, he has served as chair of the Advancement Committee and as a member of the Finance Committee, Facilities and Environment Committee, Educational Quality Committee, Student Affairs Committee, Wig Fund for Teaching Committee and Honorary Degrees Committee.

Matthew J. Estes ’88

Matthew J. Estes built four companies in China during the past 24 years. He was founder & CEO of BabyCare Ltd., which manufactures and sells nutritional supplements via a chain of BabyCare Centers and a direct sales force of over 200,000 people in China. He was also founder of Yaolan New Media Ltd. (yaolan.com), a leading Chinese language parenting website with more than 11 million registered families. He sold BabyCare and Yaolan to U.S. companies. Previously, he was with Wella Cosmetics (now part of Proctor & Gamble) and Smithkline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline PLC). He served as Vice Chair of the American Chamber of Commerce in China and is currently focusing on healthcare- and internet-related venture capital.

Nathaniel “Nate” Kirtman III ’92

As senior vice president of corporate PR for NBC Entertainment, Nathaniel “Nate” Kirtman III ’92 oversees the network’s corporate communications initiatives, media relations, charitable contributions, operations, events and digital communications efforts. His previous roles at NBC included overseeing publicity for late-night programs such as The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, talent relations and events. Earlier, Kirtman served as manager of marketing communications at GE-Aviation and led the corporate digital team at GE’s corporate headquarters. A government major and star athlete at Pomona, Kirtman was a ninth-round pick of the Dallas Cowboys. He is also chairman of the California State Lottery Commission and has served on Pomona’s Alumni Association Board.

Xiaoye “MD” Ma ’11

Xiaoye “MD” Ma ’11 is the new young alumni trustee. Ma is a senior manager of business intelligence at 5.11 Tactical, a firm that innovates tactical gear for global special force operators, first responders, and outdoor enthusiasts. Prior to taking on this role, he was a management consultant at Deloitte Consulting. Graduated magna cum laude from Pomona, Ma was an economics and media studies major, freshman class president, ASPC commissioner of communications and RHS staff. Between high school in Singapore and Pomona, he spent part of his gap year as an actor in a Chinese television drama about firefighters.

How To

December 2, 2015 by Mark Wood Comments Off

Lesley Irvine magazine feature image There’s nothing particularly surprising in the fact that Pomona-Pitzer’s new athletic director has hit the ground running. Lesley Irvine has been moving fast ever since she was a child—first as a multi-sport athlete, then as a high-profile coach and finally as an athletic administrator. At Pomona, she has assumed a newly created full-time position as chair of Pomona’s Physical Education Department and director of the joint athletic program of Pomona and Pitzer colleges.

“I wanted to be at a place that was striving to be excellent both athletically and academically—a place that knew and believed that those things go hand in hand and support one another,” she explains in a clipped British accent softened at the edges by 16 years in the United States. “I also wanted to be at a place that was really striving to improve and be aspirational.”

Since her arrival, Irvine has been visible all over campus as she acquaints herself with every aspect of Sagehen sports—from intramurals to varsity—and begins to plot a course for the future. “As I think about the vision for Pomona-Pitzer Athletics, I think about broad-based competitive excellence,” she says. “I think about providing an experience that is at the highest level for our student-athletes. And I think about the visibility and connectivity of athletics on the campuses here.”

Number 1 Grow up in Corby, a steel town in central England where most people are of Scottish descent and speak with a Scottish brogue. Develop into an active child, always sporting a scraped knee. Get involved in athletics with the encouragement of your dad, an avid soccer player, coach and fan.

Number 2 Join a track and field club at the age of 9 and, since you excel in a range of athletic events, specialize in the heptathlon. In high school, find yourself playing almost every sport, from basketball to volleyball to soccer. Discover the game of field hockey and fall in love with it.

Number 3 Accept an invitation to play on the English junior national field hockey team at the age of 16, while also competing internationally in the heptathlon. Play for England in a victory over Scotland in the Six Nations field hockey tournament and have to explain to your teammates why your dad, a proud Scot, is rooting against you.

Number 4 Become the first member of your family to go to college, playing field hockey at prestigious Loughborough University. While there, win five national championships. During your second year, teach tennis at a summer camp in Maine (though you’ve never touched a tennis racquet before) and find yourself at home in American sports culture.

Number 5 After graduating, come back to the U.S. for graduate school, attending the University of Iowa and playing competitive field hockey for one more year, scoring the only goal in a 1–0 victory over Stanford University in your first trip out West and leading your team to a Final Four appearance. Earn your master’s degree in health, leisure and sports studies.

Number 6 Return to Stanford as assistant women’s field hockey coach. Discover that you love working with committed student athletes who love sports as much as you do. After two years, succeed the retiring head coach and spend eight years at the helm of Stanford’s elite program, guiding them to three straight NorPac championships.

Number 7 Leave Stanford to enter sports administration, spending five years at Bowling Green State University and rising to the rank of senior associate athletic director. Decide the job at Pomona-Pitzer is a perfect match for your abilities and your desire to help build something special for talented and motivated student-athletes while promoting wellness for a whole community

Tying the Knot

December 2, 2015 by Mark Wood Comments Off

As Bridges Hall of Music celebrates its centennial, many Pomona alumni look back fondly at the place where they said “I do.” The Little Bridges Wedding Register is a historical record of marriages that took place in the building, starting with Howry Warner 1912 and Mary Roof 1912, married June 1, 1916. Compiled in the early 1970s, the register was maintained and updated through 1992 and includes the names of 453 couples.

ITEM: The Little Bridges Wedding Register
DATE: 1916–1992
COLLECTION: Pomona College Books and Periodicals Collection
DESCRIPTION: 29-page handwritten book (16” X 12” X 1”), registering the names of all the couples who were married in Mabel Shaw Bridges Hall of Music between 1916 and 1992.
ORIGIN: The book was created by the College to list couples who were married in Little Bridges and kept for many years at the Alumni House (Seaver House).

If you have an item from Pomona’s history that you’d like to see preserved in the Archives, please call 909-621-8138.