In the midterm elections of 2014, according to a Tufts University survey, only 17 percent of Pomona College students cast a vote. Four years later, a group of concerned Pomona students turned to an online voting support site to give those numbers a boost.

Student leaders Michaela Shelton ’21 and Lucas Carmel ’19 led the outreach effort, encouraging their fellow students to sign up with TurboVote, an online tool that helps users take the first steps to register to vote or to request an absentee ballot.

“A recent Pew study revealed that about 75 percent of nonvoters are not voting due to logistical concerns, confusion,” says Carmel. “Where to get a stamp? How to request an absentee ballot? Where’s their polling place? The same thing is true for college kids—but if you’re concrete with people and help them with the process, you can eliminate many of those barriers.”

A portrait of President Starr’s grandmother, Ethel Starr, whose dedication to voting was featured in an op-ed in the Washington Post.

President G. Gabrielle Starr joined in encouraging students to get out and vote, not only on our own campus but across the nation. In an op-ed titled “Dear College Students: My grandmother waited 70 years for the right to vote. Don’t ignore this chance,” published in The Washington Post in late October, Starr told the story of her grandmother, Ethel Starr, who was nearly 70 when the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. “As a child in the 1970s and ’80s, I always knew when it was Election Day,” she wrote. “My grandma got dressed in her Sunday best, put on her black shoes, hoisted her hard, black pocketbook, adjusted her hat and waited by the door for my father to drive her to the polls. She never missed an election. …”

“Do something no one else can do for you,” Starr concluded. “The students I’ve worked with know I love a good dare. And I send one back. I dare you.”

The efforts at Pomona seem to have succeeded in stimulating greater interest in voting, as TurboVote reports that about 40 percent of all Pomona students—703 to be exact—signed up for the service prior to Election Day.

Driving back to campus from L.A. late one night, computer science major Eberto Andre Ruiz ’19 felt himself drifting off at the wheel. Worried, he grasped for a solution.

“I’m like, ‘Man, this is not safe,’ so I told Siri to set a timer for every five minutes,” he says. “I woke up the next morning and thought, ‘I’ve got to make an app for this.’”

Enter the 5C Hackathon—a one-night coding competition. In early November, Ruiz joined classmates Peter Nyberg ’19, Thomas Kelleher ’19 and Brook Solomon ’19 to built a prototype called Olert, with the O reminiscent of a steering wheel.

“Basically we were interested in doing something that was ‘Tech for Good,’ an idea in some way applicable to the real world,” Nyberg says. “This is something that takes lives.”

Using a camera and eye-tracking software, they built a system that would vibrate the steering wheel if the program detected signs of drowsiness in the driver’s eyes.

One after another, checking out some of the 20 projects submitted after the Hackathon, students from the 5Cs sat down and gripped the makeshift steering wheel the team fashioned with the leather cover from the steering wheel of Ruiz’s Nissan Altima. Sure enough, they felt it vibrate when their eyes closed.

As a result, Olert took the Hackathon’s top prize for the best “Tech for Good” project.

In a rite of passage, first-year students at Pomona begin their lives on campus with a Critical Inquiry seminar. These seminars focus on developing writing skills as students collaborate with peers, professors and student mentors to refine their drafts. The familiar five-paragraph format and the strict word counts of admissions essays are left behind. Here’s a look at a few of the new courses offered last fall:

Lessons from the Mouse

Professor of Art Lisa Auerbach had never been to Disneyland until a birthday celebration a few years ago. She found herself surprised and curious. “Disneyland felt to me like a subject that everyone already has a relationship with, whether you’re a local person here who knows someone who works there, or you grew up going there, or you’re an international student who has grown up with Disney movies. I don’t think there is a place it hasn’t touched,” she says. “It provides for me the opportunity to make Disneyland into this lens to look at other kinds of things. We can use Disneyland to look at, for example, race and gender and pop culture. Or we can use Disneyland as an example when we talk about labor.” Labor issues were in the news this summer as Disneyland workers pressed for a “living wage.” Gender issues were at the forefront too, as the Pirates of the Caribbean ride reopened after an update that removed a banner at an auction scene that had read, “Take a wench for a bride.” Yet for all the complicated ways in which nostalgia, utopia, commerce and reality converge in Anaheim, “there is a magical ‘there’ there,” Auerbach says. And yes, there is a field trip.

The Politics of Protest

The Women’s March. The Arab Spring. The Tea Party protests. Tiananmen Square. And of course, the Civil Rights Movement. “There’s always something going on somewhere in the world,” says Professor of Politics Erica Dobbs, a new faculty member teaching her first ID1, based on a first-year seminar she taught at Swarthmore College. “Every year, there’s been an ideological mix,” Dobbs says, noting that many of her previous students had participated in protests. Some of the questions considered include what makes a protest a success or a failure, the role of historical memory and whether social media is a positive.     “Social media and the internet have changed the game when it comes to mobilization, but at the end of the day the powers that be are still more concerned about people taking to the streets than taking to their keyboards,” Dobbs says.

Math + Art: A Secret Affair

Mathematics Professor Gizem Karaali wants to put to rest the idea that everyone is either a math person or an art person. A sculpture of the symbol for pi sits on her desk. On her whiteboard are two colorful designs that turn out to be geometric art by her husband and 9-year-old daughter. The textbook is a $49 coffee-table book, Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History, by Lynn Gamwell, including work by the artist M.C. Escher, with his stairways and tessellations. “We find his work fascinating because it’s visually interesting, but also mathematically, what’s happening?” Karaali says. The course also explores concepts such as proportion, infinity and symmetry in other less-expected artists, in some cases considering their mathematical context for the first time.

Governing Climate Change

Acknowledging climate change is one thing. Figuring out what to do about it is another. Professor of Politics Richard Worthington takes on the complex topic of how local, state, national and international governmental groups are addressing climate change, with a particular focus on climate justice. “Climate justice is really built off the idea of environmental justice, this aspiration that people have basically equal access to environmental benefits and amenities and equal protection against environmental hazards,” he says, noting that the countries that have done the most to create the problem, such as the U.S. and China, aren’t the ones most affected. Geography makes a big difference, Worthington points out. For example, he says, “small islands, with sea level rise, are going to be hit harder.”

Statistics in the Real World

In a playful twist on the old Trident commercial, the full title of Mathematics Professor Jo Hardin’s updated ID1 seminar includes the phrase, “9 out of 10 Seniors Recommend This First-Year Seminar.” The class focuses on both good and dubious uses of statistics in politics, the media and scientific studies, with particular attention to the 2016 presidential election. “Every year I have a couple of students who take it because they think the seniors recommended it,” Hardin says. “I think to myself, ‘You’re the person who should be in the class.’”

Alida Schefers ’21 usually makes the first contact with her professors to let them know she uses a wheelchair and may need accommodations. Last year, however, it was Professor of Geology Linda Reinen who contacted Schefers, inviting her to visit the classroom where Reinen’s Intro to Geohazards class would take place and talk over plans for the class field trip. Since then, the bond between Schefers and Reinen has strengthened, and the classroom experience has changed for the better—for all of Reinen’s students.

In her revamped classroom, the most important rock samples now sit at the end of narrow tables with spacious and cleared aisles that ensure a wheelchair user can move with ease. A stream table (a tall table that demonstrates stream erosion) has a camera with a bird’s-eye view. The video is played back on a large screen for all students to see the action without having to crowd around.

Reinen’s changes may seem minor, but they make the classroom accessible in a major way. It was these changes that the International Association for Geoscience Diversity (IAGD) took note of when the group honored Reinen with the 2018 Inclusive Geoscience Education and Research (IGER) Award, given to instructors who promote or implement inclusive instruction and research that supports active engagement by students with disabilities.

“If everyone were mindful of a missed opportunity for a disabled student and took the time to advocate on their behalf, then the changes would be immense,” Schefers says. “One of my favorite sayings is: ‘If everyone did a little, no one would have to do a lot.’”

For each major play produced at the College, the Theatre Department has a promotional banner made to be hoisted above the entrance to Seaver Theatre for a few weeks prior to opening night. But where does that banner go once the play is over? That was what Suzanne Reed, the department’s costume shop manager, wondered—so she asked. The answer turned out to be: the trash can. So Reed outlined a recycling idea. What if she transformed each banner into tote bags for some of the play’s principals as a parting memento of their performance? And that’s just what she’s done following the last few plays, the most recent being last fall’s production of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector. To make the recycling process complete, the chain sewn into the bottom of the banner to give it weight is now returned to the banner company to be used again in a future banner.

Former Pomona College President David W. Oxtoby has been named the new president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A chemist by training, Oxtoby was elected a member of the academy in 2012. Founded in 1780, the academy honors and brings together members from across a wide range of disciplines to pursue nonpartisan research and provide critical insight on issues of importance to the nation and the world. The list of Oxtoby’s predecessors at the helm of the academy includes former U.S. presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams; the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Theodore William Richards; and the co-founder of the Polaroid Company, Edwin Herbert Land.