Blog Articles

Fulbright Fellows

October 14, 2019 by Staff Comments Off

Nine Pomona College recipients of Fulbright fellowships boarded airplanes this fall, headed everywhere from Indonesia to Lithuania. Four others declined the award to pursue other plans. Here’s the list of new Fulbright fellows, with their majors and destinations:

Natasha Anis ’19, English major, teaching in Indonesia
Ellena Basada ’16, English major. teaching in Germany
Sarah Binau ’19, cognitive science major, teaching in Brazil.
Tiffany Mi ’19, anthropology and French major, teaching in Spain
Andrew Nguy ’19, Asian studies major, studying contemporary tea culture in China
Jessica Phan ’19, molecular biology major, studying the chemistry of addiction in Portugal
Megan Rohn ’18, international relations major, teaching in Lithuania
Ivan Solomon ’19, international relations and Middle Eastern studies major, teaching in Morocco
Laura Zhang ’19, cognitive science major, teaching in Taiwan

From the Perspective of a Trilobite

October 14, 2019 by Staff Comments Off

Interim Dean of the College Bob Gaines holds a fossil of elrathia kingii, more commonly known as a trilobite.

Interim Dean of the College and Professor of Geology Bob Gaines threw a geological twist into the College’s opening convocation on the first day of the fall 2019 semester by presenting a very small but very old gift to each member of the entering class. The gift—a 504-million-year-old fossil trilobite from the Wheeler Shale in western Utah, was both a memento of the students’ first day of classes at Pomona and a focal point for his welcoming speech, which focused on time, on both the geological scale and the human scale of the four-year college journey upon which each of the new members of the Class of 2023 has now embarked.

“What you hold,” Gaines explained, “is an animal half a billion years old. In Earth terms, this beast is a mere youngster. It appeared after 89 percent of Earth’s history had already elapsed. The last 500-plus million years—which constitute the entire history of complex life on Earth, represent only the most recent 11 percent of Earth’s history and a far, far lesser proportion of the history of our universe.”

After tracing the very long journey each of those tiny fossils had taken through ancient seabeds, rock formations, geological uplifts and ice ages to the present day, he quipped: “So, this is the perspective from which I speak when I remind you that four years is actually a relatively brief expanse of time.”

Smart Summer Reads From 12 Pomona College Professors

October 14, 2019 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

These books written and edited by 11 Pomona College faculty members this year aren’t the lightest summer reads… but they could definitely land on the shortlist of the smartest.

Read the Smart Summer Reads From 12 Pomona College Professors story on the Pomona’s website.

Last of the Yellow Journalists

October 14, 2019 by Mark Wood Comments Off

There was a time when editorial cartooning was a job a young artist could aspire to. In 1900, there were an estimated 2,000 editorial cartoonists at work in the United States. They still numbered in the hundreds by the late ’70s, when—at the start of my career—I briefly became one of them.

It’s probably just as well that I moved on to other things. Since then, the American editorial cartoonist has become an endangered species, right up there with the pygmy elephant. The total in the U.S. is reportedly below 25 now, and falling. Just in the last two years, two Pulitzer Prize-winners—Nick Anderson at the Houston Chronicle and Steve Benson at the Arizona Republic—were dumped. In June, following an uproar about a cartoon full of anti-Semitic tropes, the international edition of The New York Times followed the example of its national counterpart and fired its last two cartoonists—neither of whom, by the way, had drawn the offending cartoon.

Here’s how bad it’s gotten: Iran now boasts more editorial cartoonists than the U.S.

I thought for a while that editorial cartooning would be my life’s work. Old-timers like Herblock and Conrad were giving way to subtle, innovative artists like Pat Oliphant and Jeff MacNelly. Strip cartoonists like Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau were blurring the line between the Sunday comics and the editorial page. These young guns were transforming the medium—putting irony and satire, artistic style and sly visual humor ahead of blunt-force commentary. It was an exciting time to be an editorial cartoonist.

And I loved the actual process of creating a cartoon—the immersion in the news, the joyous flash of inspiration, the inner howls of laughter as I did my preliminary sketches, the knowledge of famous faces that allowed me to draw Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton without conscious thought and the feeling of working without a net each time I wielded my ink brush to create the final product.

Over the years, I must have done hundreds of drawings of Clinton, then governor of the state where I lived, including one, shown here, that was completed shortly after he was first elected governor at the tender age of 32. It’s without a doubt the most prescient thing I’ve ever produced.

Part of the fun of it was the pure joy of poking fun at powerful people. I used to joke that we editorial cartoonists were the last of the yellow journalists—the only purveyors of the news who still had license to use caricature and exaggeration to distill complicated situations down to a single, simplistic metaphor. Our work was full of open mockery —an artform that intentionally stretched the limits of polite discourse.

And that was probably a big part of its undoing. In a time of heightened sensitivities and social media mobs, caricature has become a dangerous sport. As Australian cartoonist Mark Knight (whose caricatures are uniformly brutal) learned when tennis player Serena Williams’s husband accused him of a racist depiction of her, there’s a fine line between the kind of harsh visual exaggeration that caricatures depend upon and the perpetuation of cruel stereotypes. Add in the decline of newspapers as a profitable industry, and it’s not surprising, I suppose, that cartoonists have become, at best, expendable and, at worst, potential liabilities.

Given all of that, the number of young American artists who now aspire to become the next great editorial cartoonist is probably on a par with the number who plan to repair steam engines. But while the bell is clearly tolling for American editorial cartooning, I have to admit that I was wrong when I said we were the last of the yellow journalists. Yellow journalism, I’m afraid, is viciously alive and well on social media and talk radio—minus, of course, the redeeming humor.

Letter Box

October 14, 2019 by Staff Comments Off

Social Media: Not the Answer

In your cartoon in the spring/summer 2019 PCM titled “Depression and Social Media,” fictional “Dr. Kay” (sadly not so fictional) provides some sort of “therapy” (using the word loosely) to fictional “Josie,” recommending she use an app to analyze her “depression-related patterns in her Twitter usage.”

Now wait a minute! My view from 35 years of actual clinical practice as a clinical psychologist is quite different. I wouldn’t say it quite so harshly, but my advice to young Josie:

“Josie, research is getting pretty clear, and the title of the cartoon you are in says it all: ‘Depression and Social Media.’ The increase in depression in your age group seems to be related, in part, to the proliferation of social media. I recommend you get off of Twitter! Also, fire Dr. Kay as he is incompetent and doesn’t know the literature about what helps people.

“It is other people.

“Perhaps Dr. Kay fears this assertion is not ‘scientific.’ He is wrong, the scientific data is actually very clear in this regard. Dr. Kay seems most thoughtful as he looks at his computer screen, where he (along with the surveillance capitalists at Twitter) renders your behavioral data. When you are, ironically, lying on the Freudian couch, he’s not looking at you, but at the ‘report’ that the app has rendered, and reminding you that your dog was seriously ill.

“Josie, do you really not remember that your furry friend was seriously ill?

“Maybe you have been conditioned to believe, as some of my clients have, that such an experience shouldn’t upset you, but clearly it does, and that makes a lot of sense. If you really don’t remember he was ill, we need to explore your rather severe dissociative disorder, perhaps caused in part by your overuse of social media.”

I make what is called a “right livelihood” working directly, face to face, with a broad range of people, including those in Josie’s generation. Many, on their own, without my saying anything, have realized they need to decrease their use of social media, and all would seem to prefer and benefit from relating to me, not an app, as we, together, uncover and explore their joys, sorrows, hopes and fears. It is profoundly rewarding work.

—Jon Maaske ’72
Albuquerque, NM

In Defense of the Federalist Society

The article “History & the Court” in the winter 2019 PCM, about Professor Hollis-Brusky’s analysis of a recent Supreme Court decision on guns, references the way federal courts may inadvertently, but sometimes intentionally, intrude on Congress’s plenary power to enact substantive law under Article I of the Constitution.

Professor Hollis-Brusky’s apparent call to view the courts as a vehicle to “throw out all the rules about what we ought to expect, [which] opens up a lot of possibilities for people who want to reimagine the way we are” is essentially a call to judicial activism. Jurists answering that call would be acting in a way irreconcilable with the Constitution’s foundational tenet of separation of powers, which vests in Congress, not the courts, the authority to create the law.

In contrast to Professor Hollis-Brusky’s call to judicial activism, the Federalist Society advocates that “the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.” The Federalist Society’s solution for judicial activism is a judicial approach focusing first on the Constitution’s express words, and then, if any ambiguity exists, determining the Framers’ actual intent by focusing on what reasonable persons living at the time of its adoption would have understood the ordinary meaning of the text to be. This approach was followed in the Heller decision referenced by Professor Hollis-Brusky. The Heller decision reflects a proper judicial analysis of the Founders’ original intent and meaning of the Second Amendment at the time of ratification.

Although Professor Hollis-Brusky asserts that such an analysis had been made many times over the 150 years preceding Heller, resulting in an answer contrary to the Heller majority’s approach and conclusion, the judicial record indicates otherwise. As the 8th Circuit held in U.S. v. Seay, “Prior to 2009, the Supreme Court had not examined [the Second Amendment right] in depth. This changed with the Court’s landmark decision in Heller.” Similarly, in People v. Aguilar, the Illinois Supreme Court (none of whose judges were, at the time of the opinion, members of the Federalist Society) unanimously noted that the U.S. Supreme Court in Heller “undertook its first-ever ‘in-depth examination’ of the Second Amendment’s meaning.”A consistent application of original intent thereby decreases the danger posed by the temptation for jurists to impose their own policy preferences into decisions and/or exercise judicial activism to change the law independently of the legislature.

—Grant Frazier ’16
Phoenix, AZ

Real VR Therapy

I am writing with regard to the article in the spring/summer 2019 PCM about the potential research of Cynthia Nyongesa ’19 on virtual reality and individuals with ASD.

While we do not use VR as a therapeutic intervention, per se, we at AHRC Middle/High School in Brooklyn, NY (schools.ahrcnyc.org) have been using this technology with our students since 2017.

We have used VR to help our students simulate community experiences such as traveling via subway, making purchases and having social interactions, as well as using it a tool for “virtual field trips” and curriculum extensions. In our experience, VR is an easy-to-use, cost-effective tool for introducing more “real-life” situations to our students with ASD so that they are better prepared to handle these encounters in the real world.

We appreciate that these novel and safe interventions are being investigated at Pomona College these days.

—John Goodson ’02
Cambridge, MA

Corrections

I’m at a point in life where one is inclined to be somewhat forgetful. Personally, I am a good example of that some of the time, but thankfully not all of the time. So when I saw my class note in the spring/summer 2019 PCM with the Class of 1950, I had to think twice: Am I Class of ’50 or Class of ’51? The ’50ers are a great group, but I really am a loyal ’51er and always will be. Thus I felt compelled to bring this little editorial glitch to your attention.

—Pat Newton ’51
Pomona, CA

The spring/summer issue is a splendid piece of work in all ways, but unfortunately, it contains an error on page 52, line 7 of the Class of ’49 notes. I am a member of the Nature PRINTING Society, not the Nature PAINTING Society. If you will access the Nature Printing Society website, you will see that while our society is fairly young, the art of printing from nature is centuries old. I mostly print botanicals [see right] but have also printed fish (does gyotaku ring a bell?), feathers, squid, octopi, fossils, shells, snakeskins and really flat roadkill, and I even got to assist at the printing of an orca that washed up down-coast and was assigned to the museum for a necropsy. NPS also appears on Facebook, but since I’m a technological Luddite, I have no idea how to find it.

—Lila Anne Bartha (AKA “Hebe”)
Santa Barbara, CA

Concerning an error in “Smoke in the Wine” in the winter 2019 PCM, Sonoma and Santa Rosa were not “Spanish settlements” in what is today Sonoma County, Calif., as the article says. They were Mexican.

—Hal Beck ’64
Forestville, CA

Bowling for Atoms

October 14, 2019 by Staff Comments Off

Professor of Physics and Astronomy David Tanenbaum keeps this broken pink bowling ball in his office as a reminder of a project that he considers to be one of the most important responsibilities of his career—playing the lead role in providing faculty oversight for the design, planning and construction of the new Millikan Laboratory for Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy. The last step in that long and arduous process was the grand opening of the new facility on Founders’ Day 2015. In planning for that special event, the question arose: How should they christen the new building? The answer to that question involved some showmanship, some real physics and, incidentally, the destruction of a bowling ball.

Built in the 1950s, the original Millikan Laboratory had become badly out-of-date, so in 2013 it was torn down to make room for a new, state-of-the-art Millikan, built upon the footprint of the original.

To dedicate this new building for physics, math and astronomy in 2015, the faculty didn’t want anything trite, like cutting a ribbon. They wanted nothing less than to smash an atom.

Not a real atom, of course. An atom made of papier-maché. The Math Department took on the job of creating the atom, using as a model the sculpture above the building’s front door.

Created for the original Millikan by artist Albert Stewart, that bronze sculpture, a striking but not-very-accurate representation of a lithium atom, is the only remaining feature from the original structure.

The next question was how to smash this make-believe atom. After some consideration, the faculty settled on two bowling balls, suspended by ropes from the ceiling, swinging down simultaneously from two sides to smash together in the middle.

Knowing that it would take some experimentation to create a safe and reliable way of smashing the atom, Tanenbaum and his colleagues bought several bowling balls and fitted them with hooks.

They then hung two bowling balls from the ceiling and devised a clever mechanism to pull them apart and release them at the same instant by the pull of a cord, so that they would swing down and collide.

Since there was only one papier-maché atom and it couldn’t be destroyed more than once, they concentrated on making the two bowling balls collide at the midpoint where the atom would be hung on the day of the opening.

In one test, the balls collided so violently that the resin covering of one ball shattered. After that, Tanenbaum used a cardboard box as a stand-in for the atom to cushion the blow.

For the event, then-President David Oxtoby was recruited to do the honors. Standing in a lift and wearing a hard-hat, he pulled the cord, and all of that hard work ended in a crash, with a thoroughly smashed atom.

How to Become a Concert Pianist

October 14, 2019 by Staff Comments Off

Genevieve Lee

AT AGE 4, although neither of your parents is a musician, decide on your own that you want to play the piano. Study with a neighborhood teacher in Racine, Wisconsin, and discover that you love it so much that your parents never have to make you practice.

WHILE ASPIRING to become an architect or a brain surgeon, show so much promise as a young pianist that, when you’re 8 years old, your piano teacher tells your parents that you need to move on to a more advanced instructor.

AFTER MOVING to York, Pennsylvania, apply to study piano with a well-known teacher in Baltimore, an hour’s drive away. Get accepted and work with her for five years, as she gently nudges you to abandon brain surgery for a career in music.

AT 12, PERFORM as a soloist in your very first concert with an actual orchestra. Play a Mozart concerto with the York Symphony Orchestra and discover the thrill of performing before an audience that isn’t made up of relatives and friends.

AS A HIGH school senior at the age of 15, decide to apply only to music schools. Choose Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where you feel both intimidated and inspired by the talented people around you. Decide that this is the right path for you.

GRADUATE FROM Peabody in three years and attend a summer program for musicians in Fontainebleau, France, where you win a one-year scholarship to the École Supérieure de Musique in Paris. Take first prize in the school’s annual competition.

GO ON TO graduate school at Yale University, where you find a mentor, the pianist Boris Berman, who challenges you to think independently and find your own special voice as a musician. Eventually earn your doctor of musical arts degree there.

TEACH FOR TWO years as a visiting professor at Bucknell University and fall in love with the liberal arts setting. Apply for a job at Pomona College and get it. Enjoy working with the students so much that you’re still at it 25 years later.

IN ADDITION to your solo work, play with various chamber music ensembles, including the Mojave Trio and the Garth Newel Piano Quartet, even though the latter means flying across the country to Virginia for each rehearsal.

PERFORM AT venues around the globe, including Carnegie Hall in New York and Disney Hall in L.A. Play both classical works and experimental pieces and earn a Grammy nomination for a CD in which you play a toy grand piano.

Last Look: Commencement 2019

October 14, 2019 by Staff Comments Off

A graduating senior celebrating after receiving his diploma

President Gabi Starr greeting members of the Class of 2019 with high fives

An 8-foot globe on display on Marston Quad, painted to show the various home countries of the new graduates

An address by senior class speaker Ivan Solomon

Members of the Class of 2019 applauding a speech by Esther Brimmer ’83

Two new graduates sharing a congratulatory hug

Critical Inquiries

October 14, 2019 by Staff Comments Off

Professor Sandeep Mukherjee in his studio

A glimpse inside three of Pomona’s creative ID1 classes

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

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

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

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

I Disagree

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

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

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

On Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

Color and Its Affects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wig Winners 2019

October 14, 2019 by Staff Comments Off

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

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

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

Stephan Garcia

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

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

Guadalupe Bacio

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

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

Valorie Thomas

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

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

Susan McWilliams Barndt

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

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

Pey-Yi Chu

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

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

Carolyn Ratteray

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

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

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