Pomona College’s new vice president for student affairs and dean of students, Avis E. Hinkson, brings more than three decades of higher education experience in areas ranging from residential life to student recruitment to undergraduate advising. Her new role, which she began on Aug. 1, marks her return to Pomona College, where she was an associate dean of admissions from 1990 to 1994.
As dean of the college at Barnard College in New York, Hinkson led a staff of more than 100, overseeing academic advising, career development, registrar, health and wellness services, counseling services, Title IX services, residential and campus life, international and intercultural programs and diversity initiatives.
At Barnard, she worked with colleagues to shape the student experience and campus culture while sustaining direct involvement with many of Barnard’s 2,500 undergraduate women and serving as a key partner in Barnard’s unique connection with Columbia University.
“Avis brings just the right experience, energy and high level of engagement to this crucial role,” says Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr. “She is someone who reaches out, listens and helps spark change where it is needed. Our students and the wider campus community will benefit from collaborating with her.”
Hinkson’s other roles have included dean of admission and enrollment planning at Mills College in Oakland, Calif.; associate director of admission and director of minority recruitment at the University of Southern California; and associate director of admission and minority recruitment director at Cornell University.
Among her current professional activities, Hinkson serves on the board of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education as chair of the assembly for the organization of 35 highly selective private colleges and universities committed to meeting the full demonstrated financial need of admitted students.
In addition to earning a doctor of education degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Hinkson holds a master’s degree in student personnel administration from Columbia University’s Teachers College and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Barnard.
She succeeds Miriam Feldblum, who departed in February after a decade of service to become executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, a new initiative that advocates for the legislative interests of immigrant, undocumented and international students on college campuses.
Menkhoff hardly could have taken a more circuitous route to Pomona College. Already 22 years old as a first-year student, he completed Singapore’s mandatory military service before beginning his college career. He also spent a year focused almost entirely on training with the national team between high school and the military.
It’s safe to say that no Pomona faculty member has ever been more beloved among students and alumni than Emerita Professor of English Martha Andresen Wilder, who died on March 24 from multiple myeloma at the age of 74. Over the 34 years of her Pomona career, she was honored by the students themselves seven times with the coveted Wig Award for Excellence in Teaching, setting a record in the 60-plus-year history of the award that is unlikely ever to be surpassed. If she hadn’t been ineligible for four years following each win, she probably would have garnered many more.
Professor of Theatre Arthur Horowitz, who retired last spring after 14 years on Pomona College’s theatre faculty, passed away suddenly in New Orleans on June 16, at the age of 73.
Grow up in a baseball-centric family in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago—near the Chicago Cubs’ famed ballpark, Wrigley Field—and start playing tee-ball at 3. Discover that you’re “a little above average” as a toddler-athlete, meaning that you can run all the way to first base without falling down.
In kindergarten, attend a hands-on workshop by the nonprofit social-circus group CircEsteem. After failing miserably at juggling scarves, test your sense of balance on a rolling globe—a hard sphere about four feet in diameter—and do so well that the group invites you to join them for practices.
Partly because the workshop was so cool and partly to escape the soccer practice you despise, join CircEsteem’s new after-school program and discover an awe-inspiring new world—a cavernous circus ring where kids up to high-school age are performing all sorts of acrobatics on the ground and in the air.
At first, stay in your comfort zone with your rolling globe. Then slowly branch out to other circus arts, such as trampoline and partner acrobatics. Avoid two things like the plague: juggling and aerial acrobatics. Conquer your dread of juggling at the age of 8, and two years later, overcome your fear of heights on the static trapeze.
See your first Cirque de Soleil—Corteo—at age 12 and realize that the circus can be truly artistic. Then, when world gym wheel champion Wolfgang Bientzle comes to Chicago to create a Team U.S.A. in the sport, catch his eye and fall in love with the gym wheel under his expert tutelage.
Win your first national championship in gym wheel at 14 after telling your mom she didn’t need to stay because the competition was “no big deal.” Go to your first World Championships in Arnsberg, Germany, and make friends from around the world while reaching the finals in all three 18-and-under events, including one fourth-place finish.
Two years later, apply to Cirque du Soleil to spend a week at their training facility in Montreal, Canada, and get invited to serve as a temporary gym wheel coach for the Cirque du Soleil acrobats. Then, when the World Championships come to Chicago, defend your home turf by winning two bronze medals.
While applying for college, also apply to the École de Cirque in Quebec, a feeder school for Cirque du Soleil. Since you know its three-year program is impossibly exclusive, apply for a gap year in its slightly more accessible one-year program. Get accepted to the three-year program instead. Have to choose between a circus life and Pomona. Choose Pomona.
Even before arriving on campus, make arrangements to form a club at The Claremont Colleges because you want to build a community of people with an interest in the circus arts. Name the club 5Circus and serve as its president for three years before, in the name of continuity, letting someone else take over during your senior year.
Major in neuroscience and decide to become a doctor. But since you didn’t take a gap year before college, decide to take one before entering medical school. Win a Fulbright Fellowship to spend the year in Israel, melding your passions for medicine and the circus by studying an innovative paramedical practice known as “medical clowning.”
Hidden figures no more. That’s the future that Professor of Mathematics Ami Radunskaya hopes to see soon in the world of mathematics: more women—particularly more women of color—in the field.