Biochemist and UC Berkeley Professor Jennifer Doudna ’85 and her team discovered CRISPR-Cas9, a game-changing gene-editing technique with tremendous possibilities for curing diseases of all kinds, thanks to its precision. But with that finding, Doudna (who is also a Pomona trustee) discovered something else—that a great revelation sometimes brings with it a lot of wrestling. In A Crack in Creation, she tells a story that is about both success and struggle. PCM Book Editor Sneha Abraham talked to Doudna about the implications of what might be the most revolutionary scientific breakthrough of our time. This interview has been edited and condensed for space and clarity.

Jennifer Doudna ’85

PCM: You say in your book that, as a research scientist, you need adventurousness, curiosity, instinct, grit, practicality. Where do you get these traits from, and who’s your greatest influence?

Doudna: I think it comes from a combination of innate curiosity—I think we all have it, certainly as kids—and appropriate encouragement from family, friends and mentors along the way. That mix gave me an open-mindedness to ideas and a way of figuring out how to ask questions about the natural world.

PCM: Did your Pomona education prepare you for this in some way?

Doudna: I am grateful to Pomona every day, honestly, because it was a liberal arts education that exposed me to so many ideas that I would never have come into contact with, probably, without having attended Pomona. Many smart people, lots of really bright students, and not only those interested in chemistry, as I was, but also people thinking about history, French, physics, mathematics and geography. All sorts of topics. It’s a rich intellectual environment that opens one’s mind to the incredibly interesting diversity of the world in terms of cultures, ideas and perspectives.

PCM: Was there a class or professor that really impacted you while you were here?

Doudna: I think [Professor of Chemistry] Fred Grieman. I know he’s retiring soon, but Fred Grieman was a newish professor at the time when I attended Pomona. He was teaching physical chemistry, and he was spectacular. I think he’s a great combination of really deep understanding of the material so that you could teach it in a very clear and comprehensible way—and it’s not an easy topic, as you know—but also somebody who was very human, very funny, great sense of humor, really great at connecting with students. We used to play softball together in the summertime, and he always had students working in his lab over the summer and would have barbecues and things like that. He was very good at teaching us students that you could be a terrific scientist, very smart and intellectual, and still have a life outside of the lab.

PCM: In the book, you talk about that moment of discovery, that moment of pure joy in your kitchen. What was that like for you?

Doudna: Well, I’ve had a few, I would say, such moments in my career, and in this case, it was really one of those rare times in one’s life when the stars align. In our case, the ideas had come together, the data for experiments we were working on in the laboratory had given rise to a really sudden understanding of, not only how the CRISPR bacterial immune system works, but also how it could be used in a really exciting way. And that night, that moment I describe in the book, was really one of just unadulterated joy thinking about how amazing it is to explore science and make a discovery that you realize is going to be really impactful and change the world in certain ways.

PCM: That discovery presents so many amazing possibilities Was there an immediate thought that came to mind?

Doudna: For me, it was probably thinking about opportunities to cure genetic disease. When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, my lab was located at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where a professor named Jim Gusella was mapping the gene that causes Huntington’s disease. It is a terrible neurodegenerative disease that people get usually in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and then suffer from for many years with progressive loss of neurological function. So, being aware of that gene mapping experiment that was done in the ’80s, and then fast-forwarding a couple of decades and realizing that CRISPR technology, in principle, will allow the correction of that kind of mutation was a really profound thought.

PCM: You’re a research scientist, but with this discovery, you’ve become an ethicist as well, right? Were you expecting that as this was unfolding? How has that unfolding been for you?

Doudna: Not at all. I was absolutely not thinking, originally, about the kinds of ethical challenges that would come up. However, it became clear over the ensuing months that CRISPR was working better than anticipated, opening game-changing opportunities in how we might treat existing patients and how the technology might help future generations. What would be the ethical impact and what would go into making the right society and species-defining decisions needed to be explored and debated. I went from being a biochemist and structural biologist, working in my lab on this esoteric bacterial system, to realizing that I needed to get up to speed quickly on how other kinds of technologies that have been transformative had been managed and handled by the scientists that were involved in their genesis. Because the field of CRISPR was moving so quickly, the ethical discussions needed to catch up.

PCM: This is a big question. Is there an ethical dilemma that you’re most concerned about with genome editing?

Doudna: Well, there are a few that have gotten a lot of media attention. I think I would say that, at least in the near term, what I worry about the most is a rush to apply genome editing in ways that might inadvertently harm people. That might be because of over-excitement or the desire on the part of a scientist somewhere to do something first. I think that competitive want to move ahead with new ideas can be a very healthy drive in science but it can also lead to problems. In this case, I really hope that there is a concerted effort globally to restrain ourselves and do things in a measured and thoughtful fashion that doesn’t get ahead of the technology and the ethical debate.

PCM: It raises a lot of questions about us as a society, right? In the book you write about some of the implications socioeconomically and politically. How do you see this unfolding for the good? What are the dilemmas there?

Doudna: That’s another really big question. The good news is that there are now lots of discussions happening about the ethics and appropriate uses of gene editing technologies. I think that’s great progress but how we ultimately deploy CRISPR is going to come down to the pace at which helpful applications are actually developed and approved for use. For example, one of the most promising applications is called “gene drive.” It is the ability to drive a trait through a population very quickly using gene editing. Gene drive could be a real environmental impact concern due to its potential to wipe out a species of mosquitoes and perhaps cause unknown damage to associated species and ecosystems.

On the other hand, if deployed correctly, gene drive could have a hugely positive impact on human health by preventing the spread of mosquito-borne disease, perhaps by adding a trait that made mosquitoes incapable of transmitting a particular disease such as Zika virus. This is the type of cost-benefit calculation that has to be made in each case.

PCM: With CRISPR, when you’re looking ahead, or maybe it’s happening now, what kind of effects do you see on the biomedical industry or pharmaceutical companies, or the health care industry? Because this will change a lot of how we do medicine, right?

Doudna: I think it will in a few ways. One effect is using genome editing to discover genetic causes of disease. I think that’s still a very big data opportunity, to figure out, not only single genes that might cause disease, but also genetic interactions. Where there might be genes that interact with others to create a risk for certain people that bear that particular genetic makeup. I think that’s important, and it leads to opportunities to target those genes with drugs, and drug companies are increasingly using CRISPR technology to do exactly that. We are also trying to mine the human genome for new potential targets and then use genome editing to correct those mutations or create, if not a cure, at least some kind of a palliative approach to genetic disease. I think that will happen increasingly, especially as challenges like how to deliver these molecules into cells are addressed.

I also want to mention the incredible commercial opportunities. I’m seeing a lot of young entrepreneurs starting their own companies focused on making use of CRISPR technologies, investors excited to contribute money, and growing opportunities for companies to partner in different areas ranging from biomedicine to agriculture. It is very exciting and these opportunities are not just for scientists, but also for people that have a variety of backgrounds such as business. It’s really an interesting convergence of young people with a mix of expertise.

PCM: You write a bit about food politics, and the issue of GMOs, and that gap between the scientific community and the public. What do you think is driving the narrative that you say is false, that GMOs are a danger to our health? What’s behind that narrative that’s being pushed by other people?

Doudna: I think it’s a couple of things. Partly, it’s a lack of understanding about what we mean when we say “genetic modification,” and the fact that essentially all the food that we eat is genetically modified, because it’s edited by plant breeders that introduce genetic mutations. You just have to reference back to what tomatoes looked like before plant breeders got involved. They were very different from how they are today but why is that? Well, changes to the DNA, of course, but those changes were introduced, not by a precision genome editing technology like CRISPR. They were introduced by random mutation and then selection for desired traits. So, the unknown that can worry the public is what other genetic changes come along to the ride? We know they do but we just don’t happen to know what they are. I think when people understand that, they start to realize that the whole definition of GMOs is a bit contrived.

Also, I think the public can be suspicious about the intentions of corporations. That perception that corporations do not have our best health interests in mind, that they are out to make money, and that they do not care about potential risks, choosing instead to forge ahead with “Frankenfoods” or whatever you want to call it. We have seen this in the media, and it’s potentially at the expense of people’s health.

It really comes down to those two things then — not understanding what genetic modification really means and how our current food supply was created by plant breeders, and also being suspicious of the real motivations of corporations. We need to take a step back and really ask ourselves, “What makes sense here?” Then, we need to take a thoughtful path forward that allows technology to advance and help us solve important challenges in a way that is responsible. It’s not an easy balance, but I think we have to try to tackle that.

PCM: So who decides how this technology is used? You talk about that being a dilemma, as well, between scientists and the public. How is that dialogue going, currently, and how do you see that developing?

Doudna: Right now, the way that science progresses is largely decided by scientists, and then there are funders. So, if the scientists have an idea, something they want to do in the lab, they have to get money to do it. If they’re getting money from the public, namely from the taxpayers, that involves typically writing a grant, writing a proposal that says, “Here’s the science that I want to do, and here’s why,” and submitting it to a review committee of peers who review and comment on it. For example, they may say, “Well, good idea,” or, “Not a great idea,” and they then make a recommendation to the government about whether that type of science should be funded. That is how it currently works.

Now, if you’re a scientist who has other kinds of resources that are from private money—you have a wealthy donor or a foundation—you have to convince those folks rather than representatives of the government. Either way it usually comes down to an idea on the part of the scientist, and then convincing somebody or some entity to pay the bills. There’s a lot of science that involves things that could cause risk to humans. There are various kinds of regulatory controls that are placed on that work and various kinds of panels or review boards approve those kinds of projects. However, there’s not a broader oversight other than that, and a number of scientists have commented upon the fact that, for example, institutional review boards, or IRBs, have rules for how researchers can do things like work with human subjects or human tissues. The issue is that the rules are different at every institution.

Since the IRB rules at my institution, UC Berkeley, are different than other universities, I could have colleagues working elsewhere that would be under a different set of rules. That’s something that various groups are looking at—ways to try to streamline. As you can imagine, it’s very tough because you have a lot of different people with different opinions about these sorts of things. So, it’s just an ongoing challenge that we have.

PCM: This is half-joking, but I was chatting with a friend about CRISPR, and he asked, “At what point can we clone ourselves, get out of work, and still get paid?”

Doudna: Wow. That sounds very ambitious. It’ll take a lot of work to not have to work. That’s all I can say.

PCM: It’s not in the immediate future?

Doudna: No.

Of the many divisive cases in U.S. legal history, few are as haunting as Korematsu v. United States (1944). In the ruling, the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Hugo Black argued that national security took precedence over individual liberties. And they maintained the legality of the infamous Executive Order 9066—which ordered the incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.

This decision has remained a stain on civil liberties ever since, and the June 26, 2018, Supreme Court’s reversal of Korematsu represents the first major victory since 1988 related to rectifying Japanese-American incarceration. However, by overruling Korematsu while approving President Donald Trump’s travel ban, the court has simply appropriated one tragedy to justify another. While Chief Justice John Roberts argued that President Donald Trump’s travel ban is legally different—and constitutional—in comparison to the Korematsu case, they both have the purpose of unjustly singling out individuals based on race. And although the subject of Japanese- American incarceration focuses on racial injustice towards U.S. citizens, it is also a story of immigration and how the U.S. government has employed racialized immigration policies under the vague guise of “national security.”

Even before camps like Manzanar existed for holding U.S. citizens of Japanese descent against their will, the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service—the forerunner to ICE—had built their own camps to house Japanese citizens, often separating families in the process. Although Japanese immigrants had arrived in this country en masse since the 1870s, they were barred from naturalization. Long before U.S. involvement in World War II, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover drafted extensive lists of so-called “disloyal enemy aliens” because of vague associations with Japan. While Germans and Italians were on this list as well, they numbered far less and always had the option to become U.S. citizens; Japanese immigrants would not share that opportunity until 1952.

The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI conducted mass arrests of Japanese-American community leaders—sometimes in the middle of the night—and detained them in internment camps across the U.S. from Montana to Louisiana. Families often heard very little from their relatives in these camps, where their detainment lasted anywhere from a few months to several years. By 1943, the U.S. began a policy of deporting Japanese-Americans back to Japan as part of an exchange program with U.S. prisoners of war. On July 14, 1945, less than two months before the war’s end, President Harry Truman signed into effect a proclamation that permitted immigration officials to remove internees from the United States if they were deemed “a danger to the public peace.”

One man who faced such a scenario was Katsuma Mukaeda.

In 1908, he immigrated from Japan to the United States. According to his 1995 obituary in the Los Angeles Times, he distinguished himself as a law student at USC and established himself as a successful lettuce grower in Southern California and a prominent figure in L.A.

Despite being unable to practice law because he was Japanese, he worked as a paralegal supporting the Japanese community. He was a champion for improving race relations within the greater Los Angeles community, and in 1935 helped establish the Society of Oriental Studies at The Claremont Colleges. According to scholar Malcolm Douglass, the society was founded with the intention of making the “Claremont Colleges the center of Oriental Culture on the Pacific Coast.” With help from a Rockefeller Grant, scholars at Pomona and Scripps worked alongside Mukaeda to established a strong emphasis on Asian Studies, and provided the foundation to the Asian Studies Library at Honnold-Mudd Library. To many, Mukaeda was an ideal U.S. citizen who advocated greater civic engagement and mending the issues of society.

Yet because of his activism, the FBI decided he was the perfect target. On Dec. 1, 1941, Hoover recommended Mukaeda’s internment “in the event of a national emergency.” Within a week after Pearl Harbor, FBI agents detained him with hundreds of other Japanese merchants, Buddhist priests and community leaders in the Los Angeles County Jail. Although no evidence of treason or sabotage was ever produced, Mukaeda was nonetheless interned for being “a suspect.” For years, he was shipped to various internment camps such as Camp Livingston, Louisiana, and Fort Missoula, Montana. By 1945, he found himself at Santa Fe Internment Camp, New Mexico, where a large number of internees were subjected to abuse by guards and sometimes received poorer treatment than enemy POWs in stateside camps. Following Truman’s proclamation, Mukaeda also found himself facing deportation back to Japan.

All the while, his family was separated from him. While Mukaeda was sent to one internment camp after another, his wife, Minoli, and son, Richard, were incarcerated at Poston Incarceration Camp in Arizona. When Minoli received word of the July 1945 deportation list that included her husband, she pleaded to the U.S. government and others for help, arguing that their only son “needs a father’s care now more than anything.” While researching Mukaeda’s FBI file at the National Archives as a part of my graduate studies in June, I found dozens of letters of recommendation and support written to FBI officials, all testifying to his loyalty and future importance of mending relations between Japan and the U.S. The letter writers—mostly long-term residents of the Los Angeles area—ranged from close friends to L.A. Times publisher Harry Chandler and former Pomona College President James Blaisdell.

For President Emeritus Blaisdell, the story of incarceration was clear throughout Southern California. Shortly after the arrest of Mukaeda and the passage of Executive Order 9066, thousands of Japanese-Americans were herded into so-called “assembly centers” at the nearby Los Angeles County Fairgrounds and Santa Anita Racetrack. Three students from Pomona were also forced to leave campus due to the executive order, and were famously given tearful goodbyes by their fellow classmates. While the College itself did what many other universities did at the time—provide students with transfer options to East Coast schools—Blaisdell went further to help out his friend.

Throughout the years of Mukaeda’s internment, Blaisdell wrote multiple letters to the FBI reaffirming both the activist’s loyalty to the U.S. and his importance to the Los Angeles community based on his previous work with Pomona and Scripps, the only Claremont Colleges at that time. Blaisdell’s first letter of May 17, 1944, was sent to help secure Mukaeda a second hearing by the FBI. When the hearing did not clear his name, Mukaeda went back to Blaisdell for help. In a letter to the FBI in November 1945, Blaisdell praised Mukaeda as “a man, I believe, who can be of great usefulness in healing the relations between the two countries and establishing just and honorable relations between the Japanese and Americans in this country.” After a reappraisal of his case, Mukaeda was deemed loyal and freed from the Santa Fe camp in February 1946, after four years in detention separated from his family.

Following the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952, Japanese nationals were finally able to become United States citizens. A final attestation of their friendship was a letter from Blaisdell to Mukaeda dated June 3, 1953, congratulating him on becoming a citizen and proclaiming,“I only hope that we who have been native born will be worthy of you.” Mukaeda continued to be a champion for the Japanese-American community until his death on November 8, 1995 at the age of 104.

There are two important lessons from Mukaeda’s story. One is that foreign policy dictated by racism and the violent separation of families are both, sadly, a recent chapter in U.S. history. Immigrants of all backgrounds have participated in the building of our nation’s history, and a system focused on exclusion only harms ourselves.

When Mukaeda was being held captive by immigration officials and on the brink of being deported, there were Americans who stood up for him. Pomona’s mission as a college—while constantly evolving—has always focused, in part, on the importance of social justice and activism. Often we think of these stories as being driven by powerful figures that leave everyday people as mere spectators; in reality we all can play a role. Mukaeda’s story, and Blaisdell’s tireless support, remind us of our constant duty to support those victimized by unjust laws or systems such as our current immigration system—and of the ability we have to effect change.

Jonathan van Harmelen ’17 is a graduate student at Georgetown University studying the comparative history of incarceration.

PCM: You’ve said your first year at Pomona has been a year of listening. What have you heard, and are there some important things you’ve gleaned from it? Any big surprises?

Starr: Well, even though the College has changed a lot over the last 30, 40 or 50 years, there are some things about it that remain the same and should continue. And one of the things that I think is most remarkable is that every Sagehen I’ve met is defined by being intensely curious. There’s a kind of curiosity that is a fundamental characteristic of Pomona alumni and students and faculty, and there’s also a persistence to the relationships that people build. I’ve met with alumni five years out. I’ve met with alumni 50 years out. And for many of them, their core friendships, the ones that defined who they are, were forged here at the College. The fact that this has persisted is a really wonderful testament to what happens on this campus, and that is something that we have to continue to nurture.

Also, we’re an incredibly caring community. Most of us want to serve other people in some significant way in our lives. Whether this happens through teaching or building things or nurturing communities or health care, this is a group of people who really want to be there for others.

PCM: Strategic planning implies change, but Pomona is already one of the very best liberal arts colleges in the world. So the obvious question is: Why should we change? Or is the planning process really about something other than change?

Starr: Strategy does not mean simply change. I think a key part of the strategic planning process is setting priorities. Pomona has been really lucky to do everything we do so very well, but as we move into our next phase, we need to say: “We don’t have unlimited resources, and the question is: How are we going to use those resources best?” We’ve done some wonderful things at this college by prioritizing people. That’s been in financial aid; it’s been in resources for faculty; it’s been in benefits. And now it’s time for us to say: “Okay, where do we decide we’re going to make our next range of investments as a college?”

And while we are, I think, one of the best, if not the best, liberal arts college in the world, “best” is always contextual. And because the world changes around us, we don’t want to sit still. So we have to think about how we are helping to develop the best talent that is coming through our doors today and then the next five years and the next five years after that. So that, hopefully, is what planning is going to help us achieve.

PCM: The rapidity of change today has gotten quite daunting. What does that do to a planning process? How far ahead can we legitimately plan?

Starr: I think five to seven years is a reasonable horizon, because one of the things that we do as a college is try to take the long view and not be reactive to everything that comes across the bow. Part of what’s supposed to happen in your time at a liberal arts college is for you to slow down and think, and so, even though change happens at a very rapid pace, we have to be thoughtful.

Still, you can rationally look out and say, “We know we have buildings that we need to think about. We know that we have an endowment that we have to take care of. We know that we’ve got a four-year horizon for just about every new student who comes in.” So some time scales are a given. But I think the time of a 10-year strategic plan has probably passed, because the economic conditions change too rapidly, and global conditions change too rapidly to think that far out.

PCM: Are there any past commitments that you think are untouchable because they’re so intrinsically a part of who we are?

Starr: I once had a student who did her dissertation on the idea of culture and the origins of that term—coming out of the earth. Culture builds up over time. Every seed that’s planted changes it—as does every wind that comes in, every person that walks through—but the culture still rebuilds.

The culture of Pomona that seems most self-perpetuating, and also best, is that sense of a contemplative, sharply focused, curious, residential, broad, liberal arts education. I don’t think we would ever want to change that, because the whole point of a liberal arts education is that it allows you to adapt to the world around you.

I think that our commitment to the diversity of human experience should not change because, again, what we are here to do as an educational institution is to make the fullness of human history, of human knowledge, continually available. And that needs to be available to as many of the most talented people as we can properly serve. So our commitment to diversity, I think, can only continue.

And ultimately, we have defined ourselves, in some ways, as an opportunity college, so being able to admit the best students regardless of their need is really important to our future.

PCM: Of course, the world around us continues to change. What external factors do you see out there going forward that may call for us to evolve?

Starr: I think national changes around immigration are certainly very concerning. Again, if we are committed to the actual human beings who make up the world, being able to welcome people from all corners of not only our own country but of countries from around the world is really important. For students and faculty, knowledge doesn’t sit happily within any one country or state, and we want that access to be there. So that’s certainly a very important consideration.

There are financial pressures, such as the tax on endowments, that mean that we will have to make some hard choices.

I think that there are certainly possibilities for us to focus on the human side of technology, and how it is that we ethically use the technologies that we create, and how we can design them inclusively, with an eye, as I said, to ethical use. We have lots of faculty members who are focused on that.

And then there are always the uncertainties that come with life. That, again, is the reason that we have a strategic planning process—so that we can take the time to say, “When that fork in the road comes, which of those paths are we going to walk?” So strategic planning is meant to help us manage those changes that we know about, but also externalities that will pop up on their own.

PCM: One of the things that continues to change is the nature of the students who are coming here. They’re all talented, but their experiences change. Their expectations in life change. What do you think we should be looking forward to in the next generation of Pomona students?

Starr: We know that there are massive demographic shifts going on in the U.S. and globally right now. There are going to be fewer and fewer college-age students, certainly in the Northeastern U.S. There’s going to be some growth in the West and in the South, but there’s going to be increased competition for the best students, and we want to continue to be able to draw the very best students that we can.

Many of us are concerned about the effects of lots of social media usage by this particular generation of high school and college students. There’s very good psychological evidence that social media can have a strong negative effect on adolescents. As they come into college, how do we build a community that can move beyond the digital to really focus on the face-to-face? That’s going to be a lot of work that we have to do.

It’s also true, as Beverly Tatum has pointed out, that this generation of students comes from schools that are much more segregated than any since pretty much Brown v. The Board of Education. And that means that when we talk about bringing a diverse group of students together, for many of them, if not most of them, this is the first time that they will be in close proximity to people very unlike themselves, and we are one of the most diverse communities in higher education today. So being intentional about how we bring people together is going to be a major challenge that we have to keep our eye on.

And I think it’s a wonderful challenge to have, frankly, because this is the world that we hope to create: a world where everybody can exist in a way that’s true to who they are and can work toward their own goals, but also the collective goals of what’s good for the world—clean water, good health care, functioning economies, strong schools. All of those things. Being one’s true self is not in conflict with being part of a caring community.

PCM: Years ago, I think many of us had the naïve notion that once you built up the diversity of the College it was mission accomplished. Of course, making a place truly inclusive isn’t quite that simple. Do you think we have a handle on that now?

Starr: Well, I think we’re close. I will say that something that I keep reminding myself is, you know, I’m an African-American woman who was not from a monied family and dealt with real prejudice growing up. And I was successful in a much less diverse environment than this, the one that I’m in right now, and so I have something of survivor’s bias, in that I was able to make it through despite all sorts of things that didn’t exist or were wrong. So I may have a predisposition to say, “Okay, well, you know, let’s get on with it.”

And I think many people who are successful—which would be just about all of our alumni and all of the people who are in power in the country—may have a kind of survivor’s bias. And it’s very difficult for us to imagine all those who didn’t make it and understand why. There could have been 20 like me, right?—40 like me, 50 like me—if things had been different or we’d had the same support. What would our world look like now?

So I think we need to really listen to our current students and try to understand how to broaden the path instead of thinking that the path that we were on was fine as it was.

PCM: Like most institutions of higher learning over the past year, Pomona has had some intense discussions about the nature and limits of free speech on campus. How do you think that is going to play into this planning process?

Starr: Well, I think that it will play into it on several levels. One is: We’re going to certainly think about our living communities and our learning communities and how we bring intentional dialogue into them. We already have one space that does this in a particular way, which is Oldenborg—where people come with the purpose of talking in a particular language—but how can we take that model of purposeful dialogue and expand it throughout our residential communities so that people can come in and speak intentionally with one another in an open and caring and critical and thoughtful way?

So as we think about residential programming, but also our facilities, how we bring people together is really important. A funny anecdote: When we were talking with students about plans for the new Oldenborg, we asked, “Well, do you want to have separate bathrooms or communal bathrooms?” Now, when I was in college, everybody wanted their own bathroom in a single. That seemed obvious. Why would you want anything different, right? But the students were saying, “No. Now, many of us live in these small rooms by ourselves, and the only place we have surprising, accidental conversations is on the way to the bathroom.” And that said something to me about the way in which we have provided so much individualized opportunity that people are yearning for the casual conversation. So how can we think about that?

We also need to think about what changes may be needed in our curriculum. This is a conversation that is deeply in the hands of the faculty as we think it through. How we structure discussions in our classrooms. What new tools we might need for students who may have learned to speak to one another over a screen rather than face-to-face.

PCM: On the subject of the curriculum, do you think the planning process will need to address the exploding interest in STEM fields and the imbalances that grow out of that?

Starr: Yes, that’s not going away any time soon. I think we’ve seen—not just here at Pomona but nationally—a large expansion in the need for computer science instruction, and that’s a need we have to meet. And in the allocation of resources and the need for new resources, we need to think about both the curriculum and how we deliver it.

One of the things that I think is very interesting about the way some of our faculty are thinking about technology is that technology is human. It’s not something that is outside of the liberal arts tradition at all. In fact, the liberal arts tradition—when we think about what liberal arts meant in their earliest incarnations—was about tools. Mental tools, physical tools and how to be creative in this new technological landscape—those are things that are going to be really important going forward.

We also have great things going on in the humanities, with Kevin Dettmar’s Humanities Studio, and in the social sciences, where people like Tahir Andrabi and Amanda Hollis-Brusky are thinking in dramatically new ways about old problems. Our athletics faculty are teaching amazing life skills, as well as nursing leadership and the whole student. We have a lot to be proud of.

PCM: There are a number of small private colleges today that are failing or having to make significant changes to keep their doors open. How does that affect Pomona and small colleges in general as we think about our future?

Starr: I actually think, nationally, the question’s not so much size. People talk about a crisis in small liberal arts colleges, and you can look at Antioch or Sweet Briar. Even Oberlin has had some financial challenges in the past few years. However, we just learned this summer that Northwestern, a large research-one university that’s highly endowed, is having financial challenges—slowing down on building projects and laying off staff, cutting budgets by as much as 10 percent in some divisions. So it’s not size that’s the question. It really has to do with how we think about our budgets and the priorities that we’re going to set and realizing that while we may have a list of 20 things we want to do, we can’t do them all at once. Staging our accomplishments is what’s crucial. And just keeping our eyes open, because a lot of problems don’t crop up overnight. The question is whether or not you are continually keeping your eye on where difficulties can arise.

PCM: I know Pomona is not immune to resource problems, though a lot of people probably think we are. Will the new strategic plan address the way we dedicate resources?

Starr: One thing that it’s really important for folks to understand is that 10 years ago, $19 million is what we spent on financial aid. Now we’re spending closer to $50 million. That money hasn’t emerged magically. The money comes primarily from the growth of our endowment. That endowment growth comes from investing, but it also comes from giving, and so when people ask, “Why should we give to Pomona?” it is because that’s an extra $30 million that goes to support every one of those promising students who are able to take advantage of this education. And we don’t only support our students with direct aid. The cost of a Pomona education is subsidized for every single student here by the generosity of past and current members of our community.

So one of my goals, personally, but also as part of strategic planning, is to come to a point where we have fully endowed all of our financial aid. So that we are not relying on tuition to help us bring the best students here. And ultimately we’re going to be calling on our community to help us to do that, and we will need every single dollar in order to achieve it.

We look at the students who are admitted and the students who applied, and we ask, “Are we losing people because we can’t give them enough aid?” We’re doing some of that analysis now to see how well we are doing at bringing students who we know would be successful here and helping them to stay, because part of the challenge is that family circumstances change. Parents may go through a divorce, have a health care crisis, an immigration challenge, and then suddenly what was full need only covers half of it or less. So it’s a problem I’m glad we have, but it’s still a challenge. How will we secure the purse strings to free the minds to thrive?

PCM: You’ve said you want everyone to feel free to put forward new ideas, big ideas. What are some of the criteria that you’ll be using to evaluate those new ideas?

Starr: I think the question is what benefit do they bring and to whom? We want to be able to say, “Are we getting the largest benefit that we can?” Even if it’s in one small area.

As a liberal arts college, we have to continue to prioritize our students. We are here to teach them. Faculty research, though, is a really important part of that because the curiosity that defines Pomona has to be fed, and research is one way that we feed that curiosity.

And we’re going to have to make decisions. For example, should every single person have a research opportunity in the summer, or should we think about research as a year-round experience? How do we think about prioritizing investments in health? How can we best serve the students who are here? If it means that we can’t, for example, have perfect, full-time medical care all year round, then maybe we need to have fewer people on campus in the summer.

There are going to be all sorts of trade-offs that we’re going to have to consider, but what we want is to know that we’re benefitting our students with every dollar that we spend. We want to know that we’re retaining and attracting the best faculty and staff, and we want to know that our students are going off to better themselves and to better the world. Those are the three things that are the ultimate criteria we have to judge anything by.

PCM: Pomona has never intentionally grown its enrollment, but as a practical matter, there has been slow, incremental growth over the decades. Should the College be more intentional about how it grows?

Starr: Absolutely. There are several important questions we should be asking. One is: If we think we’re doing this better than anybody else, is it morally acceptable to us to do it at this particular scale? And the question that I always want us to ask is: Who are we missing, and are we comfortable with that?

And there are different ways for thinking about this. Would we want to bring in more international students? Exchange programs for a year? That’s one way of thinking about who we might be missing. Would we want to have more robust exchange programs with other colleges as a way of thinking about who we’re missing? Historically, Pomona has grown by founding new colleges. That was the model that we took. We said, “No, we’re not just going to get bigger and bigger.”

We don’t seek to educate 10,000 people here. That’s not who we are. But what size would allow us to say, “We’re doing the most for the world in the best way we think we can?”

So we should talk about it. However, serving our students requires a ratio of students to faculty that is small, and I believe in that. So if we ever were to increase the size of our student body, the size of our faculty would have to increase too.

PCM: Are there obvious issues or opportunities that need to be addressed in the planning process? What excites or worries you going forward?

Starr: Yeah. I think some of the obvious things are in the physical plant—Rains, Oldenborg and Thatcher are buildings that need attention. We have been a very thoughtful institution in thinking about equity among the students and their experience. So if students in physics have access to great things, students in music should have access to great things. To me, that’s quite obvious.

We clearly need to think about financial aid, as I said, and we need to work with the other colleges around health and mental health, as well as preventing sexual violence—I think those are obvious. Asking questions about career outcomes and life outcomes—I think we’re definitely going to have to keep an eye on that too.

Beyond that, I’m really excited to see what comes up from the community as people start to think about what we want to be seven years from now. Ten or 11 years from now, looking back, what will we see as the defining experiences of the first-year students that come in between now and the end of the strategic plan? What will be different for them? What can we do to lay a foundation?

There’s the old phrase: You plant trees under which other people will sit. That’s what this is about. We are going to be planting trees for other people, and that is good gardening.

PCM: Ultimately, what is your best hope for both the strategic planning process and its outcome?

Starr: Ultimately, what I hope is that people enjoy engaging in a constructive, collective visioning of our future, because it’s about what we hope. It’s not about what we want, you know? What we want is about now. What we hope is about the future, and so hope is knowing you’re not going to get everything out of it, but still being enthusiastic and optimistic about the next steps that we’re going to take.

So that would be a big win if we come out of this feeling really hopeful about our future. Then it’s up to us to do the work.