The old career advice isn’t relevant anymore.

Start in the mailroom. Get your foot in the door. Grab a rung on the ladder and start climbing.

But what if there’s no actual office door, because your colleagues work remotely?

What if that mailroom is merely a metaphor in an age of electronic communications and AI-written emails?

Julianna Pillemer ’09, an assistant professor of management and organizations at NYU’s Stern School of Business

And as for the ladder, who among us actually still stays at one company for decades, waiting for a gold watch and a pension?

“It’s a totally different landscape,” says Julianna Pillemer ’09, an assistant professor of management and organizations at NYU’s Stern School of Business.

A New Generation of Workers

Young workers inhabit a changed work world, and they bring very different attitudes than previous generations. The last of the baby boomers who dominated workplace culture for decades turned 60 last year and are moving toward retirement. A decade ago millennials became the largest generation in the U.S. workforce, surpassing Gen X. Just two years ago, the boomers were eclipsed by Gen Z, those born from 1997 to 2010.

What do young workers want? Among the key values identified in a 2023 survey directed by Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business was that workers ages 24 to 35 prioritized flexibility and work-life balance.

That rings true to Hazel Raja, senior director of Pomona’s Career Development Office (CDO)—a Gen Xer who encouraged the office book club to read millennial author Lindsey Pollak’s The Remix: How to Lead and Succeed in the Multigenerational Workplace, so that the CDO team could better understand both the job seekers they counsel and their own colleagues.

The Remote Work Revolution

The pandemic ushered in the era of telecommuting, but many young people who experienced the isolation of the COVID shutdown have come to crave in-person collaboration, while also appreciating the versatility of hybrid work options.

“I think there’s this feeling of wanting the best of both worlds, to have days in the office where you can connect with the community but also the flexibility to say, ‘I’m working from home today,’” Raja says.

Even after return-to-work calls following the pandemic, remote work is entrenched in many organizations. Folks with bachelor’s degrees have benefited most: 52 percent of college graduates now work remotely some or all of the time, compared to 35 percent of the overall workforce.

Hybrid jobs offer potential gains for work-life balance. Yet NYU’s Pillemer—who earned a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and studies workplace relationships—says friendships can be key sources of motivation and support at work when managed effectively.

“I think this is often what leads to work feeling like a community, a place where you don’t have to hide who you are,” she says, noting her research on the concept of “strategic authenticity,” which involves finding the right balance between self-disclosure and professionalism at work. “I think there might be a disconnect between how little this younger generation is thinking these relationships matter and how much they actually do matter to their workplace happiness.”

Gen Z workers say they yearn for more in-person connection, but that it doesn’t have to be with colleagues. Now trending: meetup activities such as book clubs and hiking groups, and even platonic matchmaking apps like Bumble BFF.

Cohen ‘81 spoke in her TED talk about how to transition back into the workforce after career breaks.

Still, remote workers may miss out not only on networking and friendships but also on mentoring, says Carol Fishman Cohen ’81, a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and co-founder and CEO of iRelaunch, a career re-entry company.

“To be in the office side-by-side with more seasoned professionals and have informal interactions with people is part of how you learn,” Cohen says. “You stop by someone’s office or walk out together from a meeting, and that’s where relationships are built and knowledge is transferred. If early-stage professionals don’t get to have that experience, it’s going to be much more difficult for them to learn what they need to know.”

A Sense of Purpose

Work-life balance is no longer something people focus on only once they have kids and a household to run. Many Pomona students are thinking ahead, evaluating career choices by considering their personal priorities—sometimes choosing a city and then finding a job instead of finding a job and moving to that city—as well as by seeking more meaning in their work.

Raja says many students these days are often much more driven by things they’re passionate about, though she notes some students from less-advantaged backgrounds may still feel the need to maximize the financial return on their education.

“Generally, there’s not this aim for a ‘35 years of service’ pin,” she says. “More students are anchored by their values being met and doing work that is personally fulfilling.”

Nate Dailey ’23

Nate Dailey ’23, a high school senior when his family fled Paradise, California, in the early morning hours of the November 2018 “Camp Fire,” is one example of melding professional skills with personally meaningful work. He arrived on campus less than a year after his family’s home was one of nearly 19,000 structures destroyed in the deadliest wildfire in California history.

After majoring in computer science, Dailey embarked on a career in wildfire science as a research analyst for Deer Creek Resources, which helps communities and landowners prepare for wildfire. There he developed a computer model to detect overgrown parcels from roadside imagery that aids in both vegetation management and evacuation planning.

“I was really inspired to pursue something that was connected to the Camp Fire, and also my interest in computers and maps,” Dailey recently told Professor Char Miller in a Sagecast podcast. “Now I’ve been able to put it all together, and I think my Pomona education really helped me with that.”

Another key differentiator for the next generation of workers is that if a job isn’t right for whatever reason, today’s young people are not afraid to move on. While job-hopping once was a resume red flag, Raja and others say that applicants are now more likely to raise eyebrows if they stay too long, potentially suggesting that they don’t have other opportunities.

According to U.S. Labor Department statistics, in early 2024 the median time workers had been with current employers was only 3.9 years—the shortest tenure recorded since 2002. While the average job-stay for older workers was almost 10 years, for workers ages 25-34 it was a mere 2.7 years.

Camille Molas ’21, co-president of the New York City Alumni Chapter with her husband, Diego Vergara ’20, sees that phenomenon around her.

“A lot of people are on their third job already,” she says. “A friend of Diego’s already is on his fourth. Younger people are just more willing to say, ‘I’m out. This is not working for me.’” (See page 27 for more on Molas.)

Uncertain Outlook

While younger generations are being given more grace for job-hopping, their prospects aren’t uniformally positive. This year there were many headlines lamenting the job market for the Class of 2025 and, for the first time in decades, unemployment rates for college graduates under 27 have surpassed the overall average. Even the typically staid Economist chimed in with “Why Today’s Graduates Are Screwed.”

Factors include everything from federal spending cuts to the explosive rise of artificial intelligence, which experts say will affect entry-level jobs most because of more replicable tasks such as coding, number-crunching and summary writing. Despite that, Raja says she has seen such admirable adaptability for Sagehen job seekers.

“While it’s nice to be able to get a job at Amazon or Apple or Google, I think students like ours are versatile enough to say, ‘Well, I have these tech skills I could apply to another industry,’” she says. “‘Maybe a lot of the values I have are still being met because I’m not only working in an area that I’m actually interested in, but I’m making the same salary or I’m still building my network.’”

Ultimately, it may be the massive uncertainty in academia brought on by new federal policies that will have the largest impact on Pomona alumni, considering that one in four respondents from Pomona’s Class of 2024 First Destinations Report said they were headed straight to graduate school. In addition, many alumni who enter the workforce right out of college pursue a graduate degree within five years, Raja says.

Federal research grant cuts and wrangling over student visas and policies such as DEI mean some jobs and graduate school opportunities that used to be stable have evaporated, particularly in STEM fields and for international alumni. Proposals to limit federal loans for graduate students could also have a chilling effect, particularly on those seeking expensive medical degrees.

The impact on academia is likely to be felt by more than just graduate students: In Pomona’s 2023 Alumni and Family Attitude Survey, higher education was the number one job sector reported by alumni, ahead of science and medicine (36 vs. 27 percent).

Pillemer says most of her undergraduate business students at NYU remain focused on finance, consulting and tech, though they also are keenly aware of the potential to pursue more independent career paths such as internet content creation, entrepreneurship and gig work.

“As a scholar I’m reckoning with things like how we think about work and how organizations are structured, especially in a future when ‘employees’ could be bots and people are striking out on their own as entrepreneurs or influencers,” Pillemer says. “As students grapple with an uncertain job market and these sweeping changes in the way we work, they’re asking themselves, ‘What do I value?’ ‘What’s meaningful to me?’ And ‘How am I going to get paid to do it?’”

After a long, slow slide that began in the era of petticoats and suffragettes, the American fertility rate recently reached a new nadir. In 2023 U.S. moms birthed 3.6 million babies—about 76,000 fewer than the year before and one of the lowest totals since 1979.

A University of Chicago professor,
Heffington ‘09 has written about motherhood and women’s movements for TIME, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

It was a low-water mark that hinted at a bigger sea change. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center study, between 2018 and 2023 the share of adults under 50 who have no children and say they are unlikely to ever do so rose from 37 to (what else?) 47 percent. Fertility is falling in “basically every county: rich and poor, rural and urban,” says University of Chicago historian Peggy Heffington ’09, who studies contemporary and historical motherhood and reproduction. In 1970, the American fertility rate was about 2.5, above the replacement rate of 2. Today, it sits around 1.6.

Academics and parents themselves agree: this is a remarkably arduous moment to raise a child in the United States. But women opting not to have children is nothing new. In her book Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother, Heffington traces the history of non-motherhood from ancient Roman women who used lemons as ad-hoc diaphragms, through abstinent medieval nuns, and all the way to the present. “It felt important to me as a historian to establish that there is significant evidence of women limiting fertility for a very long time,” she says. “As long as people have been trying to have babies, they have been trying not to have babies.”

Still, many factors make parenting feel particularly difficult in 2025, including economic struggles, gender inequities, climate anxiety, mental health concerns and shifting expectations of community support. These accumulating challenges have been central to an increasingly common choice for young people of parenting age: not to parent at all.

Factor 1: Money talks

More than one-third of respondents to the 2024 Pew survey cited money concerns as a major reason for deciding against parenthood. The financial landscape for young people is tough, to say the least: a 2016 study from the Center for Household Financial Stability found that median millennial savings were 34 percent below what historic trends would predict; in a recent survey by the financial platform Step, more than one-third of Gen Z respondents reported running out of money every month.

Shadiah Sigala ’06

Among the many costs of raising a new human, child care has emerged as especially exorbitant. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, American families pay upward of one-sixth of their median income on care for just one child—as much or more than what most pay for rent or mortgage. As tech entrepreneur Shadiah Sigala ’06 puts it, “You can see how with two or three children the calculus becomes absolutely untenable.”

On top of the cost of child care is its availability: over half of Americans live in “child care deserts,” with low-income rural and communities of color disproportionately impacted. This issue inspired Sigala to found Kinside, which provides a marketplace connecting families to caregivers in their area, helps companies build child care into their employee benefits, and works with local governments to improve larger care ecosystems.

But more accessible child care doesn’t help those who struggle to get pregnant in the first place. Fertility issues afflict many aspiring mothers, and while technologies like in-vitro fertilization (IVF) have opened up many new possibilities, they don’t come cheap, with a single round of IVF costing some $20,000. Heffington argues that, for some, such technologies actually “increase the pain of infertility in offering a promise where previously there was nothing you could do.”

Empathy Across Generations With Prof. Jessica Stern ‘12

By Lorraine Wu Harry ’97

Jessica Stern ’12

This spring a child development paper from assistant professor Jessica Stern ’12 was selected by University of California at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center as one of 2024’s “most provocative and influential findings on the science of a meaningful life.” We talked to Stern to learn more about her paper “Empathy across three generations.”

What is your study’s central research question?

Adolescents get a bad rap. The misconception goes something like this: Teens are self-focused, easily pressured to do bad things by their peers, and lacking mature social skills like empathy. But does the evidence bear this out?

Not really. In our observations, teens are deeply engaged in supporting others, particularly their friends, and peer interactions often encourage them to be prosocial. Our research team wanted to understand: How do teens learn empathy? How is empathy transmitted across generations? And what’s the role of teenage friendships?

How did you collect the data?

The KLIFF VIDA longitudinal study, led by the University of Virginia, began in 1998. We tracked 184 teens from age 13 into their mid-30s, and every year invited teens to the lab with their parents and closest friend, and recorded videos of their interactions. When teens were 13 we observed them talking to their moms about a problem they could use help on, and tracked how much empathy moms showed during that conversation. We looked for things like how emotionally engaged the mom was, whether she had an accurate understanding of the teen’s problem, and how much help and emotional support she provided.

Then, every year for seven years, we observed teens talking to their closest friend about a problem their friend needed help with. We looked for those same types of empathic behaviors in how the teen treated their friends. When some of those same teens were starting to have kids of their own about a decade later, we sent them surveys asking about their parenting behavior and their children’s empathy.

What were your key findings?

We found that teens who experienced more empathy from their mothers at age 13 were more likely to “pay it forward” by showing empathy for their friends in adolescence. For the teens who later had children, practicing empathy with close friends in late adolescence predicted more supportive parenting behavior a decade later. We were able to see how empathy is transmitted across three generations.

Our message is this: if we want to raise empathic teens, we need to give them firsthand experiences of receiving empathy from adults at home. More than lectures or pressure, teens need to feel what it’s like to be understood and supported. This gives them a model of empathy in action.

We also hope [to] give parents peace of mind, knowing that teens’ desire to hang out with friends is a boon for their social development (and perhaps their future success as caregivers). Supporting teens to cultivate close friendships may be important for them to hone their social skills by practicing caregiving for their friends.

Factor 2: Balancing the load

As she discusses the current state of non-parenthood, Heffington cites a Pew survey statistic she finds telling: 45 percent of women said they wanted kids in the future, compared to 57 percent of men. “What we’re seeing is not that women like babies less than they did,” she says. “It’s that they’re very aware of who’s going to be doing the work, whose career is going to take the hit, and who will do the vast majority of mental labor.”

That dynamic is familiar to Karen Magoon Pearson ’05, who adopted four children with her husband. As a couple, they seek to be egalitarian in their sharing of household chores, and mostly succeed. But, like many mothers, Magoon Pearson has been tasked with nearly all the intangibles: keeping track of the kids’ schedules and school workloads, planning outings, problem-solving and managing the logistics of a six-person family. “Emotional labor, the mental load; the code hasn’t fully been cracked there, even when both people want it to be,” she says.

Sigala, who now has two children, has also struggled in that arena. She experienced deep postpartum depression after her first child, exacerbated by a lack of support from her then-husband. “Mothers are the nucleus and the electrons; they’re keeping everything together,” she says. “They’re called to be many, many elements in the atom. And they’re just breaking.”

Although the twin concepts of mental load and emotional labor have finally entered the collective conversation, Heffington argues that that awareness is not enough to counter the deeply ingrained expectations that befall mothers. “Women have become more aware of the effect [parenting] will have on their lives, their marriages, their careers,” Heffington says, “and are increasingly thinking that it’s not a good trade-off.”

Factor 3: A hostile climate

The changing climate has also had profound effects on people’s parenting proclivities. In the 2024 Pew study, one in four respondents said their choice to not have children was primarily for “environmental reasons,” while 38 percent cited a slightly broader “state of the world.” (Cue meme of “gesturing broadly at everything.”)

Jade S. Sasser ’97 (Photo by Matthew Reiter Photography)

These choices are not evenly distributed among young people, notes Jade Sasser ’97, an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at University of California, Riverside. Surveys by the Yale Center for Climate Communications consistently find that people of color experience more emotional distress—and suffer from more clinically diagnosable mental health issues—due to climate change. Their fertility decisions are also more likely to reflect that experience. In a 2020 survey, 41 percent of Latino respondents and 30 percent of Black respondents cited climate change as a factor in why they did not have children, compared to 21 percent of white respondents.

This trend was compelling enough to inspire Sasser to write a book about it. Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question explores younger generations’ fear and grief around the climate emergency, the ways that people of color are disproportionately impacted, and the reproductive decisions that result.

One of Sasser’s more surprising findings was that young people are less fixated on the negative impacts their hypothetical children will have on the planet, than on the negative impacts the planet will have on their children. That is, in previous decades people who cited environmental factors in their fertility decisions were usually considering issues like overpopulation and pollution—how bringing a new human into the world would damage their surroundings. Now, the feeling is that the damage has been done, and the fears focus more on how the consequences will affect quality of life for a new generation.

Many people Sasser interviewed wanted children but felt that subjecting new humans to the potential horrors of climate change felt unethical. “If I had kids amidst a catastrophe like a hurricane, I would be worried every day,” one woman told Sasser. Would she be able to keep them safe?

Although climate anxiety and grief are common across race and socioeconomic strata, people of color experience them more strongly due to structural inequities, Sasser says. (In her book, she points to one potent example; a report analyzing FEMA records from 1999 to 2013, which found that 85 percent of post-disaster buyouts went to white families.) “Climate change seems to be a threat multiplier,” she explains, “meaning that the other reasons people have for either not wanting children or being ambivalent are compounded by emotional responses to climate change—and that’s worse for young people from marginalized communities.”

Factor 4: The parenting happiness gap

One hot take you won’t hear on Oprah: American parents seem to consistently report feeling less happy than people without children. (Specifically, 12.7 percent less happy, according to a 2016 meta-analysis of adults across 22 countries.) Heffington says that, in the U.S. at least, there is no kind of parent—new parents in the thick of it, empty nesters, step-parents—that is, on average, happier than people without children.

The so-called “happiness gap” is particularly acute for women, which Sigala and others attribute to the true emotional weight of motherhood and the opportunities young women give up by having children. Since full-time child care can often cost as much as a professional woman earns, Sigala says that women around her often feel the “pernicious, intractable” pressure to step away from work and care for their children or families. “You can see how it starts to pile up, and before you know it, women are hugely disadvantaged in their professional lives and their ability to have strength and freedom,” she says.

Still, data from Europe suggests that, while raising children is challenging everywhere, the kids themselves are not the problem. In a meta-analysis, researchers found that in countries such as France, Finland, Norway and Sweden, the gap disappears or is even reversed, with parents reporting that they are happier than non-parents by up to 8 percent. Their results showed that a few simple factors make this paradigm possible: vacation time, parental leave, sick leave, and affordable or free child care. “It doesn’t require massive infrastructure,” Heffington says. “Just dialing down some of the pressure American parents experience could make a huge difference.”

GET THEE TO A NUNNERY

In 1869 Arabella Mansfield was the first woman to pass the bar to become a lawyer. This milestone was a sign of a larger trend: women gaining better access to education and entering the workforce in increasing numbers.

In response, starting around 1900, both private companies and government entities began instituting “marriage bars” that banned married women from the workplace. These bans, which stemmed in part from racist fears around a plunging white birth rate, were common in industries such as insurance, publishing and banking, but in some cases were implemented statewide. A 1935 Wisconsin resolution called working married women “a calling card for disintegration of family life.”

Single women picketing a relief headquarters in Boston, 1935 (Bettmann Archive)

Heffington says that marriage bars were intended to force women to go back to domestic spaces after they got married, which is “often exactly what they did.” But a growing number chose instead to delay marriage or opt out of family life altogether—either to pursue their professional priorities or because they could not afford the economic costs of ceasing work.

Factor 5: Losing the village

In writing her history of non-parenthood, Heffington found that she was actually writing a story about the transformation of the American home, a transition “from something deeply embedded in community structures offering support to the isolated nuclear family.” Although the familiar single-biological-unit structure might seem inevitable from our perspective, work from Pomona professor emerita Helena Wall shows that alternative configurations were flourishing in North America as recently as 400 years ago. “Colonial Americans understood the family only in context of community, with women from throughout a community taking active part in raising children,” Heffington explains. “They spent their whole lives passing in and out of each other’s houses.”

But during the 19th century, a major demographic shift found young people flocking from rural to urban areas for factory jobs—away from those support systems and toward the smaller, suburbanized nuclear family so typical today. Heffington sees today’s millennial experience as an extension of that shift. “We’ve replaced community support structures with ones you have to pay for, with relatively predictable results in terms of fertility,” she says.

Indeed, the loss of the proverbial “village” it once took to raise a child is significantly impacting younger generations’ parental reluctance. For example, while a network of relatives and neighbors watched over Sigala during her childhood, as a young adult she lived in a succession of different cities, each time starting anew and alone. “When my friends have grandparents around to take the kids, even one day per week, I’m very envious,” she says. And babysitting neighbors? As extinct as the dinos and the dodos.

Magoon Pearson also struggled with a lack of support after her oldest child’s academic troubles led her to homeschooling; not long after, the pandemic found her at home teaching all four children. “By the end of that year, I just couldn’t do it anymore,’” she remembers. Continued changes to parenting norms only intensified the difficulty. During her own childhood, she often spent time independently at friends’ houses or birthday parties. “It wasn’t like parents were expected to be everywhere all the time, doing everything their kids were doing,” she says. “Now, you kind of are, so you never get a break.”

Next steps: should we (population) panic?

Since President Trump started his second term, his administration has taken a staunchly pronatalist approach. Vice President JD Vance has spoken disdainfully of “childless cat ladies” while Trump touts $5,000 “baby bonuses” for mothers-to-be.

Sasser interprets it all as part of a larger, politics-driven “population panic”—and one that she treats with a heavy dose of skepticism.

Indeed, while Magoon Pearson feels some anxiety when she considers a future with fewer children—what will happen to Social Security? Will there be enough young people to keep the gears of society moving?—she rejects the idea that the childfree are inherently selfish, citing family and friends who instead spend their time on other meaningful endeavors. With four children’s lives to manage, and so many places where the world needs help or healing, “I’m bogged down with this anxiety that I’m not doing enough, stuck at home,” she says. “Thank goodness there’s people out there with the time and energy I don’t have!”

Sasser, Heffington and others argue that any supposed population crisis is at best overblown, and at worst manufactured. While some East Asian countries are indeed seeing small towns depopulating and villages with no children, the U.S. has “the privilege of being a place where people want to come to raise their families,” Heffington says.

Zooming out, the larger context is that fertility rates tend to reliably settle under 2 across time and cultures as women get more access to education, contraception and professional opportunities.

Heffington suggests that policymakers could look to the European countries with happier parents for a model of how to make parenting healthier. France and Sweden, for example, have built infrastructures conducive to parenting that include paid and extended maternity leave, prenatal care, free child health care and subsidized daycare. “If you’re forcing women to choose—whether it’s because of professional ambition or economic survival—some are going to choose not to have kids,” Heffington says. “If you make it easier for them to have both, they’re going to have both.”

The numbers tell a sobering story. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for 10- to 24-year-olds—a hefty chunk of Gen Z— suicide is the second leading cause of death and has increased more than 50 percent since 2000. Across a range of psychological surveys Gen Z often is found to be the loneliest, most anxious, depressed and heavily medicated generation ever.

Many mental health professionals call it a crisis—but perhaps there is also a crisis of perception.

Gen Z folks—and, to some extent, their millennial elders—have often been slapped with disparaging labels like “the Anxious Generation,” “the Therapist Generation” or even “the Snowflake Generation.” While no one can contest the heartbreaking stats on suicide, loneliness and depression, another thing that can’t be dismissed is Gen Z’s ability to adapt to adversity. They report being sadder, but—based on conversations with several mental health professionals in the field—in many ways they are also braver.

We recently spoke to three experts on the topic:

• Pomona College Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students for Academic and Personal Success Tracy Arwari
• Crisis Systems Medical Director at King County, Washington Dr. Matthew L. Goldman ’08
• Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Clinical Director Jasmine Lamitte ’08 (below), author of The Black Mental Health Workbook: Break the Stigma, Find Space for Reflection, and Reclaim Self-Care

Today’s young adults have had more than their fair share of battle wounds. They were a key casualty of COVID-19, both in actual deaths—approximately 15 million worldwide—and in the wrap-around effects of the pandemic on their mental health. When some of your most formative years are spent communicating via screens, the consequences are sharply felt.

“Psychosocial development was basically stalled for a period of time for a lot of kids,” says Goldman. “The increased use of services, and increased suicidality among youth, suggests that COVID was absolutely a catalyst for worsening the youth mental health crisis.”

Jasmine Lamitte ’08, author of The Black Mental Health Workbook: Break the Stigma, Find Space for Reflection, and Reclaim Self-Care

Lamitte agrees, pointing specifically to something she noticed when schools reopened: Young people who had isolated at home had missed key developmental milestones, leading to behavioral challenges and a huge uptick in both social and generalized anxiety.

The social isolation may be exacerbated by increased digital connection. Social media and digital connectivity certainly have their benefits in increasing awareness of challenges that other young people might be going through.

Although Lamitte is encouraged by Gen Z’s growing comfort talking about mental health, she says that platforms such as TikTok have rampant misinformation that can lead users to self-diagnose and feel like they can handle things on their own without therapy.

Pomona College Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students for Academic and Personal Success Tracy Arwari

Arwari says that help-seeking behavior has become much more ubiquitous on campus in recent years, which she attributes to Pomona’s own proactive efforts toward outreach and prevention, as well as a larger societal trend toward being open around mental health and self-care.

“Ten or 15 years ago, you did your best to tread water on your own and you had to have quiet faith that this, too, would pass,” she says.

Experts see a greater willingness among Gen Z to seek therapy earlier and more consistently, versus waiting until things get intensely challenging.

“With my generation, the process started in college or after,” says Lamitte. “Now kids are coming out in high school and exploring trauma they’ve experienced, to not necessarily carry that burden by themselves.”

While some label Gen Z as “the Therapist Generation” with disdain, Goldman considers it a net positive that there’s been such a banishment of stigma, which translates to prioritization of funding for mental health services, not to mention greater receptivity to treatment and more engagement in the healing process.

Lamitte adds that younger generations are increasingly open to exploring different modalities that they may have first encountered on social media, including mindfulness meditation and “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.”

The experts argue that Gen Z has gotten increasingly comfortable being vulnerable about everything from anxiety to past trauma.

New Models of Care: What Systems Need to Catch Up

If the youth have caught up with the times, the systems unfortunately have not. Goldman says that the greatest barriers to care are the lack of services plus access. It’s a bind: there aren’t enough youth mental health services in general, much less ones that insurance will pay for. Complicating an already knotty situation is that pediatricians are often the ones prescribing medications for youth, without extra training in mental health or psychiatry.

“They’re doing their best and want to help, but often end up using the tools that they have at their disposal, like medications,” says Goldman. “There is plenty of data showing overprescription of psychiatric meds among kids.”

While many kids absolutely need the meds, data suggests widespread overprescription of antipsychotic medication that’s especially acute for children who are Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), including boys who are involved in a juvenile justice or foster care system. Goldman says that this form of “diagnostic overshadowing”—in which BIPOC folks are more likely to be diagnosed with a psychotic disorder or more serious mental illness—often can mask other diagnoses such as trauma or complex trauma.

Concern regarding mental health among youth in general is appropriately high. In King County, where Goldman serves as medical director for its crisis systems, there will soon be a 24-7 youth crisis facility with both urgent care and higher acuity units.

Given that dedicated behavioral health facilities tend to be much more effective at crisis care than in emergency departments or general hospitals, Goldman hopes that policymakers nationwide see the need to cover the gaps in care and support these crisis stabilization services. He cites Washington state’s requirement for commercial payment, which creates alternatives to sitting in an emergency room for hours or days waiting to be seen, or getting involved in a criminal legal system where people end up unnecessarily incarcerated.

Goldman says it’s also critical to have an outpatient system that can receive people in the aftermath of a crisis. Post-crisis follow-up resources tend to be quite limited. Someone may receive good care during the crisis, but then face a lot of post-discharge barriers to being able to access ongoing support to prevent future relapse.

“There’s a risk of them falling through the cracks again,” says Goldman.

To mitigate that risk, King County is investing in post-crisis follow-up services that are dedicated to the aftermath of a crisis, so that anyone who comes through the crisis centers has access to ongoing care. It’s based on one of the leading national models for youth crisis response, Mobile Response and Stabilization Services, or MRSS, a youth-specific model that comes from Connecticut; it is a field-based, community-based crisis response.

“Your anxiety or despair may sometimes be so overwhelming that you can’t see anything else. But it won’t be like that forever. There can still be lighter times ahead.” —Liz

If a young person or a parent calls into a crisis hotline like 988 or other local hotlines or a teen-specific hotline, and the call taker is concerned that the level of the crisis is more acute or severe than what can be handled on the phone, then they might dispatch a mobile response-type resource. While a lot of places have a general mobile crisis response that serves both adults and youth, the gold standard model is to have dedicated youth-specialized mobile teams, Goldman says.

“They’ll do the initial mobile response, but then they’ll also continue to support that child for six to eight to even up to 12 weeks after the initial mobile response,” he says. “And the idea is that it’s the team that does the initial mobile response that makes that initial bond with both the child and their family and then can continue to support them for that extended period.”

Sometimes that’s all that you need, Goldman says. Long-term outpatient or any other kind of community support isn’t always necessary because if it’s a crisis that’s related to something situational or circumstantial—bereavement, some event that happens—then youth can eventually do really well.

What Gives Us Hope

Gen Z’s crisis overwhelms, but there is hope rising nonetheless. For Lamitte, it’s their early pursuit of healing. For Goldman, it’s young people’s openness and receptivity. And for Arwari, it’s Gen Z’s commitment to kindness, camaraderie and advocacy.

“There is a lot in this world that can feel like doom and gloom at every turn,” she says. “But the thing that gives me hope is witnessing the way that students will hold each other up [and make] a rooted good faith effort to be kind to one another. The kids are all right.”

“It’s easy to equate success with visible achievements like a promotion or a new job. But it’s important to acknowledge and celebrate all growth, especially when it comes to mental health and well-being.” —Liz

We asked the same set of questions to 3 individual alums from 55, 30 and 5 years ago, as well as 4 couples across multiple generations. Ahead, our super-scientific results.

How did you meet?
Larry Hauser ’64 and Barbara Hauser ’65: We met in 1962-1963 at a “Served Dinner” at Frary Dining Hall, where a vigorous courtship ensued with lots of coffee dates that had to be completed by the 10 p.m. curfew.

Richard Bookwaiter ’82 and Galen Leung ’82:
We met as first-years when we were both elected to the Freshman Dorm Council representing Oldenborg and Walker, respectively.
Rob Ricketts ’97 and Karla Romero ’97:
We met in January 1996 in Harwood Basement. Rob was a transfer student, and Karla was his assigned sponsor.
Kai Fukutaki ’17 and Sameen Boparai ’17:
While we first met during Orientation Adventure in Sequoia, we didn’t start hanging out until we crossed paths in the social dance clubs, including ballroom dance.

What is your favorite Pomona College
memory together?

Hauser and Hauser: Our “Pinning Ceremony”—the entire Zeta Chi Sigma Fraternity marched down to South Campus and sang a romantic serenade at Mudd-Blaisdell, marking the start of our lifelong journey together.
Bookwaiter and Leung: After the “Survivors’ Party” for students who had made it through the fall, we were the only two who showed up on the cleaning committee.

Ricketts and Romero: Harwood Halloween, where we saw a relevantly unknown opening act called the Black Eyed Peas.
Fukutaki and Boparai: During senior week in San Diego, we put our liberal arts degrees to good use: we won pub trivia, sang karaoke and had our ecology friends help us identify tide pool creatures!

How long have you been together?

Hauser and Hauser: Married 60 years! We just attended Barbara’s 60th Pomona reunion and are forever bonded to this beautiful campus with all of its memories.

Bookwaiter and Leung: 34 years! By the end of our senior year we knew we wanted to be together. We married in August 2008.

Ricketts and Romero: We’ve been together since May 1996, with one brief intermission in 1998-99. We found our way back to each other, and have been inseparable ever since.

Fukutaki and Boparai: 9 years! We immediately had to do two years of long-distance after college but fortunately both ended up in Seattle for graduate school.

What is your secret to a successful relationship?

Hauser and Hauser: Patience, optimism and a sense of firm commitment. Per philosopher Brian Andreas: “I’m deciding everything is falling into place perfectly, as long as you don’t get too picky about what you mean by ‘place’. Or ‘perfectly.’”

Bookwaiter and Leung: Our relationship has lasted over 34 years because we are able to communicate with each other.

Ricketts and Romero: Relationships aren’t about being right—they’re about growing together. Also, we laugh a lot. Humor keeps things light even when things get heavy. We don’t agree on everything or spend every waking moment together, but we consistently show up for one another.

Fukutaki and Boparai: Cultivating healthy communities has helped us feel fulfilled and supported so that we don’t depend solely on each other. Staying curious and always learning new things, together and apart, keeps us excited about the world—and each other.

What is your fondest memory of Pomona?
Blair: Groups of us would get tickets to classical concerts in Big Bridges, where we’d see Arthur Rubinstein, Van Cliburn, Christopher Parkening and the Romeros, among many others.
Trupin: I think a lot about the freshman seminar, the intramural sports and, of course, both the good friends and the meaningful conversations I had all the time there.

Addo-Ashong: I don’t think I could truly narrow down to just one memory—I look back at dozens of moments spent with my friends and laugh all the time.

Where did you and your friends hang out?

Blair: I developed some of my longer-lasting friendships when I lived in Oldenborg for two years. We hung out in the language lounge for the Russian and Chinese students. I was studying Russian. We studied, we partied and had a great time there.

Trupin: We attempted to study at pools, a lot. Somehow I still passed my classes. We ate a lot of fried food and shakes at the Coop. And we ventured to parties on whatever campus was hosting one.
Addo-Ashong: I could guarantee that you’d see me and my friends in Frary at some point, especially for Snack. My Sontag suite was also a glorified community center my senior year with the number of people that were in and out every day.

The career path you first envisioned in college—is that what you’re doing now?

Blair: I fell in love with the fields of anthropology and education. As a result, I studied at Stanford and received an MA in Education. Although later I studied theology, was ordained a Presbyterian minister and received a Ph.D. from the Claremont School of Theology, I was always using what I had learned at Pomona.

Trupin: I majored in American Studies, so I wouldn’t say I had a planned career path. But I did get to spend a lot of time focusing on youth homelessness at Pomona, including a Watson Fellowship in Latin America. I still work on that today, so the answer, I guess, is yes!

Addo-Ashong: I didn’t have one career path clearly laid out, but my current job working in data analysis and research for litigation is a good mix of my public policy analysis and math background. My next steps are to apply for a master’s in similar fields, so in that sense, I think I’m following what I set out to do!

What do you wish you’d known before you came to Pomona?

Blair: I felt instantly at home at Pomona because of the many new students who, like me, had lived outside the United States. I was embarrassed, however, that I had not yet heard of Jefferson Airplane and their music.

Trupin: This is a rare four-year opportunity that you’ll never get again, and you should take advantage of all it has to offer during your time there. A lot of us would come back for another year if we could.

Addo-Ashong: I wish I’d known that the pluses and minuses on grades do in fact affect your GPA, because that was a very rude awakening my freshman fall!

What was your favorite dining-hall food?

Blair: I have little memories of the food. It was better in Oldenborg than elsewhere.

Trupin: Fried mozzarella sticks at the Coop. In the dining hall, maybe the omelet bar—how nice it would be to have that in my house now!

Addo-Ashong: My usual breakfast omelet and avocado toast, maybe the tomato/burrata, and balsamic sandwiches and the oatmeal craisin cookies!

What was the best book you read during your Pomona years?

Blair: A book that over the long term shaped me the most was Mysticism, by Evelyn Underhill. I read it for a course I took at Pitzer; we also read Tillich and William James.

Trupin: In the Name of Eugenics by Daniel Kevles stuck with me and stays relevant today as a frightening and helpful exploration of using science to justify racism and every type of discrimination.

Addo-Ashong: I don’t know how many books I read for fun , but I really enjoyed American Hookup by Lisa Wade!

What was your favorite band while you were in college?

Blair: The Beatles, then Jefferson Airplane and the Doors.

Trupin: I have fond memories of seeing No Doubt perform in my dorm. They weren’t my favorite band, and I think my glasses fell into the mosh pit and got crushed, but it still stands out.

Addo-Ashong: I’d say favorite actual band was Glass Animals, and individuals were SZA and Childish Gambino.

What was the first electronic device you ever owned?

Blair: I got my first computer in 1986, when I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation.

Trupin: My roommate and I had a combo tape/record/CD player that I think was the size of half of one of our walls.

Addo-Ashong: My Game Boy Advance.

Shark Mutulili ’25 and Fares Marzouk ’25

Some 447 graduates received their diplomas at Pomona’s 132nd commencement in May. Speakers included Senior Class President Shark Mutulili ’25 (top left), Senior Class Speaker Fares Marzouk ’25 (top right) and the following four recipients of honorary degrees.

W. Benton Boone ’62

As ophthalmology faculty at UCLA and the University of California, Irvine, Boone has published extensive research on advancements in eye surgery and immunology. Certified in the supervision of hyperbaric oxygen therapy, he helped to pioneer the use of hyperbaric oxygen in eye disease.

Louise Henry Bryson

Originally a documentary film writer and public television producer, Bryson later became senior vice president of FX networks and then president of distribution for Lifetime Networks. She is a former member of the board of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the former chair of the Board of Trustees of The J. Paul Getty Trust.

Halim Dhanidina ’94

In 2012 Justice Dhanidina (ret.) was appointed to the Los Angeles County Superior Court, becoming the first Muslim to ever be appointed judge in California. Previously a litigator in arbitration and criminal investigations, an associate justice in the California 2nd District Court of Appeal, he became the country’s first-ever Muslim appellate-level judge.

David W. Oxtoby

A recognized leader in American higher education, Oxtoby was Pomona’s ninth president from 2003 to 2017. He also chaired the board of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and was president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Pomona College Class of 2029 on the steps of Carnegie Hall during Move-In Day

Move-In Day:

Cars started lining First Street at Columbia Avenue as early as 7 a.m. Saturday, the license plates along the queue as diverse as the Pomona community that the precious cargo inside the vehicles would soon join.

Hundreds of new students moved into their residence halls with the help of dozens of residential advisors and Pomona staff members.

Bailey Williams ’26, a computer science and politics double major from Dallas, Texas, was among the cohort of residential advisors outside Lyon Court offloading suitcases, appliances and furniture by the trunkload.

“The energy is unmatched,” he said. “Everyone’s excited to see the new class.”

With most new students moved in by noon, families shared a meal at Frank Dining Hall before students met with members of the Orientation Team, their resident advisors or their sponsors to make first connections with the Pomona community.

The Class of 2029 took a group photo on the steps of Carnegie Hall in the afternoon, then did the traditional “Through the Gates” walk with President G. Gabrielle Starr.

Starr, who returned to her post last month after a spring sabbatical, addressed the first-years later in the evening, before a “Boba Break” at Harwood Pergola to cap off the day.

In total, 423 first-year students and 30 transfer students are joining Pomona this fall.

For Williams, the hustle and bustle of Move-In Day rekindled fond memories of his first days at Pomona.

“My advice to new students is [that] there’s a lot of things to get into, and you’ll find yourself and your place at Pomona eventually,” Williams said. “So take your time and take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way.”

Orientation Adventure Builds Friendships and Faith

In August 453 new students-first-years and transfers-kicked off their Pomona journey by participating in the annual Orientation Adventure (OA), a three-day experience that allows students to bond in the week before classes start.

A nearly 30-year-old tradition, OA features opportunities ranging from backpacking and surfing to “Quintessential L.A.,” which included taking in the Hollywood sign, Grand Central Market and an Angels baseball game.

The “Pali Retreat” group participated in a variety of outdoor activities that included archery, tomahawk throws, three ropes courses and a 40-foot harnessed drop known as the “Leap of Faith.”

Other excursions included “Farm and Fish” (think fishing trips and urban farms in Pasadena) and “Community Partnerships and Service,” where, among other things, students spent a morning helping the Claremont-based Prison Library Project find books for local incarcerated individuals.

Four years from now, OA friends will cheer for each other again—only this time, rather than being 40 feet overhead getting ready to leap, they’ll be walking across the stage at Commencement.

“This is only my second day here, and it’s already been amazing,” says Isaac Aguirre ’29, who hails from Buena Park, California. “There are great people out there.”

Geology Professor Nikki Moore took a team to the “exposed granites” of the White Mountains, nestled in the Sierras.

The sun is setting over the White Mountains an hour west of Nevada as Visiting Assistant Professor of Geology Nikki Moore and Ruth Vesta-June Gale ’25 set up portable chairs some 8,000 feet above sea level.

Grandview Campground—where the two are staying this August weekend—is a certified dark sky location, a haven for stargazers and astronomy groups. From here, once darkness consumes the light, the Milky Way and other collections of stars dot the sky.

As Moore, Pomona visiting assistant professor of geology, and Gale relax after a day of collecting rock samples from ancient dikes, meteors sparkle overhead before darting south and vanishing into the horizon.

While most appear and disappear within seconds, one stays visible long enough for Moore to audibly gasp.

The brightest and longest shooting star she’s ever seen.

“There’s a connection I have with nature where I can have these special moments that stick with me for a lifetime,” she says.

For Gale, a geology and applied math double major, the three-day trip to the Lone Pine area marked her second year doing fieldwork with Moore. She says the chance to visit the White Mountains—one of the lesser-explored ranges in the Sierra Nevada region—for the first time this summer was too good to pass up.

“You think of mountains and [that] they’re big, but it’s something else when you’re hiking on them,” Gale says. “We had some remote dikes we were trying to access, and they weren’t the worst hikes, but you’re off the trail so you don’t realize the magnitude of the mountains until you’re on them. It was satisfying to conquer them, to do science in this massive area.”

Lynn Robinson, Nikki Moore and Ruth Vesta-June Gale ’25 at the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains to see Methuselah, confirmed to be the oldest tree in the world (4,856 years and counting…)

Studying Dikes

Moore’s expertise combines her three passions: geology, teaching and nature. From collecting rocks as a child growing up in Nebraska to visiting the Rocky Mountains with friends as a teenager, Moore became equal parts fascinated with how immense mountains are and determined to understand how they came to be.

While an undergrad at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Moore found herself a tutor for friends and peers. “I found that I had an innate sense of joy in sparking an interest for someone else and breaking down something complex to someone else and seeing their eyes light up with understanding and excitement,” she says.

Thanks to a roughly $200,000 National Science Foundation EMpowering BRoader Academic Capacity and Education (EMBRACE) grant, Moore traveled to the eastern Sierra, the White Mountains and the Benton Range this summer to explore dike swarms—the plumbing of magmatic systems found on Earth and other planetary bodies.

Moore’s field, geochemical and geochronological work on the dikes, blends teaching and research. It is a perfect fit for a grant program intended to give undergraduate faculty the time and means to step away from or reduce their teaching load to develop a robust research program.

Dike swarms “are the feeders for volcanic eruptions in a range of geologic settings,” she says, “and thus are the connection between magmas that are generated deep in Earth’s mantle and those that travel through the crust to be erupted at the surface.”

Because swarms exist from the deep geologic past, Moore says, they “can provide important evidence to help reconstruct the magmatic history of these regions.”

According to Moore, understanding the whole volcanic process—from how magmas first form in the “mantle,” then move through the crust and erupt at the surface—is imperative to learning how and why volcanic eruptions happen in different parts of the world.

A rock that’s part of the massive Independence Dike Swarm, which extends more than 370 miles across California.

This summer, she planned three trips to the Sierra Nevada, each accompanied by different Claremont Colleges students. Together, professor and student hiked to dikes Moore targeted and mapped, collecting a compositional range of dike rock samples for lab analysis.

“What I really enjoyed about this experience is how much I could ask Nikki about what’s going on in the field,” Gale says. “I could toss around ideas with her and make sure I understood what’s going on and what the research is trying to prove.”

Studying the chemical composition of the samples they collected this summer will help the team confirm whether the Independence Dike Swarm is 148 million years old, as experts believe, or if the dikes started to emerge even earlier, as preliminary data suggests.

“My study is unique in that the dikes were the conduits through which volcanic eruptions were produced at the surface, during the time the whole Sierra Nevada arc was forming,” Moore says. “Those volcanoes that once existed are now eroded away, and the core of the Sierras are now the exposed granites.”

Sagehens in the Sierra

Pomona College geologists have long used the Sierra Nevada as a proving ground for many core concepts on how magmas form, crystallize and build the crust, says Jade Star Lackey, professor of geology and an authority on the region.

Jade Star Lackey and Nikki Moore

Magmas produce igneous rocks, which can cool and solidify in one of two places: within the crust or erupted at the surface. The magmas that stall, cool and entirely solidify in the crust are plutonic rocks, such as granite.

Spanning some 24,000 square miles, the Sierra has 50 million years’ worth of different granites from all compositions, making it a mecca for geologists and geology students. A room on the first floor of Edmunds Hall is filled with salt-and-pepper granite collected from the Sierra Nevada over the years, each its own piece of Earth history.

“The rocks speak for themselves,” Lackey says, “but then there’s a Sagehen connection in terms of the scholarly research that’s happened on them.”

Art Sylvester ’59, who taught geology for more than 35 years at the University of California, Santa Barbara, cut his teeth navigating the region’s ridges, canyons and terrain as an undergraduate at Pomona. Sylvester, who died in 2023 at age 85, later co-authored Roadside Geology of Southern California, a popular addition to the Roadside Geology series of books published by Mountain Press.

Allen Glazner ’76, professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, also traversed the Sierra as a student and later, a professional, writing a series of books that includes volumes on Death Valley and Yosemite.

Glazner and Sylvester collaborated on the 1993 tome Geology Underfoot in Southern California.

“All the work they’ve done started by realizing just how much science could be done in the Sierras because of the sheer scale of it,” Lackey says. “It’s also important as an analog for a lot of other great granite terrains that form the Ring of Fire in Japan, Russia and Canada.”

Budding Geologists

At Pomona, Lackey and Moore are part of a Geology Department that draws students from across The Claremont Colleges fascinated by nature and the chance to study science outside the traditional biology and chemistry disciplines.

Little time is wasted getting these inquisitive minds into the field.

There is no substitute for hands-on experience, Lackey says, be it outside or in the lab. As thrilling as collecting dike and granite samples from the Sierra can be for one student, equal thrill can be found by another student in preparing a sample to examine under the microscope for years to come.

“There’s enough breadth of science in geology that it’s really appealing to students,” Lackey says. “It gives you the opportunity to practice all over the world if you want to. So often we go out there looking to answer science questions, but there’s so much we can do in the Sierra that brings the classroom alive.”

He says that students with the time to accompany faculty on multi-day trips are in high demand, and the breathtaking views of the Sierra are a good incentive. Between Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon, the scenery is second to none.

“There’s a lot of power in the landscape,” Lackey adds. “The rock falls we see, or the damage that an avalanche has done to trees that are snapped off, and the really big snow years we had a couple years ago—that’s the kind of stuff that’s stunning, and is why this is such a good place for both teaching and research.”

Khadi Diallo ’25 joined Moore for a July trek to Onion Valley. Their days began at 8 a.m. and ended by 3 p.m. due to the extreme heat occurring in the lower elevations of the Owens Valley region. In those seven hours, the two navigated as much of the mountain area as they could in search of rock samples.

“I was in constant awe of the mountains,” Diallo says. “There’s something particular about mountains, too, where you’re looking at them from a distance and feel both very big and very small. You come up to the mountains and realize the sheer magnitude of geology there.”

For Diallo, a geology major and California native, the six-day experience was as fulfilling as she expected. Joining Moore in the field helped Diallo connect the idea of geology mapping with how it’s used in the real world. Some geologists spend their entire careers mapping the Sierra, paving the way for easy sampling.

“It’s a lot of work built on that of other geologists,” Lackey says. “And that’s what makes the Sierra so good. It’s really well mapped. The quadrangles across the Sierra. I used those, and it was the names on those maps that I would then connect back to Pomona people.”

Moore, who used these extensive, pre-existing maps to plan and execute her fieldwork, likes to say she “stands on the shoulders of giants who did so much incredible work before us.”

One With Nature

Moore savors the remoteness of being in the field.

While extroverted by nature, she finds truly special leaving the beaten path for secluded spaces where mountain ranges dwarf everything in sight.

“Very often I get this feeling of standing on a spot and possibly being one of the few human beings to ever stand there or trod across that particular region,” Moore says. “That’s what gives me this deeper connection with the places I go. It just makes the work more intimate.”

Very often I get this feeling of…being one of the few human beings to ever trod across that particular region. It just makes the work more intimate.”

—Visiting Assistant Professor of Geology Nikki Moore

Lackey, too, appreciates the novel terrain, smells and sights of the Sierra—though the bears have gotten boring, he must admit.

“When you hear a rockslide in the silence of the mountains it is simultaneously terrifying, but also profound,” he says. “We find human artifacts that are really old, way markers in places where nobody else travels.”

After relaxing and volunteering for much of the summer, Diallo says traveling with Moore to the Sierra Nevada “got my mind churning back to geology.”

Khadi Diallo ’25 near a dike sampling site at Onion Valley.

Diallo even plans to incorporate her summer research into her senior thesis.

“As a geology student it’s good to get fieldwork into your repertoire,” she says. “It’s important to get a taste of it to see if it’s something you like—and I do!”

She’s not alone.

“I had a great time—mostly because of the unexploredness of it all,” Gale says. “The trip was a real-world application of all the tools I’ve studied so far in college.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story described the Sierra as spanning “some 24,000 square feet,” instead of 24,000 square miles. The mountain range is much more than half an acre! (Spinal Tap Stonehenge, anyone? Thanks for the tip, Peter Wechsler ’68).

Miller in his backyard in Claremont, where he’s reintroduced Indigenous flora such as coastal sage biota, deergrass and an Engelmann oak.

Today’s view of the San Gabriel Mountains is a bit hazier than it was in 1901.

Indigenous Grounds

2016: If you’re tall enough, and I’m not, you could peer out of the large, north-facing, four-pane window in the Digital Humanities Studio on the third floor of Honnold/Mudd Library and gaze on a striking tableau. In the deep background are the chaparral-cloaked, rough folds of the San Gabriel foothills that rise to Mount Baldy, the range’s visual apex.

Pull your eyes down to the foreground and a different view comes into focus. You’re looking at the Harvey S. Mudd Quadrangle, although few passersby see its fading metal name. They are on their way to somewhere else. Above that, what catches your vision are the towering stone pines and eucalyptuses, then a green sweep of lawn, establishing the x-and-y axis filled with other geometric shapes. Sidewalks radiate out at right angles from the library connecting pedestrians to Dartmouth Avenue on the west. Stately Garrison Theater is to the immediate north, and to the east, McAllister Center, and Scripps and Claremont McKenna colleges. Nothing is out of place. All grows according to plan. This built environment tightly structures the spatial dimensions of how we experience it.

Native buckwheat can be found all across campus.

1901: Fast backward 115 years, a difficult act of imagination that historic photographs can stimulate. Consider a black-and-white photograph shot at the corner of what is now College Avenue and 7th Street, roughly a block south of Honnold. The mountains are vastly more prominent in this more unstructured terrain. The dirt road barely intrudes as your eye is caught first by the snow-capped high country.

The Tongva call this rough ground Torojoatngna, the Place Below Snowy Mountain. It was carpeted with an apparently untrammeled coastal sage ecosystem. In the flatlands, there was buckwheat, sages, ephemeral wildflowers and grasses. The washes and creeks sustained oaks and sycamores. Rock-littered, with not a lot of shade, the landscape was open, capacious. There were even herds of pronghorn antelope. The Tongva and other Indigenous Peoples of Southern California used fire and other tools to manage resources that they wished to extract, including material they invested in their rituals and ceremonies, and that provided food and shelter. Notes biologist Paula M. Schiffman, “By manipulating the mix and abundance of the native plant and animal species present in the ecosystem, the Tongva were able to exert control over the vertical structure of the region’s vegetation and over a diversity of natural processes.”

This Indigenous landscape was more rapidly and enduringly modified when Spanish and later Mexican settler-colonists ran vast herds of cattle, sheep and goat in California’s inland valleys. In 1817, Rancho San Rafael in the present-day San Gabriel Valley—a mere 20 miles to Claremont’s west—had nearly 2,000 cattle and hundreds of horses. Multiply those numbers across the region and it is little wonder these herbivores, in Schiffman’s words, quickly became the “dominant organisms” that allowed them to “govern the region’s ecological processes.” Converting coastal sage into grassland, as happened in what is now Pomona Valley, was a reflection of their dominance.

Both the Indigenous and Spanish/Mexican settler-colonist managed landscapes in turn were buried beginning with the post-Civil War Americanization of the region. The late 19th- century arrival of the railroad, and the land speculation and town-building schemes that followed, produced hardened roadbeds, gridded streetscapes, and a series of Victorian buildings that constituted Pomona’s early campus. Since then, The Claremont Colleges have constructed an environment that signals its distance from that earlier time and place. A plaque bolted in Pomona’s Smith Campus Center cheers the ecological conversion that began in the late 1880s: “the clearing away of underbrush, and the planting of roses and other flowers about the building, with an oval lawn in front … forced back the jackrabbits and rattlesnakes.”

The towering oaks that adorn”the Wash,” thirty acres of native landscape on campus.

2021: What would it take to reimagine the traces of that earlier biome? How might we peel back what the bulldozer flattened, shovel dug in, and the rake groomed? How might we re-see what we have rendered invisible? To make the past, present?”

Start with a trowel. It was the initial symbol of the student-led Ralph Cornell Society devoted to re-engaging with native plants. In the early 2010s, the organization collaborated with the college Grounds Department to plant sage, deer grass, baccharis, and buckwheat in place of grass, a re-indigenizing that dovetailed with campus water-reduction commitments. The department also reintroduced the endemic Engelmann oak, which had been logged out of the region a century earlier.

Often on my morning walks I’ll swing through campus to pay my respects to some of the more than 30 trees that add to the biodiverse canopy, flourishing in their native soil.”

These are small steps, to be sure, but they matter. Ethnobotanist and Tongva elder, the late Barbara Drake, made that case explicitly through her establishment of the Tongva Living History Garden, which has been an inspiration to many students and faculty.

This was among the influences that led my wife and me to transform our quarter-acre suburban lot one mile west of campus. When we purchased the home in 2009, we ripped up the St. Augustine lawn, and with the help of landscapers began to reintroduce coastal sage biota. Initially we planted bunches of deer grass as an evocative play on the now-departed sod; in the back, an Engelmann oak. While lizards loved the cover the grass provided, few other species did. So, as a second draft, we thinned out the long-stemmed grass, and planted different varieties of ceanothus, bitterbush, and buckwheat, and a Channel Island poppy and cherry. Clematis and morning glory are inching up the wooden fence that frames the backyard, and even a prickly pear refugee has taken root. Someone had tossed a pad over the weathered fence, and I troweled it into place. It has now stretched up and out, catching the sun’s rays.

On a recent afternoon, as I picked my way through the aromatic spring growth, jackrabbits and lizards scattered. An Anna’s hummingbird, like a sewing machine, darted around a blue-flowered Cleveland sage, and resting on a leaf while a pair of monarchs twirled into the air above, a mourning cloak. Chattering bushtits picked their way through oak and paperbark.

Home.

This second piece by Professor Miller spotlights Pomona’s two LEED Platinum dorms, first unveiled in 2011. The College has continued to make key strides in sustainability, with goals by 2030 to reach carbon neutrality and reduce its energy emissions 50 percent. Since 2014 Pomona has reduced its water use 45 percent, diverted waste at a rate of 52 percent.

Code Green

What do buildings mean? How do their volume, mass, and detail convey their subject and significance? How do their materials signal what we should see and think about their form and function? Should these structures stand for something?

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) believes so. Since its founding in 1993, the nonprofit has been a relentless promoter of the idea that a building’s design should be as sustainable as possible, and that sustainability is a key index of its value and meaning. In 2000 USGBC created the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, an incentive-based metric that has become a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for architects and developers.

LEED serves as a way to keep score—the more points a structure earns toward certification, the more lustrous the medal bestowed. While there’s nothing wrong with securing Silver or Gold, Platinum is the ultimate benchmark, a shining example of how the construction industry might help make the world a more habitable place.

Or not. LEED’s many critics are wary of the system’s low bar for certification, arguing that it asks too little of its applicants, offering instead a grade-inflated set of outcomes that undercuts their value. Critics are also skeptical about LEED’s failure to require postconstruction assessment of how certified buildings function: are they as good as advertised? As efficient? As low impact? An even greater lack in the rating is an analysis of how people interact with these certified buildings in real-time. All that glitters is not gold. Or platinum.

Yet the debate is healthy, especially if it compels producers and consumers to ask sharper questions about the built landscape we inhabit, about why it looks, feels and operates as it does. I contributed a small bit to this larger discussion when I spoke at the dedication of Pomona’s two new dormitories in 2011, shortly after they achieved the highest level of LEED certification. They earned it, too; they’re not fool’s gold.

The college takes a lot of pride in these buildings and has posted online an extensive list of their more remarkable attributes. I want to point out one that speaks to my inner wonk—stormwater control. Hardly as sexy as the array of solar panels, lacking the cachet of the green roof and garden, and not nearly as cool as the energy efficiencies that are built into the halls’ every design element, the stormwater system is arguably more revolutionary.

To understand why, imagine a single raindrop hurtling down during one of Southern California’s furious late-winter storms. The moment it hits the ground, according to those who have engineered the Los Angeles basin since the late19th-century, it should be captured as quickly as possible behind a dam or in a ditch or culvert, then swiftly channeled into the concrete-lined Santa Ana, San Gabriel or Los Angeles rivers before being flushed ignominiously into the sea.

The construction of Pomona’s LEED Platinum dorms kicked off a decade of sustainability-minded initiatives.

This complex system, designed to prevent flooding, has wreaked havoc with riparian ecosystems, destroying the once-robust regional runs of steelhead trout. It also has severely limited the capacity of nature to replenish local groundwater supplies—and we have compensated for this loss by expropriating snowmelt from as far away as the northern Rockies.

Pomona’s new dorms embody a smarter, locally framed approach. Any precipitation that falls within, or flows through, their catchment area will be retained onsite, and filtered down to a large underground detention basin in the alluvial wash that runs along the campus’ eastern edge. There it will slowly percolate into the aquifer, recharging the Pomona Valley’s groundwater. In so doing, these dorms benefit and befit their environment.

Yet will they be as integrative as human habitats? How will generations of students occupy them and make them their own? How will they respond to these buildings that teach sustainability every time they flick a light switch, open a window, or flush a toilet, but that also require their active participation to ensure its realization?

Pomona has asserted that sustainability is integral to its modern mission. One mark of its commitment has been the establishment of a Sustainability Integration Office—the middle word is of prime importance—that inculcates sustainable concepts into new construction and the rehabilitation of older facilities and infuses them into the college’s curricular goals and extracurricular activities.

The community must measure the steps it has taken to fulfill its convictions. That includes using intellectual tools and analytical methodologies to evaluate the very buildings in which so many abide and work. However limited, this rigorous self-examination is not just an academic exercise. Whatever the results, the evaluations will help us calibrate the human capacity to sustain ourselves on this planet of swelling population and finite resources.

Such calibrations may be especially impactful at the local level. How apt, then, that my students’ probing analyses of sustainability as fact and fancy—like the munificence of the donor families that made these two dormitories possible—is fully consistent with Pomona’s century-old charge to graduates: “They only are loyal to this college who, departing, bear their added riches in trust for mankind.”

With these dorms and other campus sustainability efforts the College has reframed that sense of individual social obligation, acknowledging that as an institution it too has a responsibility to redeem its pledge.