A graduating senior celebrating after receiving his diploma
President Gabi Starr greeting members of the Class of 2019 with high fives
An 8-foot globe on display on Marston Quad, painted to show the various home countries of the new graduates
An address by senior class speaker Ivan Solomon
Members of the Class of 2019 applauding a speech by Esther Brimmer ’83
Two new graduates sharing a congratulatory hug
Professor Sandeep Mukherjee in his studio
With any luck, many first-year students will find in their Critical Inquiry seminars what Miguel Delgado-Garcia ’20, president of the Associated Students of Pomona College (ASPC), told those gathered for 2019 Opening Convocation he found in his.
It was “the first of many homes for me” at Pomona College, Delgado-Garcia said as he addressed students in Bridges Hall of Music on the first day of classes.
Known as ID1 courses for their interdisciplinary designation in the catalog, Critical Inquiry seminars give first-year students an introduction to the kind of deep reading, writing and discussion that will be a foundation of their educations at Pomona. ID1 is one of three time-honored traditions (along with Orientation Adventure and sponsor groups) that introduce first-years to small groups of students who share close experiences that help them form early friendships on campus—and perhaps find the first of many homes.
Here’s a look at three of the 30 ID1 courses this year.
It’s little surprise one of the most requested ID1 classes this year considers “the problem of living with difference.” Professor of Mathematics Vin de Silva has taught the class a number of times, but says “what I’ve found in the last couple of years is that I feel that it’s almost inadequate for the much bigger task of rebalancing our public climate.”
De Silva has no illusions of resolving political conflict, but through various case studies students learn more effective ways of communicating. One example is the 1957 movie 12 Angry Men, in which the character played by Henry Fonda slowly changes the minds of jurors in a murder trial. Another comes from Edward Tufte, a Yale professor emeritus of political science, computer science and statistics. Tufte studied the efforts of Morton Thiokol engineers who advised against the 1986 launch of the ill-fated shuttle Challenger. NASA officials pushed back, and the launch went ahead.
“Of course it wasn’t OK,” de Silva says. “So then, the whole question is: If you have some piece of information and some understanding that makes you think that something shouldn’t be done, and there’s still pressure to do it, how do you try to communicate that? The contractors went to NASA and showed them all sorts of complicated figures and then said, ‘We don’t think you should launch.’ That isn’t always going to be effective. Tufte proposes a simplified chart, and as soon as you spend a couple of minutes looking at it and figuring it out, then you realize it’s totally clear that you shouldn’t launch.”
In an era when truth is under scrutiny, where does that leave fiction? Colleen Rosenfeld, an associate professor of English and a faculty fellow this year in Pomona’s Humanities Studio, designed her course to complement the studio’s 2019–20 theme, Post/Truth.
“The question of post-truth was especially interesting to me for fiction because the debate right now is so much around facts. How do we evaluate facts, and is it about trusting institutional sources?” Rosenfeld says. “Fiction has an interesting status because it’s neither truth nor lies.”
Among the readings in this class is the essay “Defence of Poesy” by 16th-century poet Philip Sidney. “Sidney says against the charge from Plato that poets are liars that, well, a poet cannot lie because ‘he nothing affirms,’” Rosenfeld says. “If you don’t make an affirmation, then your speech can’t be held to the question of true or false.”
Other texts include Italo Calvino’s short story collection Cosmicomics and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“There’s a long tradition which says, “Yes, fiction does involve truth—it’s just truth operating on a higher order,’” Rosenfeld says.
“These questions are old. We’re thinking about them in this political context, but it’s the same set of ideas that people have been using to think through literature and poetry and fiction, as far back as I can read.”
Inside Sandeep Mukherjee’s studio, a work in progress lines two walls in layers of fleshy reddish-brown paint. Hanging from the ceiling are aluminum moldings of tree trunks, sprayed with black and white paint that runs down the metal like rivulets.
Mukherjee, an associate professor of art and recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, says one of the challenges his ID1 students will face is the elusive endeavor of writing about color and its affects. (He draws on affect theory as proposed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.)
“It escapes, because color isn’t a fixed entity,” Mukherjee says. “It depends on what’s around it, where it’s located, space, time, the person viewing it. So when all these factors come together is when color is produced as an experience, and to try and pin it down in language is almost impossible.
Black and white will be examined too, and Mukherjee notes the inadequacy of those terms in describing race or skin tone.
“You’ve got brown, purple,” says Mukherjee, who often assigns self-portraits to beginning painting students. “I have them make the color that is their flesh, their hair, their eyes, their eyebrows. So they understand how much color each of us has.”
More unsettling is an essay students will read by Aruna D’Souza in Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts on the painting Open Casket by Dana Schutz. The painting depicts the grotesquely mutilated face of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black boy who was murdered in 1955 after whistling at a white woman. His mother chose a glass-topped casket to show the world what had been done.
“There was a huge controversy at the Whitney Museum about race and who gets to speak on it,” Mukherjee says, noting that Schutz, the artist, is white.
“The most gratifying feedback I get is, ‘The way I look at the world has changed on the most basic level,’” Mukherjee says. “That’s profound.”
The 2019 recipients of the Wig Distinguished Professor Award, the highest honor bestowed on Pomona faculty, were (from left):
In anonymously-written nomination comments, students offered high praise for the six professors who were honored at Commencement on May 19.
W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and Professor of Mathematics Stephan Garcia is the author of more than 80 research articles, many of them with Pomona students as coauthors. In 2018 he was recognized by the American Mathematics Society for his excellence in research in operator theory, complex analysis, matrix theory and number theory. This is his second Wig Award.
Bacio joined Pomona in 2016 with a double appointment to the departments of psychology and Chicana/o Latina/o studies. A clinical psychologist and researcher, she explores disparities in alcohol and drug use among young people of ethnic minorities. Bacio directs the CENTRO research lab where she and her students combine several research methods including community-participatory research, laboratory-based tasks and large-scale surveys. This is her first Wig Award.
Professor of English and Africana Studies Valorie Thomas has taught at Pomona since 1998 and specializes in Afrofuturism, Native American literature, African Diaspora theory and decolonizing theory. Thomas also studies film and visual art, has an ongoing interest in the connections between writing, art and social justice and is a screenwriter. This is her second Wig Award.
A third time Wig Award winner, Professor of Politics Susan McWilliams Barndt currently serves as chair of the Politics Department, where she has taught since 2006. Among her areas of expertise are political theory, American political thought, politics and literature and civic education. She is the author, most recently, of The American Road Trip and American Political Thought (2018).
Associate Professor of History Pey-Yi Chu teaches European history focusing on Russia and the Soviet Union. Through her research, she aims to understand the environment and environmental change through the history of science and technology as well as environmental history. Her first book, The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science, explores the history of the study of frozen earth and the creation of permafrost science in the Soviet Union. This is her first Wig Award.
Actor and director Carolyn Ratteray is a Daytime Emmy-nominated actress who joined Pomona College in 2016 as a tenure-track faculty member. A first-time Wig Award winner, Ratteray has worked in off-Broadway and regional theatres as well as in television and commercials. She’s served as moderator for on-campus speakers such as Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander and has directed numerous student plays during her time at Pomona such as Midsummer Night’s Dreamand In Love and Warcraft.
Emily Glass ’15 with Miami Marlins pitcher Jose Quijada
Walk through the Miami Marlins clubhouse and there’s a chance you’ll hear a Spanish phrase common in the Dominican Republic: “¿Qué lo que?”
Thanks to an innovative education program led by Emily Glass ’15, that might be an English-speaking player engaging in Spanish banter that roughly translates as “What’s up?” And you’re just as likely to hear a Latin player greeting his U.S.-born teammates in English.
With Glass’s help, the Marlins are trying to become the first bilingual organization in Major League Baseball (MLB). “We’re teaching English to our international players and Spanish to our domestic players, but then also life skills, from financial planning to cooking classes,” says Glass, whose work as the Marlins’ first education coordinator has been featured in The New York Times and The Washington Post. “The philosophy behind that is that we live in a globalized world, and Miami is at the center of that,” Glass says.
More than a quarter of the players on major league rosters at the beginning of this season were born outside the U.S., with a record 102 from the Dominican Republic, 68 from Venezuela and 19 from Cuba. In Miami and some other cities, the fans are increasingly Spanish-speaking too.
“Our new stadium is in Little Havana, so it’s in a neighborhood where everybody speaks Spanish,” Glass says. “So we want to give our players and all of our front-office employees the ability to interact with our fans that come to the ballpark and with the community, in both Spanish and English.”
Working for an MLB team seems glamorous when you see Glass bumping fists with a major leaguer on the field before a game. But the former Pomona-Pitzer softball player also spends at least a month each winter in the Dominican and much of the season on the road visiting Marlins minor- league players on teams like the Batavia Muckdogs, the New Orleans Baby Cakes and the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp.
Though her path to the big leagues has been winding, she has been preparing for this work even before she stepped on the Pomona College campus. She played baseball with her brother on youth teams until she was a teenager and then switched to softball for high school and college. She started every game for the Sagehens her first season, batting .386. But Glass would play only one more season of softball because competing campus interests and a love for hardball led her to recreational baseball with the guys in what she euphemistically calls a “carbonated-beverage league.”
Her first-year Critical Inquiry class at Pomona, or ID1 as it’s known, was Baseball in America with Lorn Foster, now an emeritus professor, who became such a close mentor that the two still have a standing phone call each Sunday at 3 p.m.
“She was a very gifted writer—that’s first and foremost,” Foster says. “But her interest in baseball was abiding.”
Glass later served as a teaching assistant for the class, and honed her high school and college Spanish while studying abroad in Salamanca, Spain. When it came time to write her senior thesis for a degree in public policy analysis, she again chose baseball as her topic, delving into a renowned program for disadvantaged youth called Reviving Baseball in the Inner City (RBI), founded by former major-league player John Young in Los Angeles in 1989.
She also won a coveted Watson Fellowship, which provides a stipend of more than $30,000 for a new graduate to engage in a year of independent research abroad. Glass studied international baseball while traveling to seven countries, including the Dominican, Japan and Australia. In Japan, she coached Little League on a field onto which she believes only one other woman had ever stepped. There she faced language and cultural barriers and “just baffled confusion from some people of ‘Why are you here?’”
On her return, she reached the final round of interviews for a position as an assistant of baseball operations with the New York Yankees but didn’t get the job. She then worked as the chief sales officer for a company called Acme Smoked Fish in Brooklyn for a year and a half before realizing, “I want to work in baseball. I don’t want to work in smoked fish.”
Mayu Fielding, the education coordinator for the Pittsburgh Pirates, became a mentor and referred her to multiple teams. Glass made it to the final round for a job with the New York Mets and interviewed with the Toronto Blue Jays and the Cincinnati Reds.
“My dad had always said to me that it takes six months to get the job that you want,” she says. “But if you try for six months and you put in the time and you trust the process, it will work out.”
Finally, the Marlins called, and Gary Denbo, the organization’s vice president of player development and scouting, gave her the only chance she needed.
The shared language of baseball often starts with pitches. Recta for straight fastball, curva for curveball, cambio for changeup. For catchers and pitchers in particular, it’s important nothing gets lost in translation.
“Baseball is a game of inches,” Glass says, “whether something is a ball or a strike or fair or foul, and our players see that by being able to communicate and be on the same page as some of their teammates, everything works better.”
Her mission might be most crucial with the Latin teenagers at the Dominican academy or just starting minor-league careers, many of them trying to break free of poverty and provide for their families. Landing in the hinterlands of the American minor leagues with no English is difficult.
“A lot of our players we sign at 18 or 20 years old; they’ve never cooked meals for themselves,” says Glass, who hires teachers to work with various Marlins teams in classes limited to 12 students—a hat tip to her small-class experiences at Pomona. She also shapes the curriculum, part of which is delivered by mobile phone or online.
“All of it truly is encompassed in service in the highest sense of the word—the skills they are going to need when they’re in a rookie league making very little money and trying to support themselves,” she says. “So we really tailor things toward interview skills and toward the off-field and money management skills—how to send money to your family abroad and how to communicate professionally at the field and away from the field.”
Jarlin Garcia, a 26-year-old Dominican pitcher now in the majors, remembers how challenging it was when the amount of English he spoke was nada.
“It’s a little bit hard, because you want to talk with the people, with the fans, and like when you’re out to eat,” he says in English, sitting in the visitors’ dugout at Dodger Stadium. “That’s why we need to learn.”
Beside him was Luis Dorante, a player relations and Spanish media relations liaison who works closely with Glass and travels with the major-league team to translate when necessary.
Like Glass, he is cognizant of the importance of life skills. “Some of these guys come from very humble places,” he says. “They have no idea what is a debit card, what is a credit card. Credit is difficult to explain. I say, ‘Son, be careful, you have to pay that later on.’”
Of course, only one in 200 minor leaguers ever reaches the big leagues. And even for those who do, the money may not last forever. “What we tell them is that many of these players won’t make it. Unfortunately, it’s a statistical fact,” Dorante says. “They need to enjoy this period in their life where they’re learning many skills and also gaining friends that might last for life.”
Jose Quijada, a 23-year-old pitcher from Venezuela, echoes Garcia, once again in English. “I think it’s important for me because, like, you play here in America, you need to talk with your friends from America who speak English. When you go to the bank, you need to talk English.”
It’s Glass’s job to make that happen—even if players’ Spanglish is sometimes charmingly imperfect. “Emily’s my friend,” Quijada says. “She’s a good guy.”
A new album of organ music performed by Professor Emeritus of Music Bill Peterson, titled “Recital at Bridges Hall, Pomona College,” has been released on CD by Loft Recordings. The album was recorded last March and features music performed on the Hill Memorial Organ in Bridges Hall of Music.
“The CD is based on a concert that I presented in February of 2018,” Peterson explains, “and there are really four areas of organ repertoire represented.” These, he said, were the music of J.S. Bach; the music of A. Guilmant, which are organ pieces from the 19th century based on vocal-music styles; three compositions published after World War I from an anthology dedicated to the “Heroes of the Great War,” and several compositions by composers with Pomona connections, including John Cage, who attended Pomona from 1928 to 1930; Professor Emeritus of Music Karl Kohn and Professor of Music Tom Flaherty.
Peterson began planning the project in May 2017, working with Roger Sherman of The Gothic Catalog. In summer of the same year, he received a Sontag Fellowship, making the project possible.
The album is available for purchase as CD or download on The Gothic Catalog website.
Peterson retired this year as the Harry S. and Madge Rice Thatcher Professor of Music after a 39-year career at Pomona. A noted organist, he has performed in venues across the United States.
The Hill Memorial Organ was designed and built by C.B. Fisk of Gloucester, Mass., and carries the designation of Fisk Op. 117. The three-manual organ was installed in the then-newly renovated Bridges Hall of Music in 2002.
Presenting for HumansInsights for Speakers on Ditching Perfection and Creating Connection
Lisa Braithwaite ’87 challenges preconceived notions about public speaking and guides the creation of meaningful and memorable presentations.
Fascinating New YorkersPower Freaks, Mobsters, Liberated Women, Creators, Queers and Crazies
Clifford Browder ’50 profiles the famous and forgotten, from J.P. Morgan’s nose to a pioneer in female erotica.
AldoIn this mystery/thriller /love story by Betty Jean Craige ’68, a university president is held hostage when a dangerous ideologue tries to eradicate the school’s genetics institute.
Everyday CreaturesA Naturalist on the Surprising Beauty of Ordinary Life in Wild Places
George James Kenagy ’67 offers13 personal essays on nature, gleaned from observations, discoveries and experiences of deserts, mountains, forests and the sea.
Come West and SeeThis debut collection of short stories by Maxim Loskutoff ’07 describes a violent separatist movement, with tales of love and heartbreak.
WinThe Atlantis Grail (Book Three)
In this fantasy novel by Vera Nazarian ’88, nerdy Gwen Lark must fight her way through a difficult contest as the fate of two worlds, Earth and Atlantis, hangs in the balance.
The Big NoteA Guide to the Recordings of Frank Zappa
Charles Ulrich ’79 offers a guide to Frank Zappa’s music composed from hundreds of interviews, letters and email correspondences spanning 35 years.
WoodsworkNew and Selected Stories of the American West
Miles Wilson ’66 offers a collection of short stories set in the American West—geographically, culturally and psychologically—ranging from fable to realism and ranchers to fathers.
Latin America in the Era of the Cuban RevolutionThomas C. Wright ’63 offers an interpretation of the Cuban Revolution era, synthesizing its trends, phases, impact and influence on Latin America.
Understanding NanomaterialsProfessor of Chemistry Malkiat Johal and his former student, Lewis Johnson ’07, co-wrote this second-edition textbook, providing a comprehensive introduction to the field of nanomaterials as well as an easy read.
The AI DelusionFletcher Jones Professor of Economics Gary Smith argues that our faith in artificial intelligence is misplaced and makes the case for human judgment.
At Goldman Sachs in San Francisco, the ambience was formal and there were plenty of suits. At the consulting firm Accenture, one of the leaders wore jeans and sneakers but kept a blazer handy. At another company across the bay, the highest-paid employees wore shorts. (That would be the Golden State Warriors.)
In the working world, clothes are a clue, but they might not tell the whole story. That’s just one of the lessons 12 Pomona College sophomores who identify as low-income or first-generation college students learned last fall in an innovative new program. Smart Start Career Fellows is designed to teach students about a working world unfamiliar to many of them. The program concluded in January with a three-day trip to the offices of seven Bay Area businesses.
One of the things Smart Start taught Leisan Garifullina ’20, an economics major from Russia, was the difference between business casual and business formal.
“I had this awkward situation last semester where I went to an information session—I think it was Citibank. I showed up in shorts and the nicest, nicest T-shirt that I had,” she says. Now, with the help of a stipend from the program, “I have business casual,” Garifullina says.
On the Bay Area trip, the students connected with new contacts as well as Pomona College alumni, visiting the offices of Kate Walker Brown ’07, an attorney at the National Center for Youth Law; Natalie Casey ’17, a software engineer at Salesforce; and Adam Rogers ’92, deputy editor at Wired magazine. The group also went to LumiGrow, a startup company that offers high-tech, energy-efficient horticultural lighting solutions, in addition to Goldman Sachs, Accenture and both the business offices of the NBA’s Warriors and a game that night against the Los Angeles Clippers.
Created with grants from Accenture and John Gingrich ’91, a managing director at the firm, the Smart Start program began last fall with a series of two-hour Friday night dinner sessions where the students took part in self-assessment exercises and various networking, résumé and career-coaching sessions.
“Every single place we went to in San Francisco, you could ask yourself, ‘OK, could I see myself coming in here every single day for a long period of time, maybe two, three or 10 years?’” mused Shy Lavasani ’20, an economics major from Millbrae, California, whose family emigrated from Iran. “Could I see myself really enjoying this job? It just really helped me thinking about that at every single location, what I really want, what I really need. It gave me a clear direction in terms of what I want to do.”
No job seemed out of reach, except maybe one. “I don’t think any of us were considering pro basketball,” he says. “It’s always nice to dream.”
Rosalind Faulkner ‘19 is podcasting superlatives.
Earlier this year, Faulkner launched “The Most,” a SoundCloud podcast in which she interviews Pomona students who embody a particular characteristic the most of anyone on campus—the most quirky, the most flirty, the most existential. Students nominate potential interviewees on Faulkner’s Facebook page, and whoever receives the most votes joins her in her KSPC studio for a 15-minute breakdown of the chosen adjective and what it means to them.
Faulkner, who has been interested in podcasting since she created her first podcast during her study abroad in Morocco last year, wanted to use an interview format to explore the idea of social reputation. “So many people here have really big personalities or things that distinguish them in different ways,” Faulkner says, and boiling that nuanced personality down to a single label—like “the most existential”—seems limiting.
But though she expected many people to resist being defined by a lone adjective, most students have embraced their superlatives. “My original intention was to subvert it, but some people do genuinely think of themselves in these big ways,” Faulkner says. “At least two of the three were so thrilled to be chosen for these adjectives. They were so happy.”
Noor Dhingra ’20 likes to start her Fridays with a cup of coffee in the Claremont Village before wandering over to Claremont Depot, the gorgeous 1927 Spanish Colonial Revival train station where she catches the 8:42 Metrolink to Los Angeles.
Her roommate, Tulika Mohan ’20 takes a different approach. “I should be getting up at 7:45. I don’t,” Mohan laughs. “I usually end up getting up at 8:10, and then I run.”
Together, with headphones on or book in hand, they ride to one-day-a-week internships in L.A. subsidized by the Pomona College Internship Program (PCIP), a program that provides a stipend that turns an unpaid internship into a paid one, along with an allowance for transportation—in this case, train tickets for Dhingra and Mohan.
Taking the train to L.A. for an internship during the school year takes time—students often start work at 10 to allow for the commute—but many say the train beats fighting traffic even if someone has access to a car.
“I just find it fun. You don’t feel like a student when you’re on the train, which is a really good feeling to have once a week,” Dhingra says. “You’re so used to seeing professors or students on campus, so it’s just nice being with people of different ages. I always hear conversations, and sometimes it turns into a story I write.”
Just before her own senior year arrived, Abby Lewis ’19 was working to send off Pomona’s 2018 graduates in the most environmentally-responsible way possible—with a zero-waste commencement.
Armed with information and data from the Office of Sustainability, where she works during the year, Lewis noticed a significant spike in the College’s waste production during the month of May, when thousands come to campus for the annual Commencement ceremony. Working closely with Alexis Reyes, assistant director of sustainability, she started working on a zero-waste event model.
An event is deemed ‘zero-waste’ when organizers plan ahead to reduce solid waste, reuse some event elements in future years and set up compost and recycling stations in order to divert at least 90 percent of waste from landfills. For Pomona’s 2018 Commencement Weekend, Lewis focused, among other things, on the catered food and products served at the reception on Commencement Day.
Backed by a President’s Sustainability Fund grant, Lewis worked with Pomona’s catering management on details ranging from the type of wax paper used to wrap food, to proposing utensils that are compostable and the use of reusable sugar containers instead of sugar packets.
Instead of trash bins, Commencement attendees found recycling and composting stations where they could sort their waste. Nearly all food waste generated, such as plates, cups and napkins, was diverted to either compost or recycling. The disposable products used at Commencement were made from either corn starch or recycled paper.
Another key partnership that Lewis secured with the help of the Office of the President’s Christina Ciambriello and Reyes was a deal with Burrtec, the College’s disposal contractor. Lewis and her allies were able to convince the company to collect and process ‘industrially-compostable’ items such as specially labeled plates and napkins—something they usually don’t do as part of their service to the College.