Blog Articles

Rite of Passage

February 23, 2015 by Kris Dreessen Comments Off

“HAMBA MUTALIA. Haaaaa woyeee. Hamba mutalia.”

Young Humphrey walks into the center of the crowd before his traditional mud-covered home. The metal jingles on the leather strips on his wrist, making a bright snap in the air.

Surrounded by their voices, chanting softly and clapping, he leads the procession, draped in the skin and testicles of a bull sacrificed to mark this momentous change. They make a clearing for him. He stops silent before an elder, who carefully lifts off the skin. More than 100 of the boy’s family, friends and fellow villagers envelope him with whoops of joy and dance.

The next phase of his coming-of-age ceremony has begun.

The ground vibrates as they lift their hands to the sky and dance. “Hamba mutalia … Haaaaa woyeee…”

Michael Diercks, assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science at Pomona, smiles, watching the circle of bodies sway and jump. In an instant, many people reach out and pull him into the fray.

They will celebrate throughout the night, encouraging 12-year-old Humphrey to have courage for morning, when he will go with them to the river to be covered in mud, and run home for the circumcision ritual to become a man.

It is one of the most important events in Bukusu life—a rite of passage that few outsiders ever see. Humphrey’s parents trusted Diercks to share the event, and want to preserve it for future generations.

“I feel like I know more about the world than I did 24 hours ago,” says Diercks in the morning. “We were experiencing something ancient, right in the present, through their rituals and dancing and singing, that are the same things they have been practicing for ages, perhaps even hundreds of years. It was as if we were transported back in time. When you looked up in the sky in the middle of the night, it could have been 100 years ago.”

Such intimate sharing and insight into Luhya language-speaking communities is the result of a multi-year collaborative international research project, of which Diercks is a principal investigator. A team of seven American linguists are studying four small Kenyan languages—Bukusu, Wanga, Llogoori and Tiriki.

The team is supported by several grants, including a prestigious $477,000 National Science Foundation grant. Much of Diercks’ work so far was made possible by the Hirsch Research Initiation Grant from Pomona College. The team includes Pomona Linguistics and Cognitive Science Chair and Professor Mary Paster and Pomona linguistics students, as well as researchers at Ohio State University, Southern Illinois University, the University of Maryland and the University of Missouri.

While there are more than 1.6 million speakers of the four Luhya languages, they are at risk, says Diercks, as everyday life changes to a less forested area and young people move toward English and Swahili for economic advantage. One example is the circumcision itself. More families are choosing hospital circumcision over the traditional way.

“As the community changes, so does the language, and what isn’t preserved may be lost,” says Diercks.

IN THE MOST comprehensive study of each of these languages to date, the team is collecting audio recordings from Luhya speakers and analyzing tone, sentence structure and other characteristics to describe how the language works. They are also collecting folk tales, narratives, songs and many other kinds of oral literature that document language use and aspects of each culture, as well as creating dictionaries for each language. Their research will be available in open-access venues for other scholars, and for Kenyans to learn about their languages.

“In the end, we are producing description and analysis of these languages that will be theoretically relevant and useful to furthering our knowledge of how human languages work,” says Diercks, “but also producing work that will be valuable to communities, whether for its role in preserving aspects of their language and culture, or in providing resources that will be useful in educational contexts, like adult and child literacy.”

So far, the team has collected and begun to analyze more than 100 hours of audio samples by Luhya speakers. Diercks, and phonologist and co-primary investigator Michael Marlo, from the University of Missouri English Department, have spent a lot of time in Kenya fostering the close-knit relationships needed to gain trust and access to different communities.

Diercks has been to Kenya many times. Earlier this year, he spent several months with a Tiriki family, gathering interviews and training Kenyan research assistants Kelvin Alulu and linguist Maurice Sifuna to collect interviews year-round.

Back in California, the students in Paster and Diercks’ Field Methods of Linguistics course are at the center of Luhya work.

“The field methods class is a great opportunity for students to apply their knowledge of linguistic theory to real languages, which are much messier and more interesting than the data sets they see in theory courses,” says Paster. “We try to find speakers of lesser-known languages so that students have an opportunity to break new ground and publish their findings. Our students this year are doing professional-quality research and writing that will be the basis for all of our future work on Llogoori.”

“I’ve been able to have so many experiences that I would not have had at another university,” says aspiring linguist Alex Samuels ’15. “Professors need research assistants. At other places, it would be graduate students doing the work I’m doing. Here, it gets to be me, which is awesome.”

As a Summer Undergraduate Research Program scholar, Samuels also spent the summer researching aspects of Llogoori with Paster. Since there is no published grammar of Llogoori, Samuels’ final paper from the previous semester is this fall’s required reading in the advanced fields methods class. “I was really proud,” he says.

WHAT LUHYA SPEAKERS choose to share is a mixed bag. Linet Kebeya Mmbone spoke about hardships after losing her husband, and raising her children as a single mother without skills. Mungambwe talked about Llogoori history. Retired police officer Benjamin Egadwe spoke about how men used to have several wives, and changes in community since Christianity arrived.

Ultimately, the stories will be shared with community members, along with images and stories generated by a volunteer photojournalist who spent several weeks in Kenya last summer. Together, they help to create an intimate portrait of the communities in which the linguistic team works; a snapshot of who they are and what’s important to them. Back at Pomona, the photographs and portraits are connections to the stories and texts students study, 9,500 miles away.

This summer, Diercks was able to see the pride Benjamin and other Llogoori speakers have in their culture and in the language project, when Alulu organized a celebration of progress so far.

They took motorbike taxis over windy dirt paths through the forest to their village. When they arrived, Mugangwe, Egadwe, and a dozen others ran out to meet them, dressed in their finest suits and traditional kanga cloths, and singing traditional greeting songs. They had walked hours into town for a goat, which they slaughtered for the feast.

“This was a big moment for me,” says Diercks. “We spend so much of our time with individual people and then holed up analyzing the language, we don’t always get to see the whole community come together and celebrate research progress. It’s easy to focus on the academic side of things, but a celebration like this really drives home how intertwined language is with our identity, and how even small research advances matter so much to the community.”

At the celebration, Diercks also got a taste of what the project means to the Luhya speakers who have the opportunity to share. “This is how we teach our current children about how the Llogoori used to live,” says Egadwe. “Children have new customs. We feel it is good to teach them this way. Most of the old people do not remain. We are now the old people, telling our ways. This is a way to preserve our culture. We are taking good care of it.”

The Mystery of 47

February 13, 2015 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

“To the uninitiated, 47 is a mystery. To knowledgeable Pomona Sagehens, 47 is dogma. To sociologists, 47 is a prime example of a minor piece of whimsy that somehow developed into a legend of mythical proportions…”
—Pomona Student Handbook, 1985-86

In 1964, a tongue-in-cheek student project to determine whether the number 47 appeared more often in nature than other random numbers turned into a wholesale 47 hunt that has continued to this day and is even celebrated at Pomona on April 7.

After all, you can’t deny the evidence:

Pomona College is located at Exit 47 of the San Bernardino Freeway.
There are 47 pipes in the top row of the Lyman Hall organ.
At the time of Pomona’s first graduating class in 1894, there were 47 students enrolled.
The Bible credits Jesus with 47 miracles.
The Declaration of Independence has 47 sentences.
There are 47 strings on a concert harp.
In the freshman class that entered Pomona College in the year 2000, there were 47 valedictorians.
The tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are located 47 degrees apart.

Even Hollywood has gotten in on the act. From art films to sci-fi to Will Ferrell vehicles, Pomona’s enduring in-joke has slipped past countless millions of movie-goers and tube-watchers in recent years. On TV’s Lost, 47 people survive the plane crash. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Steve Carell keeps a collection of 47 G.I. Joes. Watch Monsters Inc. closely and you’ll spot an “Accident Free for 47 Days” sign on the Scare Factory floor. The 2009 blockbuster reboot of Star Trek alludes to 47 Klingon vessels being destroyed. There is even a much-viewed YouTube spoof of Jim Carrey’s The Number 23, substituting—you guessed it–the No. 47.

It goes as far back as the The Absent-minded Professor (1961). The Disney comedy features a basketball game filmed at Pomona’s old Renwick Gym. The final score? 47-46.

The recent spate of number-dropping started in the ’90s in earlier incarnations of Star Trek. Joe Menosky ’79 was a writer for The Next Generation (and later Voyager and Deep Space Nine) when he started slipping 47s into the shows. A producer eventually got wind and shut down the underground effort. But 47 keeps popping up in all sorts of shows.

If Menosky has moved on, how come our secret number keeps landing bit parts time and again? Is our 47 tradition at risk of overexposure? There’s no getting a straight answer out of Tinseltown on this sort of stuff, so—in a playful spirit—we turned to graphic novel artist Andrew Mitchell ’89 in our Fall 2009 issue of Pomona College Magazine for a creative take on the mystery (page 22 of the PDF).

Pomona Pair Mix Alt-Pop, Entrepreneurship and Environmental Activism

March 21, 2014 by Emma Paine '14 Comments Off

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Skylar Funk Boorman ’10 and Merritt Graves ’10 have spent their years since Pomona successfully combining their love of music with the fight against climate change.

Their outlet is Trapdoor Social, a band self-described as “Los Angeles Alternative Energy Rock and Sustainability Activism.” They recently released their second album and have been touring, doing shows throughout the Midwest and West Coast. The music videos for their alt-pop songs from their first album “Death of a Friend,” which featured Death Cab for Cutie’s well-known drummer Jason McGerr, have drawn large viewership online and radio airplay.

Boorman and Graves channel their anxieties about climate change and other environmental issues into Trapdoor Social’s music, with lyrics and melodies ranging from stormy to upbeat, nervous to hopeful. “We really do want to create an anthem for the environmental movement — a popular song that has a message that gets people pumped about social responsibility and leaving a great legacy,” says Boorman.

The pair met at Pomona on Orientation Adventure and developed a friendship through such courses as Green Urbanism and Farms and Gardens in the Environmental Analysis Program under the tutelage of Professors Rick Hazlett and Char Miller, who has attended several of Trapdoor Social’s performances, describing even their unplugged gigs as “electric.”

Boorman was active in music while at Pomona, singing in Men’s Blue and White and taking music theory courses. Graves managed his own hedge fund from an office in the Claremont Village while using profits to found his company Farmscape.

“One day in Intro to Environmental Analysis, Rick Hazlett was talking about L.A sprawl. And it just clicked that we’d never get to go back and redesign L.A with the appropriate density, but we could make the best of the error by farming the sprawl,” Graves remembers.

Now, Farmscape operates more than 150 farms in the Los Angeles Area. With 12 employees including seven full-time farmers, Farmscape designs, installs, and helps to maintain urban farms that range in size from rooftop garden plots to a larger farms used by restaurants. Graves also helped create the company Agrisaurus, a web app that helps gardeners to plan and manage their own plots.

Integrating community work is important to the pair. They held a presale for their second album as a fundraiser, working with partners Everybody Solar and Grid Alternatives to donate their profits toward the purchase of solar panels for Los Angeles nonprofit Homeboy Industries, which re-trains former gang members in Los Angeles.

Among all the activities, Boorman and Graves work to find time for their songs. Striking a balance in music with an environmental message can be difficult, Graves says. “On one hand we don’t want to be preachy and play into stereotypes, but on the other hand we don’t to play so coy that the message is lost.” A growing fan base indicates that the duo is on the right track.

Leaks and Firestorms

March 20, 2014 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

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In today’s class, students discuss the firestorm ignited by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks of top secret documents last summer. Among the questions raised are: who decides what are legitimate targets for domestic and foreign surveillance; why some secrets should be protected; and whether information gathering by corporations like Google and Facebook should be part of a broader privacy debate.

Munter: I was at the Rand Corporation yesterday on a panel about secrecy and privacy. One side, I had an FBI agent, and on the other an ACLU lawyer, and I realized the reason they invited me was to be sure they didn’t rip each other’s throats out. On the domestic side, they talked about privacy and the Constitution. I suggested that many of these issues should not be limited to domestic policy, but should be part of foreign policy. I’m curious what you think of the (Snowden) revelations about spying on the American people.

Ben: If we are truly at war, we are engaged in a war on terrorism, we have a duty to understand the lay of the land; it’s our job to have a complete awareness of exactly where the enemy is, and understand the lines of communication and organization.

Munter: Let me go back to the first thing you said. You guys think we’re at war. Yes, no?

Aidan: I think it’s almost antithetical to democracy to accept that we can be on a constant war footing. Because it is true when you are in a war, democracy affords certain executive powers that are supposed to be temporary. The problem is this war has been going on for more than a decade, and it can do that because it doesn’t affect our daily lives. Mass spying on citizens inside the country and out isn’t even seen as surprising anymore.

Ben: Are you talking more about spying on foreign leaders? I’m talking about domestic spying. Foreign spying in general is kind of an accepted thing.

Munter: So this doesn’t surprise you?

Ben: Not as much, but domestic spying gets me because it’s shrouded in deep secrecy. The way the administration acted after Snowden’s revelations, trying to tarnish the guy’s name and trying to underplay how big the domestic spying programs were. The whole process itself; there is no transparency anywhere. It seems very antithetical to democracy.

Munter: There is kind of a carve-out that in exceptional times you can have exceptional measures. I don’t know if any of you know the state song of Maryland (hums it), and it has the words, the despot’s heel is at thy door/ Avenge the patriotic gore that flecked the streets of Baltimore.

Now the despot in the song is Abraham Lincoln, There were riots against Lincoln. He put the legislature in jail so they wouldn’t secede from the union. So here is our hero Abraham Lincoln who, basically for the period of the Civil War, was unconstitutional. We can say exceptional circumstances, pretty serious times. We can say 9/11 was a pretty serious time.

Jack: When you frame it about taking away constitutional liberties and the Fourth Amendment and stuff, it sounds very serious and it is. But when you contextualize it in the terms that it’s not just government doing this, it’s the private sector as well. And that, honestly, is what scares me more.

Munter: You mean when you search something in Google and it gives you commentary about what you could buy?

Michael: Google’s and Facebook’s whole business model is to own your information and to sell it. And that worries me just as much if not more.

Tom: I guess where I draw the line is that Google and Facebook can’t put you on a watch list, but the NSA can, based on information that might not necessarily be suspicious, like a search history.

Munter: What you’re saying is that we’re getting it wrong if we only worry about constitutional issues, serious or not serious as they might be, because there is something bigger, which is the technological issue, which is both inside and outside government.

Aidan: It’s such a slippery slope that there are going to be abuses and that brings up the question of either you have to have one extreme, no surveillance, or you have to recognize that it will be abused, and I think most Americans aren’t willing to have no surveillance.

Munter: So there is the permanent war footing argument and the violation of civil liberties argument. Obviously, the American public want something in between; they want to be safe and they’re willing to pay a certain price in order to be safe, but they don’t want to lose the essence of what it means to be Americans and have freedoms, which is not satisfying intellectually but pretty realistic.

Charlotte: I was going to say that it’s really a generational thing. My parents are vehemently opposed to wiretapping, domestic surveillance, where most of the people I’ve talked to don’t really care.

Munter: Because they’re used to it.

Charlotte: Yeah, we’ve grown up where everything is totally public. When it comes down to the message Snowden is making about why this is wrong, most people in my generation probably don’t relate.

Munter: There are reasons why we keep secrets. If I’m in Iraq or Libya, people tell you things in confidence, and they tell you things at the risk of their lives, and you keep that confidence because that’s your job.

Ben: When you say secrets are kept for the reason, the question is who is deciding the reason for that. Obviously, in the example you mentioned it’s for national security, people’s jobs, but I think when it strays to things that would portray the U.S. poorly or things that the U.S. is doing that are illegal, then I think that borders the line when secrets should be revealed.

Nick: My problem with Snowden was for him to take this issue into his own hands and to leak it to the public. I think it’s not really up to an individual to make that call.

Munter: Arguing uncharacteristically on Snowden’s behalf, isn’t that what a citizen is supposed to do, to some extent? Isn’t civil disobedience, from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, part of our tradition?

Nick: Unless you have a viable alternative like a legitimate pathway to share that information.

Munter: But is the issue here simply the amount of information we’re gathering? The whole point of 9/11 was that domestic and foreign intelligence had different pieces of intel and didn’t bring it together, which was part of what led to the Homeland Security that we know and love. Now that we have that, is there such a massive amount of material to deal with that no one can pick up his or her eyes and ask where we are going strategically?

How Your Gifts Support Daring Minds

March 11, 2014 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Gifts from 16,457 alumni, parents, students and friends of the College lifted Campaign Pomona:

Daring Minds above the $200 million milestone late last year. Launched in 2010, the campaign already has provided funding for initiatives to support students and faculty, expand financial aid, build new facilities and increase programming in the arts and music.

Your gifts have:

• Expanded financial aid

Providing an affordable education to every admitted student remains the College’s top priority. Gifts of all sizes have helped meet this growing need for financial aid, which supports 56 percent of all Pomona students this year.

• Created a summer internship program

Since 2011, 80 students have participated in paid summer internships in eight states and 10 countries. More than 125 parents helped spearhead the drive to raise funding for internships.

• Increased support for summer research

More than $8 million has been raised for student summer research in the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities

• Built two residence halls

Sontag and Pomona halls house 153 seniors in residences that meet the nation’s most stringent environmental standards.

• Contributed to the cost of two important new academic buildings

A new Millikan Hall will feature a digital planetarium, state-of-the art labs and innovative classrooms.

The new center for studio arts will have cutting-edge facilities and flexible studio spaces that invite collaboration.

With less than two years left to reach our goal of $250 million, we need your help to fulfill our promise to faculty and students, and to support, challenge and inspire the next generation of Daring Minds.

Thank you!

To learn more about how to support Campaign Pomona: Daring Minds, go to www.pomona.edu/giving or call Pamela Besnard, Vice President for Advancement, at 909-621-8192

Global Pomona

March 11, 2014 by Terril Yue Jones '80 Comments Off

international

Yi Li ’16 is a blur, juggling classes, mentoring new international students, producing the sophomore class newsletter she founded, attending Oldenborg Center language tables. The second-year student from China has also served this year as sophomore class president and treasurer of the five-college Chinese Drama Society and is helping to produce a website and an informational video for the International Student Mentoring Program. Over winter break, she interned with the Bank of China in her hometown, met with students at her Nanjing high school, and held an event for a startup company she and some fellow international students are forming to assist other Chinese students interested in studying in the U.S. “I’m a ‘yes’ type of person,” says Yi. “I always say ‘yes’ to new opportunities and challenges.”

Yi is one of about 50 Pomona students from China, the largest, fastest-growing group of international students on campus. Since Pomona’s first international recruiting trip in 2006, the College has seen applications from Chinese nationals grow from 24 to 250. Pomona has also seen fourfold increases in applicants from Korea and India.

The growing presence of students from India came even though Pomona admissions only recently made its first trip to the country. “We had never visited there and had not attempted to build relationships with schools or even tried to figure the country out,” says Seth Allen, Pomona’s vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid. But, he notes, “Having an international dimension is important today in the modern educational setting. The Board of Trustees has charged us to seek out, identify and enroll the very best intellects and best purveyors of talent among young people in the world.”

International enrollment comes in waves. At one point, for instance, Bulgaria was sending a disproportionate number of stu dents to the U.S. Then it joined the European Union and had easier access to other European institutions, and numbers declined.

In addition to building a greater presence in India, Pomona has made recruiting in Europe a priority and started reaching out to Africa and Latin America as well. Sammy Kiprono Bor is a second-year student from rural Kenya who says he was drawn to Pomona’s small-school dynamics and liberal arts approach. And, yes, by the location, too. He had applied to schools in Maine and Connecticut, but “snow seemed scary,” he says.

Robert Langat is also a sophomore from Kenya who was identified by a program seeking promising students to study in the U.S. In Kenya, he was accustomed to an educational system “where the teacher does all the talking and students take in everything.” His first few weeks in Claremont, he struggled through the required freshman seminar class—reading, writing, class participation—before adjusting to the demands of an American liberal arts college.

Both Robert, who is considering majoring in mathematical economics, and chemistry major Sammy cite financial aid as a big factor in bringing them to Pomona. So does Lazaros Chalkias, a sophomore from Greece majoring in molecular biology. Lazaros also found the consortium of the seven Claremont Colleges appealing, but only after arriving on campus did he discover how deep his involvement in the 7Cs would be—as a member of the consortium’s seven-time national champion Ballroom Dance Company. “It’s the best way the colleges come together,” he says.

Sagehens from abroad universally laud International Place, which supports the foreign communities on all of the Claremont campuses, and Pomona’s International Student Mentor Program, under which students guide new arrivals from overseas through tasks such as opening bank accounts, understanding cell phone plans, tackling homesickness and the rigor of studying at Pomona or helping them get off campus to explore Planet California.

Nick Eng, a junior economics major from Singapore, is giving back to the ISMP by being a mentor himself, even reaching out to students who are just considering applying to Pomona. “The Admissions Office passes on emails to us,” Nick says. “In a small college, culture and fit is so important,” so he tries to explain to prospective applicants what to expect at Pomona and the broader 7C community.

At Pomona, Lazaros says he found “limitless possibilities and people who care and want to work with you.” At the same time he feels that many students from abroad don’t take advantage of the opportunities here, something he’s noticed as commissioner for clubs and organizations in Pomona’s student government. the College has room for improvement, he says, in teaching international students about campus life and values, as well as writing term papers, something many internationals face for the first time after enrolling.

Other international students agree that the College could do more to ease their assimilation—Robert and Sammy felt trapped in their dorm rooms over the five-week winter holiday freshman year when dining halls were closed (they say with smiles that they’ve figured it out now). Yi Li, despite attending a foreign language high school in China and speaking superb English, was confused at first by some expressions she heard. “When I came here people were greeting with, ‘What’s up?’ and I didn’t know how to respond; I had learned ‘How are you?’ in China,” she recalls. “I would really have appreciated it if someone had taught me more about American culture, even if it was just daily slang, or how people interact with each other, or the drinking and party culture, or the academics: you have to speak up in class, that’s really important.”

Pomona continues to expand international recruiting, with an increased focus on Latin America and Africa, even as it becomes ever more selective. Pomona admitted 29.5 percent of 3,804 applicants in 2000, but only 13.9 percent of the 7,153 who applied last year.

“If we are not proactive in performing our own outreach in other parts of the world it would be very easy to have an international population that was solely from Asia, simply because of the interest and the sheer volume of applications,” says Allen, who before coming to Pomona in 2011 was dean of admissions and financial aid at Grinnell College in Iowa, which receives some 400 applications from China a year because of its early start on international recruitment. “So we are going out of our way to ensure there is even more variety of students coming to Pomona from outside of the U.S.”

Nevertheless administrators—and professors—say they are often astounded by the number of high-caliber students from Asia, obliging the Admissions Committee to delve into recommendations and extracurricular activities. “We look for cues that tell us this is someone who has multiple interests, is open to learning through class discussions, can contribute to conversations in the academic realm, and would be a good fit as a mentee or advisee for a faculty member,” Allen says. Often admissions officers rely on students they’ve met and have been able to assess in terms of quickness of mind and ability to articulate ideas. “Because of the strength of the applicant pool from China we can be choosy in setting the criteria very high.”

Financial aid can be the deciding factor. While Pomona does not conduct need-blind admissions for international students, funding for them has been significantly increased in recent years, and the College looks for about a 50–50 balance of international students who need and do not need financial assistance. For her part, Yi Li is focused on making every day at Pomona count. Even on winter break she was drumming up funding and clients in China for Succeed America, the startup she is co-founding. She garnered 600 subscribers to the startup’s microblog in two weeks.

Today she’s back to her studies and almost in awe that she was elected to Pomona’s student senate, on which two other international students serve. “That’s pretty amazing because if I were at a larger school I couldn’t really imagine American people would vote for me as an international and female student from China,” she says. “But at Pomona, that happened.”

Coming to Doha

March 11, 2014 by Daniel Gould Comments Off

Just before graduating from Pomona, Alexandra “Zan” Gutowski ’13 learned she’d gotten a great opportunity to immerse herself in Arabic and Middle Eastern studies, two of her biggest interests. Since this past September, Gutowski has been a student at a university in Qatar, doing intensive study of Arabic to master her language skills and prepare for a career in foreign policy.

TAKING ON A CHALLENGE Gutowski studied the language for several years in college and even spent some time in the Middle East while she was a student at Pomona, including a semester in Jordan during her junior year. “In Jordan I learned how to conduct my life in Arabic. I could negotiate my rent, get around the city, and attend college classes.”

But her interactions with people from local communities, including a volunteer project with refugees from Syria and Iraq, inspired her to take her learning even further. “In conversations with these young refugee women, my Arabic was good enough to understand them, but not strong enough to say something meaningful back,” Gutowski says. “That’s when I realized I wanted to push my Arabic much further.”

Hoping to become a more skillful speaker, Gutowski made plans to enroll in an Arabic program after graduation. Part of her goal was to gain an edge in Middle Eastern affairs, the field she hopes to enter.“There’s a level of nuance I want to reach in the language,” says Gutowski. “Sure I want to understand things, but that’s something Google Translator can do for you. I want to dig deeper into tone, diction, and syntax, to understand what is being said beyond mere translation.”With the help of some of the staff at Pomona’s Career Development Office, Gutowski applied to the Qatar Scholarship, a year-long program sponsored by Georgetown which allows college graduates from the United States to study Arabic at Qatar University in Doha, the country’s capital. Her acceptance letter came just in time for Commencement.

LEARNING ON THE GROUND

Living and studying with a very international group of students, Gutowski says she’s started to make some exciting progress since arriving last fall. “What’s great is that I’m getting to the point where I’m learning about other things using this language. I can turn on the news or pick up an article, and really understand the bulk of it.”“This is a big breakthrough for me,” she says. “It’s getting fun now.”Outside of class, Gutowski spends a lot of her free time with friends and classmates exploring what the city has to offer, including museum exhibits, lectures and film festivals.

Gutowski says that her experiences in the Middle East so far have opened her eyes to the complexities of the region.

Meeting people from many different countries and having to find her way in an unfamiliar place has been a challenge, but also a cause for growth.“Coming to Doha was a good experience. It woke me up to the fact that I don’t know everything and there’s so much that I have to learn.”

SHAPING HER PATH

An international relations major, Gutowski says she’s always been drawn to public service. But her classes at Pomona were what stoked her passion for foreign affairs. She points to Professor David Elliott as a key influence. “I’m truly indebted to him, not just for shaping me into someone who could pursue foreign policy as a career but as someone who always wants to keep learning.”

Going forward, Gutowski wants to focus on national security issues and Middle Eastern politics. After her scholarship ends in June, she hopes to find work with a research institute or a branch of government like the State Department. She’s already taken a first step by landing an internship this spring as a foreign policy researcher at the Brookings Doha Center, the Qatar-based branch of the well-known Washington think tank. Still, Gutowski says her time in Doha has given her a broader perspective on the path she wants to take in the future.

“Especially in the first year out of college, people feel like they have to have everything figured out,” she says. “In this program I’ve met people who are all in different stages of their lives. I’ve realized that it takes awhile to get to where you want. It might not happen right away.”

How to Become a YouTube Star

March 11, 2014 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

Albert Chang ’14 has drawn a devoted YouTube following with his pop song mash-ups, orchestral covers, and mix of music and magic. Posting under the moniker “Sleightly Musical,” the Pomona music major and amateur magician has more than 51,000 YouTube subscribers, with his videos logging about 3.8 million views (and climbing).

Start piano lessons at 5, violin lessons at 7. Hate practicing but like the stickers you get from parents for doing it. Choose the violin. Enter regional and state orchestra competitions in junior high. Join chamber music quartets in high school and learn you love making music.

Learn a few card tricks from an eighth-grade friend. Borrow his magic how-to DVDs and start practicing anytime and everywhere—even in the school bathroom. Make a video of card tricks and post it on YouTube under the name “Sleight Sensations.” Get 40,000 views.

Head for Pomona and plan to major in science. Follow your parents’ advice to follow your heart. Switch to music. Land a spot as the beat boxer for Midnight Echo, and a capella group. Borrow their mics and mixer for the summer. Invite your sponsor group to visit you at parents’ home in Fresno. Use your dad’s camcorder to record a mash-up of pop songs.

Buy a camera and teach yourself to edit. Combine magic and music with covers of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” and Coldplay’s “Fix You.” Draw a crowd of hikers on the Claremont Wilderness Trail while recording an instrumental version of Game of Thrones theme. Interact with fans through social media, drawing 1,000 new followers every week.

Put on a fall show demonstrating your abilities as a “mentalist.” Wow the crowd with mindreading skills that combine psychology and trickery. Plan a senior thesis performance that uses magic and music to explore emotional reactions to music. Mull whether to go on to film school. Plan to keep performing and producing videos. Watch those YouTube numbers grow.

The Island of California

March 11, 2014 by Mark Wood Comments Off

1600s map of California from Honnold-Mudd Library Special Collections.

Somehow it seems fitting that the story of California should begin with a fabulous tale about a mythical island.

Both the island and the myth, along with the state’s future name, seem to have sprung first from the pen of Spanish writer Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo, whose lavish romantic novel Las Sergas de Esplandián (The Deeds of Esplandián), published around 1510, described a race of griffin-riding Amazons living in a far-off realm rich in gold and precious stones—“an island on the right hand of the Indies … very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise.” He dubbed this imaginary isle California, a name that may have been constructed from Latin roots meaning “hot oven.”

So, right from the start, California was portrayed as isolated, rich, strange, adventurous, bigger than life, sunburned and next door to Paradise. Is this starting to sound familiar?

The real California—the Baja part—was first discovered by Europeans in 1533 by an expedition commissioned by Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conqueror of Mexico. Sailing west from the Mexican mainland, the crew set ashore on what they believed to be an island. After their shore party was slain in a clash with the inhabitants, the survivors returned to the mainland with tales of an island full of pearls and other riches.

No one knows exactly when or where place and name actually came together, but at some point in the ensuing years of failed colonization, someone—probably some conquistador familiar with Montalvo’s tale and eager to believe in its treasures—gave the presumed island its suitably mythic name.

Here’s where things get a bit strange. Through the rest of the 1500s and early 1600s, the few surviving maps depicted the west coast of North America as a continuous line and Baja California as a peninsula. Then, in the early 1600s, the supposed island of California suddenly returned to the scene, apparently firing the imagination of mapmakers across Europe. For more than a century thereafter, California would be depicted as a huge, rugged outline separated from the west coast of the North American mainland by a narrow strait.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about maps from this period is that the truth was already known by the time they were made. As early as 1539, one of Cortés’s lieutenants, Francisco de Ulloa, sailed north and confirmed that the so-called island was actually a peninsula, and by the mid-1600s, the geographic facts of the place had been pretty clearly established by its Spanish masters. So why did the island of California resist reattachment to the mainland for so long?

One practical reason may be that the people most familiar with the actual place weren’t making the maps. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Spanish held sway over much of western North America. Most of the surviving maps from this period, however, were drawn by cartographers in Venice, Paris, Amsterdam and London. These maps were meant for public consumption, so they needed to appeal to the romantic notions of the time. Meanwhile, Spanish mapmakers were drawing their maps behind closed doors to be used by actual navigators, and Spanish officials, jealous of their secrets and worried about foreign intrusions into their New World possessions, had good reason to keep them under wraps—or even to encourage misinformation.

Historian Dora Beale Polk blames the voyage of the famous English explorer (and gentleman pirate) Sir Francis Drake into Pacific waters in 1578 for the myth’s 17^th-century revival. Confused stories about Drake’s exploits along the west coast shores seem to have lent new strength to the notion that there was a continuous strait separating those lands from the continent.

But by the beginning of the 18th century, the only remaining prop for this geographical blunder seems to have been the persistence of myth. Mapmakers who should have known better still clung to the diminishing evidence that California was an island. Perhaps they were so enthralled by the notion of California as a strange and magical place—a place that simply felt more suitable as an island—that they couldn’t bring themselves to accept the more pedestrian truth.

A lot has changed, of course, since those maps were made. The California of the 1600s was eventually subdivided into three huge, modern states, one north of the border and two south of it. Here in the United States, the 31st state became the biggest, most populous, most diverse, and, in many ways, most controversial state in the Union.

And yet, as a metaphor, the island of California still feels eerily appropriate, even today. Maybe because there’s so much truth in it. After all, as a bio-region, California has been termed an “island on the land,” isolated from the rest of the continent by such natural barriers as deserts and mountain ranges. And from an economic standpoint, the state is frequently described as if it were a separate nation. (With last year’s economic surge, California reportedly regained its theoretical place as the eighth largest national economy in the world, just behind the United Kingdom and Brazil and just ahead of Russia and Italy.)

Perhaps most importantly, California continues to occupy a place in the cultural life of our nation that sets it apart. Admired by some as a place of innovation and a harbinger of national change and decried by others as a narcotic in the body politic, intoxicating the rest of the country with its crazy ideas, the state seems to inspire in Middle America just about every emotion except apathy.

In 1747, Ferdinand VI of Spain issued a royal proclamation declaring: “California is not an island.” That may have helped bring an end to the literal vision of California as an enchanted isle, but the idea of California as a quasi-myth—a strange and wonderful place in the distant west where venturesome souls might go to find adventure or wealth or simply a spot in the sun—was just getting started.

Letterbox — Spring 2014

March 11, 2014 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

I had the good fortune of traveling to Borneo last summer and seeing orangutans and gibbons in their natural habitat. I also saw the absolutely devastating effects of palm oil plantations that are destroying one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. I want to express my support and enthusiasm for Madison Vorva’s work!

—Rebeca Plank ’92
Boston, Mass.

Agricultural Adventurer

The cover story “Back to the Farm” in the fall issue caught my interest. During my last trip to Alumni Weekend five years ago, Pete Stephens ’68, Mark Sweeney ’69 and I stopped by the Wash to find hippie-style concrete domes with a garden of tomatoes and other vegetables, along with chickens in the area. Finding a young co-ed puttering around there, I inquired whether she thought such activity was worth the sizable tuition her parents were paying, particularly at a college with no courses in agriculture practice.

The back story was that I graduated from Pomona a published author with Clifton Trafton in brain research, went on to UCSB and NYU grad schools to publish more brain research with M. S. Gazzaniga, only to run screaming to the horizon and the middle of nowhere (east of Garberville, Calif.) on 60 acres (with Jacob Smith ’69) to pursue a career in art, for which I was basically untrained and arguably unaccomplished.

There, off the grid for the next 30 years, I hunted or raised, prepared and preserved my meat and foraged, or grew and preserved my fruit and vegetables in a 100-by-100-foot garden. Eventually, I returned to civilization, to the small village of Blue Lake, Calif., 100 miles north of my rural property. Along with doing some art, I’ve been propagating rare and endangered succulents and selling them along with fruits and vegetables my family grows at local farmers markets. In this sense, my entire adult life has been occupied with activities Pomona College did nothing to prepare me for, although I’m grateful for the wide worldview I obtained there. I wonder what percentage of other graduates have strayed so far from their training.

—Bob Filbey ’68
Blue Lake, Calif.

Rooftop Memories

Every Christmas season, I think about how much I would enjoy having a CD of the “tower music” that we played from the roof of Big Bridges each December when I was at Pomona. For those who aren’t familiar with this bit of campus history, Professor William F. Russell was the director, and the group was meant to be similar to the musicians, apparently common in Renaissance villages, who would play for the townspeople from the tower of the village church on important occasions. At Pomona, the group was maybe 10 musicians, with prominent brass, and the tunes simple songs of that era such as “Il est ne le divin enfant” and “In dulce jubilo.”

One thing that made the process memorable was getting to the roof of Big Bridges. We had to work our way through the labyrinth of the backstage passageways, following each other through a succession of narrow hallways and stairs until we finally emerged into the cool night air. We couldn’t actually see our audience, so we played to the night sky and hoped the people on the ground could hear well enough. It was a special privilege to be permitted to play up there.

It wasn’t a spectacular event or a showing of musical virtuosity; it was just a comfortable holiday tradition. But for me it was a special part of the Christmas season. I expect many alumni have pleasant memories of playing in the group or listening from the quad. It may not be practical to produce a CD, but maybe a download would be economical. I hope there is a way to make the music available.

—Don Wolfe ’73
Portland, Ore.

[Alumni and friends are invited to email letters to pcm@pomona.edu or to send them by mail to Pomona College Magazine, 550 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Letters are selected for publication based on relevance and interest to our readers and may be edited for length, style and clarity.]

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