Blog Articles

The Sudden Senator

March 28, 2013 by Steve Gettinger '70 Comments Off

The weight of it finally hit him, Brian Schatz ’94 says, when he woke up from a rest on Air Force One, bound for the nation’s capital, in the early morning of Dec. 27. A day before, Schatz had basked in the warm breezes of Honolulu, where he served as Hawaii’s lieutenant governor, a role with few expectations compared to the one he was about to begin.

Now he was pulling out of his slumber, mobilizing himself for a private chat with President Barack Obama. He was flying to Washington, D.C., to be sworn in as the youngest of 100 senators, arriving just as Congress was in an acrimonious fight over how to keep the nation from going over the “fiscal cliff” of budget cuts and tax hikes. Less than 24 hours earlier, the governor of Hawaii had called Schatz into his office and informed him that he would be appointed to fill the seat of Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, who had died Dec. 17 at the age of 88.

The appointment of Schatz (pronounced “shots”) had been something of a surprise. In the last days of his life, Inouye, a revered figure who had represented Hawaii in Congress since it became a state in 1959, wrote a note to the governor asking that his protégé, Rep. Colleen Hanabusa, succeed him. But Hawaii law had a procedure to fill the last two years of Inouye’s term, requiring aspirants to apply to a committee that would forward three names to the governor. Schatz, who had flirted with running for Hawaii’s other Senate seat last year, applied along with a host of other public figures.

Gov. Neil Abercrombie—a friend of Obama’s father in graduate school at the University of Hawaii—had served in Congress for 20 years, and he had his own ideas about what the state needed. Abercrombie knew how important it was for small states to build up seniority, and Hawaii was losing not just Inouye, the longest-serving senator and the chairman of the cornucopia that is the Appropriations Committee, but also Sen. Daniel Akaka, who was retiring after 36 years in Washington. So instead of turning to politicians of his own era, Abercrombie looked to Schatz, who was only 40 and had served four terms in the state legislature before chairing the state party and winning a primary to become Abercrombie’s running mate in 2010.

WHEN ABERCROMBIE CALLED HIM into his office in the early afternoon of the day after Christmas, Schatz had an inkling that the news would be good, although he says the men hadn’t talked about the position.

After a quick news conference and official paperwork in the state Capitol, Schatz recalls in an interview, he and his family had “the fastest two or three hours of our lives” as Schatz rushed to buy warm clothes for the Washington winter, arrange commercial flights for his parents, his wife and two children, and get everyone to the airport.

Air Force One took off from Hawaii, where President Obama had been on vacation, at 10 p.m. Schatz slept decently, had his friendly chat with the president, and at 11:19 a.m. Eastern time, the plane landed at a military base in the Washington suburbs. (Schatz already knew Obama: He had chaired the 2008 Obama campaign in Hawaii and, as lieutenant governor, he had worked with Obama to host a 2011 international economic conference in Honolulu.)

There was no time to savor the moment. His swearing-in ceremony was set for 2:30 p.m., when Schatz walked hand-in-hand into the Senate chamber with Akaka, trailed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who was anxious to meet his 53rd Democratic vote. After Vice President Joe Biden administered the oath of office, the entourage re-enacted the ceremony in an adjacent chamber before Schatz’s family and the cameras. Biden played Schatz’s mother, Barbara. “Uncle Joe made me feel really comfortable,” 8-year-old Tyler Schatz told his dad. Schatz hurried back to his new office—a temporary space in a former dining room of a Senate office building, chopped into cubicles punctuated by awkwardly spaced chandeliers—and dove into paperwork. At 5 p.m. he had to hustle back to the Senate floor to vote on a renewal of the law that governs foreign surveillance, which faced civil liberties objections from left and right.

Schatz voted for several amendments to add privacy restrictions and oversight, and after they failed, he voted against the measure. But it passed easily. A few days later, in the early morning of Jan. 1, Schatz voted with the overwhelming 89-to-8 majority in the Senate to pass a deal to avert the “fiscal cliff.”

SCHATZ CAME TO POMONA in the fall of 1990, shortly after his older brother Jake graduated from there. “I was looking for a high-quality academic experience but I didn’t want to be overwhelmed in crowds. And of course I was looking for someplace warm,” he says.

“My goal going into Pomona was to learn how to think through issues,” Schatz recalls. That led him to major in philosophy. He particularly remembers two celebrated professors, Stephen Erickson and Jay Atlas, who gave him a jolt of reality. “Erickson wasn’t afraid to be a little tough on me,” Schatz says.

“I once wrote something sort of substandard for him, and he wrote a note to me that said: ‘Brian, we both know you’re better than this, and that is what matters.’”

Atlas dissuaded him from pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy, saying, “Brian, you lack a certain rigor.” And, Schatz says, Atlas had a point. “As interesting as philosophy was to me, I wanted to be engaged in problem-solving; I wanted to make a direct impact on people’s lives.”

And so, after he graduated, Schatz headed home to Hawaii. He started a nonprofit to get young people involved in community service, engaging in environmental restoration (“planting trees and digging weeds”) and activism. “That was where I found my passion for public service.” Schatz later went on to run Helping Hands Hawaii, a major social service agency.

The importance of service was ingrained in the Schatz children from an early age by their father, a cardiologist who moved his family from Michigan to take a post at the University of Hawaii when Brian was 2. In 1965, four years out of medical school, Dr. Irwin Schatz put his career at risk by writing the only

letter of protest against the Tuskegee syphilis study, which since 1932 had been recording symptoms of black men in rural Alabama without treating their syphilis—even though penicillin was well known as an effective treatment. When the existence of the federal study became public in 1972, it was quickly shut down, sparking the development of standards to protect research subjects. Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic recognized Dr. Schatz as a “hero of medicine” in 2009.

“To this day, you have to prod him to mention it,” says Schatz of his father. “His style is that you just do the right thing and move on, then you do the right thing again and just move on … I think that’s the example that guides all of his children.”

AT OBAMA’S INAUGURATION IN JANUARY, Schatz found himself seated on the main platform outside the Capitol, looking out at three-quarters of a million people on the National Mall framed by the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. He didn’t know that the invocation speaker, civil rights leader Myrlie Evers-Williams ’68, was a fellow Sagehen. Schatz’s sharpest recollection was that even the lions of Congress, such as Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, who replaced Inouye as Senate president pro tempore and thus became third in the presidential line of succession, were snapping photos with their cell phones and sending them out on Facebook. “Even the toughest politicians of both parties recognize that the inauguration of the American president is something to celebrate. And they were giddy like the rest of us.”

Still giddy next year or not, Schatz says he may not be able to chirp in person in 2014 at his 20th reunion. After all, he’s up for election that year, and several Hawaii Democrats are eyeing a challenge in the August primary.

Sidebar: Congressional Connections

Brian Schatz ’94 isn’t the first Sagehen sent to Congress in the post-war era. Fellow Democrat Alan Cranston ’36, who attended Pomona for a time but graduated from Stanford, held a California seat for 24 years, ending in 1993. In the House, Republican Charles “Chip” Pashayan Jr. ’63 represented the Fresno area from 1979 to 1991, and Democrat Frank Evans ’45, who attended Pomona for two years before entering the Navy, held a Colorado district from 1965 to 1979.

I Wonder What They’re Thinking

March 28, 2013 by Mark Wood Comments Off

“I wonder what they’re thinking.”

We’ve all had those moments with the animals in our lives—whether it’s a cocker spaniel at our feet or a baboon in the zoo. Moments when we’ve seen something that rings a bell. Something telling in their eyes or their body language or their actions. A playful hop. A thoughtful look. A slump of sadness. Something our human minds, so adept at mind-reading among our own species, can almost latch onto as a sign of purpose or emotion or contemplation. At such moments, it seems to be simple common sense that other animals think and feel in ways that are both strange to us and, at the same time, strikingly familiar.

And yet, during much of the 20th century, with the ascendancy of behaviorism in both human and animal psychology, it was strictly taboo in most scientific circles to speak of animals having minds or feelings. The very idea was mocked as anthropomorphic thinking—that sentimental human tendency to project our own motivations onto things around us, from the balky station wagon that won’t start to those vicious weeds that invade our garden each summer. Even Darwin, who, in his time, speculated freely about the cognitive abilities of all sorts of animals, from lizards to apes, was considered naive in this regard. And so, for much of the century, science moved forward in the unshakable conviction that not only was animal thought and emotion unknowable; it was out of the question. Animals did not love.They did not suffer. They did not think or plan or communicate in meaningful ways.

Then, in 1960, along came Jane Goodall, a non-scientist who didn’t know any better, and her years of careful observation and record-keeping among the scheming, tool-wielding, communicating, socially obsessed chimpanzees with whom she lived was instrumental in starting a revolution. That revolution—still somewhat controversial in scientific circles—is slowly but surely opening to scientific discovery an amazing world of animal cognition, offering tantalizing glimpses into the thoughts and feelings of the creatures with whom we share this world.

For Virginia Morell ’71, this has clearly been a subject of fascination for many years, and her new book is a joyous, globe-trotting trek through the surprising and not so surprising intelligentsia of the animal kingdom. Along the way, we meet a number of the scientists who have risked their reputations and dedicated their lives to finding rigorously scientific ways of breaking through the barrier of ignorance surrounding non-human cognition. How they’ve done so is as interesting a story, in many ways, as what they’ve discovered.

But the real stars of this book are the animals themselves, who sometimes seem as easy to understand as old friends, sometimes demonstrate abilities that are so startling that they almost give us goosebumps, and sometimes reveal attitudes and motivations that are so alien that we recoil.

Morell starts her journey as far from the human branch of the evolutionary tree as possible, with a creature the size of a printed hyphen—a rock ant—and works her way closer, upping the cognitive ante each step along the way.

There’s the archerfish that has to learn and apply some fairly advanced mental calculations in order to shoot a bug off a branch with an intense little jet of water (and also seems to take special pleasure in shooting lab technicians in the eye).

There’s Alex, the African gray parrot who not only seemed to have a clear grasp of the meaning of the many words in his vocabulary, but used them to describe concepts that were once thought far beyond the understanding of non-human brains. Here’s an example:

… Pepperberg carried Alex on her arm to a tall wooden perch in the middle of the room. She then retrieved a green key and a small green cup from a basket on a shelf. She held up the two items to Alex’s eye.

“What’s same?” she asked. She looked at Alex nose-to-beak.

Without hesitation, Alex’s beak opened. “Co-lor.”

“What’s different?” Pepperberg asked.

“Shape,” Alex said. Since he lacked lips and only slightly opened his beak to reply, the words seemed to come from the air around him, as if a ventriloquist were speaking. But the words— and what can only be called the thoughts—were entirely his.

One of my own favorite moments in the book is a bit later in the chapter, when Alex is listening to another young parrot garbling a new word it’s trying to learn and bursts out with: “Talk clearly! Talk clearly!”

Then, there are the wild parrotlets in Venezuela whose calls are being translated, bit by bit, during a study that has gone on for decades. Each bird, it seems, has a signature call that it uses to identify itself and that other birds use to call to it. That signature is inflected slightly differently based upon the relationship between the caller and the callee. Not only that, evidence is accumulating to indicate that this signature call is given to each bird by its parents. It’s a process that sounds spookily familiar to any parent who ever named a newborn.

The book is full of such intriguing details, offering glimpses of amazing possibilities, many of which are still beyond the confirmation of science, but maybe not forever. The names of the chapters are enough to give you an idea: “The Laughter of Rats,” “Elephant Memories,” “The Educated Dolphin” and “What it Means to be a Chimpanzee.”

It’s telling, by the way, that Morell chose to end her trek through animal intelligence not with humanity’s closest relative, the chimpanzee, but with its closest friend and partner. After all, humans and chimpanzees have had millionsof years to evolve apart. Humans and dogs, on the other hand, have had many millennia—maybe forty or more—to evolve together to the point that it’s not fantastic at all to say that we can read each other’s minds.

For those of us whose intuitions have always shouted that animals have thoughts and feelings that are just as real and just as intense and just as meaningful as our own, this book is both a vindication and a joy ride, but it’s also an ethical challenge. After all, the more you know about how animals think and feel, the more you can identify with them and the harder it becomes to ignore their plight. Morell’s epilogue is a cautionary note that reflects a sense of sadness born of many years as a science writer, watching species after species vanish forever from the earth. But there’s also a note of hope. Understanding how animals think, she suggests, can help us eliminate unintended consequences. For instance, understanding that elephant herds depend upon senior matriarchs to keep youngsters from going rogue may help to eliminate the damaging practice of thinning herds by killing off the oldest animals.

It’s true that the science in this book is still on the bleeding edge, much of it controversial, and that applying rigor to this field is both necessary and exceedingly difficult. But in the final analysis, it’s hard to believe there’s no connection between the eagerness with which so many people embraced—and continue to embrace—the idea that animal cognition is a chimera and the vested interest that the human race holds in its sense of exceptionalism and its dominance over the animal world. With that in mind, though I found the stories in this book uplifting and compelling, I also found Morell’s pessimism more convincing than her thin reeds of hope.

Past Perfect

March 28, 2013 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Day after day, the fragments of Pomona’s past find their way to archivist Jamie Weber. Dance cards and football tickets, patches and pins, student diaries, faculty papers, and presidential letters—Weber pores over and processes box after box of Pomoniana, often surprised by what she finds in the historical record of campus life.

The skeleton, though, was a bit of a shock. Paging through the donated scrapbook of Susan Shedd, Class of 1918, Weber came across bony animal remains folded in paper. A note, which Weber read only after opening, explained that they were the remains of a frog dissected in biology class. And then there were the professor’s grade books from the 1920s that a long-ago student happened across while working in a basement lab—and decided to swipe. The thievery may well have preserved them for posterity, since he turned the books over to the archives decades later.

Whether handling old bones, stolen tomes or key documents, Weber’s job is to prevent the College’s history from slipping away. She started at Pomona nearly three years ago, working with Director of Donor Relations Don Pattison to preserve the College’s historical record. Since then, Weber has been processing the papers of presidents and distinguished faculty, staff and alumni; photographs; and all manner of keepsakes.

“I get phone calls from all over campus: ‘I have this box. It was here when I moved into this office 30 years ago. I don’t know what it is and I don’t know what to do with it.’”

Weber does: Remove metal fasteners. Separate newsprint from photos. Sheath photos in Mylar. Put textiles in acid-free tissue. Record the items in the database. Create a finding aid.

All in all, the materials she has processed already take up more than 200 linear feet on campus, housed in a variety of temporary storage areas. The backlog, however, is daunting. Many of the archival treasures of Pomona and the other Claremont Colleges are held at Honnold Library, where Weber, an honors graduate of Pitzer with an MLIS from San Jose State, worked before joining the staff at Pomona. But space at Honnold is limited, and Weber’s new role arose from Pattison’s realization that Pomona needed a professional archivist to take charge of its ever-growing trove of historical materials.

She started off doing triage, dealing with things that were the oldest and most in need of preservation, including damaged items—damp basements and vermin are the archivist’s bane. Her base is in the Sumner Hall office the late David Alexander occupied as president emeritus. There he had stored correspondence from his 22-year tenure, along with letters from previous presidents including Wilson Lyon and James Blaisdell.

The Alexander collection was the first to be completed, processed and entered into a professional database, making its content accessible for scholarly use. His papers provide background on the College’s decision to divest of its stocks in companies doing business in South Africa in the 1980s, and on the creation of the Chicano/Latino Student Affairs Center, among other topics.

Other papers, including those of the late professors Fred Sontag and Corwin Hansch, have since been added to the archives. Now Weber is working on Nu Alpha Phi materials offered by alumni concerned about their care. Other items arrive from far beyond campus, sometimes the gift of a graduate or heir who wants that box of college memorabilia from the attic to get into the right hands. Wherever it comes from, this slice-of-life material is some of the most evocative, says Weber.

“Sure am having lots of fun here, too much in fact,” reads a letter recently donated by a man whose grandfather corresponded with a buddy in Pomona’s Class of 1931. “Since I’ve been here I can’t get to bed till after 12 and have to get up a [sic] five.”

Fascinating stuff, but does the thought of getting too much Pomona paraphernalia keep Weber up at night? She has wondered whether she will eventually be overrun with material. Still, Weber, archivist that she is, won’t risk letting items get away. “My attitude is, bring it,” she says. “We’ll find a way.”

Stray Thoughts: Lost and Found

March 28, 2013 by Mark Wood Comments Off

When the Interactive Timeline of Pomona College history launched online last October, on the College’s 125th birthday, it was the culmination of a great deal of research. For six months, my staff and I had pored over the College history books, combed through old publications, leafed through ancient press releases and sought out every credible source of information that we could identify in order to bring those lost years of Pomona history back into the light.

Along the way, we made some intriguing discoveries. Like the fact that Pomona and Occidental considered merging in 1909. (Pomona proposed; Oxy declined.) Or the puzzling photo (below) showing Lebus Court with a Madonna in place of the familiar sculpture of a boy with a Pan-pipe (a prop for the 1952 filming of the John Wayne movie Trouble Along the Way).

But some of the most interesting details have come directly from you—alumni, parents and friends of the College—by way of the comments many of you have added at www.pomona.edu/timeline as part of our year-by-year unveiling of the project. Here are a few of my favorites so far:

1949: “Snow on the quad was a lot of fun. It lasted for two or three days. It also brought a lot of smudge from the snudge pots that burned oil in an effort to keep the citrus groves alive and well. Smudge crept through any slight crack so we wrapped our clothes in sheets in the closets. It helped a little.” —Pat Wickersham Newton ’51

1952: “Addition to the filming of Trouble Along the Way: a scene was filmed with the character played by John Wayne and his daughter walking through the main gate. Wayne reads but doesn’t say ‘Let Only the Eager, Thoughtful and Reverent Enter Here.’ Wayne then says to his daughter, “Well, let’s go in anyway.” This scene was not included in the final version.” —Peter Wait ’54

1964: “Regarding the origins of the 47 fun: I remember a lunch in Frary during which Bruce Elgin’s older brother Bob mentioned that a math professor had given his class a proof that all positive integers equal 47. Homework was to disprove it. And THEN folks began to notice that 47 is everywhere.” —Beye Fyte ’65

1977: “… there was no women’s soccer team, club or varsity. I tried out for the men’s JV team and played in a few practices, but after getting run over by a player, I realized that I wasn’t going to make it. I don’t recall all of the details, but I joined with Mollie Busterud, Sue Troll and others to spread the word that we wanted to women’s team. A couple of varsity men stepped up and took on the job of coaching us, the Athletic Dept. gave us balls and old JV shirts, and the first women’s soccer club team was born.” —Sarah Clark Stuart ’81

1987: “I was in line outside Frank Dining Hall, when a gentleman asked to cut in line in front of me and my friends. I said, ‘No. This is a line. It has a beginning and an end. The end of the line is where you join the line.’ … When I sat down with my friends, they asked if I knew who that man was. I said, ‘No, but what does it matter? A line is a line.’ Then I asked, ‘Who is he anyway?’ ‘Oh,’ they replied, ‘that is David Alexander, the president of the College.’” —Rebekah Westrup ’89

As we go to press, we still have a few more years on the timeline to unveil, and every year remains permanently open to comments, so please do keep the memories flowing. After all, it may sound like hype to say that you and your memories are a part of Pomona College history, but it’s also the simple truth.

Massachusetts Miracle

March 28, 2013 by Malcolm Fleschner '91 Comments Off

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

photo by John Solem / UMass Amherst

This iconic line from Jaws occurred to MIT Senior Scientist Jeremy Kepner ’91 on the day in 2004 when he realized that the modest new data center he and his team were planning to construct in converted lab space in the Boston area wouldn’t be large enough to handle the school’s ever-growing computing needs.

Roy Scheider’s police chief character never did get that bigger boat. Kepner, though, succeeded in building a much larger data center—specifically, the recently opened Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), a nine-acre, $100 million supercomputing complex constructed alongside the Connecticut River in Holyoke, Mass.

Often larger than city blocks, data centers house countless racks of computer servers that handle the exabytes (1 followed by 18 zeros) of data generated by all of our Facebook status updates, tweets, credit card purchases, blog posts, song downloads and the trillions of other data bits that travel the Internet. Tens of thousands of data centers operate around the globe, with the largest using as much electricity as a small city.

To handle MIT’s long-term computing needs, which involve processing everything from astronomical images and climate data to plant, animal and bacteria DNA sets and particle accelerator data, Kepner realized the university would need a data center 10 times the size of the facility under consideration. A quick calculation of the electrical costs (as much as $20 million per year) and the environmental impact (as much CO2 released per year as is typically emitted by a town of 10,000) forced him to think bigger—and greener. Spending the next year researching different approaches to power generation, Kepner traveled to Western Massachusetts and the post-industrial town of Holyoke, where he chatted with the local hydroelectric plant’s operator and supervisor. He discovered that a hydroelectric dam, once built, has very low costs because turbines last for decades and maintenance costs are minimal. Other benefits Holyoke offered included available land and a dire need for urban renewal. Convinced that hydroelectric was both the greenest and least expensive option, Kepner returned to MIT intent on persuading his fellow committee members to do something unprecedented: locate the university’s new data center in an old mill town 90 miles away.

What followed was a five-year journey of persuasion and coalition-building that eventually brought together Harvard, Boston University, the University of Massachusetts and Northeastern University, all of which faced similar challenges in handling their ever-growing data processing needs.

Also on board were Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who saw the political advantage in locating a data center in economically depressed Holyoke, and corporate sponsors EMC and Cisco Systems. Executive Director John T. Goodhue credits Kepner with both the insight and the persistence that helped make the MCHPCC a reality. “Like many great ideas, the MGHPCC has many fathers—and mothers!,” he says, “but Jeremy was truly there at the beginning, when he made the first scouting visit to Holyoke in 2004 and was part of the original study group that laid out the ideas that led to the creation of the MGHPCC.”

The 90,000-square-foot building, which was constructed on the site of an old textile mill, officially opened Nov. 16. The center is powered by water from the Connecticut River, while construction materials were culled from buildings that were demolished to make way for the MGHPCC. And while a typical data center consumes nine megawatts of power just to cool the sea of electrical equipment, the MGHPCC will cut that figure to just three megawatts, in part by circulating chilly New England air through the building during winter months.

At the groundbreaking ceremony, Gov. Patrick said the facility serves as an economic development model for the state and the nation. Kepner, meanwhile, sees the MGHPCC as an example of how scientists can take the lead in working to counteract the potentially devastating impact of climate change.

“The issues associated with global warming are very technical, which makes it difficult to act decisively as a society,” he says. “… those of us in the supercomputing community who understand the environmental impact of supercomputers need to come up with innovative solutions to those problems and see them implemented.”

On a personal level, Kepner says the most rewarding moment came during a visit to Western Massachusetts with his wife, Alix Sholl ’90, and 11-year-old daughter Jemma a few weeks before the ribbon cutting. “On the way out of town I suggested to Alix that we go by the site so she could see it for the first time,” he says. “We drove past a warehouse and there it was, shining in the sun between the two canals. Alix was speechless. Eventually she turned to me and said, ‘I’m so proud of you!’ and gave me a big kiss.”

Myrlie in the Mirror

March 28, 2013 by Mary Schmich '75 Comments Off

photo by Jewel Samad / AFP / Getty Images

The widow of.

The phrase travels with her through life, as if it were part of her name.

“Widow of Medgar Evers to Deliver Inaugural Invocation,” said a recent headline in The New York Times.

“Widow of Medgar Evers to Deliver Invocation at Obama Inauguration,” said the Washington Post.

“Medgar Evers Widow Gives Inaugural Invocation,” says the YouTube video.

Fifty years have passed since the hot June night in Jackson, Miss., that she heard the crack of a gun then bolted out of her bedroom, followed by her three children, and fell to her knees next to her husband, who lay near the doorstep in a pool of blood.

Within an hour, she was the widow of.

Myrlie Evers-Williams ’68 has tried to be the very best widow Medgar Evers could have hoped for. She has devoted herself to bringing his killer to justice, to keeping the cause of civil rights alive. But in the past half century, she also has maintained another struggle—to become fully realized and recognized as herself. Just Myrlie.

“I made a decision,” she said one balmy winter day when I went to visit her at her apartment in a senior community just outside of Claremont.

The decision she was announcing wasn’t on par with others she had made recently, like selling her big house in Bend, Ore., or squeezing into a tight red dress to play piano at Carnegie Hall with Pink Martini, or agreeing to stand next to the black president of the United States and deliver the inauguration prayer.

This was a smaller act of liberation.

“I’m going to keep my hair natural,” she said, with a deep laugh. “I don’t have time for blow drying and curling and styling. I prefer to let the personality of yours truly emerge.”

On that day in early January, Evers-Williams, a tall woman with a rich voice whose friendliness carries a dash of tartness, felt under siege. She was recovering from the flu. Her sunny one-bedroom apartment was stuffed with boxes and her days were packed with chores.

The inaugural staff kept calling, and she had preparations to make for a 50th anniversary commemoration of Medgar Evers’ assassination.

“I am juggling a life that is not mine,” she said. “You know, as I approach 80, I ask myself why, why are you doing this?”

OK, why?

She plunged her hands into the pockets of her jeans.

“It’s just me,” she said. “It’s the nature of Myrlie.”

A few days earlier, trying to get organized for her upcoming appearances, she had fished some old documents out of the boxes in her living room. She sat down, in one of her orange wing chairs, and began to read about the funeral of the man she had married at 18 and lost at 30.

She was freshly struck by what he meant, to American history and to her. It had been a long time since she wept over Medgar, but sitting there, alone in the clutter of the past, she cried.

This powerful photo of Myrlie Evers-Williams ’68 (by Flip Schulke/Corbis) taken at a memorial service after her husbands assassination in June 1963 appears on the cover of our spring issue.

TO GRASP the improbable sweep of Myrlie Evers-Williams’ life, you have to understand the place she came from.

Mississippi in 1933 was poor, even by the standards of the Great Depression. In its small towns and out on the sharecroppers’ fields where blacks and whites alike struggled to eke a living from the land, the myth of white supremacy flourished as hardily as Delta cotton.

Like the rest of the Deep South, Mississippi abided by Jim Crow, a set of laws and customs that segregated blacks and whites in public places. Black people were shunted into separate schools and corralled in the backs of buses.They drank from water fountains marked “colored.” When they were allowed in “white” movie theaters, it was through a side door, then on up to “the buzzard’s roost” in the balcony far from the white patrons and the screen.

In that era, in the Mississippi River town of Vicksburg, lived a schoolteacher named Annie Beasley.

Beasley was one of the lucky few, a black woman who had gone to college for a while, and she believed that education was salvation. Shortly after her son and a 16-year-old girl gave birth to a child, she knew what she had to do.

She brought the baby, Myrlie, home.

Beasley owned her own house, a whitewashed place up the hill from the shacks where the poorest blacks lived. In her clean rooms, with the vegetable garden and fruit trees out back, she kept books. She listened to classical music and on Sundays wore white gloves to church.

Myrlie, named after an aunt who also helped raise her, called her grandmother “Mama.”

“Open your mouth and speak distinctly,” Mama instructed Myrlie.

“Baby,” Mama told her, “you may not have the money to travel, but as long as you can read, and books are accessible to you, you can travel anywhere in the world.”

“Baby, baby, get back here,” Mama would call if Myrlie left her nightly prayers too early. “You didn’t ask God to make you a blessing.”

Myrlie Beasley didn’t grow up feeling inferior or poor, and not until she was ready for college did she register how high and hard the wall of segregation was. When she applied for a state scholarship, hoping to study music at a college outside Mississippi, she was told that she could find everything she needed at a black school right there at home.

In 1950, she enrolled at Alcorn A&M College out in the woods of tiny Lorman, Miss.

“Stay away from the servicemen,” Mama and Aunt Myrlie warned.

On her first day at Alcorn, as she leaned against a lamppost, a football player approached. He was a few years older, one of the black Army veterans who had come home to Mississippi after World War II, having tasted the possibilities of the wider world. He was from the little Delta town of Decatur. His name was Medgar Evers.

They married the next year. She was 18.

Medgar Evers got a job selling insurance, and as he drove the Delta peddling his policies, he witnessed daily, in growing dismay, the black sharecroppers who lived barely better than slaves. He loved Mississippi, but in the nascent civil rights movement, he saw a chance to change it.

In 1954, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People hired Evers as its first Mississippi field secretary. He roamed the state, documenting lynchings and other brutalities against black people, helping blacks register to vote, organizing boycotts and sit-ins. At one point, he handed out bumper stickers that read, “Don’t buy gas where you can’t use the restroom.”

Myrlie Evers worked as his secretary while she raised the children. They both grew tired, and scared. They argued, about money and safety. Civil rights was risky business.

In 1957, the Evers family moved up in the world, and into a small new house, with a mortgage, in a stable black neighborhood in Jackson. Some of their neighbors didn’t want them. Medgar Evers was stirring up trouble. Trouble was bound to follow him home.

On June 12, 1963, just past midnight, a few hours after President John F. Kennedy gave a televised speech in support of civil rights, Evers pulled into his driveway. He stepped out of the car, carrying T-shirts that said “Jim Crow Must Go.” From a honeysuckle thicket across the street came a bullet. It pierced him in the back.

“His murder was eerie and providential, so flushed with history as to seem perversely proper—shot in the back on the very night President Kennedy embraced racial democracy as a moral cause,” the historian Taylor Branch wrote in his Pulitzer-Prize-winning book Parting the Waters.

“. . .White people who had never heard of Medgar Evers spoke his name over and over, as though the words themselves had the ring of legend.”

Not all white people.

A proudly racist and cockily unrepentant fertilizer salesman named Byron De La Beckwith was soon arrested, tried twice in 1964, and both times let go after the juries, composed entirely of white men, deadlocked.

THAT SUMMER Myrlie Evers packed up her life and headed for Claremont, Calif., about as far from Mississippi as a car and her imagination could take her.

“The kindness of people in Claremont was beyond belief,” Evers-Williams said, sitting in her apartment all these years later. “That was not what I wanted. I wanted the nastiness, the hatred. I wanted a fight. God, I wanted a fight so bad.”

Medgar had always told her that if they ever left Mississippi, he’d like to go to California, and in Kiplinger’s Magazine, she read a story on the country’s best small colleges. A name caught her eye: Pomona.

Then there she was, the famous widow of the newly famous Medgar Evers, living a continent away from friends and family, in a pruned and placid college town where blacks were almost as rare as snow.

She hadn’t comprehended how white her new hometown was. She had imagined it was more like the neighboring city of Pomona, and some of the black people there were miffed that she’d chosen insular, collegiate Claremont. Did she think she was too good for them?

Not only was she black in a land of whites, but as a 32-year-old student, she was old in the kingdom of youth.

She remembers her first day on campus, some professor addressing the freshmen about what an important time in life this was.

“Why am I sitting here?” she fumed to herself, “when I have three kids at home and I have no idea what they’re doing?”

Her arrival in Claremont made news. Look Magazine photographed her poring over her books. Ebony Magazine put her and the three kids on its cover, posed next to their big stone fireplace, all smiles, dressed like the era’s perfect white sitcom families, only without the dad. Inside is a story: “Why I Left Mississippi,” by Mrs. Medgar Evers.

Little by little, she softened to the kindness around her. Masago Armstrong, the Pomona College registrar, was among those who took a special interest.

“She and others were so powerful,” Evers-Williams said. “So powerful in their excellence, making me think about what I wanted to do.”

But the work was hard. Her grades weren’t good. She walked into a professor’s office one day—“Alvin?

Was that his name?”—and announced, “I quit.”

Go home, he said. Put your books away. Come back in a week. She came back in a week, ready to keep going.

When the Pomona College class of 1968 paraded across a stage to collect their diplomas, Myrlie Evers, sociology major, was there. The audience rose and cheered.

“Why did they stand up to applaud you?” her older son, Darrell, asked afterward. “You didn’t do anything different from the other graduates.”

“IS THAT the pool?” she said.

We were standing in front of Sumner Hall, out for a tour of the Pomona campus, where Evers-Williams rarely comes these days. She peered toward the blue shimmer in the distance. Pendleton Pool. She remembers that. Shivering in the water, clinging to the side, afraid, listening to the swimming instructor, Anne Bages, who finally, one day, said, “Myrlie, you must do this. Come on. If your child were on the other side drowning, what would you do? Envision it.”

She envisioned it and swam across the pool. “Her patience, her strength and determination to see I did what I had to do,” Evers-Williams said, “that speaks to my entire experience here.”

It was a sunny, warm day, and as we walked past Little Bridges, she remembered that old, elegant, mission-style building, too. She and her second husband, a longshoreman and union organizer named Walter Williams, were married there in 1975, before they set off for a life in Oregon.

“He was my dearest best friend,” she said. Williams died in 1995. “He was so good to me and my children.”

She walked on, slowly, wishing she’d brought her cane.

“God,” she said, “I’ve lived through so many changes. It’s amazing to walk on this campus and think of it. Mind if we sit?”

We sat on a bench on Marston Quad, looking toward Mount Baldy, past the trees that never seem to change. She thought back. Her eight years as an executive at Atlantic Richfield Company. Her run for Congress, unsuccessful but a decent showing. Her three years in the mid-1990s as head of the NAACP; she has some untold stories she’d love to tell about that. The writing, the speaking. The three children brought successfully to adulthood. “When I look at my bio,” she said. “I say, ‘wow.’”

Through it all, she never forgot that she was the widow of. She kept her eye on that cocky fertilizer salesman, Byron De La Beckwith. Her pressure helped persuade the state of Mississippi to retry him, and in 1994, a racially mixed jury of Mississippians declared him guilty of Medgar Evers’ murder.

There were many times after Medgar Evers died that his widow cursed and cried and wanted to dwell in hatred. She built a different life instead.

“And now?” she said. “Back in Mississippi after 50 years.”

Last February, while keeping her apartment near Claremont, she returned to Alcorn State University as a visiting scholar. “Come home,” she says the president of the college told her. “Come home and let us take care of you.”

So she went, and flew into Jackson-Medgar Wylie Evers International Airport.

In this half century, Evers-Williams has never ceased to be surprised.

Another surprise arrived after she gave a TEDx talk in Oregon a while back. She told the audience about how as a girl in Vicksburg, she sang and played the piano, and how her grandmother and aunt dreamed she would make it to Carnegie Hall. Out in the crowd that day sat Thomas Lauderdale, the founder of the pop orchestra Pink Martini. Afterward, he made her a proposition: Come perform with us. At Carnegie Hall. Crazy, she thought. Not with her arthritic fingers, and besides, she didn’t play much anymore. And, really, she was shy.

Then she thought of how Medgar used to say, “Trust yourself.”

She said “yes.”

One night last December, at the age of 79, she swept onto the New York stage in a form-fitting red dress— “long trumpet sleeves, just a little bit of cleavage and this gorgeous train”—tailored for her by the designer Ikram.

She sat down at the baby grand, so unlike the cold, out-of-tune piano at Alcorn that she’d been practicing on.

She played “Claire de Lune,” her grandmother’s favorite, followed by “The Man I Love.”

The audience gave her a standing ovation.

“As ‘the widow of,’” she said later, “I kept Medgar’s memory alive, and that’s what I was determined to do. But there is the Myrlie who at times finds herself saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I’ve done these things too, on my own.’ That’s one reason I got such a kick out of Carnegie Hall.”

Soon after her Carnegie debut, she would be at the inauguration, standing next to the first black president of the United States, praying aloud for the nation, the personification of its past, its progress, its hope.

“People choose, I think, what they want to be,” she said that day in Claremont, closing her eyes for a moment, soaking up the sun. “I don’t believe in self pity forever.”

Her mind flitted back to her old friends, Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin, and Betty Shabazz, widow of Malcolm X. She recalled a newspaper story a young woman once wrote about the three of them.

“The article was: these are just widows living off their husbands’ reputations,” she said. “Betty, Coretta and I talked, furious. Coretta said, in her calm, understanding way, ‘Oh, she’ll learn, she’ll learn.’”

Evers-Williams sighed.

“I miss those two ladies so much.”

At 80, there are many people for her to miss. Mama, Medgar, Walter, Aunt Myrlie, her mother and father, her son Darrell, who died nine years ago of cancer. She feels their absence but looks for the blessings.

Every morning when she gets up, she walks into the bathroom and before brushing her teeth or washing her face, she performs a ritual that shapes the day.

“Hi, beautiful,” she says to the mirror, and she smiles.

Autumn in Cambridge

March 28, 2013 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

President David Oxtoby spent three months on sabbatical in the fall at the University of Cambridge, where he served as a visiting fellow at Trinity College. There he conducted collaborative research in chemistry, spending half of each day on a project involving the stability of protein mixtures in solution, exploring complex physical interactions that affect the biological activity of proteins in living cells. He also audited an introduction to philosophy class and sat in on a graduate seminar in the History of Science Department. The sabbatical marked his first since 1991, when he was a professor at the University of Chicago. Oxtoby, who has been at Pomona for nearly a decade, spent some of his time in Cambridge observing a different educational structure, one that served as part of the inspiration for President James Blaisdell’s consortium plan for The Claremont Colleges in the 1920s.

The lecturers are very gifted, and the supervisions, like the tutorials at Oxford, are highly individualized. I was particularly struck by the lectures, which are given once a week over an eight-week term to about 50 or 60 students. There is no interaction with the students—no questions, no discussion, just a straight lecture; a sort of performance. They don’t have discussion-based classes where the students learn through engaging with classmates and with the faculty member on the subject being studied. I came away thinking that having those discussions is something we do right at Pomona.

I would say one of the things that I really enjoyed at Trinity was that the faculty, the fellows who are post doc and higher level—some senior faculty, some junior—go to lunch together at ‘High Table.’ One of the things that was fun is the rule that you sit wherever the next opening is at this very long table, and you talk with whomever is right there. To me, that’s great. We do have the Frank Blue Room lunches at Pomona, and I’d love to see even more of that, just a chance to talk across the College.

So, I liked certain aspects of the faculty culture there, but I’m not sure there are educational practices that I would bring back and do differently. And it was fun to work in the lab again and to go to lectures, to sit in the back row and think about the class from a student’s perspective.

Letters to the editor

March 28, 2013 by various authors Comments Off

When Brubeck Played Pomona

When the great jazz composer and pianist Dave Brubeck died on Dec. 5, 2012, a day short of his 92nd birthday, some members of the Class of 1957 reminisced about their having sponsored a concert by the Brubeck quartet in Little Bridges 58 years earlier.

This was mainly the doing of our classmate Marvin Nathan, who was a big fan of Brubeck and had gotten to know the members of the quartet the summer after our freshman year, in 1954, when the musicians had a three-month gig at Zardi’s in Hollywood. Nathan went to the club nightly during the vacation and returned to college full of enthusiasm for the new style of jazz played by Brubeck. Marvin recounts: “That Christmas I gave the four of them their first matching set of ties, handkerchiefs and cuff links, which, I think, they wore at the Pomona concert.” He made the arrangements directly with Brubeck, and a committee of the Class of ’57 was formed to produce the concert. Brubeck was the first to play college dates, lifting jazz out of smoke-filled clubs. Those were simpler times: no agent or manager or record company was intermediary. We just asked Brubeck, and later, for another concert sponsored by the class, Andre Previn; they said yes, turned up with their sidemen and played and got paid.

But paying the musicians required a paying audience. Steve Glass ’57 and subsequently professor of classics at Pitzer College, recalls that early ticket sales for the Brubeck concert were going slowly. His classmate and future wife Sandy was in charge of publicity and she was worried. In those days, West Coast/Cool Jazz was a relatively arcane phenomenon. Then, shortly before the concert, the Nov. 8, 1954 issue of Time magazine had Dave Brubeck on the cover, only the second jazz musician to be so featured (after Louis Armstrong), and the place was packed.

For the program I drew caricatures of the musicians: Brubeck (piano), Paul Desmond (alto sax), Bob Bates (bass) and Joe Dodge (drums). Marvin Nathan wrote the notes. Reflecting on the concert, he writes: “We caught the group at its acme, in the wake of the remarkable recordings of Jazz at Storyville and Jazz at Oberlin, which, for my money, are the two greatest albums Dave and Paul ever did.”

Marvin left Pomona after two years to study jazz saxophone at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music but decided the instrument should be left to the likes of John Coltrane and instead became a humanities professor. All of us amateur promoters remained jazz aficionados. Why, just this morning I refolded my fedora into a pork-pie hat and set off looking the hepcat I wished to be.

—Andrew Hoyem ’57
San Francisco, Calif.

Save Pomona’s LGBT History

Watching the results of the November election, I couldn’t help but notice the sea change that has occurred in attitudes toward LGBT people. I wish someone at PCM would document highlights of the LGBT community at Pomona over the last 40 years or so before that history gets lost.

When I chaired the Gay Student Union/Lesbian and Gay Student Union (we changed our name during my term) in the ’80s, we understood that we were the second oldest gay student organization in the country (after Columbia University), and the oldest on the West Coast. I think this is another area where Pomona has had enormous social influence and I’ve yet to see it documented. We lost a lot of our history with AIDS; it makes sense to me that with marriage equality on the march, Pomona takes its proper credit.

—Paul David Wadler ’83
Chicago, Ill.

More Shocking Pranks Revealed!

We read in the fall issue (“A Carefully Calculated Caper”) about the 1975 prank that replaced Chopin with Zappa on Big Bridges. That prank may have eclipsed our homecoming caper in Frary a decade earlier, but we think it is time for our prank to be revealed, especially since Pat Mulcahy ’66 is now retired from coaching.

It was the night before the homecoming football game with Oxy. We don’t know whose idea it was, but someone hid in a china cabinet in Frary at closing time and opened the back door to the rest of us after hours. Frank White ’66 helped Mulcahy rappel down a wall from the “Orozco” room in Clark to Frary’s locked utility courtyard below, though we can’t remember why that was necessary. Then we stole a huge Oxy Tiger from a float that was built somewhere on campus for the game the next day. We carried the tiger undetected across campus and through the very loud front doors of Frary. We set up four or six of the large dining tables on the Frary stage below Prometheus as one very large table, fluffing up the Oxy Tiger and putting it on the table as if it were the meal. Then we got the formal dinnerware and cutlery out (from locked cabinets?) and set up place settings and chairs around the table. The Oxy Tiger was served for the Sagehens’ dinner.

The next morning at breakfast, nothing was said. The students seemed to think it was an authorized set up. Dean Batchelder (we think) walked around the dining hall looking suspiciously at everyone. The dining hall czar seemed very put out that her best dishes had been violated, but no one in authority sent out a search party or even asked about it. It was hard for us to feign surprise and not to brag about our exploits. So as far as we know, it has remained a secret since. We were only foot soldiers, though. Do others remember who planned this? Does anyone have photos?

—Gary Thompson ’66, Excelsior, Minn.
& Frank White ’66, Colorado Springs, Colo.

The intriguing account of the Zappa prank reminded me of a campus adventure in which I was involved. Our escapade did not rival the artistic complexity of Zappa, but perhaps it was a bit more physically challenging. In spring of 1962, during my freshman year, I was a struggling scholar, mostly overwhelmed by the demands of all my classes, and also a social recluse. I was acquainted mainly with my own sponsor group in (then all-male) Clark Hall, and also with the cross-country and track teams. For reasons I can’t recall, I decided to run for sophomore class president.

My support was concentrated mainly within my own sponsor group. The notion emerged that my candidacy would be enhanced by a placard at the top of Smith Tower. Two members of my group, our junior class sponsor Rich Kettler ’62 and Mike Freid ’67, were enterprising climbers and welcomed the challenge.

In the wee hours of morning, we carried two desks from our rooms to the base of the tower. The desks permitted access to the tiled sides of the tower which would allow a climber foot and hand holds to the top. The plan was that Mike and Rich would climb on opposite sides, joined for safety, by a rope around the tower. This arrangement quickly proved awkward; the intrepid pair discarded the rope and climbed separately to the top, carrying the campaign signs, while the rest of us held our collective breath.

Less than half an hour after they disappeared over the edge at the top, the climbers emerged, to our great relief, from the door at the bottom. The next morning the poster announcing “Plumb for Sophomore Class President” was visible at the top of Smith Tower.

The signs atop the tower and the open door at the bottom were not ignored by the administration. The co-conspirators and I were summoned to a stern but un-punitive reprimand. Despite the unique publicity on my behalf, Steve Schaffran was elected sophomore class president. He later distinguished himself by leaving Pomona to join the then-nascent Peace Corps, then returning to Pomona after his Peace Corps service to earn a Rhodes Scholarship.

—Jim Plumb ’65
Redwood Valley, Calif.

I recall the night, when I was a freshman, that our group (The Vultures) at the east end of Walker Hall, upstairs, swapped the rooms of our two senior live-in “counselors” while they were out carousing. We used Polaroids and changed every item exactly, including switching the doors, which may be out of sequence to this day, and the telephone connections. The two seniors came back a bit blurry and looked around, saying to a few unlikely witnesses, “Didn’t I used to live over …? Oh, hell, forget it.” They went to bed that way and as far as I know it stayed.
—John Shannon ’65
Topanga, Calif.

Bad Grammar

I’m writing in reference to Mark Kendall’s article “D.B. and That Number.” I know little or nothing about math other than being able to balance my checkbook on occasion, but I do know a little about English grammar. You began the first sentence in the next-to-last paragraph of your very interesting article about Professor Donald Bentley by saying, “Me and D.B., we cover a lot of ground.” This is a very common mistake which I too often hear from kids and teenagers. When referring to oneself as the subject of a sentence, the right pronoun to use is the word “I,” and it should always come second (or last) in a compound subject. My dad, who was a 1926 graduate of Yale, was a stickler for proper English and I just want to pass his heritage along.

—Barbara Brainard Ainge ’57
St. George, Utah

Mourning a Man of Action

Last September my good friend Ted Smith ’63 died in the Montana mountains that he loved, just six weeks after my wife Cheryl ’65 and I visited him, his brother Roger ’64 and Roger’s wife Libby on Flathead Lake. Over the almost 50 years since we were at Pomona together, Ted had become a close friend. Our lives intertwined, often by coincidence and often to my benefit.

In 1970, on my first visit to Indonesia as a UNESCO consultant on education planning I made a courtesy call on the Ford Foundation office in Jakarta. When Ted walked into the room you may imagine how surprised both of us were to run into someone from Pomona. My surprise turned to astonishment when I found out that

Roger, a fellow Nappie, was also in Indonesia for a few months. Three years later, I was teaching at a state college in Vermont when Ted called me out of the blue from the Ford Foundation in New York to ask if I’d like to move to Surabaya, Indonesia, to establish the Ministry of Education and Culture’s first provincial education planning unit. Shortly after our move to East Java in 1974 with two small children we adopted our third child, Nathan Hadianto, from an orphanage in Surabaya. The next year Ted, now back in the Ford Foundation’s Indonesia office, contacted us to help arrange for Roger and Libby to adopt a child from the same place. Ted came to check out the orphanage, and Libby followed to pick up Theo, named after his uncle Ted.

After I retired and Ted was visiting us in Vermont in 2007, we were riding up a chairlift at Jay Peak when I told him of my application for a job leading a new initiative at the Hewlett Foundation. After months with no follow-up from the headhunter, I was disappointed. When I mentioned the name of the headhunter whom I’d written Ted said “I know him. I’ll call him on Monday.” Monday afternoon I got a call from the headhunter, and soon I had started three exciting and rewarding years of work that I had not expected.

From the testimonies to Ted that I’ve seen since his death, I know that he quietly supported many other people and groups besides me in his career in conservation and the environment. I attribute Ted’s interest in and concern for others, wonderfully leavened by chance in my case, to be due to values that were strengthened by the knowledge, ways of looking at the world and responsibility for those around us that our Pomona education encouraged.

Ted bore his added riches in trust for mankind, and I miss him.

—Ward Heneveld ’64
Enosburg Falls, Vt.

Musical Memory

I noted the death of Gil Plourde ’66 with melancholy. In September 1962, Gil walked into my room and noted that the music to which I was listening was his mother’s favorite and it must mean that I had good taste. That acknowledgement early in our freshman year has remained with me for 50 years, and each time I hear d’Indy’s Symphony on a French Mountain Air, I remember Gil.

—Tully Wiedman ’66
Dixon, Calif.

Lena Connor ’13: Ethics and the Environment

March 28, 2013 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

A recipient of the Udall Scholarship and a Rhodes and Marshall finalist, Lena Connor ’13 is a double major in environmental analysis and politics, with a minor in religious studies. Connor was among the first group of students awarded fellowships for full-time summer internships, funded by gifts to the Daring Minds campaign. She spent last summer working as a theological researcher for the National Council of Churches, where she put together the first comprehensive database of Protestant ecotheologians in the U.S. Connor, who grew up in Florida and Iowa, is commissioner of environmental affairs for Student Senate, a leader of the Pomona Student Union and a member of Uprising Christian Fellowship and the Pomona College Choir

Shifting focus

When I first came to Pomona, I was interested in the policy side of the environmental movement. But after I started classes, I shifted my focus. Coming from a very conservative part of the U.S., I saw that a lot of political impasses have deeper roots in people’s cultural and religious ways of viewing resources, and in the way we organize societies and make economic decisions. I became more interested in getting to the roots of some of those problems after taking a class from Professor Char Miller and reading authors like Wendell Berry.

Finding inspiration

The summer after my sophomore year, I got a Mellon grant to study bauxite mining in Brazil. When I got there, I realized that the most important actors in mediating conflict and advocating for the rural farmers were the Franciscan priests. I had been disenchanted with Christianity’s ability to do much about the environment in the U.S., partly because of apathy and because the issue had been so politicized. Being in Brazil refreshed my spirit and inspired me, because I’d seen a group of Christians who could incorporate ecological and Christian ethics and have their parishioners accept and embrace it.

From the rainforest to Oxford University

I designed a one-on-one tutorial at Oxford with an emphasis on environmental ethics and spent hours and hours in libraries reading through theological texts. It was one of most emotionally and intellectually fulfilling experiences of my college career, and I decided then I wanted to study the intersection of religion and environmentalism for the rest of my life. The people who suffer from environmental degradation are often the poorest, and there is a link in Christian theology between renewal of the earth and caring for the marginalized.

Transforming practical experience into a senior thesis

My internship with the National Council of Churches gave me a more nuanced and informed look at how academic theology and nonprofits interrelate, and how you get ecotheological theory from the ivory tower to the pulpit and into the political realm of discourse. I also attended a conference in Pennsylvania, where a Lutheran synod created a task force to study the controversial gas extraction method known as “fracking” and passed a resolution for a moratorium against it. I interviewed the congregants and pastors about the church’s appropriate role, which along with my experience in Brazil, became part of my senior thesis.

What is really valuable

Pomona, more than anything else, has taught me that this track that we’re on is not just a superficial endeavor about wealth or success or worldly glory. In my time here, I’ve been instructed by people who are grounded in what is really valuable in life. When I leave and go to graduate school and enter into what I would like to do, which is becoming ordained and doing academic ecotheology, I want to carry on what Pomona has given me by focusing on something in a deep and meaningful way.

When Brubeck played Pomona

March 15, 2013 by Andrew Hoyem '57 Comments Off

This noteworthy letter from Andrew Hoyem ’57 appears in our spring issue, which will soon hit mailboxes and appear online:

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