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Wig Awards

This year’s Wig Award winners from left: Associate Professor of Chemistry Nicholas Ball, Professor of Politics Susan McWilliams Barndt, Lingurn H. Burkhead Professor of Mathematics Ami Radunskaya, Assistant Professor of Philosophy Ellie Anderson, Professor of Computer Science David Kauchak and Assistant Professor of Economics Kyle Wilson.

This year’s Wig Award winners from left: Associate Professor of Chemistry Nicholas Ball, Professor of Politics Susan McWilliams Barndt, Lingurn H. Burkhead Professor of Mathematics Ami Radunskaya, Assistant Professor of Philosophy Ellie Anderson, Professor of Computer Science David Kauchak and Assistant Professor of Economics Kyle Wilson.

Six members of the Pomona College faculty have been named winners of the 2024 Wig Distinguished Professor Award, which recognizes excellence in teaching, commitment to students and service to the College and the community. Students in their junior and senior years vote for the awards, which are confirmed by a committee comprised of students, faculty and members of the Board of Trustees.

This year’s winners are Associate Professor of Chemistry Nicholas Ball, Professor of Politics Susan McWilliams Barndt, Lingurn H. Burkhead Professor of Mathematics Ami Radunskaya, Assistant Professor of Philosophy Ellie Anderson, Professor of Computer Science David Kauchak and Assistant Professor of Economics Kyle Wilson.

Scholars
and Fellows

Churchill Scholarship

Zoë Xiu-Zhi Batterman ’24

Downing Scholarship

Leonardo Fetta Alaghb and ’24
Zongqi Zhai ’24

Fulbright U.S. Student Program

Malia Grace Battafarano ’24
Samuel Bither ’21
Kai James Carse ’24
Jenny Min Chen ’24
Schuyler Reade DiBacco ’24
Teodelina Martelli ’24
Michael Negussie ’24
Nelia Stefin Perry ’24
Wiley Willis Valenti Roberts ’24
Melissa Ann Seecharan ’24

Claire Chang ’24, Lydia Haile ’22, Charis Kim ’24, Genevieve Krieger ’24, Christiana Marchese ’24 and Sophia Ristuben ’24 each were offered a Fulbright award but declined it.

Goldwater Scholarship

Daniel Gao ’25

National Science Foundation Fellowship

Zoë Xiu-Zhi Batterman ’24
Kehlani Alex Fay ’24

USAID Donald M. Payne International Development Graduate Fellowship

Genevieve Alena Krieger ’24

Pomona College Rena Gurley Archibald High Scholarship Prizes

Charis Kee-seon Kim ’24
Anna Tysseling Prewitt ’24
Alexandra Turvey ’24

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Oxtoby Leaves AAAS Presidency

Pomona College President Emeritus David Oxtoby stepped down as president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at the end of June after serving for more than five years.

Calling his term as leader of the distinguished society “the honor of a lifetime,” he lauded the ways many of its members have “helped to lead America and the world through this turbulent era,” including members who helped develop the COVID-19 vaccines.

A chemist by training, Oxtoby served as president of Pomona from 2003 to 2017 and was elected to the academy in 2012 for his specialty in educational and academic leadership. Current Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr also is a member of the academy.

Cecilia Conrad Elected to AAAS

New members elected in 2024 include Pomona Emerita Professor of Economics Cecilia Conrad, who was elected in recognition of her nonprofit leadership. Conrad is CEO of Lever for Change, which connects donors with problem solvers to work toward social change. Conrad also is a senior advisor to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Monika Moore ’03 Is New Director of Alumni and Family Engagement

Monika Moore '03

Monika Moore ’03

Monika Moore ’03 returned to her alma mater in March as the director of alumni and family engagement. She is an integral member of the senior team with the Office of Advancement, responsible for developing and implementing strategic oversight of Pomona College’s growing alumni and family engagement program.

Moore and her team will further strengthen Pomona’s expansive portfolio of activities and programs that engage the College’s global network of alumni, parents, families and volunteers. Working in close partnership with faculty, staff, and alumni and family leaders—including the Pomona College Alumni Association Board, Alumni Association Past Presidents Council and Family Leadership Council—Moore will lead efforts to re-envision events and programming, celebrate Pomona’s well-steeped traditions and create plentiful opportunities for engagement locally, regionally and globally. For more information, learn more at Monika Moore.

I am thrilled to be returning to my alma mater and reconnecting with the alumni I’ve met over the years and getting to know the many alumni and families that are a part of this incredible community.”

—Monika Moore ’03

A Friendship, a Year Studying in Mexico and a New Way of Seeing the World

It wasn’t until after I retired in 2008 that I realized my entire career—first as a specialist on U.S.-Latin American relations, then as a theorist on global implications of the information revolution—sprang from two casual remarks by my great friend Henry Bastien ’63.

The first was in the summer of ’61, when he said, “Let’s go to Mexico for our junior year.”

If he’d not suggested studying at Mexico City College, I never would have become a Latin American specialist. I changed my major every semester my freshman and sophomore years. First it was English (gonna write a Great American Novel). Then psychology (gonna learn how minds work). Next art (gonna be an architect). And then, government (I forget why). Going to Mexico ended that uncertainty.

Soon as I returned for my senior year, I settled on international relations, with additional studies in Latin American history. I lucked out in having two terrific professors, Henry Cord Meyer and Michael Armacost, plus a fine visiting prof on Latin American history, Donald Bray. Then came Stanford University for an M.A. in Latin American studies, plus a Ph.D. in political science.

Next, on to RAND in 1972 as an analyst on U.S.-Latin American relations, mostly regarding Mexico, Cuba and Central America, plus aspects of international terrorism.

Henry reoriented my career a second time when I visited him at home in Mount Baldy Village around 1975. As I was leaving, he waved Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock and urged me to read it. It forecast a world-changing information revolution. I suddenly wanted to work on its global implications for political and security matters.

It took me 10 years to re-educate myself and make the transition, but I finally came up with results: a paper predicting the rise of a new form of government—I called it cyberocracy—that would redefine technocracy and democracy. Accordingly, the information revolution would favor network forms of organization, making them more attractive than hierarchies as a way to get stuff done. We would live in a world of networks versus nations.

Soon after the publication of the paper in 1991, a new colleague walked into my office and declared, “David, I have a single word for you: cyberwar.” Thus began a collaboration in which we formulated new concepts for rethinking the entire future conflict spectrum with terms like cyberwar, netwar and swarming (coordinated, networked strikes from multiple directions).

Plus, I got to meet Toffler, who wrote a foreword for one of our volumes.

Late in the 1990s, we worked on broader implications for statecraft. The information age will mean that “whose story wins” becomes almost as decisive as “whose weaponry wins.” The importance of “soft power”—e.g., narrative strategy, cognitive warfare—will grow relative to the traditional importance of “hard power.” But how to express that? Hard-power strategists had their classic realpolitik concept; soft-power strategists had nothing comparable.

So we turned to a century-old scientific vision whereby Earth first evolved a geological layer, the geosphere, then eons later a biosphere full of plant and animal life, including people. In this vision first proposed in the 1920s, a third layer would emerge next: the noosphere (from the Greek root “noos” meaning “mind”)—a globe-circling “thinking circuit” that would interconnect all cultures, religions, ideologies and mentalities, thus enabling higher levels of global cooperation, but also conflict.

We saw it was already taking shape, with immense implications for strategy. So we came up with a comprehensive new soft-power concept: noopolitik as an alternative to realpolitik—and later added noopolitics as a contrast to geopolitics. All this is playing out now in the fights over Ukraine and Gaza, where both noopolitical and geopolitical maneuvering are vigorously in play.

Meanwhile, while wondering what forms of organization besides networks were important, I unearthed a new framework about past, present and future social evolution. Accordingly, societies have relied across the ages on four cardinal forms of organization: tribes, hierarchical institutions, markets and information-age networks—in that order. This framework proved immediately useful, not only to forecast cyberwar and netwar as modes of conflict, but also to herald new modes of collaboration and coordination for those such as activists in non-government organizations working on human rights, environmental and other social problems.

I wanted to finish this framework at RAND but opted to retire in 2008 and continue at home. Here’s one implication I’m still trying to write up: For 200 years, our society has had three major realms: civil society, government, the economy. In the decades ahead, a fourth—a “commons sector”?—will slowly materialize around the network form. It will become the new home for those interconnected challenges that the existing three sectors no longer handle very well, such as health, education, welfare, the environment. They will all move, and be moved, into this next realm, vastly strengthening and improving our society.

My classmate Henry Bastien and I remain great friends, with keen memories of Pomona’s value to our lives. And in keeping with Pomona College Magazine’s most recent issue, I’m sure Pomona’s emphasis on liberal arts educated me to have sufficient flexibility and adaptability to refocus my career. But I better be careful around Henry now—I’m not sure I could handle a third shift at this point in life.

A Dozen Final Fours

Melissa Barlow ’87

Melissa Barlow ’87

Melissa Barlow ’87 was selected to the officiating crew for the NCAA women’s basketball Final Four for the 12th time in her career this past season. She called the semifinal game between eventual national champion South Carolina and North Carolina State.

Barlow has officiated on the floor in 11 Final Four games and worked as the alternate at the scorer’s table one other time. She was the senior official of the 11-person Final Four crew for the most-watched women’s Final Four in history, with viewers drawn by Iowa star Caitlin Clark and South Carolina’s undefeated season.

Mindful of staying in sports officiating when she no longer wants to run up and down the court for the better part of an hour, Barlow has now trained as an NCAA football replay official who works from the booth. This football season, she’ll work in the role of communicator in the booth in the Big Ten Conference after wrapping up last season on the crew for the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York.

‘Coach Bud’ Moves West

Mike Budenholzer at a press conference. Courtesy of Phoenix Suns.

Mike Budenholzer at a press conference. Courtesy of Phoenix Suns.

Mike Budenholzer ’92 grew emotional as he returned to his native Arizona in May and was introduced as the new coach of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns with family members and friends from his hometown of Holbrook on hand.

“My dad, Vince Budenholzer, 94 years old, sitting here in the front row. We call him the original Coach Bud, ’71 state championship with my brother Jim,” Budenholzer said at his first news conference. “I love you, Dad.”

Budenholzer, who won the 2021 NBA title as coach of the Milwaukee Bucks and twice has been chosen NBA Coach of the Year, grew up following the Suns.

“I don’t know what the word is, surreal or wild,” said Budenholzer, who reminisced about past players including Alvan Adams, Walter Davis and Paul Westphal and “my dad taking me in the backyard and teaching me Paul Westphal, reverse pivot into a pump fake into a step-through.”

At Pomona, Budenholzer was a four-year player and senior co-captain of the Sagehens basketball team and also played golf, while majoring in philosophy, politics and economics. Though he didn’t play for former coach Gregg Popovich at Pomona-Pitzer, he spent 19 years working for Popovich with the San Antonio Spurs, first as a video assistant and then for 17 seasons as an assistant coach, helping the Spurs to four NBA titles.

He’ll be trying to get the Suns, led by Devin Booker, Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal, to the NBA title he helped deny the Suns in the 2021 Finals.

“I can’t wait to get to work,” he said.

Hidden History

Four years after graduating, Michael Waters ’20 has published his first book, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports. Released in June ahead of the 2024 Olympics this summer in Paris, Waters’ book tells the story of early trans athletes and the roots of sex testing of athletes in the 1930s.

In 2021, Waters’ senior history thesis at Pomona about placements of queer youth with queer foster parents in New York City in the 1970s was adapted and published in The New Yorker. Since graduating, he has contributed numerous articles to publications including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, WIRED, Vox and The New York Times.

Pomona College Magazine’s Lorraine Wu Harry ’97 talked to Waters about the book as well as his development as a historian and journalist. Answers have been edited for clarity and length.

PCM: How did Pomona train you as a student of history?

Waters: Professors in the History Department taught me the potential of discovery in the past. There are so many stories of marginalized communities out there. They are just harder to find in traditional archives. But there’s a way of doing history where you read against the grain and you look for what’s not there.

What fascinates me about queer history is finding pockets of queer community in these spaces and in these eras before we would expect them. I want to try to scramble this idea of queer history as a linear story of progress. Queer history has never been linear. There are so many surprising examples of acceptance and celebrity and community that existed before World War II, before traditional narratives of queer history, before Stonewall. My work is about finding those lost communities. Where was community, where were queer people coming together and what does that say about us today?

Often what I do is I look through newspaper archives. I like to do search terms related to gender and sexuality and filter for certain eras to see what comes up. There are often stories in those newspaper archives that haven’t bubbled to the popular consciousness today but that were a big thing at the time.

PCM: How did you conduct research for this book?

Waters: It was hard in many ways, but one really lucky thing was finding a short memoir that Zdeněk Koubek, the main Czech athlete in the book, wrote in 1936 in a Czech magazine. It was this rich, 40,000-word manuscript about his life. That solved what would have been potentially insurmountable archival problems, because a lot of his story is otherwise not well-documented.

A lot of the book pulls from different newspaper records, too. For the Olympics, I went to the International Olympic Committee archive and went through some of their 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s correspondence files. Avery Brundage, who’s a big part of the book—he’s an American IOC official—has this huge archive in Illinois, where he saved literally everything, it seems.

To make a book, especially a nonfiction book, sellable, there’s so much luck involved when it comes to sourcing. I couldn’t have done this book if it wasn’t for that source from Koubek’s life. Everything kind of came together after that.

PCM: How did you learn to write so well?

Waters: I hope that’s true. I’ve been writing magazine-type stories for a while now, which is very different from writing a book, obviously. But that muscle was helpful in this process. I started freelancing originally for Atlas Obscura, which is a website that chronicles historical oddities. I started writing for them in 2016. I emailed an editor out of the blue with an idea. That was between high school and college. I’ve been doing something along those lines in my free time ever since. It makes it easier to figure out how to tell history in a compelling way, I hope.

PCM: Were there any things that surprised you as you wrote this book?

Waters: When I first started doing this research, I was surprised how American media received the news of these athletes transitioning gender. When you read those articles from the 1930s, there’s a real sense of curiosity about them and how one could move between different categories of what we would call gender today. Certainly, there were some skeptical stories that existed, and there were others that were quite sensationalist. But even through that, there is this real sense of interest and fascination and, in many cases, acceptance. People accepted that there’s a lot we don’t understand about how gender works, how the body works. There were op-eds from doctors that would say, “This is actually quite normal.” It’s especially illuminating when, by contrast, you look at all of the transphobic coverage in newspapers today.

PCM: What impact do you hope your book will have?

Waters: When it comes to sports today, I hope that the book provides context for the anti-trans and anti-intersex policies that exist at the Olympics. The big thing for me is to show the influence of fascist ideology on these policies. Tracing that history lets us see how Nazi-aligned sports officials originally rammed these policies through. These policies were flawed from the beginning, and that tells us something about them today. We can also see alternate pathways for how sports could have included people of many different genders, if officials had just been willing to have that conversation.

I also hope that the book inspires more researchers to look into queer life in the early 20th century, because there were so many incredible stories that I came across about queer community and gender transition in this era. I hope to bring some extra attention to these stories of real people that have been lost, and then let other researchers take the mantle. I don’t want to have the final word, especially on a story as significant as Koubek’s. But that takes researchers and that takes institutions being willing to fund this research.

Three Pomona Alumni Publish Their First Novels

Patience and persistence. A little bit of luck. And the mentorship of novelist Jonathan Lethem, the Roy Edward Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College. These factors helped three Pomona alumni publish their first novels last year.

Francesca Capossela ’18, David Connor ’15 and Julius Taranto ’12, along with Tyriek White PZ ’13, convened on Pomona’s campus last spring for an event organized by the English Department that featured the four first-time novelists.

Francesca Capossela ’18

Capossela’s book Trouble the Living, set in the 1990s in Northern Ireland and the 2010s in a Los Angeles suburb, follows a mother and daughter as they confront the past while navigating their relationship with each other in the present.

Capossela knew she wanted the mother in the story to be from a different place than the daughter, hence Northern Ireland as one of the settings. Many years later, the mother raises her daughter in a Southern California town with several colleges—“basically Claremont,” says Capossela.

It often feels surreal to see physical copies of her novel on bookstore shelves, Capossela says. She’s learning how to pause and celebrate the accomplishment.

David Connor ’15

To introduce Connor’s book Oh God, the Sun Goes, Brian Evenson, faculty at California Institute of the Arts, said, “The premise is simple and absurd: The sun has disappeared, and no one knows why.

“It’s the kind of work that only David could write,” Evenson added.

At Pomona, Connor majored in neuroscience and minored in computer science. He also took a fair number of creative writing classes, which he says “without hyperbole, are some of the best I’ve been in.”

With an interest in the mind, consciousness and human experience, he says, “As time went on, I discovered that language was a much more malleable way to approach those questions than the scientific method for me.”

Julius Taranto ’12

Taranto’s novel How I Won a Nobel Prize is set on a college campus: one founded by a libertarian billionaire as a safe haven for canceled scholars and located on an island off the coast of Connecticut.

When Taranto arrived at Pomona, he thought he might major in economics or philosophy. But taking a class on James Joyce made him want to “keep coming back for more.” As his interest in economics started to wane, he discovered that he loved working with the faculty in the English Department.

After graduating, Taranto attended Yale Law School and practiced law for five years.

How I Won a Nobel Prize was named one of the best books of the year by Vogue and Vox.

Orientation Book

If you’d like to read along with the Class of 2028 and other Sagehens arriving on campus this fall, join them in checking out this year’s Orientation Book, Afterparties, a collection of short stories by young Cambodian American writer Anthony Veasna So that was published posthumously in 2021.

Diane Nguyen ’27, the first-year class president, helped make the selection, writing in a letter to incoming Sagehens, “I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, even though I admittedly squeezed it in during finals week!”

The stories “adeptly mix lighthearted moments with significant reflections on themes such as race, sexuality, friendship and family—each narrative underlined by the historical echoes of the Khmer Rouge past,” she wrote to future students.

The book was selected by a committee led by Colleen Rosenfeld, associate professor of English, that included professors, Associate Dean of Students Josh Eisenberg and Nguyen.