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FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2017
Making Politics Personal: Portantino Tells PZ Students About His Journey to State Senate
Adela Pfaff • The Student Life
California State Sen. Anthony Portantino (D-La Cañada Flintridge) addresses a group of students at Pitzer College on Oct. 27 as part of the Mindful of the Future series. Portantino, Claremont’s representative, backed a bill that would require public schools to start after 8:30 a.m..
Pitzer Senior Running for Hometown Houston School Board Helena Ong Every week, Carlos Perrett PZ ‘18 flies to Houston, Texas, to campaign for his home city’s Independent School District board. Perrett, who is double majoring in political science and Spanish, is vying for a spot as the District III representative. Although he finds coursework manageable, there is no time to rest, he said. The time he spends in Houston is focused on campaigning, so he does homework on flights. “I’ve been involved in politics for quite a while now. I think if anything, it has helped me understand the perspective of the candidate and how much your life is pulled around,” Perrett said. “In many ways I think that I’m so used to this sleep deprivation because I experience it so much here at the Claremont Colleges.” Perrett said his decision to run for school board is based on the need for a fresh perspective. “There is a need for new and innovative leadership for someone who isn’t tied to any political groups, isn’t tied to any company, someone simply has an interest in the students, the educators, and the parents,” he said. “I’ve been a leader for my community, I’ve been outspoken for District III, I am a recent graduate, I continuously work with students, I know the system well, and I‘ve had conversations about initiatives that we’ve spent millions of dollars on that haven’t worked.” As the youngest candidate, Perrett said he is often asked about his age working against him in the campaign. “I’m tired of this narrative that [those with] the most experience are the great leaders. Experience doesn’t translate into leadership,” Perrett said. “I met with students, parents, educators and came to the conclusion that we have a cyclical problem ongoing in the district for the last 15 to 20 years,
and we concluded there was this need for young and innovative leadership.” As a graduate of Chavez High School within the Houston Independent School District, Perrett is familiar with local students’ experiences. “The school had been labeled a dropout factory, so as a prospective student I was so scared that I was going to drop out,” Perrett said, recalling his freshman year of high school. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan met with administrators and teachers to discuss the creation of Chavez Prep, an academy within the school that provided high-achieving students a space for better educational resources. “For the first time students were passing the AP exam, performing well on the ACT and SAT,” Perrett said. “So we saw that it was successful, but it was things going unnoticed by the school board.” Since 2010, Perrett has been involved with conversations about student education and played a role in the EMERGE fellowship, which has become a successful college access group, sending students to more than 100 top-tier colleges. “When you provide students the opportunity, they will take advantage of it. But as long as you don’t give them that opportunity, they will continue to fail,” Perrett said. Perrett is also interested in parent involvement. “Educators value a parent’s voice,” he said, emphasizing the role of parental involvement in re-shaping policy-making within the schools. “A lot of parents are choosing to send their kids off to charter schools when our tradition of public schools have the capacity
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VOL. CXXX NO. 8
Students Criticize Dining Hall ID Policies as “Restrictive” Karen Song & Marc Rod The Malott Commons at Scripps College will now require students who not have their student ID card with them to present an alternative form of identification in order to enter, Malott general manager Tom Adkins announced in an email to the student body on Monday. Previously, students without an ID were able to enter Malott by providing only their ID number. The change was made in response to people using other students’ ID numbers from lost or stolen ID cards to access Malott, Adkins wrote in the email. “We have had three or four students report to us that they either lost their card or it was taken and then used at dining halls for meals and board plus dollars,” Adkins added in a statement to TSL. Adkins emphasized that the new ID requirements do not require students to present a government-issued photo ID. “For ID we could even take something on their phone with their name on it or a letter with their name on it – we just need some way to match their name to what comes up on the screen for the cashier for the number entered,” he wrote in a later statement. “Or they could even get something from the Dean of Students office with verification of their name.”
Meanwhile, students at Pitzer College are petitioning for changes to Pitzer’s policies after a student was denied access to McConnell Dining Hall because she did not have her physical ID card, despite offering to provide her ID number. Pitzer requires students to present their IDs to access the dining halls and has been enforcing the policy more strictly this year than in the past. “When school started this year, a sign was posted at the register reminding students that student ID cards were necessary to swipe in,” Cynthia Bennington, the general manager of McConnell, wrote in an email to TSL. “This is not a new policy. The perception may be that the policy has changed because the team is being more proactive with enforcement of a policy that was already in existence.” The Pitzer petition has now gained over 40 signatures. The student who started it did not respond to TSL’s requests for comment. Sydney Levine PZ ‘18 signed the petition because she has been turned away from McConnell multiple times for ID issues. “I have been personally denied entry and had to scrounge for dinner multiple times, which is honestly really scary for me,” she wrote in an email to TSL. “I’ve also received a lot of attitude from staff when I asked if I could please use my state ID and
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Students, Staff Advocate for Undocumented in City of Pomona Henry Easton-Koehler A coalition called ICE out of Pomona will soon petition the Pomona City Council to protect undocumented immigrants, and 5C student activists are among its members. The coalition hopes to convince the council at its Nov. 6 meeting to consider an ordinance, which would demand that local law enforcement abstains from cooperating with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities, at its subsequent Nov. 21 meeting. This past week, members of the coalition met with Pomona Mayor Tim Sandoval and an attorney from the city of Pomona to discuss the ordinance. According to Tascha Shahriari-Parsa PO ‘18, a member of the coalition, many of the city council members have vowed to support the coalition’s efforts. “The mayor himself is in support of the campaign, and there are a lot of city council members who are in support,” Shahriari-Parsa said. “We’ve been trying to show the ones who are still on the fence that their community wants this to pass.”
The ordinance claims to bring Pomona’s policies in line with SB54, a recent bill authored by state Sen. President Pro Tem Kevin De León PZ ’03. The bill, which was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in October and will take effect on Jan. 1 of next year, bans the use of state and local police as immigration agents and prevents law officials in California from inquiring about an individual’s immigration status. Coalition member Grace Reckers SC ’18 said that although the state legislation is encouraging, local laws are needed to strengthen the state law and tailor it to the demands of the community. “While SB54 is a major step in securing immigrant rights in the state of California, it will operate on a much slower timeline than local ordinances and therefore has inherently less capacity for enforcement,” Reckers said. “Local policies like the ordinance in Pomona will ensure that these standards are implemented and enforced based on the terms of the people who need it in the city itself.” There have been two incidents in the past year where the Pomona Police Department has worked with
HMC Pres Criticizes School’s Exclusion from Ranking Adrián Suárez del Busto Harvey Mudd College President Maria Klawe wrote a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 17 protesting the exclusion of HMC and other small colleges from the new Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings. HMC is not considered in the WSJ/THE Rankings because it has 844 enrolled students, and the rankings only consider institutions with at least 1,000 enrolled students. The ranking may consider
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small colleges if their faculty published 1,000 scholarly papers in the previous five years and 150 each year, but HMC’s highest number of publications in a year was 122, according to Klawe. “For a liberal arts college, that’s a really insane expectation,” she said in an interview with TSL. Klawe’s letter to the editor was co-signed by the presidents of Wabash College, Agnes Scott College, St. John’s College, and Bennington College, which have all been excluded from their small
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federal law enforcement agencies to detain undocumented residents, according to Benjamin Wood, a community organizer for the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center who is involved with the ICE out of Pomona coalition. “Pomona has been much better than other cities in not cooperating with federal agencies to go after undocumented people,” Wood said. “But it’s still important that we set an example for other cities who need these policies more than we do. We’ve talked to elected officials in other places about passing something like this and they always ask us if there are other cities passing these policies.” According to Wood, some city employees have pushed for the coalition to change the ordinance to a resolution, similar to the Claremont city council’s resolution that pledges to continue its practice of “not enforcing federal immigration,” but members of the coalition think this would weaken the legislation. “An ordinance would force city employees to be legally liable if they cooperated with ICE,” Wood said. “We really want this thing to have some teeth.”
The coalition is also considering whether to include sanctuary city language in the ordinance. Although SB54 is commonly referred to as “sanctuary state” policy, the word sanctuary doesn’t actually show up in the bill. At a planning meeting for ICE out of Pomona on Oct. 30, some members argued that to avoid repercussions from the Trump administration, such as withholding federal funds or increasing the presence of ICE officers in certain areas, cities should abstain from using sanctuary city language. Others think the term connects the movement to the sanctuary movements of the 1980s, when church groups came into conflict with the Reagan administration over offering asylum to Central Americans fleeing from United States-backed military governments. “Personally, I like the sanctuary city language because it gives the ordinance roots in a historical legacy,” Wood said. “The language speaks to the moral underpinning of why we want to enact this policy. At the end of the day, though, it doesn’t matter as long as it is protecting people in the community.”
PZ Senate President To Step Down Temporarily Liam Brooks After sustaining a concussion last week, Pitzer College Student Senate President Hajar Hammado PZ ‘18 is stepping down from the office for an undetermined amount of time, she announced in a campus-wide email on Wednesday. “Having previously dealt with a concussion, I recognize the importance of taking the necessary time to fully recuperate before fully returning to critical responsibilities,” Hammado wrote. When Hammado formally yields the office, the executive board line of succession would hand the presidency to current Vice President Lora McManus PZ ‘18, according to the Senate Constitution. Hammado did
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not specify if and when this would occur, but told TSL that the executive board was “determining a timeline for implementation.” While Hammado did not mention McManus by name, she wrote that the executive board has been meeting to “discuss solutions for this interim period.” “I have full confidence that they will put forth an effective, transparent, and responsible method to ensure operations continue smoothly as expected,” she wrote. Following her formal yielding of the office, Hammado will continue to meet informally with the executive board and other student leaders, she wrote. This is a developing story, and will be updated as more information becomes available.
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NOVEMBER 3, 2017
THE STUDENT LIFE
CMC Professor, Trustee Both Awarded Order of ID: PZ Students Petition the Aztec Eagle, Mexico’s Top Honor for Foreigners for More Lenient Policies Bryce Wachtell Last month, two Claremont McKenna College connected scholars, one Board of Trustees member and one professor, were awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle, Mexico’s highest honor for foreigners. David Dreier CM ‘75 is a former United States congressman and member of the Board of Trustees for the college. Roderic Camp is an academic, scholar, author of dozens of books on Mexico in both English and Spanish, and a professor of government at CMC. The annual award honors a small number of foreigners for their exceptional contributions to Mexico and is given by the Office of the Foreign Minister at the direction of an established committee and the approval of the President of Mexico. Past recipients include Queen Elizabeth II, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nelson Mandela, Walt Disney, Bono, and Bill Gates. “The Order of the Aztec Eagle is a big deal if you’re a foreigner because it is the highest award that the Mexican government can give to a non-Mexican,” Camp said. “I’ve never heard of two people getting this award at the same time from the same institution. We just became friends about a year ago.” C a m p , w h o g re w u p i n Southern California, credits his mother for inspiring his path towards studying Mexico. “She told me when I was in elementary school that I should take as much Spanish as I could, and she was absolutely right,” he said. By his sophomore year of college, he had determined that academia was his calling, and Mexican history and politics
his passion. “I’ve written books on intellectual life in Mexico, the educational system, political leadership, the relation between entrepreneurs and the state, and religion and politics; and I’ve written a number of biographical directories of Mexican leaders,” Camp said. His literature is widely circulated and cited in Mexican schools, academia, and politics, and Camp is regularly credited with fundamentally altering the academic and historical landscape of the country. Camp said, “I am just delighted to receive the award for what I did as a scholar and as a person who has devoted his whole career to Mexico. I’m just verging on five decades of teaching and I’m already at five decades of doing research on Mexico, so I am very honored to have this award.” Dreier made his first run for Congress at age 24 and spent the majority of his adult life serving in the House of Representatives. After graduating from CMC and attending Claremont Graduate University, he fell in love with California and the prospect of shaping the nation’s politics. One of Dreier’s key issues was free and fair trade, and for decades he was an advocate for the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other legislative issues like it. “In 1987, exactly thirty years ago, I introduced with two of my colleagues the first legislation that called for the elimination of tariff barriers among Canada, the United States and Mexico,” Dreier said. That legislation, he said, “encouraged a greater degree of political pluralism and economic openness that had not previously existed in Mexico, and that lead to a greater opportunity for political engagement and free and fair
elections.” Today, Dreier is deeply troubled by the Trump Administration’s legislative agenda on trade. “If we, the United States of America, don’t shape the global economy, then we will be shaped by it,” he said. Defending the legacy of his legislative accomplishments, he said, “The North American Free Trade Agreement not only has led to tremendous commercial relations, but the sociopolitical and geopolitical ramifications have been very positive.” Last month, Dreier and Camp were honored together at the
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Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles. Camp described the festivities as “animated.” On winning it alongside someone who happens to have close ties to CMC, Camp said, “For this to happen at the same time is very astonishing. David was as surprised as I was; I think that’s unique.” This certainly isn’t the last the two will see each other. Next week, Camp and Dreier will serve as panelists alongside Carlos García de Alba, the Consul General of Mexico in Los Angeles, on a discussion of NAFTA’s endangerment.
Flex in, and provide my student ID number. I’ve been ordered to ‘bring [my] ID next time’ and have seen others get treated really poorly for ID issues too.” Sophia Montano PZ ‘19, another signatory, believes that the ID policy is unnecessarily onerous. “Because the prices are so high, food shouldn’t be restricted to us,” Montano wrote in an email to TSL. “If the school is going to insist that our eating schedules, and consequently our life schedules revolve around their strict dining hall schedule, then we should at least be allowed to use our ID number to access the food we already paid for.” Stephanie Cekov PZ ‘18 agrees. She signed the petition because her friend had experienced a similar problem while getting a meal. She said the policy is strict, and has put students in uncomfortable situations. “I think denying people access to food even when they have evidence that they have paid for a meal plan is wrong,” Cekov wrote in an email to TSL. “We need to eat and we’ve paid to eat.” Bennington is aware that students are unhappy with the enhanced enforcement of ID policies and encourages students to speak to dining managers about their concerns, she wrote in her email to TSL. “I don’t believe anyone has the intention of creating an unhappy situation,” she wrote. “If a student has a concern about any of our policies, we ask that they come speak with a manager so that we have the opportunity to share more information about why a policy is in place.” However, dining hall ID concerns are not isolated to Malott and McConnell. Students report difficulties accessing dining halls without their student ID cards across the 5Cs. “I’ve been denied entry at Pitzer and Frary even with a driver’s
Photo courtesy of Claremont McKenna College
Ambassador Carlos Sada presents the Order of the Aztec Eagle to CMC Government Prof. Roderic Camp.
BOARD: Perrett Interested in Student, Parent Involvement
license, after explaining that there is a grace period after you lose your ID in which you have to wait to see if it’s found before you shelve out money for a new one,” Julia McCartan SC ‘21 wrote in a message to TSL. McCartan recently lost her ID and was unable to replace it for several weeks due to the grace period. Pomona’s dining halls should not have turned students like McCartan away, Patti Weaver, Pomona’s general manager of dining services, wrote in an email to TSL. “It would be my expectation that the manager on duty would inform the student to make sure to go and get a replacement ID as soon as possible but to allow the student to come in and eat,” she wrote. The incident McCartan described is a violation of Pomona dining hall policy, Weaver added. “Our policy is to never turn a student away regardless of the circumstance,” she wrote. “We should be allowing the student access to the dining hall while we figure out how to account for the meal on our end. I am troubled to hear that this was not followed and negatively affected a student.” Weaver said she would be meeting with her managers to discuss the issue and pledged to re-train staff on the proper procedures for when students have lost their IDs. Harvey Mudd College’s policies are similar to the newly enacted ones at Scripps. “It is required for students to present their ID meal card every time they swipe for a meal,” wrote Miguel Ruvalcaba, general manager of dining services at Hoch-Shanahan Dining Commons, in an email to TSL. “Occasionally if a student misplaces or doesn’t have his or her ID, we allowed them to give us their student number with a proof of some kind of picture ID.” Claremont McKenna College also requires students to present their student ID to access Collins Dining Hall, Joanne Young, CMC’s executive director of public affairs and communications, wrote in an email to TSL.
Continued from Page 1 to do what charter schools are doing,” he said. According to Perrett, schools within the district have closed down, largely affecting communities of color. “When you ignore an issue, it’s not going to get better on its own. It’s simply going to get worse,” Perrett said. The election takes place on Nov. 7. Even if he doesn’t win, Perrett is “excited to work with the future board member.” “What I’ve seen on the campaign trail is an even bigger passion of politics, and even bigger passion for political social change,” he said.
Adela Pfaff • The Student Life Adela Pfaff • The Student Life
Carlos Perrett PZ ’18 smiles for the camera in front of West Hall.
WSJ: Rankings Not Main Factor in Students’ Decisions Continued from Page 1 enrollment numbers. “[We] worry that your exclusion from The Wall Street Journal/ Times Higher Education College Rankings of some of the most outstanding small colleges in the country … does a disservice to your readers and to the very students and parents you are attempting to help,” the letter reads. The letter praises the educational experience offered at these small colleges and argues that their reduced size plays a key role in it. “With their small student-tofaculty ratios, our colleges are focused primarily on providing the highest quality teaching for undergraduates,” the letter says. “In many cases, colleges like ours have made conscious choices to remain small to better serve our students and our missions.” Klawe believes THE, the London-based publication that determined the methodology for the ranking, may have assumed there were no relevant small colleges because of their lack of familiarity with the U.S. college system. “Maybe they were unaware of the fact that there are some very highly regarded colleges with a smaller student population. … They probably didn’t know the U.S. higher education landscape well enough to realize it because they’re based in Britain,” she said. HMC ranks 18th in Forbes’ America’s Best Colleges Ranking and 12th in U.S. News’ Best Liberal Arts Colleges Ranking. “Realistically, it’s not that big a deal that we’re not ranked by the ranking,” she said. High rankings, particularly in terms of post-graduation earnings, give assurance to families who may be dissuaded from enrolling their children in HMC due to its costs of attendance, the highest of any college in the country, Klawe said.
Students entering McConnell dining hall for breakfast tap their ID and “swipe in,” either using Flex, Claremont Cash, or their meal plan.
“The fact that payscale ranks us so highly is very helpful in terms of families thinking whether [HMC] is worth the investment or not,” she said. But however useful rankings may be, Klawe believes they should not determine the college’s policies. “We’re happy we’re highly ranked, but what we’re trying to do is to create the best science and engineering education on the planet,” she said. “What an external group thinks is important won’t change our practices if we don’t think it helps our educational outcomes.” The other 5Cs are all included in the WSJ/THE ranking, but they fare worse than in other rankings. Pomona College is 26th, Claremont McKenna College 35th, Scripps College 93rd, and Pitzer College 115th. Many students at HMC do not think rankings are not a central tool for choosing a college. “I didn’t really look at rankings when looking for [college] options,” Andrea Vasquez HM ‘18 said. “I didn’t even know that HMC had the highest return of investment or anything like that until I had already accepted to come here.” Vasquez said her visits to campus were her central motivation to enroll, but she understand others may depend more on rankings. “For me, the most important factor when deciding to come here was speaking to people and figuring out what the community was like when I visited for different events that are held for pre-frosh,” she said. “But I know [rankings] can be important to some people because I know a few friends of mine who came here specifically because it was ranked highest in [return on investment].” Other students considered rankings when scouting colleges, but not for their final decision. “Rankings maybe limited the
pool of colleges I would consider, but when I looked more in depth they had less of an impact,” Shayan Akmal HM ’19 said. Last semester, students protested Mudd’s burdensome curriculum and argued the school lacked mental health resources and support for women and minorities. In part, these protests were fueled by comments from faculty cited in a leaked external report evaluating HMC’s curriculum, which argued that efforts to include women and minorities in the college were hindering the college’s excellence. “There was a lot of dialogue and a lot of claims made last semester, but I don’t think the data supports it,” Klawe said in reference to HMC’s recent evaluation of different groups’ performance in core courses. Klawe said HMC is now prioritizing inclusion and student health, and not college rankings. “What we’re really immersed in right now is, given that we have a very diverse student body and increasingly diverse faculty, let’s explore what it means to have a community that is truly inclusive,” she said. “We’re trying to figure how to teach so everyone learns.” Klawe highlighted changes to the introductory engineering course as an example of HMC’s innovative approach to inclusion. After laboratory exercises and teamwork were given more importance in the curriculum, the difference between women’s and men’s performance seen in the previous 20 years disappeared, and performance improved overall. “If [HMC] makes their education accessible to people of different backgrounds, they’re staying true to their mission statement of educating for social impact,” Vasquez said.
Senate Briefs Scripps Associated Students The SAS Executive Board Meeting began with updates. First-year president Julia Kelly SC ‘21 planned several events for the class, including a baking event. Leta Ames SC ‘18 reported that the first Sustainability Committee had occurred and that the committee was hoping to make sustainability a part of the President Tieden’s five-year plan. Treasurers Grace Wang and Romanshi Gupta SC ‘19 reported an increased number of funding requests from SAS and encouraged others to apply. Diversity and Inclusivity Chair Abby Clarke wrote to the board that she wants to plan an event with career planning and resources that focuses on opportunities for students of minority identities. Executive Vice President Irene Yi requested that SAS approve an increase of $154 for the Office of the Executive Vice President in proportion to the 1.5% of the budget that the office has received in the past. The board approved the increase 130-2. Yi and President Kelly Peng SC ‘18 abstained. The Scripps College Senate also had its first meeting. The Senate highlighted its areas of priority such as sustainability, mental health resources, POC spaces, and academic resources. –Sam Norrito SC ‘21 Associated Students of Claremont McKenna The meeting opened with a presentation from President Pro Tempore Thomas Schalke ‘18 on proposed changes to the Constitution, including adding a Non-Discrimination Clause; adding a 50%+1 majority vote and defining abstentions; giv-
ing the Clubs and Organizations Chair a vote on the Executive Board; fixing numbering issues; and making all email chains public in Senate minutes, with a provision to make them private via a vote. Some senators disputed the provision regarding email publicity, and the Senate discussed the issue. Ultimately, Schalke changed the wording of the proposed clause allow the Executive Board to block the publication of email chains by a majority vote. The changes will be discussed further at the Executive Board meeting Sunday. –Marc Rod PO’20 Pitzer College Student Senate Pitzer College Student Senate met on Sunday to discuss a recently completed Title IX Audit and several pieces of legislation, including two proposed constitutional amendments. Pitzer Title IX Coordinator Corinne Vorenkamp and Senate Vice President Lora McManus PZ ‘18 presented on the audit by skipping to the fourth of five slides in the presentation, a summary of the findings. Several senators asked about specific plans moving forward from the audit. Vorenkamp said she would “very much love [student] leadership” on the matter, and encouraged students to call for a special College Council meeting to discuss concrete action. During open forum, Senator Isaiah Kramer PZ ‘20 called for more relaxed rationing of free toilet paper. “Recently, I was able to gather entire bags full of toilet paper to feed my eight suitemates, and when I came back I could only take two,” he said. Senator Donnie TC Denome PZ
‘20 added that it would be helpful if toilet paper was available in locations other than the housing office, especially for students who may have health and mobility issues. During weekly reports, Senator Simone Bishara PZ ‘18 questioned McManus’s report on the upcoming Israel/Palestine town hall, which was re-designated as a “listening session” for a newly formed working group. McManus identified Associate Dean of Students for Campus Life Dan Hirsch with encouraging this decision, which resulted in an audible murmur from the Senate body. New business included the introduction of resolution 54-R03, which would scale the financial aid budget in proportion to donations. Next introduced was bill 54B-05, which would appropriate about $6,000 to pay for delayed 2016-17 reimbursements. Proposed amendments included 54-A-01, which would move student-body-wide votes on constitutional amendments to the same ballots as elections for representatives; amendment 54A-02, which would loosen membership requirements for student organizations; and amendment 54-A-03, which would restructure judicial council to better empower it with constitutional review similar to the U.S. Supreme Court. Also introduced were bills 54-B-06, which would pay for a new ice machine for the Grove House, and 54-B-07, which would ban the use of student activities fees to purchase shopping bags, and invest in 75 shared reusable bags instead. –Liam Brooks PZ’18
NEWS NOVEMBER 3, 2017
THE STUDENT LIFE
Claremont’s State Senator Encourages Indigenous Activist Shares Personal PZ Students to Get Politically Involved Experiences at Scripps Jojo Sanders
Twenty years ago, Anthony Portantino read in his local paper that his hometown’s next elections would not be held because no one was running. “Next time there’s an election, I’m going to run just so we have an election,” Portantino recalled thinking. Portantino ran for city council the following year and lost by just two votes. But after a successful city council bid the next year, Portantino was elected first to the state assembly and then to the state senate. Portantino, now Sen. Portantino (D-La Cañada Flintridge), visited Pitzer College on Oct. 27 as part of the Pitzer Student Senate’s Mind-
ful of the Future series. About eight people attended. Portantino, who represents Claremont in the California State Senate, started the event by explaining how he got involved with politics. “One of the reasons I work so hard now is that I truly understand that every vote matters,” he said. Portantino is passionate about creating legislation to enforce a late start for California public schools. His goal is for schools to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m. because he said extensive research has shown that later starts to improve many aspects of the academic lives and health of high school students, including test scores, attendance, and sports participation. Portantino said there is no evidence that later starts in high schools would
be costly. He created a bill that called for later starts in schools, which passed in the state senate but received pushback in the assembly. Portantino has also received criticism from school districts who don’t want late start to be implemented. “My biggest frustration on this issue is people who are putting adult concerns over the interests of the kids,” he said. Portantino said he does “a little bit of everything” and told TSL he’s also invested in environmental issues. He believes there needs to be nonpartisan discussion before any change can be enacted. “There used to be discourse about what’s in the best interest of our society and it wasn’t partisan,”
he said. “Now climate change has become a litmus test. … It’s become partisan.” If students are interested in politics, Portantino said, they should pursue their passion. “Don’t be afraid to start small,” he said. He advised students to think bold. “Roll up your sleeves and get involved in a campaign, a cause, a public policy area you care about,” Portantino said. “This is the time to do it.” Some of Portantino’s work has directly impacted the 5Cs. For instance, the senator opposed a recent proposal to cut Cal Grants for private schools. Instead, Cal Grants were raised by $2,000 this fiscal year.
Yijie Wang Andrea Ixchiu Hernandez, a K’iche activist, journalist, and filmmaker, shared her personal stories about filmmaking, the definition of communitarian communication and her participation in communities in a lecture at Humanities Auditorium at Scripps College last Thursday, Oct. 26. At the beginning of the lecture, Hernandez defined the term “communitarian communication” – the process of the social and political communication that involves participation, communal interactions, and social movements. One key network that Hernandez has produced involves local movie producers and community media groups that have developed small actions in Guatemala. Hernandez has been a member of the Tz’ikin Network, a group focused on examining the potential and challenges of film and video in Guatemala. In Hernandez’s mind, birds are valued as guardians of energy and communicators among supernatural, heaven and the earth. As guardians, birds bring people freedom and consciousness, according to Hernandez. Red Tz’ikin are the organizers of the 13th international Festival of Cinema and Communication of the Indigenous People, or FicMayab’ for the years 2017 and 2018, according to the lecture brochure. This festival happened every two years in Latin America. The name of Red Tz’ikin was based on the idea that they want to spread “seeds” and share their stories with all the people around the world. Red Tz’ikin has already developed more than 500
projections, six video examples, 40 workshops, and 200 more people have received training. Further, they have gathered community members from both indigenous and non-indigenous communities. Beyond learning and adapting the tools and skills of the industry, Hernandez and her team are working to develop an independent methodology of storytelling itself. “The most important thing for us is not just how to use equipment, but how to tell the stories and what stories we want to tell,” Hernandez said in her lecture. Since 2015, Red Tz’ikin has started promoting itself and created its own TV channel. “This learning of making television in our own way and developing the methodologies to connect the communities has been a challenge for us to make different and new storytelling,” Hernandez said. Hernandez and her team are trying to create new narratives by working with indigenous and non-indigenous kids who are living in urban areas in Guatemala and hosting workshops in video production, both to empower them and give them practical skills for the job market. “Some of them are working now with organizations,” Hernandez commented in the lecture, “they have another option to have a job, when they are not capable to go to public schools, to universities, but now they are filmmakers.” “We have a political position. We don’t call ourselves neutral. We are in community, with community, from community.” said Hernandez. In 2002, the Board of Natural Resources selected Hernandez as the first woman president of the 48 Cantones in Totonicapan.
Zeke Wapner • The Student Life
Madeline Hauenstein (PZ ’18) laughs with California State Senator Anthony Portantino during his roundtable discussion for Pitzer’s “Mindful of the Future” speaker series.
Pass/No Credit Policies and Perceptions Vary Widely Among Claremont Colleges Daisy Ni As the deadline to change the grading basis of classes passed during the last few weeks, discussion regarding the pass/fail option has begun as students on different campuses consider their options. Each of the 5Cs have varying approaches to pass/fail; even the terminology differs from school to school, though the concept remains the same. The option is termed “pass/no credit” at Pomona College and Pitzer College, “pass/fail” at Harvey Mudd College and Scripps College, and “credit/no credit” at Claremont McKenna College. Scripps, Pitzer, and CMC limit students to one pass/fail option per semester. Scripps and CMC also limits students to a maximum of four pass/fail classes that can count toward graduation credits. At Pomona, first-years and sophomores are limited to three pass/no credit courses per year, while juniors and seniors may take unlimited pass/no credit options outside their major. A t P o mo n a , S c r i p p s , a n d Pitzer, first-year seminars or their equivalent cannot be taken for pass/no credit, though there have been debates about this among the faculty. Nigel Boyle, the vice president for academic affairs at Pitzer, said that when the grading basis for first-year seminars was voted on, “a majority [of the faculty] thought students would take the class more seriously if it was graded.” However, some faculty support a change to pass/no credit “so that students are encouraged to be less grade-focused,” Boyle said. Ace Elliott PZ ‘19 wrote in a message to TSL that she has felt supported by students and faculty when taking courses pass/ no credit. “I’d say that the culture at Pitzer is pretty reaffirming of students’ needs,” Elliott wrote. “I think there’s a positive culture around P/NC because everyone understands that we’re just people, not robotic machines. Sometimes you realize that you’re in too deep with a hard class, or sometimes you may be going through a hard time yourself, and people recognize those challenges as valid.” At Harvey Mudd, all firstyears are required to take their courses as pass/fail during their first semester. Harvey Mudd Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
Lori Bassman wrote in an email to TSL that this policy complements faculty’s attitude to “regularly encourage students to take a class pass/fail when they have that option.” After the first semester, however, students can only take one course pass/fail per semester, but only one of those courses per year can be from one department, Bassman wrote. Even then, the percentage of students who opt to take a course pass/fail in any given semester ranges from 15 to 20. “I definitely enjoyed pass/ fail,” Jessica Wang HM ‘18 wrote in a message to TSL. “I think I appreciated it the most when I looked at my transcript.” She said Harvey Mudd has a saying of “pass/fail frosh” to refer to the first-years’ manageable workload. Regarding different perception of pass/fail at the separate campuses, Wang speculated that perhaps Harvey Mudd students use the option frequently “be-
cause HMC students first of all realize how hard the classes are.” She also said frequency of use depends on one’s major. “Usually we take humanities pass/fail because everything else is a major requirement, so we kinda understand we are doing that so we can make more time for the ‘serious’ classes,” Wang wrote. In comparison, only about two percent of Pomona and Scripps students elect to take courses pass/no credit every semester. This occurs despite the lack of regulations around P/NC for upperclassmen at Pomona, which serve to encourage students to explore classes beyond their major once GEs are generally fulfilled. “In my own experience as a faculty member, I was relatively agnostic about the P/NC option because it simply did not come up often,” Audrey Bilger, the vice president for academic affairs at Pomona, wrote in an email to TSL. “Students tend to want grades.” Anais Gonzalez Nyberg PO ‘20
said there’s a social stigma at Pomona around pass/no credit. Gonzalez Nyberg said that “the perception is that if I pass/ no credit it means I’m failing my course. People see it as an excuse to not do the work.” As such, students may want to avoid being associated with a label. She explained that the small number of students who use the option turns others away, perpetuating a cycle. “People don’t do it enough here, and so people don’t talk about it enough,” she said. Gonzalez Nyberg encouraged open dialogue to increase comfort in using the pass/no credit option, and said “there are specific reasons why measures like these are in place.” Bilger also reaffirmed the value of the option. “I believe that having the option to take a course without being graded is important in a liberal arts college context,” Bilger wrote.
Corrections In the October 27 issue: A number of inaccuracies appeared in last week’s article “At CMC’s Sex Week, A Focus on Empathy and Pleasure.” The first speaker mentioned is named Mia Li, not Mia Lin, and is an educator as well as a sex worker. There was no ferris wheel at Thursday’s carnival, but there was a bouncy house. STI testing will be free for all CMC students during the month of November, not during the carnival. O.school provided speakers, not funding, to the event. The article did not properly reflect the Advocates’ comments on the level of support they received from the college. The online version has been updated. A graphic in last week’s article “Out of 50 Athenaeum Talks, Only 12 Women” incorrectly labeled data as being from spring 2017. Data from that period is not yet available. The online version has been updated.
TSL regrets these errors.
CRIME REPORT Below are selected crimes from Oct. 18 to Oct. 30. Between Oct. 11 and Oct. 18 a grand theft occurred at Claremont McKenna College’s Acre Baseball Field. The case is still open. On Oct. 19, a theft occurred at Collins Dining Hall. The case is open. On the afternoon of Oct. 20, a theft occurred at Pomona College’s Seaver Theater. No suspects have been arrested. On the night of Oct. 21, a theft occurred at Pomona’s Walker Hall. No arrests have been made. On Oct. 22, between 7:45 a.m. and 8 a.m., somebody graffitied Pomona’s Sontag Greek Theater and tampered with the fire alarm equipment. The case remains unsolved. Between Oct. 22 and 23, a bike was stolen from Scripps College’s Balch Hall. The case is open. At 10:15 p.m. on Oct. 23, a trespasser was arrested at Pomona’s Walker Hall after an incident of indecent exposure. No timely notice was issued. The logs indicate that two bikes were stolen from Pitzer College’s East Mesa Lot the morning of Oct. 28 around 8:30 a.m. Consistent redundancies in the logs make it unclear whether there were actually multiple thefts. The case(s) are open. Overnight on Oct. 28, a grand theft occurred at Pitzer’s Mead Hall. The case is open. The morning of Oct. 29, a grand bike theft occurred at Pomona’s Wig Hall. The case is open. Between Oct. 29 and 30, a bike was stolen from Scripps’ New Residence Hall. This case is open. – Adam Starr PO ’18 This information is from the Clery Act Public Crime Logs, which are currently available Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Campus Safety. The past 60 days of logs are now available on the Campus Safety website.
Adela Pfaff • The Student Life
A post-it note directs students to the pass/no credit forms in the Pitzer Registrar in Fletcher Hall.
LIFE & STYLE PAGE 4
NOVEMBER 3, 2017
THE STUDENT LIFE
Eddie’s and Mike’s Self-Named Dining Hall Stations Bring Personality to 5C Food Service
FOOD COLUMN
Eat, Drink and Be Autumnal as Disneyland Resort Embraces Fall Molly Edison
Serene Harb • The Student Life
Dining hall employees prepare and serve food in Malott Dining Commons at Scripps College.
Parker Beak Our dining halls are best when they are most personal. The proof is in the pudding: the personalized food stations often have the longest lines. These stations’ appeal is obvious. There is a clear draw to both designing your meal to your exact specifications and having someone cook your food in front of your own eyes. Currently, dining halls at Pitzer College and Harvey Mudd College are focusing on lifting the curtain behind who’s making our food and putting our chefs at the forefront of our experience. In a system of self-service cafeteria lines, these stations’ popularity highlights both the importance and current lack of interaction between the 5C student body and dining hall staff. Other 5C dining hall stations offer the same products every week with changing chefs. However, “Eddie’s Toast Bar” at Pitzer and “Mike’s Burger Bar” at Harvey Mudd reverse this paradigm by offering changing products prepared by the same chef. This shifts the focus away from the food and onto the chef. It simulta-
neously highlights the chef’s role in the food’s preparation, while offering an opportunity for the chef to build a closer relationship with the student eating. “We’re always trying to look for things that are different or more innovative than what we’ve done in the past,” Pitzer Dining Hall’s General Manager Cynthia Bennington said. Bennington’s notion of “different” indeed seems to be working – as every other Thursday night, 5C students line up for the newest edition to Pitzer’s breakfast for dinner (“AM in the PM”) station, namely Eddie Soto’s toast bar. Students are usually given the option of two savory toasts and one sweet toast, while the toast bar menu remains a surprise. “Eddie’s so open; he became the Thursday grill special guy for breakfast,” Bennington said. “Last semester, when we started doing some of the toast ideas, we realized that people really were starting to like them. It used to be that our Thursday night “AM in the PM” was always an omelette bar, but now we’re rotating it. There’s a toast bar, an omelette bar, and pancake bar as well.”
Students seem to be enjoying the toast bar in both flavor and experience. “Stations like these connect a name [of ] a face to a food,” Danny Guimaraes PZ ‘18 said. “Just including the name of the chef in the station name does a lot. I feel some sort of a relationship with Eddie. He used to make me toast for breakfast, and now he’s making me toast for dinner. We’ve grown up together.” Mike’s Burger Bar is based on the same idea. Every Tuesday night, chef Mike Telleria offers a new signature burger. With the option of having the burger “my way or your way,” Telleria gives dining-hall-goers the opportunity for a personal experience and a moment of connection. Over the course of a Tuesday night, Telleria serves “more than two hundred burgers, and ninetypercent of them are ‘my way,’” Telleria wrote in an email to TSL. “I get the ideas for the burgers from TV shows, ads, magazines, student feedback, and coworker feedback.” Telleria carries himself with an undeniable sense of confidence. Once finished perfecting a burger,
he often slides the plate down the silver counter to the eater and says something along the lines of, “Try that one on for size.” “I look forward to Mike’s Burger Bar every week,” Corey Smith Scripps ‘20 said. “I know that I’m getting a product that Mike believes in every time, and the surprise of a different burger every week is fun. I feel like I know Mike through his burgers.” Students love Mike’s Burger Bar and Eddie’s Toast Bar, but not only for their food. Much of these stations’ appeal is a result of the experience. Food is inherently personal, and there is an intimacy between a chef and an eater. These stations humanize both the ordering process and the chef, which juxtaposes the buffet lines. “Toast Bar and Burger Bar stand out to me because it’s the same people there every week.” Ryan Cullen PZ ‘19 said. “I always know what I’m getting, but with those [stations], I also know who I’m getting. I know Eddie and Mike, and Eddie and Mike know me.”
Each year, Disneyland Resort rolls out a variety of treats based on the season. This year from Sept. 15th through Oct. 31st, Disneyland, California Adventure, and Downtown Disney all offered a variety of Halloweenthemed meals, snacks, treats, and drinks. It was the first year that California Adventure was decorated for the Halloween season, and they went big. As an annual passholder and avid Disneyland food lover, I was able to try out some of these treats on my most recent visit. This was the first time I visited California Adventure since turning 21. As such, I got to indulge in a few Halloweentime drinks. At the Lounge at Carthay Circle in California Adventure, one of their seasonal specials was Poison Apple-Tini with Crown Royal Apple, Dekuyper, and cranberry juice. With the cocktail came a plastic glowing poisoned apple floating in the drink that you even got to take home. The inspiration for this drink was drawn directly from Disney’s Enchanted, in which the evil henchman tries to poison the soon-to-be princess with a poisoned apple cocktail – itself a reference to the poison apple made famous by Snow White. The drink was very sweet and felt very “fall.” It tasted like apples and cranberry with hints of caramel. It wasn’t very strong, but you could certainly taste the Canadian whiskey. I stopped by the Studio Bar in Hollywood Land after a ride on Guardians of the Galaxy: Monsters after Dark. I tasted the Blue Moon Harvest Pumpkin Ale. You can get this brew at most groceries stores throughout the fall season, but it was nice to have the festive option. It was very good, and tasted like a pumpkin spice latte in a beer. They also offered a variety of themed cocktails including a seasonal Michelada. My Disney partner for the day ordered the Screaming Strawberry Lemonade. It was a yummy, classic strawberry lemonade spiked with vodka, but not strong at all. The most seasonally themed area in California Adventure Park was Cars Land. Many of
the characters along the main walkway of Route 66 were wearing Halloween costumes, and lots of other cute Halloween decorations and motifs were all around. Vampire Mater zoomed past a few times during our stay. As a lover of all things pumpkin spice, the food I was looking forward to the most on this trip was the pumpkin spice churro offered at the Cozy Cone Motel, one of the eateries in the entire resort that features the most seasonal food. Disneyland is famous for its huge, delicious churros, and over the past few seasons they have been adding in fun flavors for special occasions. In the spring, Disneyland Park offered a gold churro to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride; in the summer, they offered a glittery blue raspberry churro to celebrate the return of Fantasmic. With autumn rolling around, it only made sense to feature a new churro with the most ubiquitous flavor of the fall. Like any Disneyland churro, the pumpkin spice churro was light and crisp. It came out wonderful and hot and covered in pumpkin spice dust. However, the pumpkin and spice flavors left something to be desired. The flavors were there, but weren’t quite the intensity I’m used to in other pumpkin spice products. There were various flavors and colors also offered all around California Adventure. At Disneyland Park, fall brought Orange Creamsicle churros to the Mint Julep Bar and various festive colors of churros to different areas of the park. My Disney partner picked the Spoke-y Cone Macaron filled with marshmallow buttercream and candy corn from the Cozy Cone Motel. Candy Corn is her favorite Halloween Candy, so it only made sense for her to pick this fall treat. The macaron was light and fluffy. The buttercream was heavy and sweet, and the candy corn was a great touch. It sort of tasted like one giant piece of candy corn. The macaroon was shaped like a traffic cone, matching the eatery it was served at, and printed with the Jack-O-Lantern face that Cozy Cones all bore for the season. In my experience, California Adventure always succeeds with its seasonal foods. The first time Halloween was celebrated in the park at all, California Adventure really nailed it.
How Claremont Cookies Delivers 15-Minute Dream Fulfillment Whitney Wachtel “A meme that was a dream became a reality,” co-founder Isaiah Kramer PZ ’20 describes his 5C student-run cookie delivery service, Claremont Cookies. What started as a creative venture and is now a fully functioning company, Claremont Cookies has been delivering freshly-baked desserts to on-andoff-campus 5C students since April. This business was founded and is currently run by Kramer, along with Sam Horowitz PZ ’20, Roshni Patel PZ ’20, and Micah Sallus PZ ’20. According to the founding staff, most people placing orders are initially skeptical about the legitimacy of Claremont Cookies since their business was notably advertised on the “Meme Queens of the 5Cs” Facebook page. In fact, many 5C students are surprised to hear a person on the receiving end of a phone call with the Claremont Cookies, Patel said. After placing an order, some people still doubt whether their order will ever be fulfilled, which only leads to heightened joy when the cookies are actually delivered, the founding team said. At $1 a cookie, there are currently four flavors available, named after some of the 5Cs: “Pomona College (OG chocolate chip); Scripps College (Snickerdoodle: cinnamon, spice, and everything nice); CMC (Everyone’s favorite ‘sugar daddy’ cookie); and Harvey Mudd College (Double the graduation requirements! Double the chocolate!)” The staff noted that the Pomona cookie is the most common order, but they unanimously agreed that the Scripps cookie is their favorite. While the group had already been friends well before their entrepreneurial initiative, Kramer and Horowitz originally theorized the concept. After frequenting Harvey Mudd’s Hoch-Shana-
han Dining Commons, Kramer noted that he became the “cookie dealer for his whole floor” and began to take note about the demand for readily-available desserts at the 5Cs. Horowitz and Kramer then began attempting to make cookies in a trial-and-error manner, until Patel stepped in to help with the baking process. Sallus joined the team after spontaneously stopping by the Pitzer’s Shakedown Café during their first night of operation and subsequently became a key member of the group. Claremont Cookies orders are placed via their official website or the phone number shared among the four team members. Horowitz is responsible for taking orders, while Patel is in charge of baking the cookies. Both Sallus and Kramer finally deliver the desserts to 5C students. Kramer usually bikes to different parts of the 5Cs, and Sallus drives his car to provide desserts off-campus. Claremont Cookies operates through Pitzer’s Shakedown Cafe, which has allowed the staff to operate in a professional kitchen. The business is considered an extension of the Shakedown, and has to function at times that do not conflict with the cafe’s normal business hours. Claremont Cookie orders take an estimated 15 minutes to be delivered after the initial request, depending on students’ locations and the level of demand at different times. Even though the staff has dedicated many late nights to jumpstarting its company, the founders admitted that they have yet to officially launch the business. The four-person Claremont Cookies team plans to hire more people in order to progress as an enterprise. Along with expanding the number of employees, they intend to add gluten-free “Pitzer” cookies, whoopie pies, and ice cream sandwiches to their menu.
Sophie Reingold • The Student Life
LIFE & STYLE NOVEMBER 3, 2017
PAGE 5
THE STUDENT LIFE
“I Don’t Remember a Time Without Dogs”: A Conversation with Leland de la Durantaye Will Gottsegen Earlier this week I interviewed Leland de la Durantaye, a professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College, about his dog – an AkitaHusky mix named Bear. Professor de la Durantaye’s most recent book is “Beckett’s Art of Mismaking.” In another sort of “art of mismaking,” Bear recently fought off two coyotes in Elysian Park. TSL: How did you meet your dog? De la Durantaye: I’ve had my dog for the exact amount of time that I’ve been in California. I moved here from Berlin and my things hadn’t arrived yet — I had a rental car, one chair and a mattress — but I’d been looking on Petfinder every day. I felt morally obliged to do something that my family had done a number of times as I was growing up, which was to adopt or foster an adult dog with some deal-with-able issue. And that’s the sort of thing you find on Petfinder. But every once in a while, very rarely, there would be puppies. There was a listing in East LA in a really ganged-up neighborhood, which I called, but no one answered. So I just drove over there and found two puppies who’d clearly been neglected. They were locked up in a big cage, where they pissed and shit in one corner and tried to live in another corner. It was nine in the morning and the owner was drunk, so I couldn’t really get any information out of him. Because this was the first week that I was in LA, it’s easy for me to think about him and Los Angeles together. TSL: So how long has it been, now? LD: Five years. He has the same birthday as me. When I took him to get his shots I didn’t know anything about him, and a year and a half later when I got my final certificate I noticed that it had “July 17th 2013” as his birthday. I realized this had to be their best guess for Bear’s birthday, which is no better than mine. TSL: What astrological sign does that put you under? LD: We’re both Cancers, probably pretty typically so. It’s really soothing to read and write around an animal, especially at home, in the garden. There are lots of paintings and woodcuts of St. Jerome with a lion, which to the Italian Renaissance imagination almost always looked like a very big dog, since not a lot of people had seen lions. There are these images of the scholar tranquilly protected either by a magically powerful animal or a big dog. You’re not quite alone, but you’re not going to be pulled into conversation, either. TSL: I recently read Walter Benjamin’s essay on Kafka, and I
was really struck by the formulation of Kafka’s animal characters. I think for both Benjamin and Kafka, animals are privy to a higher sort of knowledge, and that comes across in their being these weird “unfinished” creatures, or hybrids. Does that ring true for Bear? LD: Those Kafka stories are amazing. Especially the “Forschungen eines Hundes,” [Investigations of a Dog] in which the dog is very human. I don’t have any strong desire to imagine him graced, or cursed, with speech. I think a lot about what his timeworld is like. Obviously dogs live in the moment, they’re very forgiving. I remember seeing a three-legged dog in the Canyon de Chelly, and we couldn’t quite figure out how it had gotten there. We fed it some Triscuits. I was amazed at what a good attitude it had about its handicap. I thought: “you’re so in the present of life”. TSL: I mean, what would a dog in that position even want to say? LD: I think it would want to know what it was like for you to be living so distended and neurotically in time. And if you said you weren’t happier as a result, it would want to know why you didn’t just live closer to the present, why you have all these nonstrategic concerns. TSL: I feel like any discussion about the canine experience of time inevitably begs the question of whether or not dogs are thinking about death. Do dogs know death, as we do? LD: It seems like it has to be one or the other – either they’re never thinking about death, or they always have death on the mind because they always have survival on the mind, in the way that they’re never so carefree about death as we are. We think that we’re the ones who are so burdened by our knowledge of death, and that animals are so lucky to not know that they have to die, and so they don’t know the existential question. I think the sense of mortality lives very differently in them. Dogs live right up against the problem of mortality because, generally speaking, they live much less long than do we. And therefore people who love dogs, they almost always have loved and lost a number of times. You can’t have dogs without them dying, from the human perspective. So they have the good side of reflecting on death, which is that it makes life very sharp and interesting and present. TSL: I didn’t grow up with dogs, mostly because my small New York apartment didn’t permit having them. My sister had a fish that she never took care of, and so would die every few months and have to be replaced.
Photo courtesy of Leland de la Durantaye
Professor Leland de la Durantaye’s dog, Bear, while on a walk.
So I was never attuned to dogs’ sensibilities in the way that people who grew up around dogs seem to be. LD: There’s this really cool Adam Gopnik essay, “Death of a Fish”, about child development and having fish in a New York apartment. Definitely one of his best essays. I don’t remember a time without dogs. And I remember they were the one of the most interesting things about the world for me, when I was little. Not even to the exception of humans. One of them was really well trained and she would go places with me, and protect me in this little college town where there wasn’t really
any danger. Dogs were always just a warm background hum to my earliest memories and feelings. Having a dog is the default state of the world, for me. TSL: My early experiences with dogs are totally opposite. I have these memories of playdates where one of my friends’ giant dogs would run up to me and I would just freak out, it was really terrifying. I mentioned to one of my other professors that I never had a dog, and she responded by asking if I had any love in my heart at all. LD: Wow. I definitely can’t approve of that extremity, but certainly for some people it’s the
“Underground Theatrical Institute” 5C Improvisation Group Lightens Up Student Body Shringi Diva Vikram “There’s power in being ridiculous.” That’s how Christine Covode PZ ‘19, one of the three leaders of the Underground Theatrical Institute (UTI) improvisation group, describes his work. “I really do love silly,” he said. “I love creating stupid little realities with other people who just want a laugh. There’s no better feeling in the world than laughing hard and having other people laugh with you. That’s a big part of what we do in improv.” The 5C UTI improvisation group unleashed their line-up of silly, fun scenes in their Halloween-themed show this past Saturday in Scripps College’s Vita Nova Hall. The rows of seats in the hall were full with 5C students, and the room’s sides were strewn with more people leaning against the walls. The other leaders of the groups include Miranda Smith PZ ‘20 and Eric Gofen PO ‘19. “I was surprised by the number of people who showed up,” said Abdullah Shahid PO ‘19, who was sitting in the audience. “But [UTI was] very good. You know how improv groups have this energy? I thought they played with the energy well.” In keeping with the Halloween theme, the cast introduced themselves as different pumpkins. “I’m the spicy pumpkin latte,” one cast member screamed, accompanying the dialogue with a jig. “I’m punk pumpkin,” another member said. The cast split into two groups of eight people. The first cohort took hold of the limelight, building scenes from audience-suggested scenarios, such as a criminal being interrogated for stealing shoes, and producing ripples of laughter in the audience. The actor who played the criminal wasn’t allowed to hear the audience’s
suggestion; she sat clueless, as the two detectives who accused her of gallivanting off with Paris Hilton in a criminal manner kept indicating her shoes. “Fine,” she said after figuring out what her own crime was, “I stole shoes with Paris Hilton on Labor Day! Happy now?” “In improv, you have no idea what’s going to come out of your mouth, and sometimes you’ll say something, and you’ll be like, ‘Where did that come from?’” said Zed Hopkins PO ‘20, one of the new UTI members. “I think what’s great about [improv] is that it exists in this world in which it’s okay not to have control, to be spontaneous. It’s so different from the routine of everyday life.” Hopkins mentioned that he does recognize that less funny or less productive things can sometimes spill out from an actor’s mouth. “But the thing is, you still have each other’s backs,” he said. “Your scene partners are going to help you get out of the hole that you just dug yourself into.” Covode added that one of her favorite parts about improv is the support that your group gives you. “Nowhere else do people validate you so wholly,” Covode said. “We accept each other’s ideas, draw off what we [say] to each other, to let the scene form as instantly [as] it needs to.” The show proceeded with the audience suggesting that the cast members use a shovel in a scene. The UTI members mimed a gravedigging scene, jumping when another cast member impersonating a detective jauntily riding a steed demanded to know where another villain was. They played the same scene again, pretending to be corpses, flopping over one another as the detective attempted to have them stay upright, while he handcuffed them. The cast shifted characters again, to people trying
to earn favour with the Pope, and then to dancers preparing some special move. Halfway through the show, the second group trooped on stage and performed ‘long-form,’ a style that builds off from a single suggestion from the audience. UTI member Rein Irving SC ’20 jumped in, starting a monologue about a tiny old flip cell phone with an antenna and rubber keypad. Actors then impersonated talking on the phone, miming a long antenna protruding from their head, bending down so that people could speak straight into the antenna. The scene somehow shifted to a guidance counselor chastising a math teacher for being in contact with aliens, and then shifted to a man throwing a racoon onto the shoulder of the antenna phone, which the actor accompanied with little raccoon noises. The audience broke into applause as the whole cast gathered again and did a series of lines, each describing
themselves in the role of a bad mortician. “I think what I want is to give the audience an engine that helps them escape all this stress and worry – college is [a] stressful environment, and the world is [a] strange place – and just have an hour of pure laughter,” said Covode. “It’s not heavy and deep as some theatre is, and watching a group of people pretend to be aliens or something sounds so ridiculous. But that’s why it helps people release.” Shahid added that the reason he particularly liked this show was that the scenes were not laden with implicit political connotations. “They didn’t rely on Donald Trump or any other political figures, which I feel like most comedians do these days,” Shahid said. “Meaning always deepens the show. But, this improv show was just light and funny, and nice because it was different from what people are used to seeing.”
Photo courtesy of UTI
Members of UTI light up the stage during their free Halloween-themed show on Saturday, October 28th in Vita Nova at Scripps College.
purest form of love. Not for me, but for some people. Would the dogs actually come into contact with you? TSL: Yeah, this particular friend would let his dogs lick me until his mother came and pulled them off me. And I remember the mother would always say, “Oh don’t worry, they just love you.” I couldn’t process that as a young kid. LD: Yeah. It’s hard to love and trust the animal when you’re like, “this is how it expresses that? How does it express the other things? If it just likes me, why is it doing this thing which I’m obviously not into? How is it so
oblivious?” I realize that I could just be the most “ancient mariner” about dogs. What is it to have a lot of experience with dogs? Why do they feel as they do, thereafter? TSL: You mention the Ancient Mariner – did you ever have an “albatross” moment with Bear? LD: I have a variety of them, but they all sort of work out. He’s gotten attacked a few times, one time in Huntington Beach, one time in Claremont. I’ve let him off leash, a bunch of times. There are a lot of things that ended up being okay. Like the time he fought coyotes in Elysian Park. There isn’t a single albatross, a single mistake that endangered him.
FILM COLUMN
“The Meyerowitz Stories” Lacks Emotional Development, Despite Natural Dialogue Lauren Churchwell This is the day I have to admit that Adam Sandler can act circles around Ben Stiller. It’s a very strange day. Leo Tolstoy once wrote that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and American filmmaker Noah Baumbach dives deep into that unique familial unhappiness. “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)” tells the story of the eponymous Meyerowitz family and is centered around its patriarch Harold Meyerowitz and his three children: Danny, Matthew, and Jean. Harold is a sculptor and former Bard College professor who has neglected his eldest two children, Danny and Jean, in order to start over with his son, Matthew, from another marriage. An octogenarian who has failed to find prestige, fame, and money from his work, Harold has become bitter toward the art establishment, his old friends, and especially his family. While Harold isn’t an abusive father, he is still depicted as a terrible parental figure – far too narcissistic to truly give love, care, or attention to his family. In this film, Noah Baumbach shows a new approach to many of his favorite subjects. His past films often deal with the difficulty of family relationships, such as in the movies “The Squid and The Whale” and “Margot at the Wedding,” and his love for the lives of the awkward and lost, such as in “Frances Ha.” By telling a story with older and more mature characters, Baumbach is able to reach a different depth of feeling – one of long simmering resentment, mixed with the wisp of hope that Harold might change.
The plot goes on predictably: the family gets together, there’s a crisis, the family gets closer, and at the end, some people change, and some people stay the same. However, the focus of the movie isn’t on the plot but on the dialogue instead, which does feel ‘Baumbachian’ with its sarcastic quips and awkward pauses. More importantly, the dialogue feels natural when played into the tight family drama. Probably the most impressive feature of the dialogue is that although everyone talks in the Baumbachian style, the characters all feel different, which is a testament to the actors. Dustin Hoffman as Harold comes off as both punchable and pretentious, while Elizabeth Marvel as Jean comes off as awkward yet biting. At the end of the day, I would say that the movie is a worthwhile but frustrating experience; sometimes, the film all feels a bit too cute as it mixes comedy with deep, pathological tragedy. The movie also just doesn’t know where to end, stretching from 100 minutes to an almost painful two hours, especially at the end when the film fades in and out with almost five different endings. Watching this film and other movies, such as “Punch-Drunk Love” and “The Royal Tenenbaums,” makes me feel fed up with Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller who both continue to churn out some of the worst lowest common denominator comedies year after year, despite their ability to make something great. I would recommend people to watch this movie, but to also be wary of how it shies away from its emotional depth and how the main actors could give us more things like this film instead of “Jack and Jill” and “Zoolander 2.” 3.5/5
LIFE & STYLE PAGE 6
NOVEMBER 3, 2017
THE STUDENT LIFE
Politics of Pleasure: O.school Teaches Sex & Intersectionality Carmin Sherlock “What is pleasure to you? What would it mean to use your pleasure to resist all the ways that society tries to further marginalize you, further oppress you, the ways that other people try to cause you harm? What keeps you from your pleasure?” That’s what Latishia James, one of two sex educators who came to Claremont on Thursday, asked a group of students on Thursday, Oct. 26, during an interactive workshop on the politics of pleasure. James works with O.school, an online school intent on revolutionizing sex through daily live online streams and workshops by sex professionals. The site aims to be a safe space for all identities, and its live stream and workshop topics cover everything from “How to get the most out of your hookup” to “Sex after giving birth.” For this in-person, interactive workshop, James was here with fellow O.school sex educator Kate McCombs to talk about identity, resilience, and pleasure as resistance. “When thinking about this workshop, we were curious about the ways in which our intersecting marginalized identities can potentially cut us off from experiencing pleasure in the world,” James said. “This can be isolating and infuriating. But we also wanted to explore how those identities can bring us power and joy, and allow us to exercise resistance.” Participants were invited to say the names of people from whom they draw the power to be resilient. Amongst others, Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, and mothers and grandmothers were invoked. The focus was on the multiplicity of identity, and how intersecting aspects cannot be ignored. “I can never talk about sex without talking about race, about ability, about my other identities, because I don’t live a single-issue life,” said James. “If we’re going to talk about accessing the fullness of our pleasure, we’re going to have to talk about all of the things that block us from that
pleasure.” The facilitators divided participants into two caucuses – people of color and non-POCs – to confidentially speak about their own pleasure. The members in each group were given two minutes to speak freely about any frustrations regarding their intersecting identities or things that may be blocking them from their pleasure. Participants found it challenging, but meaningful, to speak in such an intimate environment about topics so rarely discussed. “I wanted to hold and acknowledge the ways that identities intersect, because the ways that trauma shows up racially can be very unique,” explained James. “Even if we hold the same gender or sexual identity, race really complicates how we show up in the world.” James and McCombs also explored the ways people can redefine themselves and unconventionally resist. “As queer people, trans people, people with disabilities, we often get told how our bodies are supposed to function,” said James. “We get told how, and when, and with whom they’re supposed to function, and this erodes our sense of autonomy and agency.” However, O.school wants to change this. They’re starting by redefining pleasure and reclaiming self care. “Self care often gets reduced by the media to a spa day,” McCombs said. “But I think that self care, as a form of resistance, including forms of pleasure, is a real skill set, and is so critically individual. And it’s not something we’re taught how to do.” O.school is creating a “Relearn” Campaign, where they take traditional phrases and terms and define them for themselves. “Pleasure,” for example, was given a new definition: “a sensation in the body, mind, and/ or soul that makes you go mmm, ahh, or yum.” “We’re interested in things outside of the box of what is prescribed as pleasurable,” said James. “Often times when people think of pleasure, it’s automatically associated with sex. But
Adela Pfaff • The Student Life
Inside the O.school exhibition during last week’s sex carnival, intimacy and relationships educator Kate McCombs discusses the anatomy of the clitoris with students.
pleasure doesn’t have to mean sex. And as folks with multiple identities, we get to determine what this means. Because society has already put us in the box of the ‘other,’ you get to exploit that a little bit. You get to say, ‘If you’re going to “other” me,
Student Health Magazine Spearheads Wellness Awareness Marielle Meyer Assistant Dean of Sally Tiernan Field House Deborah A. Gisvold believes wellness is “a conscious, self-directed and evolving process of achieving full potential.” In conjunction with her understanding the strong relationship between health and a student’s academic success, she believes health should be a priority in students’ daily lives. In September this year, the Gisvold found something unlike she had ever found before: an online magazine focused on health and wellness for collegiate students. The magazine, called Student Health 101, has 2,525 followers on Instagram and has reached nearly a third of the total enrollment at Scripps. As part of the magazine and Scripps’ partnership, Scripps students that subscribe receive a monthly brief email with different topics that direct students on “how to succeed.” Gisvold said
that the goal for the magazine on campus is to have students become the “healthiest they can be from all perspectives.” Monthly email topics include “Your guide to a mindful morning” and “4 ways to push back on perfection.” Students can also download the mobile app or follow the magazine on Instagram. The magazine is circulated to Scripps students, and links are posted to the Facebook page so anyone can access the articles. Student Health 101 has nine subdivisions: “Move,” “Feel,” “Eat,” “Learn,” “Overcome,” “Prosper,” “Relate,” “Sleep,” and “Empower.” The final one is titled “Scripps,” and includes Scripps events such as workshops, support groups, and campus specific tips. In addition to its comprehensive approach to wellness, the site has links to wellness apps and podcasts, and highlights contributors in its sidebar. The mainstream’s current
fascination with wellness seems to have only begun to spread to college campuses. Googling “college wellness magazines” reveals a lack of publications. The first two results are from Faith & Fitness Magazine, the third result is a college magazine list titled “Top 10 Colleges for Health and Wellness,” and the rest include wellness magazines that mention college life in a few of their articles. In tenth place and at the bottom of the page is Student Health 101’s chapter at Ohlone College. This is the first result, underneath American College Health Association, that is a college-specific wellness magazine. Wellness’s positive correlation with academic success, Scripps’ commitment to student wellness, and mainstream media’s current fascination with the idea of wellness makes The Student Health 101 the trending online magazine at Scripps.
Elisabeth Lawton• The Student Life
and tell me that my relationships aren’t real, then I’m going to use that to my advantage.” McCombs echoed this sentiment. “You have to define yourself for yourself. You get to define what is pleasurable to yourself. You get to build resilience in
what could be seen as mundane ways, but in ways that are really helping you to go out and face the world.” These ways, the educators encouraged, do not have to be heroic feats of protest. Even the act of being oneself is political.
“As we tap into this innate resiliency, I want to think about how being unapologetic in who we are in and of itself is a form of resistance and can be a way that brings pleasure into our lives,” said James. “The mere act of existing can be resistance.”
OPINIONS THE STUDENT LIFE LIAM BROOKS Editor-in-Chief KATIE BAUGHMAN Managing Editor CHRISTOPHER ESKILSON Managing Editor GRACE OZONOFF-RICHEY Production Editor
NOVEMBER 3, 2017
THE STUDENT LIFE
PAGE 7
ELINOR ASPEGREN, News Editor KELLEN BROWNING, News Editor MARC ROD, News Associate SEAN OGAMI, Life & Style Editor ARIEL SO, Life & Style Editor JOLO LABIO, Opinions Editor TIARA SHARMA, Opinions Editor HANK SNOWDON, Sports Editor SABRINA WILK, Sports Editor DONNIE DENOME, Copy Chief OLIVIA TRUESDALE, Copy Editor PRIYA KARETI, Copy Editor PEGGY CHOU, Copy Editor
DOMINIC FREMPONG, Graphics Editor MEGHAN JOYCE, Photo Manager ADELA PFAFF, Photo Editor
Shut Up and Listen: Rethinking Classroom Discussions
DAPHNE YANG, Senior Design Editor MADELINE MCCLUSKEY, News Designer SARAH TRAN, Life & Style Designer NOOR DHINGRA, Opinions Designer CASSIE WANG, Sports Designer CAROLINE ALBRO, Design Associate IRIS SHI, Distribution Manager ANNIE WAN, Business Manager LAUREN ISON, Editor-at-large
Amy Lowndes Columnist The Student Life, the oldest college newspaper in Southern California, is produced and managed by students of the Claremont Colleges and published weekly.
TSL welcomes Letters to the Editor, which can be submitted by mail, by email, or in person at the Fishbowl in Walker Hall. Letters must be under 400 words (although when an issue is particularly salient, we reserve the right to allow letters to run at a longer length) and submitted by 4 p.m. Wednesday of the The Editorial Board consists of the Editor-in-Chief and two week of publication. We reserve the right to decline publication Managing Editors. Aside from the editorial, the views exof submitted letters and will not accept anonymous letters, letpressed in the opinions section do not necessarily reflect the views of The Student Life. ters containing profanity, factually inaccurate letters or letters making personal attacks. TSL also reserves the right to edit for E-mail Letters, Questions and Concerns to editor@tsl.pomona. spelling, punctuation and grammar. Letters may be signed by edu. email tips to liaison@tsl.pomona.edu; email advertising a maximum of three persons. All letters become the property of inquiries to ads@tsl.pomona.edu. TSL and may not be reprinted without prior permission from the Editorial Board.
EDITORIAL BOARD
Lose Your ID, Not Your Identity
TSL SAYS
As highlighted in the News sections this week, students can only enter the McConnell and Malott dining halls after presenting their IDs. The policy enforcements sparked some Pitzer College students to start a petition, arguing that students should be able to enter the dining halls just by giving their ID numbers at the register. It’s important to remember that the actual chefs and dining hall workers behind our meals at the dining halls are not behind these policies. The staff is not trying to go out of their way to be rude; they did not create these rules, and their enforcement is part of doing their jobs. In fact, it is crucial we recognize the institutional policies that continue to impact the dining hall staff across the 5Cs. With the history of documented labor rights disputes in the din-
ing halls, our grievance must be put in perspective. When successful movements – which this likely will not turn out to be – occur, they can and do confront representations of power. Statues are toppled and logos meme-ified. But dining hall employees are not mere extensions of power; indeed, they are caught in corporate power systems in ways that are no less real than the client relationship student enjoy. This policy is not new. Students have always needed their IDs to get in the dining halls; a sign at the entrance to McConnell reminds students that just providing the number isn’t enough. As more and more students have used dining hall numbers to sneak in, the staff has had no other choice but to reinforce the student ID policy. While some of us may feel penal-
ized by the implementation, we are implicated in this. In a perfect world, of course, students wouldn’t have to be sneaking in. A truly just food system would see all of our students well-fed, whether they can afford a meal plan or not. But that’s not what this petition is really about. It’s true that what some see as minor inconveniences others better understand as structural failings or, worse yet, active forces of oppression. The obvious example here is voter ID laws. But Bon Appétit and Sodexo are not the government, and shouldn’t have to act like it. While food is often unacknowledged as being deeply political in terms of access and quality, we find the current petition to be, if not fundamentally unproductive, at least misdirected.
TAX THE RICH Burn Bourgeoisie
Lion King Bringing childhood back
45% Marijuana Tax Keep your paws off of my Wacko Tobacco
Lion King 1 1/2 Snubbed Timon’s story must be told, dammit!
Hi. I’m Amy Lowndes, and I am here to tell you to shut up and listen. Okay, this might seem a bit hypocritical coming from an opinions columnist, but hear me out. Too many seminar classes at the 5Cs have participation grades. Pomona’s speaking intensive requirements are particularly rigid; horror stories abound. In some classes, for example, students grade each other on discussion performance, effectively turning grading into a whisper campaign. Other professors have grades partially dependent on checking students off for speaking a perfunctory sentence or two each class. Tiny seminar classes are the stuff of an admissions brochure-maker’s wet dreams. At liberal arts colleges, being able to clearly articulate points in an academic discussion is, no doubt, an important and useful skill. There is heavy mythos surrounding open dialogue,
free speech, and learning from each other’s (so-called equal) perspectives. But why the practically singleminded focus on verbal ‘participation’ in classes? Not only do indiscriminate participation grades penalize introverted people, they disadvantage those who do not want to take up unnecessary space by talking when they may have little to contribute. Though they may be gaining the same amount from the conversation, they are judged as removed and nonresponsive, as opposed to thoughtful and respectful. If these students are made to feel uneasy, it will likely come across in their speech, making them hesitant or awkward. There are other problems with placing such a high premium on verbal participation. First, it comes at the expense of the discussion’s quality. A myopic focus on verbal participation also renders active listening – an equally important aspect of education – invisible. Inevitably, some students will better understand the discussion or be otherwise more qualified to speak on a topic - what one person can contribute to a certain discussion, another might not be able to. For example, people of color have the lived experience to discuss topics concerning their own marginalization and lived experiences in a class discussion concerning marginalized histories and topics. A queer student in a politics of sexuality class likely has more relevant information to contribute than a straight student. In classes like these, it takes a
concerted effort to ensure these voices are amplified rather than further marginalized. Shutting up is simple; attempting to understand is harder. Choosing to not interrupt those that are speaking and really pay attention - kindergarten manners involves conscious effort. It means not always listening to respond, but listening to expand your mind. It also means attempting to understand and not doubting the validity of peoples’ personal experiences and struggles they choose to share. Furthermore, if one is constantly formulating a half-comprehensible soundbite while their peers are speaking, they are unable to actively listen. Freedom from the pressure of always having a response enables better listening and more intellectual growth. Active listening is a skill, though it is rarely framed as one. The 5Cs are an incredibly vibrant, diverse community, and every person here knows something you don’t. It is to the benefit of everyone in the classroom if words are chosen carefully; sometimes that entails being quiet and taking the time to listen, not speak. Not all discussion is created equal; anybody who has sat through the even the most preliminary freshman seminar class can confirm that. When every student in the class is required to fulfill a meaningless word quota, the most relevant voices and perspectives are diluted. By relaxing participation requirements at the 5Cs, students could devote more energy to truly listening to important perspectives.
Elodie Arbogast • The Student Life
Sweater Weather No need to cuddle if your sweater keeps you warm #foreveralone
Return of the Claremont River PSA: We’re still in a drought!
Mueller Keep the indictments coming!
Weekly Comic
Twitter Taunting Us All we did was just talk about Trump still
[Insert Your Article Here] We’re looking for: News writers Sports writers Opinions writers Graphic designers Photographers
Email jobs@tsl.news for more information or to apply.
Audrey Jang • The Student Life
OPINIONS NOVEMBER 3, 2017
THE STUDENT LIFE
PAGE 8
R.I.P. Vine: The Internet Just Isn’t the Same Without You
Isabel Simon Columnist Oct. 27, 2017, marked the one-year anniversary of Twitter’s announcement that it would be shutting down its subsidiary video-hosting network, Vine. I remember the day well. The internet hasn’t been the same since. In this Vine-less world, I frequently think about those sixsecond reveries and miss them dearly. Vine was a seeminglyendless source of entertainment. However, it also served as a uniquely accessible location of cultural production. Some brief background: Vine, a social network, allowed users to create six-second, looped videos. Other users could then “like” or “revine” (akin to a retweet) the videos. It began independently in
2012, but Twitter bought it within months of its inception. The content of these videos ranged from comedians offering brief impersonations, to sports highlights, to edits of existing videos with music superimposed … the list goes on. Vine fulfilled a dual role of culture reflector and culture creator. Vines were a platform for reactions to current events (like the 2016 US Presidential race), and were sources of countless memes and fads like “Do It For the Vine,” “What are Those?” and “Suh Dude.” Vine launched the career of many a comedian (Jay Versace) and musician (Shawn Mendes). Vine really catered to Millennials and Generation Z-ers. It was perfectly attuned to our everdecreasing attention spans: six seconds is long enough to convey content, but short enough to provide instant gratification. Viners capitalized on this opportunity to create and share their content in a way primed for the young internet community of which they were a part. It’s important to note that in the United States and elsewhere, creative production often comes with a price tag. There is a mon-
etary barrier separating most art from becoming commercially successful and visible. Sometimes these categories bleed together (as in the case of some artists like Keith Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat), but rarely. Vine, however, provided a distinctly accessible platform. Although Vining requires a smartphone in the first place, which of course is not cheap, users could create content whenever, from wherever, relatively free of any additional cost. With Vine, young people from around the world, coming from myriad backgrounds and walks of life, created and disseminated their audiovisual work with ease. Vine expressed a user’s creativity, talent, and ideas quickly and effectively, like an online elevator pitch. Vine’s accessibility to marginalized voices, particularly young, black voices, was a critical part of its legacy. As journalist Jazmine Hughes writes in the New York Times, Vine became “a home for young black people, who dominated the service and established its visual language early — quick cuts, referential jokes, deep allusions.” The platform’s accessibility,
however, was a double-edged sword: the mastermind behind the Vine often got lost in the proliferation of the content. The result is the co-option of Viners’ work, particularly black Viners’ work, by mainstream media without financial compensation or recognition. Take the case of Kayla Newman a.k.a. Peaches Monroee, who singlehandedly coined the term “on fleek” in her viral Vine from 2014. Many of us recognize “on fleek,” but how many of us recognize the name Peaches Monroee, much less Kayla Newman? There is a long list of phrases created by black Viners that have permeated popular culture so deeply that many people may not know that they were born on Vine (more examples: “Yeet,” “Or Nah,” and “Ooo Kill Em”). The online world, no matter how accessible, is not immune to exploitation. As of January 2017, the space Vine provided, with all its assets and issues, has disappeared due to Twitter’s financial issues. The internet still hasn’t recovered. It sounds extreme, but I think it’s true: to my knowledge, no comparable social media site has cropped up since Vine’s demise. Some of the finest Viners have
Content Warnings: One Size Does Not Fit All I saw Pomona College Theatre and Dance’s production of “Cabaret” last Saturday night. I loved it. It was a wonderful production. It also gave me such a huge panic attack that I didn’t go to sleep that night. My friend told me ahead of time that “Cabaret” is set in a nightclub in Nazi Germany. That should have been enough of a warning for me to reconsider seeing the musical. And yet I didn’t reconsider and ended up shaking, sweating cold, and staring up at my ceiling, cursing myself for attending a musical to which I reacted so viscerally. The theatre department, for its part, gave a “mature audiences recommended” content warning for “Cabaret,” as well as having both a swastika and the phrase “Silence = Death” prominently featured on the posters. I don’t blame the theatre department for my panic attack. I know there are some people who, if they were in my place, would. I see this bad experience instead as a way to examine the role of content warnings in fictional media. In higher education, content warnings usually apply to nonfiction media because nonfiction media makes up most of what most college students read for class. If I read an essay about someone’s household growing up and put a content warning on it for “parental abuse,” that’s imposing a general moral judgment on it because parental abuse is rightly considered amoral. The author of that essay, however, might disagree with me and say, “I didn’t experience my parents’ behavior as abusive.” But that essay could still upset someone who has lived in an unhealthy, abusive household. It’s all relative. Nonfiction – real, lived experi-
ences in this world told with little flourish – is intensely personal. We read these experiences and our hearts ache because we know someone lived through those events. We walk a fine line of wanting to give others fair warning to what a work may contain but also to not distort others’ readings of the piece with our own morals. In spite of this subjectivity and risk, I still believe we should use content warnings for nonfiction. Rather, we should be careful in how we present content warnings in nonfiction. However, fictional media does not deal with real people and lived experiences. When the actors in “Cabaret” step off the stage, they are once again students in Claremont, not people in a 1930s nightclub in Berlin. Even fictional media based on the experiences of real people (such as “Cabaret”) does not carry this same risk. I do not give as much thought in creating content warnings for fictional media in the way I might for non-fictional media because there is not the risk of imposing my morals on someone else’s life. Of course, a creator could be hurt by the way I, or anyone else, warn for content in their work – but it is not their lived experiences I am judging. It is fiction, removed from but still interacting with reality. Even as I try to differentiate between “nonfiction” and “fiction,” I struggle. Some works of “fiction,” are essentially nonfiction with a thin veneer of falsehood. Some works of “nonfiction” are so heavily stylized that they barely resemble the truth. Works of media fall into a continuum between fiction and nonfiction, not into two binary categories. “Cabaret” falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between fiction and nonfiction. T h e e ve n t s t h e m s e l ve s m a y
not have happened but each of the characters represents a real person – and possibly many real people. I don’t hesitate judging what happens in “Cabaret” harshly. I feel that the events of the musical must be warned for appropriately and in an accessible manner. In the age of the internet, a poster like the one Pomona used probably sufficed. Yet on Tuesday, the Chaplains’ office held a debrief and processing session about “Cabaret.” Obviously, I am not the only one deeply affected by the musical. If there were enough people upset in that way, perhaps the poster wasn’t enough of a warning. It doesn’t make us weak or deficient to admit we sometimes make mistakes and interact with media that hurts or agitates us. We cannot all be perfect in our self-care and self-preservation all the time. Even with content warnings, sometimes we assume we can handle media that we ultimately cannot. I don’t think colleges should shy away from controversial media because some people might be hurt by it. The story of “Cabaret” is one that must be told in today’s political climate. We cannot forget the visceral hatred and fear that lead to the Holocaust. We must fight against fascism wherever it rises. And yet, we cannot conflate this fight with a fight against content warnings for hugely traumatic media. We can’t fight the evils that are here already if we burn out from exposure to trauma over and over again. I cannot give a definitive balance for when and how we should warn for content. I could try to give exact guidelines, try to outline strategies with footnotes and asterisks for every little exception, but I would never be able to make everyone happy with these strategies. We all have our own lists of
traumas. For every person in the Claremont community who was deeply affected by “Cabaret,” there is a different reason, a different trauma, a different history. In my own case, the pink triangle imagery and the persecution of queer men in the Holocaust was the main upset.
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It doesn’t make us weak or deficient to admit we sometimes make mistakes and interact with media that hurts or agitates us.
But there were Jewish people in that audience, people of color, other LGBTQIA+ people, disabled people, Romani people, people from all walks of life affected by the Holocaust. Every person who watched “Cabaret” came to it with their own set of experiences and came away with their own opinions and reactions. In the end, the only way we can truly make content warnings function is on a caseby-case basis: work by work, person by person. There are no rules, only guidelines. It’s a learning process. Donnie TC Denome PZ ‘20 is a public health major from the San Francisco Bay Area. They like to sprint around the Mounds while singing along horrifically to their music.
Why Was It One Hundred Degrees Last Week? Valentina Emanuele-Jervis Guest Columnist Why was it one hundred degrees in late October? The last few weeks has been subject to some extreme unpredictable weather changes. Most students have recently moved to Claremont or have not been here for longer than three years. Thus, it can be hard to notice local climate shifts and heating trends. The truth is, Claremont and the entire Greater Los Angeles Area has been experiencing a heating trend for over a century. Lack of awareness of climate change among Claremont students prevents resource mobilization and legislative change that addresses environmental issues from occuring. I looked at daily temperature records from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). I created graphs of monthly temperature averages for the
minimum temperatures recorded since 1880. I chose these four specific months to represent the four seasons. As indicated by the increasing slopes of the models, since 1880, there has been a sustained increase in Claremont’s recorded temperatures. Why should we care about sustained temperature increases? Are there any negative consequences to this heat? In fact, there are several social, ecological and economic implications. Beyond buying air conditioning units for old residence halls in August and a jacket to keep warm in November, we are facing the real effects of climate change. Most recently, Zika-transmitting Aedes mosquitoes have been travelling to areas with warmer climates. Last year was one of the hottest years on record in Southern California, creating “optimal [conditions] for Aedes to expand,” said Kenn Fujioka, manager of the San Gabriel Valley Mosquito and Vector
Control District. These worst fears have been realized. According to a report by the LA County Department of Public Health, the Aedes mosquitoes have been moving across Southern California since 2015. In addition to disease proliferation, climate change creates other sources of worry. “The changing climate will not only bring new diseases, but also will threaten water supply, worsen air quality and cardiovascular disease, and cause deaths from extreme heat,” experts say. Frank Lyles PO ‘17 wrote his thesis on this topic. He claims that sustained heating is a serious threat to water supply systems such as the Six Basins Aquifer, which distributes water in eastern Los Angeles and western San Bernardino counties. Heating also exacerbates wildfires and drought, which further complicate the water distribution process. Although most of us will be here
brought their talents to Instagram, but Instagram videos don’t loop as seamlessly as Vines do. Laugh if you will, but I think Vine made the internet a better place. Vine’s death was not just the end of a Millennial craze. It was the end of an irreplaceable
and invaluable cultural space. So in light of this sad anniversary, let me say with my whole heart: R.I.P. Vine. The internet misses you. Isabel Simon is a Pomona College senior from Mill Valley, CA. She loves dogs.
The Scale is But A Number
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Donnie TC Denome Guest Columnist
Elodie Arbogast • The Student Life
for only four years, as students, we account for a significant part of Claremont’s population, and we carry the responsibility of knowing what is happening to our environment. As college students, we are in a position of power when it comes to this issue. We can start by shortening our showers, decreasing our use of disposable utensils, and attending talks and events that center environmental issues. One way to get informed about Claremont’s sustainable policies is through taking a look at the City of Claremont’s webpage, where they have links to their sustainability goals and plans. Furthermore, the Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability (LARC) has an online portal for information about Los Angeles’ sustainability programs and initiatives. Valentina Emanuele Jervis PO ‘20 came straight from Quito, Ecuador. Catch her stealing coffee from Carnegie’s lounge.
Katie Baughman Guest Columnist This article discusses eating disorders and body dysmorphia. One of the most common misconceptions people have about me is that I’m bubbly and happy all the time, and that I live completely problem-free. Though I wish this were the case, it couldn’t be further from the truth. After years of silence, I want to share my story of body dysmorphia and anorexia. My body’s shape and weight weren’t an issue to me until senior year of high school. As an athlete, I didn’t obsess over how much I exercised or how much I ate. After I put food in my body, I moved on with my life. In my junior year of high school, after multiple head injuries forced me out of sports and put me on months of bed, I desperately searched for a solution for my headaches, fatigue, and dizziness. After reading online that eating clean could potentially speed up recovery time, I vowed to cut out processed, fried, and sugary foods. If it wasn’t fruit, vegetable, or fish, I wouldn’t touch it. To maintain a daily regime, I counted calories, downed 10 cups of water, and refused to eat past 8 p.m.. And initially, I did feel different. I had more energy, and felt clearer mentally. I also unintentionally dropped 20 pounds. I hadn’t really changed. Nothing about me was different; I wasn’t any smarter or more deserving of attention. And yet, classmates, parents, and even teachers started complimenting my “transformation” when I started my senior year. It’s funny how those little comments can have such a big impact on your life. I got an incredible rush from the attention It pushed me to maintain that number on the scale. I began associating my happiness with the number: the lower, the better. Just one more pound, I can so vividly recall telling myself as a freshman. Just one more pound, and I’ll be fine. I followed this demoralizing and destructive routine my first three years of college. I kept a scale in my room to track my weight and developed a morning routine where I’d step on the scale first thing every morning. I dreaded that number, the number that determined my mood and actions the entire day, the number that held the weight of the world. Being down a pound indicated progress. I could breathe easy, and to some level even treat myself to a fun day. Up was failure. Disappointing, all-consuming, hopeless failure. The solution? Eat less. Exercise more. Make up for that gain. The formula was straightforward, but the process itself was unimaginable. Eventually, I lost my willpower to engage and connect with people beyond surface-level small-talk. Sure, I could keep the conversation flowing, and follow through with thoughtful questions to engage. My fear of uncovering my unspoken disorders fostered a social defense mechanism. I always withheld information pertain-
ing to my own life, and deflected any questions directed my way. I couldn’t bear the idea of my peers judging me, or my friends turning against me. After a period of time, I couldn’t take the guilt building in my chest any longer. My self-inflicted torturous thoughts made my heart race and my head spin. Palms sweating, all color drained from my face. I finally had to tell someone. This summer, I developed a close enough relationship with my boss where I could comfortably confide in her. One day, I burst into her office, and desperately spoke the words. “I have an eating disorder.” The words echoed around the room, and evaporated into nothing. They had bogged me down for years. And finally, in that moment, I felt lighter. For the first time in years, I could finally breathe. We sat in silence for a minute. “This doesn’t change how I perceive you,” she reassured me. “This doesn’t make you a bad person; this doesn’t change who you are, or what you can do. But I want you to ask yourself: Is your weight going to determine your happiness the rest of your life?” Everything clicked – all my preconceived fears faded. At the time, I didn’t realize that in losing weight, I had lost a bigger part of me. For years, the all-consuming, ever-present, and inescapable grief and anxiety held me back from being fully present, engaging, and enjoying the fundamental pleasures of life. I was no longer living. I left my scale at home. It was the hardest decision I made. During the first few days, all I could think about was how that number was changing, how I looked in my clothes, and how others were viewing me. But I didn’t have a choice. Looking back, I wonder: Could people really know what was going on? Did anyone actually see what I was going through? Even without the scale, I know I’ve gotten bigger. I know I look different, and my clothes fit differently. But that doesn’t hold me back anymore. It doesn’t determine my merits or ability, or the person I am. In the absence of the scale, I’ve formed more reasonable and sustainable habits that work for me. I don’t have to look perfect to win the approval of my peers. I exercise because it feels good, not because I have to. I eat when I’m hungry or I need the fuel, regardless of the type of food or time of day. The number on the scale no longer defines me. My individual value and human worth cannot and will not be measured by the size of my jeans, or the number on the scale. Controlling that number, that foolish and hopeless number, is no longer the end goal. For years, I’ve been ashamed of my eating disorder. I’ve hidden it away and used every possible excuse to hide it, to pretend it doesn’t exist. But in sharing my story, I’m no less of a person than I was before. My eating disorder does not define me. I’m not in any way completely recovered from the disorder. I still battle my insecurities and cravings on a daily basis. But I no longer fall victim to the scale. Katie Baughman SC ‘18 studies Economics and English. She loves music, baseball, and Mamma Mia.
SPORTS NOVEMBER 3, 2017
PAGE 9
THE STUDENT LIFE
Sports Calendar
November 3 - November 9
Pomona-Pitzer Saturday, November 4
Football La Verne At P-P 7:00 p.m.
Wednesday, November 8th
Women’s Basketbal Exhibition Ottawa University Arizona At P-P 4:00 p.m.
Men’s Water Polo At La Verne 4:00 p.m.
Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Saturday, November 4th Swimming and Diving Alumni Meet At CMS 11:00 a.m. Men’s Water Polo At La Verne 11:00 a.m.
Football At Chapman 7:00 p.m.
Wednesday, November 8th Men’s Water Polo Redlands At CMS 7:00 p.m.
EDIT OR’S
Women’s PICK Volleyball SCIAC Tournament Final Cal Lutheran At CMS
Women’s Volleyball Chapman 3 P-P 2 Men’s Water Polo P-P 6 CMS 5 Pepperdine 10 P-P 6 Women’s Soccer P-P 3 Occidental 0 P-P 2 Redlands 1 Men’s Cross Country First in SCIAC Women’s Cross Country Fourth in SCIAC Football Redlands 42 P-P 20 Men’s Soccer P-P 1 Chapman 0 Redlands 3 P-P 0 Swimming and Diving Cal Baptist P-P v. La Verne Pentathlon
Photo courtesy of Dan Keck on Flickr
Fireworks light up the sky over Mapfre Stadium, formerly known as Columbus Crew Stadium.
Danny Klain Earlier this week, the Columbus Crew soccer team played what could be their last home playoff game in front of their loyal fanbase. The owner of the Crew, Anthony Precourt, announced on Oct. 17 that if ownership cannot secure a new stadium deal in Columbus, the franchise will be relocated to Austin, Texas in 2019. Precourt has also said that “dramatic changes” in attendance and other revenue streams will need to occur if the team wants to stay. Precourt, leader of Precourt Sports Ventures, based in San Francisco, moved to Columbus and bought the team in 2013 from the Hunt Family, who had owned the club for their entire existence. Though there has been an increase in ticket sales since Precourt acquired the club, the Crew still ranks 20th of 22
Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Women’s Volleyball CMS 3 Whittier 0 CMS 3 Cal Lutheran 0 CMS 3 Chapman 0 Men’s Cross Country Third in SCIAC Women’s Cross Country First in SCIAC Men’s Water Polo P-P 6 CMS 5 Pepperdine 18 CMS 8 CMS 15 Occidental 11 Women’s Soccer Redlands 1 CMS 0 Men’s Soccer CMS 3 La Verne 0 Football CMS 17 La Verne 7 Swimming and Diving UC San Diego
teams this season for attendance, averaging about 16,000 fans per game over the last three years. It must be understood that the MLS is ultimately a business and if the Crew is failing to bring in revenue then something must change. However, every resource should be spent first to try and keep the Crew in Columbus. Columbus is a historic piece to the story of the MLS. The Crew was one of the original MLS teams, and before the current days of fanbases like Atlanta and Seattle packing the stands, they set the standard for a loyal fanbase. Crew Stadium (now Mapfre Stadium), was not only the first soccer specific stadium in the United States, but has also been a de-facto home field for the US Men’s National Team. Some of the most important matches in USMNT history have been played at Crew Stadium, including the four consecutive “Dos a Cero” victories over Mexico. The MLS is growing and ex-
panding, and while that is good for the league, it must be sure to not forget its roots. The city of Columbus was a trendsetter in the early days of American soccer and fanbases like Portland’s “Timbers Army” or Atlanta’s “Resurgence” took note from the Crew’s “Nordecke.” Other franchises have also followed in the footsteps of Columbus, as cities like Chicago and Kansas City built soccer specific stadiums copying the layout of Crew Stadium. The Crew is integral to the history and foundation that built the current MLS, and Precourt shouldn’t destroy this foundation with a move to Austin. The move would be heartbreaking for the city of Columbus and would destroy the integrity of the foundation the league was built on. It is also difficult to find the economic benefit from the change for both Precourt and the MLS. While Precourt complains about the attendance and fan base in Columbus, nothing indicates he will do any better with the franchise in Austin. The MLS already has two franchises in Texas, FC Dallas and the Houston Dynamo, and while both are fairly competitive teams, neither have brought in droves of fans. In fact, neither team has had above-average attendance over the past two seasons, and this year both finished in the bottom five of all teams in the league. Austin is a smaller market than Dallas or Houston, closer to the mid-major market blueprint that most MLS teams follow, but who is to say that the team could really thrive there? The Austin Astex, the only professional soccer team to call Austin home, last played in the United Soccer
League (USL) in 2015, a league considered second-tier to the MLS, and had an average home attendance just over 3,000 people. Nothing indicates that another team in Texas will do that well economically, so does it really make sense for the team to move to Austin? On top of this, the move completely undermines the MLS’s expansion goals. Currently, if a team wishes to join the MLS, they have to pay a heavy expansion fee, close to 150 million dollars. This huge cash infusion gets allocated across the league. These fund allocations have helped MLS rapidly improve quality of play, as teams are able to use this money to buy better players. So, what sort of precedent would this move set? One who wanted to own an MLS team could get out of paying a large fee by buying buy a team that’s not performing economically and move them to a mid-size market like Austin. The process for expansion would be disincentivized by this move, which would hurt the MLS. It would decrease the cash invested in the league, and wouldn’t help the MLS expand their markets, but rather shuffle them around to different places. MLS has a history, and has been extremely crucial to the development of American soccer in the past two decades. If the Columbus Crew is removed from the MLS, then the country will lose such a crucial piece of the MLS story. Without the Crew and the Hunt Family many of the thriving MLS clubs today would have no foundation to stand on. With that in mind, one must hope that there will be many more matches to be played in Columbus, Ohio.
PROFILE
Lukas Menkhoff PO ’21 is Making a Splash for Sagehen Swimming Jacinta Chen
Scores Pomona-Pitzer
Save the Crew: Why Professional Soccer Must Remain in Columbus
Men’s Water Polo Occidental At P-P 4:00 p.m.
Men’s Water Polo Redlands At P-P 11:00 a.m. Women’s Soccer SCIAC Championship Whittier EDIT At P-P PICOKR’S 12:00 p.m.
COMMENTARY
Just four weeks into the Sagehen swimming season, Lukas Ming Menkhoff PO ‘21 is already making waves. As a former member of Singapore’s national team and military, he is no stranger to managing a busy schedule with intensive training – in this case, seven to eight times a week. Last Friday, he raced in four events against Division II Cal Baptist University, where he cruised to first place by 0.41 seconds in the 100 meter freestyle and finished second in the 100 meter breaststroke 0.3 seconds behind CBU’s top performer. In the 400 meter medley and freestyle relays, he swam as a part of Pomona-Pitzer’s A relay team, placing second in both events. During Saturday’s meet against La Verne, Menkhoff placed first in the 100 breastroke, 2.95 seconds ahead of teammate Samuel To PO ‘18, and also won the 100 IM event, with teammate Nikhil Kundu PO ‘21 trailing behind by 0.28 seconds. Beyond swimming, Menkhoff’s passions extend to music. He plays five instruments: guitar, trumpet, drums, piano, and bass. He is interested in cartography and British military history, dabbles in photography, explores the design process of music videos and album art, and loves “mentoring, coaching, and inspiring” others when he has the chance. In Singapore, Menkhoff started swimming at age 12. He notes that this was fairly late, since most Singaporean swimmers begin at age six. “I was like most swimmers in their humble beginnings – just learning how to swim for the sake of water safety,” he said. Menkhoff’s coach noticed how quickly he was improving, and pushed him to join his club team’s senior squad. By the time he was 14, he qualified for Singapore’s national team for the 50, 100, and 200 meter freestyle events and represented the nation in various regional championships. “From that point on, my swimming career was set in motion and it has been an interesting journey ever since,” he said. Through the years, Menkhoff said that swimming has provided him with a deep sense of achievement and discipline. “It’s beautiful really. You train, compete, learn from your mistakes and work towards a new goal each time. Once that is fulfilled, the process repeats itself. I thoroughly enjoy this abil-
ity, and it gives me a great sense of fulfillment. For me, this is what keeps me going,” he said. While attending United World College in Singapore, Menkhoff said he represented his high school with much success, and became the most bemedaled athlete in the South East Asian Student Activities Conference (SEASAC). Even so, Menkhoff added that he “was first and foremost a club and national swimmer,” and had a multitude of opportunities to travel to locations such as Moscow, Berlin, Stockholm, Beijing, Dubai, and Doha to compete for his nation. During his eight years as an international swimming competitor, he raced fourteen times in several events at the FINA World Swimming Cup, swimming’s equivalent of football’s FIFA and basketball’s FIBA. There were many close calls: Menkhoff missed qualifying for the 2010 Commonwealth Games by a mere 0.01 seconds in the 4 by 200 meter freestyle relay. Though Menkhoff was constitutionally required to enlist in the Singaporean military, his initial enlistment date fell six months after his graduation date from high school and he realized that his service term would end after the standard fall intake period for universities. Up against tough odds, he appealed to defer his enlistment to “train fulltime” and was grateful to be one of four swimmers deferred from national service for the first time in many years. He spent a full year training at what he considered “the highest level [he] had ever done.” After trying to qualify for the South East Asian Games, his new enlistment date arrived in May 2015, and he “went through basic military training, followed by seven months of leadership training in the Specialist Cadet School,” eventually graduating with a sergeant’s rank. Normally, soldiers in the Singapore military cannot leave their camps Monday through Friday. As an Infantry Subject Matter Expert on an isolated island off the coast of Singapore, Menkhoff worked with his superiors so that he would be able “to train and dutifully serve [his] nation in the military” during his second year of national service. He said that his superiors ultimately granted him the privilege to leave the camp daily to train. Even with the challenge of balancing his service and swimming commitments, Menkhoff made a strong comeback in March this year. “I surprised myself by coming back really quickly, despite not being able
Stella Li • The Student Life
Lukas Menkhoff PO ’21 poses for the camera at Walker Beach.
to training full-time for nearly two years, hitting some personal best times.” Though the acclimation period was “rough,” Menkhoff said he was still “extremely grateful” for the support of his coaches and military commanders. After taking nearly three years off after high school, Menkhoff wanted to study in the UK, but was reminded of the “value of a US education” by his cousins and chose to explore his options in the United States. On his first stop of college tours in the summer of 2016, Menkhoff visited Pomona, where he said he gained extensive knowledge about American higher education and swimming through his interactions with Head Coach Jean-Paul Gowdy and various members of the P-P team. In search of the right fit, Menkhoff considered everything from “course offerings to financial challenges, employment prospects, proximity to family, the environment, interactions with coaches, and even [his] NCAA eligibility concerns for Division I programs.” Ultimately, Menkhoff felt that “Pomona checked all the boxes,” and later applied under early decision. While transitioning to college competition, Menkhoff has also seen how different swimming is in the United States compared to Singapore. “It’s a fresh perspective. Everything’s different in every way, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it and am really looking forward to the next four years,” he said. After experiencing his first three meets as a Sagehen, Menkhoff is excited about what the team has already accomplished, and is hopeful for the remainder of the season.
“I’m so incredibly proud of the team, especially to see the team swimming this quick just three, four weeks into the season,” he said. With the difficult task of handling both the mental and physical aspects of sports with academics the past few weeks, Menkhoff felt that “everyone took on their challenges head on and still swam with their hearts out,” with several swimmers rounding out the weekend with personal best times. “Personally for this first season, I want to be the best team player and all-round student-athlete that I can be and as we go through the season, hopefully aim for a national title in March, whilst continuing to put in a hundred and ten percent into every meet,” Menkhoff added. Since P-P lost the SCIAC title to its CMS rival by just eight points last year, Menkhoff hopes that he, along with P-P’s new group of firstyear swimmers, “will help elevate [the team] to the level of other top Division III programs.” With their team’s results from this season in mind, Menkhoff said, “I believe that we’re going to be scoring high this year. I have the utmost belief in every member of the team. I can’t wait to see what we can do.” With a strong focus on race preparation, recovery, and nutrition, Menkhoff looks forward to drawing from his own experience and imparting his knowledge and personal values on P-P’s team in the next four years. “I realize too that I will be seven years older than the freshman by the time I am senior,” he said. “Despite this, I hope that I will still be able to be in a position to continue mentoring and coaching swimmers when that time comes.”
SPORTS PAGE 10
NOVEMBER 3, 2017
THE STUDENT LIFE
P-P Athlete of the Week Men’s Soccer
COMMENTARY
After Incredible Season, Heartbreak in Game Seven for Dodgers
Aiden Ferrer PO ‘19 Cypress, Texas
Leading the Pomona-Pitzer men’s soccer team (8-8-2, 7-5-2 SCIAC) with eight goals, 16 shots on goal, and 19 points is Aiden Ferrer PO ‘19. Ferrer played an important role in the 2017 season, his third with the Sagehens, helping the team earn a close win over California Lutheran University (12-4-2, 9-3-2 SCIAC) and draw with Whittier (5-10, 5-9 SCIAC) early in the season. He also netted the key goal in a match against Claremont-Mudd-Scripps (411-1, 4-9-1 SCIAC). Recently, he was tabbed for Second Team AllSCIAC, his first All-SCIAC title.
CMS Athlete of the Week Football Garrett Cheadle In a 17-7 road win over University of La Verne on Oct. 28, Garrett Cheadle HM ‘20 led the Stags’ football team ground attack, rushing for 76 yards and a touchdown. He got CMS on the board early, as he punched in a two-yard score to give the Stags a 6-0 lead. He averaged 4.5 yards per carry on the afternoon, and was a major key to the Stags convincing victory. The sophomore is leading CMS in rushing yards (368) and now has three touchdowns on the season. The Stags are back in action Sat. Nov. 4 at Chapman University at 7:00 p.m..
HM ‘20 Portland, Oregon
Courtesy of Ken Lund on Flickr.
Dodger Stadium played host to a winner-take-all Game Seven Wednesday night, as the Houston Astros defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers 5-1.
Hank Snowdon Before first pitch, Wednesday night had the makings of the perfect Dodger baseball game for those 5C students rooting for the local team. After winning 104 of 162 regular season games, two playoff series over the Diamondbacks and Cubs, and playing to a tie in six incredible World Series games against the Astros, the Dodgers entered Game Seven with the perfect opportunity to snap a 29-year World Series drought. And then they didn’t. Everything went wrong for the Boys in Blue from the very first at-bat. Soon-to-be World Series MVP George Springer led off the game by drilling a double into the left field corner, and then scored on the next pitch, as Dodgers rookie sensation Cody Bellinger committed an egregius error, throwing the ball wide of pitcher Yu Darvish as he covered first on an Alex Bregman ground ball. The Astros then tacked on
P-P WOMEN’S SOCCER
P-P Women’s Soccer Secures SCIAC Spot with 3-0 Win Over Occidental
Meghan Joyce • The Student Life
Pomona-Pitzer midfielder Bria Varnbuhler (PO ’20) passes to forward Natasha Thornton-Clark (PO ’18) in their game at Pomona’s Lower Field against Occidental on Oct. 28. The Sagehens won the game 3-0.
Noah Shapiro The Pomona-Pitzer women’s soccer team (9-7-3) clinched a place in the SCIAC tournament Saturday with a crucial 3-0 Senior Day victory over the Occidental Tigers (7-7-2). The Sagehens’ season would’ve been over with a loss or tie, but they were able to secure a second place finish in the conference – the sixth straight year they’ve finished in the top four. P-P’s offense gave them an early lead. Natasha Thornton-Clark PO ‘18 scored in the 15th minute of play, followed a minute later by Bria VarnBuhler’s PO ‘20 with a deep strike from in front of the goal. Just 16
minutes into the game, the Sagehens held a commanding 2-0 lead. The team’s defense was strong throughout the game. Occidental was unable to attempt a single shot on goal in the first half. The game slowed down after the Sagehens’ quick start. The two teams went back and forth, yet both were unable to find the goal until the 59th minute. With a beautiful pass through the defense, Chloe Hamer PZ ‘21 set up a goal by Abby Onderwyzer-Gold PO ‘18 to add to the lead. The 3-0 deficit proved insurmountable for the visiting Tigers, and the Sagehens celebrated the extension of their season, and their
seniors’ collegiate careers. The five seniors on the team – Molly Mosher PO ‘18, Ellie Harris PO ‘18, Natasha Thornton-Clark PO ‘18, Abby Onderwyzer Gold PO ‘18 and Lindsay Piwinski PZ ‘18 – were all honored before the game. Mosher called the must-win situation “a strong motivating force,” adding that “this was the first step toward us continuing our post-season run.” “It was heartening to see the younger players all over the field working hard for us as seniors,” she said. The seniors on the team have been a part of multiple very talented and successful teams – the Sagehens have gone to the NCAA tournament twice in the last three years. Harris, a newcomer to the team, said “this year a lot of players are returning from a really successful season last year, so the standard is pretty high.” The players point towards their team’s cohesion as the reason for its continued success. “What makes P-P women’s soccer successful is our unparalleled connections with each other off the field that translate to our performance on the field,” Mosher said. Harris added, “when we bond off the the field, it leads to success on the field.”
another run on a lazy ground-ball RBI, quickly jumping out to a 2-0 lead. After leaving Chris Taylor stranded after his leadoff double in the bottom of the first, the mistakes continued for the Dodgers. In the second, a leadoff walk was followed by a double by a struggling Marwin Gonzalez, and a run then scored on a groundout by Lance McCullers. With Darvish struggling, manager Dave Roberts had reliever Brandon Morrow warming up in the bullpen, but elected to let Darvish pitch to Springer again with one on and two outs. Though Roberts was a manager that was consistently able to push the right buttons this postseason, he finally made the wrong decision: Springer destroyed a linedrive home run into the left-field pavilion, his fifth homer of the series, giving Houston a 5-0 lead. The Dodger Stadium crowd fell to a shocked hush. Suddenly, all 54,000 plus fans in attendance realized they likely wouldn’t be
celebrating a title in a few hours time. The team didn’t do much to change this feeling. While the bullpen pitched 7 2/3 scoreless innings, led by superstars Clayton Kershaw and Kenley Jansen, the offense sputtered and never broke through, only pushing across a single run. The series ended anticlimactically on Corey Seager’s groundout in the bottom of the ninth. The celebratory shouts of the Astros players could be heard throughout Chavez Ravine. It felt like they were crashing a funeral. The silence was overwhelming. Somehow, it managed to encapsulate the massive disappointment felt by nearly everyone in the park. This was supposed to be the Dodgers’ year. And so, as they stood on the top rail of the dugout watching the Astros celebrate, it didn’t feel real. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end. They hadn’t imagined coming up one game short. When Bellinger broke onto the scene and smashed a Dodger rookie record 39 home runs, everyone thought of a World Series. When the team won 43 of 50 games in July and August, the city of Los Angeles imagined a championship. When front office wizards Andrew Friedman and Farhan Zaidi pulled off a trade deadline deal for Darvish, hoisting the Commissioner’s Trophy seemed inevitable. And when they breezed through the Diamondbacks and Cubs, only losing one game, the team could taste how close they were to a title. Yet, on Wednesday, none of this mattered. Bellinger struck out three times, went 0-4, and stranded six runners. Darvish couldn’t make it past the second inning for his second straight start. And the Dodgers
offense appeared nothing like the same squad that rolled through the talented staffs of Chicago and Arizona. In a season where nearly everything went right, it suddenly all went terribly wrong. They went down quietly without much of a fight, and were left to watch the Astros celebrate on their field, and hoist the trophy that was supposed to be theirs. As former MLB Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti once wrote, “It breaks your heart. [Baseball] is designed to break your heart.” On Wednesday night, one baseball game broke the hearts of all 25 men on the Dodgers roster, and the millions that pledge their allegiance to them. In a way, this disappointing finish encapsulates the beauty that is Major League Baseball. While teams have to play a grueling 162-game season, grinding out thousands of at-bats and throwing thousands and thousands of pitches over the spring and summer, in the end it all comes down to execution in a few key moments. The teams that become champions are the ones that excel in those few important moments. On Wednesday, the Dodgers couldn’t. At the end of last season, legendary broadcaster Vin Scully noted upon his retirement: “There will be a new day, and eventually a new year, and when the upcoming winter gives way to spring, ah, rest assured, once again, it will be time for Dodgers baseball.” Just like Scully said, baseball will begin again, just as it always does, and the Dodgers will embark again on the long quest to snap their title drought. Until then, however, they will be forced to wait, and consider just how far they came, only to fall one win short.
Men’s P-P XC Takes Home SCIAC Championship Title For First Time in Twelve Years
Photo courtesy of Rudy Valenzuela
With an explosive start, the Pomona-Pitzer men’s cross country team begins the 8000-meter race.
Sabrina Wilk The Pomona-Pitzer men’s cross country team aimed for redemption on Saturday, Oct. 28, when they snagged the top finish in the SCIAC Championships for the first time since 2005. After suffering a close loss last year at the SCIAC Championships, with Claremont-Mudd-Scripps closing out a win a mere four points ahead of the Sagehens, the team
took no chances with its 2017 victory, conquering second-place Occidental by a whopping 36 points. Andy Reischling PO ‘19 pushed for first with a time of 25:33.71, more than ten seconds ahead of the second-place finisher and three places up from his fourth-place finish last year. Carter Stripp PZ ‘19 joined him 30 seconds later in fifth place with sixth-place James Kinney PO ‘18 right behind him, while Julian Degrootz-Lutzner PZ
‘19 also finished in the top ten at 26:19.98, taking eighth. One of the newest members of the team, Owen Woo PZ ‘21, completed the race in 12th place, eleven seconds ahead of Nick Vucovich PO ‘18 and Colin Mulligan PZ ‘19 in 13th and 14th, respectively. The Hens’ next race in the NCAA Division III West Region Championship is on Saturday, Nov. 11, at 10 a.m..
P-P V. CMS WATER POLO
Pomona-Pitzer Men’s Water Polo Fights Back, Edges Stags Blaise Malley
Meghan Joyce • The Student Life
Robert Driscoll (CM ’21) throws the ball for Claremont-Mudd-Scripps past Pomona-Pitzer defender Joseph Schafer (PO ’20) in the Sixth Street Rivalry water polo game at Axelrood Pool on Oct. 28. The Sagehens won the game 6-5.
The first three quarters of the game had been tough for the No. 16 nationally Division III-ranked Pomona-Pitzer men’s water polo team (17-10, 8-1 SCIAC) against the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Stags (11-14, 6-5 SCIAC). By the end of the third quarter, the Sagehens had managed to create a fair number of chances to score, yet they trailed 5-4 to their crossstreet rivals. Early in the first quarter, Robert Driscoll CM ‘21 set the Stags into action by responding quickly to a goal from Adam Gross PZ ‘21. His prompt response set teammates Peter Tilton CM ‘18 and Zack Rossman CM ‘20 on a roll. They buried two more shots in the net and put the Stags in a twopoint lead three minutes into the second quarter. On all accounts,
it looked like the beginnings of an upset for the Sagehens. But P-P didn’t plan to let them go easily. Riley Mangan PZ ‘20 put one in two minutes after Rossman, with Dylan Elliott PO ‘21 filling in for the tie at 3-3 just before half. It didn’t help the Hens that CMS keeper Ethan Lewis CM ‘20 seemed unstoppable. “[Lewis] played a great game,” said PP head coach Alexander Rodriguez. “We struggled to finish our opportunities against him.” While Lewis continued holding his ground in the goal in the third quarter, Driscoll squeezed a shot past Daniel Diemer PZ ‘18, with Noah Deer CM ‘18 following up less than a minute later to put the Stags ahead by two once more. But despite a strong performance, CMS was unable to main-
tain their lead through the fourth quarter. P-P scored three consecutive goals from Mark Hallman PO ‘18, Cade Curry PZ ‘20, and Adam Ward PO ‘19. “We came out with a lot more intensity in the fourth quarter,” said P-P head coach Alexander Rodriguez. “I’m not sure why we didn’t play with energy the first three quarters, but when the fourth quarter started I could tell we were more urgent than we were in the first three quarters.” That energy yielded a positive result for the Sagehens as they scraped through the fourth quarter to clinch a 6-5 victory over the Stags. “I think we can play a lot better than we have,” Rodriguez said when asked what his team needed to improve as they move into the stretch run of the season. “We are very young and make a
lot of mistakes. We need to get more consistent on offense and really limit our turnovers. ... If we improve on both of these aspects of our game, we should be able to accomplish our team goals.” It was a tough loss for the Stags to take, as all three of the last games of the season will now be of paramount importance if CMS hopes to qualify for the SCIAC playoffs. Next, the Sagehens will play a doubleheader at home on Saturday, Nov. 4, first against Redlands, and then Occidental. With four games remaining and only one conference loss to date, P-P is in very strong position to reach the SCIAC playoffs. Meanwhile, CMS will play at La Verne next Saturday. With only three games left, they will need to win at least two to remain in playoff contention.