Next semester, Miriam Feldblum will leave the city of trees and Ph.D.s for the city of the U.S. federal government.
Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr announced in a campus-wide email Wednesday that Dean of Students Feldblum will be taking a sabbatical to work at New America, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank focused on immigration policy issues.
She will also be working with former Pomona president David Oxtoby to launch a new initiative that will focus on connecting American colleges and universities on immigration and higher education issues.
The initiative’s goal is to “bring about positive and lasting outcomes for immigrant and DACA students as well as for international students and scholars,” Starr wrote in the email Wednesday. “As president, I am proud that Dean Feldblum, an immigration scholar and leading voice on the topic in higher education, will have the opportunity to provide her expertise on this timely issue, and I am excited to support her in this effort.”
Feldblum is also a politics professor, and has focused her research and teaching on immigration, citizenship, and higher education. In spring 2016, she took a sabbatical to work as a visiting fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington D.C.. Her work there focused on how colleges and universities can help to influence national immigration reform.
Pomona has yet to name an acting dean of students in Feldblum’s place.
“I will be working closely with executive staff and our Division of Student Affairs to ensure students have ongoing support during this time,” Starr wrote.