On April 5, Pomona College called the police on 19 students peacefully occupying President G. Gabrielle Starr’s office. The 19 students — alongside one student arrested from the sidewalk, totaling 20 — were held at the Claremont Police Department (CPD) long into the night while several hundred students assembled outside in protest.
As individuals willing to take up physical space in the protests’ aims for boycott, divestment and sanctions, the arrested students became essential contributors to our community — something Starr clearly doesn’t understand.
Disruptive protest, like the peaceful occupation of Starr’s office, invites legal and disciplinary consequences. I am certain that the protestors anticipated facing retributive action from the police and/or administration.
While the non-Pomona arrestees were, fortunately, able to return to campus upon release, the seven Pomona students arrested (PO7) were greeted with interim suspensions and barred from entering campus facilities, including their own dormitories.
Starr claims to prioritize community, but this “community” does not include student protestors. In a statement she sent out on April 5, Starr refers to protesters not as community members, but as “masked, unidentified individuals.” What’s more, an email from Pomona Treasurer Jeff Roth on April 9 includes a “web resource” for students that uses “protestor” and “unidentifiable individual” interchangeably.
By failing to mention that said “unidentifiable individuals” are also students, the school portrays them instead as foreign actors on our college campuses. This dehumanizes and alienates student protestors from other students. In essence, this illogical, nonsensical separation between student and student protestor discourages other students from engaging in peaceful protest.
Pomona’s rhetoric demonizes the same people it claims to stand for.
Pomona criticizes students for not revealing their identities, but their narrative fails to address this question: Why is it that students are so afraid to identify themselves? The answer is twofold — and terrifying.
One explanation is doxxing.
Doxxing is the risk of having one’s private information plastered online for malicious purposes — something easily imaginable in a world where filming in public is completely legal. Starr’s emails have exasperated doxxing by repeatedly slandering and mischaracterizing protestors, including but not limited to unsubstantiated claims about food waste, assault and usage of “a sickening, anti-black racial slur in addressing an administrator.” In these circumstances, student protestors conceal their identity to avoid defamation from such a voice of supposed authority.
Another answer lies in now-abused tools such as interim suspensions.
According to Article II, Student Affairs, Section B ii “Interim Suspension” of the Pomona College Student Code, an interim suspension may be imposed only for the safety and well-being of the college community, property or suspended student; or if the student’s presence threatens to disrupt the college’s “normal operations.”
One could assume that the college views the disruptive protests as contrarian to “normal operations” — it appears, however, that this is not the case.
In Roth’s “web resource” email, administration claims that they “need to ensure the safety of our community due to the risk caused by unidentifiable individuals protesting on our campus.”
This crass, insensitive hogwash willfully misrepresents student protestors as literal threats to the community rather than peaceful protestors. As such, administrators sought to remove the “threat” with police force rather than address it — an example of Pomona’s complicity in the prison industrial complex.
In calling the police on peaceful protestors, Pomona administrators actively ignored the impact that police and the prison industrial complex have on communities across the United States and abroad.
For a liberal arts college that prides itself on being diverse, this is a colossal humiliation. This act from administration only demonstrated that Starr’s Pomona community doesn’t consist of any students, much less those that police institutions systemically oppress.
To the Pomona administration, community only includes Pomona trustees, administrators, Campus Security and the CPD. By invoking interim suspensions against the PO7, President Starr has made clear that no student is a part of this elite community.
Students should take away that the Pomona community, overflowing with financially overprivileged administrators and trustees, will see you as a threat if you dissent. They will exile you, barring you from seeing your friends or attending classes.
Thus, even though Starr claims to invite students to Alexander Hall to discuss divestment (under the wild, oafish assumption that debating human rights is a civil discussion worth having), the reality is that no student can safely accept those terms. After April 5, Starr made it abundantly clear that discussions without anonymity leave the possibility for disciplinary action.
Student protestors are a menace to the “community” — that is, a gated community enclosed within the walls of Alexander Hall, now guarded by a campus insecurity force. Unless Pomona College rectifies this transgression against student activism, there will be no Pomona community in which students are included.
Of course, the focus of the current protests isn’t about the PO7 or President Starr — it is about an active cause of divestment from an ongoing genocide. We are unable to divest if administrators continue to consider us as threats rather than members of the Pomona community. We must cultivate a community that dismantles Starr’s gated community and includes students at Pomona — a school students pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend.
Pomona, stop scapegoating student protestors; stop blaming the community’s fracture on your “fear” of masked individuals. Instead, rebuild trust with your students by showing interest in our democratic processes.
In other words, divest now and you can salvage pieces of the community you’ve destroyed.
Aria Wang PO ’27 believes the police have no place on our campus and supports divestment from Israeli apartheid and genocide of Palestinians. She can occasionally be found enjoying the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s recording of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 with conductor Leonard Bernstein — until at least thirty oinking cops in riot gear are called in to satisfy the insecurities of money-guzzling trustees and administrators.
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