I write in hopes of demonstrating that you — Pomona’s administration and relevant faculty — haven’t been as committed to dialogue as you claim. I hope for genuine understanding.
I also implicitly write to my peers in hopes of a more strategic call for divestment. I encourage those who have been particularly wronged by Pomona to speak up about their experiences; they contain the more disturbing actions of the College that I lack the authority to address.
To begin — you condemn the escalating protests on campus. You assert that dialogue cannot happen amidst these protests, that dialogue is preferable. I agree! Shall we examine the conditions that brought these protests into being?
Before the escalation of protests, there was, in fact, buzzingly imperfect conversation about divestment on campus. It looked like talks, teach-ins, and delegations to admin. In return, you offered strange, neutral smiles and a piece of paper that read “FAQs on Divestment and Disclosure.”
On Oct. 25, 2023, you implemented a new rule: “There will be no more than 20 posters or physical flyers for any event, announcement, advertisement or communication on Pomona College’s campus.”
Around this time, the Pomona Student Union began promoting their upcoming Palestinian speaker, Linda Sarsour. As a member, I promoted this mostly verbally due to the flyer restriction. Though the most remarkable obstacle was the scrutiny and discouragement from admin — “How many will attend? What’s your next event? How much are you paying her?” — unlike anything we’d ever experienced.
You won’t admit your new policies and “safety enhancements” are for suppressing pro-Palestinian activism. I won’t make you say it. Everyone knows.
In Feb. 2024, students expressed their thoughts on divestment, with words, in the ASPC referendum. You discouraged students from expressing themselves this way: “There are many ways to help heal a broken world. This is not one of them.”
Touching, but also irrelevant. The student vote didn’t correspond to the politics in Israel and Palestine. It corresponded to Pomona’s decision to continue investing in companies that aid Israel’s military regime. The difference is the political statement that Pomona would make in divesting — not to condemn Israel as a state, but to criticize its military actions. Between these is a world of difference.
However, you conflate them, most explicitly in a statement on Jun. 6: “I do not envision circumstances in which the College chooses to make a statement of repudiation of any country.” To repudiate an entire country and to divest from its military actions are quite different. You conflated them in order to polarize dialogue about divestment. You conflated them so people would talk about Israel and Palestine instead of about Pomona.
What I intend to illustrate is that student escalation didn’t begin in order to obstruct dialogue, but because you’d already obstructed it. What could’ve been dialogue was deliberately made into monologue.
Condemning the protests instead of their causes is only your latest act of misdirection. You also accuse protests of breaching Pomona’s neutrality. You say neutrality justifies your investments: “At no point have we taken sides.” You imply divestment is taking a “side.” What you don’t say is that continuing to invest is equally as political, equally as much of a “side” as divestment — especially because students persistently demand justification for Pomona’s investments.
Pomona will divest or it won’t. Pomona will arrest its own students or it won’t. Pomona considers options, prioritizes some values over others, and acts. Neutrality is the wrong word.
You mistake neutrality for the refusal to justify your active commitments. Why? Because these commitments aren’t justifiable by your purported moral values. You’re dishonest about your reasons against divestment because your reasons are that divestment doesn’t maximize Pomona’s returns, and maximizing returns is more important than the morality of what you do.
Alas, you are committed to two conflicting things: your moral image and your elite status. Maybe you’re too shy to grapple with this tension openly. Maybe there’s too much at stake. So you obscure it. You undermine divestment efforts by entangling them in paralyzing politics. You suppress protests like a frightened child, resorting to a thinly veiled intransigence to avoid collapsing altogether.
Except Pomona College isn’t a child. It’s an institution with stunningly carceral surveillance and suppression, that deprives its students of housing and food, that cannot bear the students who voice their values because it finds itself unable to voice its own.
Neutrality isn’t where your values lie. It’s where they’re buried. The true, unneutral reasons for your actions carry your values. Acknowledge those values for what they are, because they’re where Pomona is at and where dialogue begins.
It’s okay to have pragmatic values that sometimes overstep moral ones. It’s not okay to be dishonest about it, or to refuse to do better. If we cannot be honest with each other, with our contradictions, if we cannot say what we mean and be more vulnerable because of it — then this place is no better than “any of the other places” we could be. Then we’re not intellectuals, or teaching, or learning. Then we’re just people fighting.
What Pomona’s student protesters have is immensely rich passion, both political and intellectual. What courses through them are the values you abandon. You want Pomona to persist; they want it to be better. As leaders of this institution, it’s your job to engage with that demanding and astonishing threshold. It’s your job to be constructively charitable, to listen closely, to be honest, to reflect, to get uncomfortable, to not know. It’s not your job to remain complacent or to suppress the passion that pulses before you.
Your student protesters are not naughty kids causing trouble for giggles. They are not dangerous and “unfathomable” individuals who should be jailed or banned. They are intelligent, kind people with whom I cherish critical, sensitive dialogue. They are annoyingly stubborn nerds, with very bad sleep schedules, who act on examined beliefs. And they are, despite being at times careless with rhetoric, the ones who want to make Pomona College a better place.
They certainly don’t agree on everything, but they do on this: Pomona can and must do better. If you cannot see the kernel of immense good in that — if you cannot hold it with awe, respect, and recognition — if all you insist on is weaponizing neutrality and rhetoric — then you don’t believe in Pomona College, too.
If you continue to stifle the very essence of what makes Pomona good, the institution will certainly go on, yes — but not as itself. It will go on as the hollow, unpulsing shell of what Pomona College once was.
There cannot be more at stake than Pomona College itself. I don’t know how to make that something you care about. But I do know this. You picked the right people. It’s time to believe in them.
Maggie Zhang PO ’26 is from Cincinnati, OH. She studies philosophy and English at Pomona College.
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