After Pomona College’s Oldenborg demolition announcement, my roommate and I made a tough and all-too-relatable choice: spend our sophomore year living in a construction zone or take a tiny room on North campus. We chose the latter, enticed by fantasies of mountain views and Frary Dining Hall breakfasts.
When we first set foot in our Clark Hall III forced double, we weren’t fazed by its small size, but instead perplexed by the giant extra wardrobe that Housing and Residence Life (HRL) had shoved against a chest of drawers. The room was hot and crowded enough even without a passageway to Narnia. So we submitted a work order to remove the wardrobe and kept shuffling around it like bewildered penguins.
The following week, Facilities denied our request, claiming it violated the Individual and Common Room Furnishings clause of the Student Handbook, so we went to the HRL office in person. Our case should have been straightforward — we were living in a room with double occupancy, and the wardrobe took up an eighth of our floor space. But instead of understanding, we were met with bureaucratic deflection. From calling our room a historic single, which now functions as a double, to claiming that our furniture request was just one of many, the office offered no real solution beyond bunking our beds or removing our mini fridge, which was “also taking up space.”
Over the next month, while also juggling classes and activities, getting rid of the wardrobe became our part-time job. We sent numerous emails to HRL. We pleaded. We met with the Dean of Students, Josh Eisenberg. Eventually, after weeks of back-and-forth, HRL relented and said yes: Eisenberg emailed us, stating that “we are only doing this because Clark III had increased occupancy.” The experience still left a sour taste in my mouth. When she saw our tiny, furniture-infested room, Residence Life Coordinator Kristen Nichols remarked, “Oldenborg happened to us, too.”
If Oldenborg “happened to” HRL, then who is truly responsible for the Pomona housing debacle? As students with limited authority, we often can’t pinpoint exactly who made what choice or where power truly lies. The haziness around Pomona’s administrative decision-making is not accidental. It reflects a broader institutional attempt to corporatize what should be a student-centered place of learning.
The ways in which Pomona pretends not to be a business are exactly what makes it so clear the college actually is one. By creating performative student feedback channels, Pomona tries to circumvent meaningful communication with the student body when designing initiatives allegedly meant for us. Our college claims to value shared governance, yet lofty projects like the Center for Global Engagement (CGE) teach us that Pomona prioritizes attracting hypothetical future students over serving those who are already here.
The Pomona Board of Trustees approved the $125 million CGE, scheduled to open in fall 2028, in March of this year. The plan temporarily eliminated 120 beds due to the demolition of air-conditioned Oldenborg dorms. The plan also, it seems, called for packing students like sardines into non-air-conditioned rooms during construction.
Pomona’s housing plan has also made life more difficult for student Resident Advisors (RAs) and sponsors.
Overcrowding has made multiple RAs and sponsors feel overwhelmed and unsupported. One South Campus RA told me that most of the rooms they oversee are now triples, which has been stressful. According to this RA and a sponsor, the increased capacity has also increased roommate conflicts, which the RAs are expected to manage with minimal staff support. When I asked several RAs what they thought of HRL’s handling of the transition away from Oldenborg more broadly, their responses revealed a complicated truth: Following the Oldenborg demolition, HRL was left to handle the logistics of the housing shortage with little guidance.
After speaking with student staff at HRL, I realized our campus housing problems cannot be placed on HRL’s shoulders alone. Instead, the true decision-making authority lies within a complex network of board members, administrative leaders and loaded philanthropists. HRL may seem disorganized and uncooperative, but it did not create the housing shortage. The individuals who designed and approved the CGE plan without deliberate student input are shielded behind a bureaucratic veil, making them harder to access and target.
Pomona’s website breaks down the CGE’s components in an FAQ section. The creation component is only outlined in four vague steps, peppered with flashy jargon like “interdisciplinary” and “state-of-the-art.” First, President G. Gabrielle Starr convened the “Global Pomona Project” in 2021, which put forth a plan to build the center. Then, the Global Pomona Council was established in fall 2024, “within which academic and administrative leaders collaborate to identify ways to bring the Global Pomona vision to life.” Finally, “leaders” decided that the CGE’s new home would be on the Oldenborg site. Nowhere in this summary was intentional, widespread student involvement mentioned, let alone emphasized.
The Global Pomona Council includes a student working group, which ostensibly “gather[s] data from the Pomona student body … to consider how immersive residential and academic experiences can best serve Pomona students and advance the CGE’s vision.” However, the group isn’t an official part of the council. In an Oct. 27 email to staff and faculty on the council, the working group and ASPC obtained by TSL, ASPC VP of Academic Affairs Tendo Lumala PO ’28 wrote that “students have not been welcomed at the deliberation table” and that students have never “attended a Global Pomona Council meeting.” The working group is a committee of students that provides input to one administrator on topics provided by the administrator, demonstrating its “siloed nature … [which] means that students are unable to craft the integrated academic experiences.”
The email wrote that “to be labeled as ambassadors to the project at this time feels more akin to a marketing ploy than a true reflection of [the students’] involvement in this process.” Lumala’s email additionally stated that over the past two months, ASPC leaders have spoken extensively with faculty and administrations about reshaping student participation on the Global Pomona Council, and requested that students have the opportunity to present their case at the council’s first meeting of the academic year. In response to this request, council member and Classics professor Benjamin Keim denied this request; in his email, Lumala quoted Keim as writing “‘the nature of the Council’s work right now is really rather different and needs to be tackled together by key staff and faculty colleagues.’”
As of Oct. 29, Lumala and ASPC had not received a response to this email.
The working group is now beginning to draft designs for CGE living-learning communities (LLCs); according to an anonymous member of the working group, however, students have not been given the tools needed to create effective plans that developers can adopt. The LLCs are one of ten broad initiatives housed under the new CGE; that means nine programs that, as of now, receive zero student input. Even within the LLC programs, after 400 days of the Global Pomona Council, the anonymous student expressed that it remains unclear how student input can or will translate into meaningful policy for the college moving forward.
If the Pomona administration actually cared about student well-being, it would appoint students to the Global Pomona Council so they could shape future residential decisions. It would be transparent about the volume of forced living situations — I visited Lyon early this year and discovered that 25 of 34 rooms are now triples (I lived in Lyon last year and never noticed more than one triple). Pomona wouldn’t claim to value student feedback, while viewing the student experience as secondary to its institutional future.
The idea of demolishing Oldenborg and building a global engagement center in its place was conceived nearly a decade ago, and the initial 2018 planning group was already reported to be “looking into ways to deal with the potential resultant housing shortage.” Pomona had nearly eight years to account for student needs during construction and ensure that all students could meaningfully contribute to the CGE creation process. The fact that our college failed to take either of these crucial steps proves that leaving students out isn’t a simple oversight, but a calculated decision. We should not be background characters in Pomona’s global engagement fantasy or long-term vision report. We have real wardrobes to deal with.
Zara Seldon PO ’29 is actually a sandwich.
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