Aami Sejpal & Ila Assegaf: How does your experience living in LA compare to the Claremont bubble?
Jordan Daniels, assistant professor of environmental analysis, Pomona College: Having something like a bubble in college can be valuable, and part of what I hope a bubble means is that you’re in a walkable environment. That there are places where you bump into the same characters, that you become familiar with people with whom you don’t share immediate interests but you warm to, that’s a really good model for living elsewhere. And bubbles are better than fortresses because they can be popped, and they should be popped. So if there’s a sense of place that lets you get oriented in your first year as you make lots of horizontal bonds, hopefully you resist something of the insularity of the really curated world that’s been prepared for you.
I’ve enjoyed running into students in LA, like Ila, but there are lots of parts of the student experience that I’m not privy to, and I don’t want to be. Your social lives and a lot of big changes that happen – you know how they say that forests in fairytales are enchanted spaces of transformation? That’s kind of how I want to think of Pomona College. This is opposed to a model of pure professionalization. I love that this is a space of transformation, but there are aspects of transformation that I definitely don’t want to know about. But then again there are some aspects of transformation that intersect with what we do in the classroom. And that’s what I like about the classroom. I don’t want to surveil anyone or know too much, but I like it when some pieces of how people are changing and what they are really thinking are freely offered, especially in philosophy classes. But it’s definitely often none of my business.
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