Aami Sejpal & Vivian Fan: Why should Pomona College be weirder?
Jody Valentine, Assistant Professor of Classics, Pomona College: For me, the magic of a small liberal arts college is that it doesn’t have to fit into a neoliberal, transactional [model]. But when we try to box ourselves into that model, saying, “You’ll be great! Come to Pomona, and you’ll be able to achieve all these individualistic, capitalistic sorts of goals,” we dilute our real power.
Our real power is the power of the weird, the power to imagine time as something that cannot be wasted, because it’s not something that has a monetary value — it’s yours. A task takes the time it takes because that’s the time a task takes.
If you’re immersed in something, and you’re growing as a person and learning what you love -— an ethical love, not just a passionate love, but a passion grounded in your values — and when you’re working towards that, and you start to see accomplishments happening around that, and you find more opportunities to learn and grow — that’s the magic of our possibility. But the less weird we get, the farther we will get from what’s actually special, or possible here.
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