Vol. CXXX, No. 7

Presenting the 2018 joke issue insert.

Pages 7-10

Four pages of comedy in a dark, humorless world. Only in print.

THE STUDENT

LIFE

The Student Newspaper of the Claremont Colleges Since 1889

CLAREMONT, CA

FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2018

NEWS

VOL. CXXX NO. 7

‘5 Lesbians Eating A Quiche’ Explores Sisterhood And Sexuality

Pitzer Student Senate Promises Financial Reform Laney Pope

An explosion of unknown origin destroyed a house in the Claremont Village Monday, forcing nearby residents to evacuate. Read more on page 2.

NEWS

Former Pomona-Pitzer golf coach Bernard Walker was fired by the college March 7, in the middle of the season.

Read more on page 3.

LIFE AND STYLE Audrey Simmons • The Student Life

From left: Mia Kania SC ’20, Tyra Popovich PZ ’21, Miranda Mattlin PO ’21, and Carolyn Williams SC ’21 sing together during a recent student-directed production of “5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche” at Pomona College’s Seaver Theatre.

SEE LIFE & STYLE PAGE 4

CMC Senior Class President Trains For Years, Finally Takes On ‘Jeopardy’

Humanities major Maya Zhou SC ’19 feels the sparks fly, but her STEM partner explains it’s just chemistry. Read more on page 6.

OPINIONS

Daisy Ni

Opinions columnist Jo Nordhoff-Beard SC ’19 discusses how Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve as House Minority Leader and Speaker of the House, is still relevant in Democratic politics, despite discourse around her in leftist circles. Read more on page 13.

SPORTS

Danny Klain CM ’20 takes a look at the most interesting teams and players to watch for in the 2018 MLB season, including the Philadelphia Phillies and the Washington Nationals.

Read more on page 15.

Some students spend their after-class hours at internships.

Others volunteer. Daniel Ludlam CM ’18 spends his free time training for the American television show “Jeopardy.”

His interest in competing began during sophomore year of college, while he was sick and on bed rest.

“I was in my room watching YouTube videos, unable to do a whole lot, and saw some clips for ‘Jeopardy,’” he said.

From there, Ludlam decided that competing on “Jeopardy” was something he could try.

Once committed to his goal, Ludlam utilized different resources to prepare for his audition and appearance.

“I started by watching the show every single day,” he explained. “You have to be faithful about it.”

Other than watching current episodes, Ludlam also searched up where past Jeopardy episodes are stored.

“There’s a whole archive online,” he said. “They don’t store the game video, but they do store a map of where the questions were, the order they were chosen, how much they were worth, the question, the answer, who got it right, who got it wrong.”

Ludlam studied the questions and made notes on which ones were missed, which he further researched.

Additionally, Ludlam compiled his own spreadsheet, using different tabs for the seven cat-

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egories that frequently appear on “Jeopardy.”

“There were some [categories], which I realized I was too far behind [in] that weren’t common enough … to justify studying for them within a short window of time,” he said.

Ludlam lists fashion as an example. However, for other categories, such as literature, art, opera, and dance, he recognized that a little studying could make a big difference.

The audition process for the show took over a year. His first audition was the fall of junior year, and during his junior spring, he flew out for an additional callback interview.

The callback audition consisted of 50 rapid-fire questions.

However, Ludlam explained that Jeopardy takes into account more than just answers.

“In addition to getting questions right, they test to see how you do on camera, how you are with the buzzer, how likable you are on camera, what you’re going to do with the money, and how you choose clues,” he said.

Ludlam thought his experience on “Jeopardy” was close to how he had expected it to be. He ultimately placed third, taking home $1,000.

“My favorite moment … was probably getting the daily double right,” he said.

He described how a friend’s comment in his international relations class led him to look up the answer.

See JEOPARDY page 5

http://tsl.news

Pitzer College Student Senate’s incoming executive board is promising accountability and transparency in the wake of revelations of poor accounting practices and potential misuse of funds by the organization.

The details, first reported by TSL March 23, describe how the Senate lost track of more than $40,000, and include allegations of unapproved spending by some senators.

The recently elected incoming executive board addressed these financial and ethical issues in a statement Tuesday.

“The fact that funds could be spent without being tracked internally allows for the possibility that they could be misused,” the statement said.

The new board also emphasized its commitment to transparency and promised to “publish a live spreadsheet tracking all Senate expenditures, including purchases made through credit cards, which can be viewed by all students.”

Senate members said that although they believe most of the untracked money ultimately will be accounted for when the organization switches to a new accounting system, they have identified lapses in spending practices that need to be rectified.

One of these instances occurred last summer, when former Senate President Josue Pasillas PZ ’17 and current President Hajar Hammado PZ ’18 traveled to a presidential leadership conference in Washington, D.C. Expenses totaling $1,579.60 — including flights, cash withdrawals, Uber trips, and inflight WiFi costs — were charged to the Senate credit card.

Claire Wengrod PZ ’19 said in an email to TSL that the executive board agreed to “fully fund the conference.”

However, President-Elect Shivani Kavuluru PZ ’19, who was also on the executive board as secretary in spring 2017, said she and the rest of the board were never informed that Pasillas and

See PITZER page 2

Menkhoff Wins National Title P-P, CMS Swimmers Make Waves At NCAAs Kellen Browning Lukas Menkhoff PO ’21 was exhausted.

He had already swam and dived in nine different races over the course of three days at the NCAA Division III Swim and Dive Championships in Indianapolis, and was about to compete in the final of the 100-yard breastroke, an event that was not his specialty.

But it didn’t matter. The firstyear delivered on the highest collegiate stage, swimming 53.39 seconds to shatter his own program record and claim the first NCAA title in Pomona-Pitzer swim history.

“It was incredible. I was so overjoyed,” he said. “I felt happy [that I could achieve this] for the team and the program.”

Menkhoff couldn’t tell what place he was in during the race, because turning to look left or right could have cost crucial time.

“By looking left, you lose like one-hundredth of a second,” he said. “I tend to look, but for that final, I did not look.”

Menkhoff didn’t know he had won until he saw the scoreboard after the race, and smashed the water with his hands in celebration.

“I’ve never been that driven to achieve something,” he said.

Coach Jean-Paul Gowdy said Menkhoff was one of the favorites going into the eight-person final, but he tried to avoid putting undue pressure on his swimmer.

“It is especially rare for firstyears to perform well at the NCAA meet — let alone win — and so we weren’t setting the expectation of win or bust,” Gowdy wrote in an email to TSL. “We had a quick chat about his race plan between prelims and finals and to me he sounded very confident and ready to go for it – which he did!”

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Athletic Director Lesley Irvine was proud of Menkhoff’s outstanding swim.

“Having Lukas win a national championship in his first year as a Sagehen was truly something special,” she wrote in an email to TSL. “It’s been an incredible season and one which has helped solidify Pomona-Pitzer as a national contender in this sport.”

Sixteen athletes led both Sagehen squads to top-10 team finishes, with the men taking eighth and the women placing ninth. In 2017, the men were 18th and the women were 27th.

Angela Ling PO ’19 and Sarah Jin PO ’19 were fifth and sixth in the 100-yard backstroke final, Sam To PO ’18 placed eighth in the 200yard individual medley, and Mark Hallman PO ’18 was eighth in the 200-yard freestyle.

Team coordination was on full display in the relays, as eight of P-P’s

Courtesy of Lukas Menkhoff

Lukas Menkhoff PO ’21 poses with his trophy after winning an NCAA title.

@TSLnews

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nine teams finished in the top eight in the nation, earning first-team allAmerican status. Two relay teams — Menkhoff, Hallman, To, and Ryan Drover PZ ’19 in the 400-yard medley, and the same four in the 400-yard freestyle — placed third in the country.

“I’m just so proud of the guys,” Menkhoff said, noting that the Sagehen relays were competing against more established D-III swim powerhouses like Emory College and Denison University. “To be able to [place so highly], to put a mark for our name nationally, is just incredible.”

Menkhoff swam 14 events total, and said team camaraderie — combined with plenty of ice baths in between races — helped him endure.

“It’s extremely draining,” he said. “But as a team we really stuck together and really took care of each other, encouraged each other to pull

See NCAA page 14

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NEWS................................1 LIFE & STYLE.....................4 OPINIONS......................12 SPORTS...........................14

NEWS PAGE 2

PITZER: Senators Criticize TSL Coverage

Scripps Opens Four Classrooms For After-Hours Studying Yasmine Razzak

Chloe Ortiz • The Student Life

Pitzer Student Senate executive board members Jack Kessel PZ ’19, Hajar Hammado PZ ’18, and Kamyab Mashian PZ ’19 discuss matters on campus in the wake of recent spending criticism at a meeting March 25.

Continued from Page 1 Hammado would take the Senate credit card to D.C. Treasurer Jack Kessel PZ ’19 said in an email to TSL that “none of [these transactions] were approved” by the Senate at large, including the flights to the conference.

S e n a t e s e c re t a r y K a m y a b Mashian PZ ’19 wrote in an email to TSL that he could find no record in the budget committee spreadsheet of any request for funding for a conference.

Mashian wrote that he interpreted the decision to spend on the conference to be a violation of Senate bylaws, which state that “all unspent funds move to the reserve fund at the end of the academic year.” The purchases happened over the summer, which prevented the money from going into the reserve.

This instance of misusing funds “raises serious ethical issues,” Mashian said after the Senate meeting Sunday.

Mashian added after the meeting that the funding controversy “has been a complete failure in leadership; we can’t even figure out what the truth is.”

“It’s valid for students to feel frustrated [about the conference],” Kavuluru said. “[It] was an abuse of power and mismanaging [of] funds.”

Pasillas said in an interview prior to the publication of the initial article that the majority of the funds were approved by the budget committee, while some of the conference was paid for out of an internal reserve fund.

Kavuluru said that during her term as secretary, the executive board sometimes held meetings off campus, including at Starbucks, where senators bought drinks using the Senate credit card.

“I personally felt uncomfortable using the Senate card to buy anything without talking to the legislature first,” but it was not uncommon, she said.

MARCH 30, 2018

THE STUDENT LIFE

Hammado did not return TSL’s eight email and phone requests for comment since last Friday.

Posts sharing TSL’s initial article to current Pitzer students Facebook group were deleted by one of its moderators, who are members of Pitzer Senate — either Elijah Pantoja PZ ’18, Simone Bishara PZ ’18, Hammado, or Mashian.

Some senators criticized TSL’s reporting.

Senator Isaiah Kramer PZ ’20 said he was concerned with the way the article depicted Pitzer Senate.

It made “Senate look completely incompetent” and spread a “false reputation of Pitzer College,” he said.

Kramer specifically disagreed with TSL’s description of the untracked funds and worried that it did not convey to readers that the funds did not disappear, but instead were not entered into the spreadsheet.

At the Senate meeting Sunday, Hammado said TSL “disregarded the truth” and “none of that’s true.” She did not specify which portions of the article she believed to be inaccurate.

Incoming vice president of external affairs Clint Isom PZ ’20 raised concerns about the way the $40,000 was discussed. He said that the article “brought up legitimate concerns” but the money “did not just disappear.”

Nevertheless, the Senate is “currently taking steps to address [the] issues” raised in the article, according to the statement from the incoming executive board.

Associate Dean Dan Hirsch said much of the budget confusion will be cleared up once the Senate vice president of finance has access to a new accounting system called Workday.

With this system, the vice president of finance will be able to “access past transactions and approve future transactions.”

He said he thinks Workday will reveal that the majority of the unaccounted-for money was probably spent paying outside

speakers, or sending money to ASPC to contribute to 5C clubs.

The Senate attributed the untracked funds to the transition between treasurers, during which time approved transactions were not recorded in an official spreadsheet.

Former treasurer Jacquelyn Aguilera PZ ’19 wrote in an email to TSL that the treasurer position came with a large amount of power and responsibility.

“The way the executive board is currently structured relies heavily on the well-intentions of individual elected leaders,” she wrote. Aguilera is also hopeful that the newly restructured its executive branch model will allow for “more checks and balances, while preserving student autonomy.”

Members of next year’s executive board promised to abide by high standards of behavior in using Senate funds.

Senators are “going to hold [themselves] to the same standards as students” in terms of using of Senate funds, Isom said.

The current executive board may be in for major shakeups in the near future. The Senate discussed a bill Sunday that would allow the recently elected board, which normally would assume office in the fall, to start now instead.

Members of the current executive board argued that because of recent resignations that have dwindled the board down to three people, its continued governance is not sustainable.

The motion was ultimately tabled until April 8.

Kavuluru said this proposition was a “blessing in disguise [because] all of us get to learn the ropes a lot sooner.”

She feels optimistic about next year’s structure and commitment to transparency.

“I feel very confident that next year is going to be better,” she said.

Liam Brooks contributed reporting.

Scripps College will open select classrooms in the Bette Cree Edwards Humanities Building as study spaces in response to student feedback, according to an email sent to students last Thursday

by Dean of Students Charlotte Johnson.

Humanities 104, 105, 201, and 203 will be open to students after 7 p.m. on weekdays and during the day and evening on weekends, accessible via ID card swipe.

This is a new initiative for the college, which some students have argued has been plagued by a dearth of communal study spaces on campus.

The administration said Scripps already has communal working spaces available for students, including the Motley, residence hall recreation rooms and courtyards, and the Student Union, but admitted expanded classroom hours were a necessary addition.

“The impetus for the decision was feedback from students that they would like to see more study spaces on campus,” Johnson wrote in an email to TSL. “The primary goal of the additional space is to increase the ‘footprint’ of available study spaces, especially during late evening hours. Opening these additional spaces provides our students with more options.”

Many students have attributed this change to a TSL opinion column published in December titled “It’s Not Me, Scripps, It’s You” by former Scripps student Tiara Sharma. Sharma wrote in a message to TSL that, although she considered

the recent study space additions “a step in the right direction,” she felt it was ultimately “weak.”

“Unlocking four classrooms (which should have been ours to claim in the first place) during the nighttime does not constitute a meaningful ‘expansion of study spaces,’” she wrote. “These classrooms are not lounges; they are still isolated from one another and will inevitably serve the same purpose as browsing rooms: confining students within small, quiet units of space.”

Sharma noted that the college has 11 residence halls in comparison to just four academic buildings, a phenomenon that she believes does not align with Scripps’ mission to center “active participation in a community of scholars.”

Sharma said the lack of communal spaces on campus, both academic and otherwise, was central to her decision to transfer to Brown University.

“The reason Scripps social life is so stratified and insular can be attributed entirely to the lack of communal spaces to socialize and venture outside of your clique,” she wrote.

Johnson wrote that she does not know “if we were aware of Sharma’s opinion piece” during the decisionmaking process on this project.

Michelle Wang SC ’20 said she thinks the administration did not give due credit to Sharma when announcing the changes.

“Tiara was the one to call them out on it,” Wang wrote in a message to TSL. “I feel like if Tiara hadn’t written that column, nothing would have changed.”

Current students seem pleased with the changes.

Explosion Destroys Village Home Samuel Breslow An explosion of unknown origin destroyed a home in the northern part of the Village Monday afternoon, sending firefighters scrambling to fight the blaze. No one was injured.

Neighbors described feeling the ground shaking intensely a few minutes before 3 p.m. They rushed outside to find the house at 220 W. 12th St. burning and billowing black smoke. Several yelled through windows to see if anyone was inside and used garden hoses to douse the flames before the first fire truck arrived approximately three minutes later.

The homeowner, Ron Podojil, rushed home from work to find more than a dozen emergency vehicles at the scene. Shards of glass and other debris were scattered up to at least 50 feet away, and some windows of the house next door were blown out.

Campus Safety sent out an alert at 3:06 p.m., roughly 10 minutes after the explosion, advising students to avoid the area.

Podojil remained remarkably calm, speaking with officials, neighbors, and reporters on

Meghan Joyce • The Student Life

Firefighters confer in front of the destroyed home.

scene. He lost his composure only briefly when expressing his gratitude for his neighbors who rushed in to help.

“The only thing you can do is just thank God nobody was there,” he said. “It is kind of amazing. You see this stuff happen. You just don’t think it’s going to happen to you. And then when it does, you’re like ‘How did this happen?’”

Allison Dollman was staying

Mudd Alumna Develops App To Track Local Protests Alexandra Branscom

Malous Kossarian HM ’12 quit her job at IBM in November 2016 to create Magnified Progress, an app that allows users to connect to organizations, politicians, and each other to take action.

The idea originated when she struggled to find volunteer opportunities after graduating.

“There is so much stuff all over the place and it’s really hard,” Kossarian said. “You could be working and say you could help on the weekends, but everything is on Wednesday mornings and you can’t help anymore,” Kossarian said her idea was several years in the making.

“I had been thinking about doing a platform for volunteering for a long time, basically taking all the volunteer opportunities in local areas and making a filter system where you could say, ‘I want to give two hours on Saturday for the next six Saturdays and see what the options were,’” she said.”

Today’s political climate — in which activism has been particularly widespread — inspired her to extend the app from just volunteering to political activism.

“After the election and after people that I knew started getting

a lot more aware and a lot more involved in politics, the thought shifted from just volunteering to getting more socially and politically active, so we also tied in bills,” Kossarian said.

When a user logs into Magnified Progress, they receive a personalized feed catered to the type of action they want to take for the causes most important to them. This could be anything from finding local protests or volunteer opportunities to calling their representatives about current bills being proposed.

“A lot of the time I think people don’t see bills until they’re voted on,” she said. “If we could get the information easily accessible to people who care about it, and they could make calls earlier on, we thought it could give them more of a voice.”

Magnified Progress both gathers this information automatically and through organizations putting the information directly in the app.

“If you follow a bill or follow a topic and something new happens that is in any way connected to you … we make an automated action for you to call about that,” Kossarian said.

Users can connect with friends through Facebook and tag them

in actions they could take, including friends not in the local area, who can attend events on others’ behalf.

Kossarian said her experience at HMC and The Claremont Colleges contributed to her success with Magnified Progress.

“There’s a feeling from being there that’s like you can solve anything as long as you break it down into something you can handle,” she said. “I think that really came out of Harvey Mudd and being at The Claremont Colleges, which I think are all kind of like that.”

Professor Adam Johnson spoke about what Kossarian contributed as a student at HMC. “Malous Kossarian took a lab course and a lecture course from me, but that isn’t what I remember most about her. She always had a smile on her face and was able to bring a sense of humor to any situation. For example, when I went on sabbatical a year early, she was no longer able to do her senior thesis project with me. I remember taking my whole group out to dinner and she spent most of the meal pretending to pout. What a character,” Johnson said.

Amy Buswell SC ’19 said she believes the study space options previously available to students were not always sufficient.

“Sometimes the recreation rooms or Motley are used for social spaces and it can feel like you’re monopolizing the room when you try to do work there,” she said. “I think the new study spaces will be more accessible and a more neutral space for studying.”

Buswell said that although certain departments or classes on campus have a sense of academic community, she does not believe Scripps has an overarching academic community.

“I think the new spaces are definitely a step in the right direction, and I’m really glad the administration made the change,” Niyati Narang SC ’20 said.

She thinks more work needs to be done, however.

“I would say that classrooms aren’t enough. I think further upgrading the Student Union would be another good addition,” she said.

Sharma does not have faith that the recent change heralds further developments to come.

“There [is] no communal space at Scripps that [is] indoors, yet open, comfortable, central to campus, and conducive to either studying or socializing. And no matter how many classrooms the administration unlocks, this won’t change,” Sharma wrote.

As for potential future plans to expand communal study spaces available to students, Johnson said the school will be “evaluating the use of current study spaces in order to determine if additional spaces are needed.”

Meghan Joyce • The Student Life

A firefighter walks away from the site of the explosion.

in a back house on the property when the explosion took place and climbed the back fence to escape the fire, she told the Claremont Courier.

“The flames were getting higher and higher and I thought I really had no choice,” she said to the Courier.

Molly Perez was in her kitchen across the street when the blast occurred.

“I heard a loud explosion, but I thought it was an earthquake because the whole building shook,” she said. As she and her son heard fire trucks approaching, they rushed to move their cars off the street to make room.

One firefighter told TSL that his main concern upon arrival was containing the fire to prevent it from spreading to nearby houses. He said the crew was able to douse the flames enough to enter and search the building within minutes.

Podojil said he had lived in the house for 11 years and did some remodeling after he bought it, including updating all the utility systems.

Officials said they are still investigating the cause of the explosion.

Courtesy of Liz Solis.

Smoke billows out of the burning home as a woman walks by.

NEWS MARCH 30, 2018

THE STUDENT LIFE

PAGE 3

Scripps Student’s Video Of Border Pomona-Pitzer Golf Coach Fired Guards Attracts Media Attention Jaimie Ding

Erin Slichter Students in Pomona College professor Miguel R. Tinker Salas’s Mexico-U.S. Border class visited the border in San Diego-Tijuana during spring break, where one student filmed a video that gained attention from national media of uniformed officers posing in front of border wall prototypes for pictures that some deemed to be insensitive toward immigrants.

The video, captured and posted to Instagram by Jaicel Ortega SC ’18, shows one officer pretending to try to climb the prototype while a second gives him a leg up.

A third officer photographs them with a phone.

Her post garnered more than 1,000 likes and more than 100 comments, and was picked up by a number of news outlets, including NBC, ABC, and Newsweek.

Ortega took down the video Thursday.

The class members viewed the

prototypes one by one from the top of a ladder on the Mexican side March 14. When Ortega climbed up and noticed the officers, she started recording.

“These are the officers that are on the streets terrorizing communities of color,” Ortega wrote in the caption to the video.

“Seeing this was nothing new but it was a reminder to broaden how we talk about immigration policy, especially in California.”

5C students generally agreed that the officers’ actions were disrespectful, but they differed on the significance of the incident.

“It’s really disgusting that they were mocking what is going to, if [the wall is] built, become such a hardship for some people,” Molly Tucker PO ’21 said.

Daniel Holtzer PO ’20 thought it the incident more minor.

“It’s not professional, and maybe we should expect more from police, but it’s not the big-

gest deal in the world,” he said.

The Mexico-U.S. Border class’ visit occurred the day after Donald Trump’s first visit to California as president. Tinker Salas said this was coincidence, and that the purpose of the class trip was to interview immigrants and to gain a lived experience of seeing the border.

Tinker Salas said the officers’ actions and the reaction the video has received demonstrate the need to recognize the diverse backgrounds that inform people’s opinions.

“It highlights the importance of being sensitive to other people’s realities, that something that some group may think is a humorous gag … has other meanings for other people,” he said. “That’s significant. That’s important to understand.”

Ortega did not respond to TSL’s requests for comment. Other members of the class declined to comment.

CMC Alum, Former Disney Star Joins White House Comms Office

Former Claremont McKenna College student and actress on Disney Channel’s “Shake It Up” Caroline Sunshine has joined the White House as a press assistant in the office Communications office, the White House announced Wednesday.

The 22-year-old is a former White House intern, and previously interned for House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the College Republican National Committee, and the California Republican Party, according to White House spokesperson Lindsay Walters.

Sunshine was also involved with the American Enterprise Institute and the Model United Nations team while at CMC, according to Walters.

TSL was unable to contact Sunshine for comment before press time.

—Marc Rod

CPD No Longer Investigating CMS Track Case

The Claremont Police Department is no longer investigating a reported assault on a Pomona student allegedly committed by members of the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps men’s track and field team as part of a hazing incident on the evening of Feb. 3. as part of a hazing incident.

The alleged victim decided he no longer desired prosecution against the students involved and the colleges have handled the matter internally, a CPD spokesperson told TSL. The alleged victim did not respond to TSL’s request for comment on his decision.

Harvey Mudd College Dean of Students Jon Jacobsen previously issued a statement that multiple students had been reported for or self-reported honor code violations on Feb. 3, but judicial board chair Charles Dawson HM ’19 wrote in an email to TSL that he could not comment “on the specifics of any potential Honor Code issue.”

Claremont McKenna College spokesperson Peter Hong told TSL that he was not aware of any additional developments in the case, including punishments issued by CMC to students allegedly involved.

—Marc Rod

ASPC Elections Choose New Senators

ASPC’s elections chose a new group of senators for the upcoming academic year earlier this week.

The newly elected officials include President Alejandro Guerrero PO ’19, Executive Vice President Johny Ek Aban PO ’19, VP of Academic Affairs Meredith Simpson PO ’19, VP of Campus Events Jorden Favors PO ’19, Commissioner of Clubs and Organizations Hans Zhou PO ’20, Commissioner of Community Relations Samantha Borje PO ’19, Commissioner of Environmental Affairs Juste Simanauskaite PO ’21, Commissioner of External Affairs Alezandro Ruvalcaba PO ’21, Commissioner of Sports Winston Nelson PO ’21, Senior Class President Laura Zhang PO ’19, and Junior Class President Perla Grimaldo-Ramirez.

Soleil X Ball Van Zee PO ’19, Bradley Druzinsky PO ’19, and Elvis Kahoro PO ’20 were also elected as representatives on trustee committees.

Aban, Simpson, Simanauskaite, Nelson, Zhang, Kahoro, and Ball Van Zee all ran unopposed.

—Marc Rod

Pitzer Student Initiative Fund Completes Projects

Pitzer College Student Senate’s Student Initiative Fund has completed several of the projects planned for this semester, SIF Committee chair Isaiah Kramer PZ ’20 announced in an email to Pitzer students.

The SIF has paid for the construction of a 12-person hammock structure, free bike equipment available for students to borrow, a punching bag setup in the Gold Student Center gym, and a new hammock on Pitzer’s Mounds.

Kramer wrote that he expects the SIF will complete “two to three more big projects … this semester.”

—Marc Rod

Pomona Dining Hall Workers Recognized For Unionization Efforts

Pomona College dining hall workers will be honored for their unionization efforts during the 14th Annual Cesar Chavez Breakfast fundraiser, which will be held Friday in Pomona.

The breakfast, hosted by the Latina and Latino Roundtable and the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, generally raises $20,000 for scholarships and other funding for the Latina and Latino Roundtable, according to President Jose Calderon.

Chavez’s grandson Andres Chavez and Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis are expected to attend.

—Marc Rod

Pomona Clock Tower Chiming Again

Pomona College’s Smith Clock Tower has often stood silent in recent years, but the 2,350-pound bell at its top is now chiming again following the completion of repairs.

“The equipment for operating the chimes is very old and repair parts are virtually nonexistent,” wrote Assistant Vice President for Facilities and Campus Services Bob Robinson in an email to TSL. “It took some time to locate parts and staff who could perform the repairs.”

The 125-foot tower was completed in 1961, according to Pomona’s official timeline.

Flouting Pomona tradition, the tower is currently chiming on the start of every hour rather than the 47th minute, but Robinson said this is just a temporary measure while crews see if the repairs hold.

Robinson also crushed the dreams of any Sagehen hoping to climb to the top. “Unfortunately, we are not in a position to provide that kind of access,” he wrote.

—Samuel Breslow

HMC Receives National Science Foundation Grant

Harvey Mudd College professors Lisette de Pillis and Tanja Srebotnjak received a National Science Foundation grant to fund student research involving data science in life science, environmental science, according to an HMC press release.

The project, which will run for three years, will allow students to learn data science techniques in several concentration areas, with a focus on practical research. It will also involve 10-week intensive summer projects for nine students each summer.

—Marc Rod

Pomona-Pitzer golf coach Bernard Walker was fired by Pomona College March 7. Walker claims he was terminated for not reporting allegations of student misconduct, among other reasons.

According to Walker, the termination letter given to him by Pomona Human Resources said he was fired because he did not inform the athletic director of allegations made by a student about team members drinking alcohol on team trips and doctoring scores during qualifying rounds.

“There was a student who informed me of these allegations,” Walker said. “I investigated, found nothing, so I chose not to bring unsubstantiated allegations to the athletic director.” He said that the letter provided other reasons for his termination, but would not disclose them to TSL. Walker said he was not given any prior notice that he would be terminated and described it as “unfair.” He has not made any plans going forward, but will probably look for a position at another college, he said.

According to Pomona spokesperson Marylou Ferry, the Dean of Students’ Office is now investigating a student conduct matter related to the golf team.

With regard to the allegations of doctoring scores, “it was a perception that can be addressed with a more structured practice environment that better reflects the procedures in competitions,” Ferry wrote.

Pomona spokesperson Mark Kendall declined to comment on Walker ’s termination more broadly and said he could not comment on personnel matters.

In addition to coaching the men’s and women’s golf teams, Walker was the manager of the Rains Athletic Center. He came to Pomona in 2004 and has been the head golf coach since then, and also served as the assistant football coach for several years.

The assistant coach, Javier Bazurto, will serve as interim head coach for the rest of the season, according to P-P Athletic Director Lesley Irvine, who informed the team of the news in a meeting on the day of Walker’s termination.

Courtesy of P-P Athletics

Former golf coach and Rains Center manager Bernard Walker was fired by Pomona College March 7.

Irvine referred TSL to Ferry for comment.

The team was not given any explanation for Walker’s departure, Thomas Verigin PZ ’21 said.

Beyond his failure to inform administrators of the misconduct allegations, members of the men’s team have had complaints about Walker for some time, golfer Jack Carrigan PZ ’20 said.

Although Walker said he had coached golf for 15 years prior to being hired by Pomona, Carrigan claimed that Walker knew little about golf and was an ineffective coach.

“When you know nothing about the sport and you’ve got ability on the team and a lot of potential, he just really wasn’t letting us unlock that,” Carrigan said. “We would have tournaments and come illprepared and play really bad the first day but once we knew the course we’d have the lowest score of the day in terms of tournaments.”

Team members either voiced their opinions to the team captain, Conor Rooney PO ’19, or met directly with Irvine, Carrigan said.

Rooney could not be reached for comment before press time.

The allegations of misconduct were brought to Walker in the last week of February, Walker said. It was unclear to him whether they were aimed specifically at the men’s or women’s team.

Sophia Hui PO ’19, the captain of the women’s team, said she believes the allegations are not connected to the women’s team.

“If ... this happened recently in the spring, I was here and I would be very surprised if this was connected to the girls,” Hui wrote in a message to TSL. Two members of the men’s team, Carrigan and Hunter Lowry PZ ’18, said they had no knowledge of these allegations and had never heard of or witnessed such incidents.

Some golfers also defended Walker’s coaching.

“Yes, there were definitely some things that I did not agree with how he managed the team,” said one golfer, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid jeopardizing their position on the team. “But he was always open to our feedback, and year after year I definitely saw improvements in his time management and his organizations, how he interacted with all of us. I think every player has had complaints about him, but also we have a lot of respect and care for him.”

The same anonymous golfer also felt the decision was poorly timed.

“I don’t think the way it was handled was justified, because it was in the middle of our season and it was very, very abrupt,” the golfer said. “I felt like they didn’t really consider the players’ input [and] it was very much, at least from my perspective, an administrative decision.”

Despite the turmoil, Carrigan is optimistic about the future.

“Things are looking up for the first time in a while for the golf team,” he said.

VPSA Of Claremont Consortium To Resign Samantha Norrito After nearly a decade at The Claremont Colleges Services, Vice President for Student Affairs Denise Hayes will resign at the end of the semester to take a position at Indiana University, Chief Executive Officer of TCCS Stig Lanesskog announced March 19.

Hayes first began her work for TCCS as the director of Monsour Counseling and Psychological Services in July 2009.

In 2011, she became the vice president for student affairs and began to oversee the Chicano/ Latino/a Student Affairs, the Chaplains Office, Health Education Outreach, and the Office of Black Student Affairs.

“Denise’s decision to take a position at Indiana University is both a great opportunity for her to do a job she loves and also allows her to return to her home state of Indiana to be closer to her family,” Lanesskog wrote in a statement to TSL. He highlighted many of the improvements Hayes has spearheaded during her time as vice president.

“Denise’s contributions include, but are not limited to, diversifying the identities, cultural backgrounds, and areas of expertise of our clinical staff at the counseling center,” he wrote. “She has always been passionate about her support for the students she serves.”

According to Lanesskog, Hayes was critical to diversifying and expanding the staff at Monsour and bringing a 24/7 on-call counseling resource to the 7Cs. She also helped create the Student Disability Resource Center and add a Muslim imam to the Chaplains’ office, he added.

“I’ve enjoyed working collaboratively with faculty, staff, and administrators of The Claremont Colleges,” Hayes wrote in a statement to TSL. “I feel fortunate that I have served the colleges for nine years.”

In her new position, Hayes will continue her focus on issues regarding mental health and diversity at Indiana University, she wrote.

Hayes’ resignation comes during fresh scrutiny, after an anonymous email from a group calling themselves “5C Social Justice,” which wrote a fiery

Courtesy of The Claremont Colleges

Denise Hayes, The Claremont Colleges Services’ vice president for student affairs, will take a job at Indiana University next semester.

letter about Hayes to Lanesskog and other TCCS leadership.

The email alleged that Hayes has failed to address the needs of students with mental health struggles and discriminated against Jewish and Muslim student groups to further an agenda that supports her own Christian beliefs.

“We are horrified by the mediocre levels of service rendered to our students under the leadership of [Hayes],” the group wrote.

The individual or individuals controlling the email account did not respond to TSL’s requests for comment.

The group claimed to Lanesskog that it is made up of students, faculty — including tenured professors — and staff who are “concerned about the lack of quality student services across the 5Cs.” The email claims Hayes “caused the previous rabbi to leave due to an anti-Semitic hostile environment,” and alleges that she has discriminated against the Muslim Student Association and Muslim staff members at the 5Cs, and attempted to

convert a Muslim staff member to Christianity.

However, Jewish Chaplain Rabbi Daniel Shapiro wrote in an email to TSL that the antisemitism charges are baseless. “[Hayes] has been professionally supportive of me as the Jewish Chaplain when I was under her direct supervision and subsequently when I became under the supervision of the new [assistant vice president],” Shapiro wrote in a statement to TSL. In his statement to TSL, Lanesskog did not comment on the specific charges that the group levied.

“The letter I received from the anonymous 5C group makes some very serious accusations,” Lanesskog wrote. “I have found that these types of communications do not lead to an effective resolution for anyone.”

Instead, he invited the group to reach out to him to have a conversation in person. In its email, the group said that previous TCCS responses had been “dismissive and retaliatory.”

Hayes declined to comment on the letter, as it was addressed to Lanesskog.

LIFE & STYLE PAGE 4

MARCH 30, 2018

THE STUDENT LIFE

Pitzer College Joins Tongva Tribe In Welcoming Spring Leah Kelly Last Sunday, I had the unique opportunity of witnessing indigenous peoples and members of Pitzer College come together in a traditional celebration to honor the land and the changing of seasons.

The ceremony, hosted by Elder Barbara Drake and member Glenn Miller of the Tongva tribe in collaboration with Pitzer ’s Robert Redford Conservancy, took place at the Conservancy’s property at the Bernard Field Station to welcome the Spring Equinox and thank the earth for providing sustenance.

Tongva member Craig Torres said the ceremony is a good way to teach people about Tongva beliefs.

“It was important for me to make people aware of these seasonal markers that actually are very important in ushering in the seasons as they change,” Torres said. “There’s an upper world and a lower world too. … So what happens up there is a reflection of what happens down here also.”

Pitzer has a long relationship with the Tongva, an indigenous tribe that was subjected to centuries of oppression by settlers.

The tribe, whose territory once spread all across the Los Angeles area, no longer has property of its own and has not been given federal recognition.

Despite its suffering, the Tongva tribe continues to work to revitalize its culture. Some of its elders work with Pitzer to share and teach its culture on the college’s campus.

“We’re the one percent of the one percent in the area, and that goes for our culture because we’ve lost a lot,” Torres said.

“I think the things that we can recover and bring back are the things that we know like this.”

When I arrived at the Conservancy, members of indigenous communities — some Tongva and some from other tribes — were greeting each other with hugs and laughs. Some Pitzer students and professors with their families also attended.

Pitzer Professor of Sociology Erich Steinman said he attended the event to continue the relationship between the Tongva and Pitzer.

Courtesy of Justin Sleppy

Tongva Elder Barbara Drake welcomes members of the indigenous and Pitzer College communities to a traditional celebration of the Spring Equinox.

“Re-learning a perspective on life that centers the natural world and its process is important in our time,” Steinman said. “I wanted my daughter to learn from the elders and stories and perspectives, especially giving thanks and being attuned to the natural world.”

Conservancy Director Brinda Sarathy said one of the reasons she wanted to hold this event is Pitzer’s core value of environmental sustainability.

“We see this as including ‘cultural sustainability,’ which in part involves affirming a link between land/natural systems and the peoples who live in relationship to these particular places and systems,” Sarathy wrote in an email to TSL. “For us to be able to learn from and with indigenous peoples who are of this

place, and whose ancestral land now hosts us all, is an honor and responsibility.”

The ceremony was held in a sacred area where a dozen large logs were arranged in a large circle. Four poles surrounded the circle, placed at each cardinal direction, and were colored with the Tongva colors black, white, and red, which symbolize life.

Miller said he is glad to have Pitzer’s Conservancy as a place to hold ceremonies like these.

“This particular community at Pitzer offers an enormously valuable asset because we are dealing with all kinds of people, especially youth,” Miller said.

“This gives us a chance to do our thing and invite others and school others on this that might be interested.”

Guests entered the ceremonial circle in a line, following a clockwise motion until we found seats on logs. Then the ceremony began, accompanied by a song.

The Ancestral Song was sung by several indigenous adults. The rest of us played a rhythm with clapping sticks. A man walked around the circle, sprinkling bits of tobacco, a plant sacred to the Tongva, on the ground. Trailing him, two girls sprinkled water from large shells to symbolize rejuvenating the earth.

At the back of the line was another man carrying a large wooden pole. He placed the pole in the center of the circle, creating a giant sundial.

Afterward, several Tongva members gave speeches and shared stories. Drake honored an-

The Proof Is In The Quiche: Student Production Celebrates Queer Theatre

other Tongva elder for her lifelong work for the tribe. Miller talked about the stars’ significance to the Tongva. Others shared more songs, including the Water Song and the Willow Song.

Aaron Gonzalez PZ ’21 said his favorite part of attending the event was the singing.

“I liked that we all got to participate in [the songs] with the clapping sticks and that they had a song for everything in nature,” Gonzalez said.

Finally, at exactly 12:58 p.m., we celebrated the sun in all its glory. At this point, the sun was at its highest peak in the sky, and the pole’s shadow directed due north. The Spring Equinox was officially acknowledged.

We ended the ceremony by standing up and shaking each

Scripps Highlights Multiculturalism In 74th Ceramic Annual Will Howard

Audrey Simmons • The Student Life

Carolyn Williams SC ’21 and Miranda Mattlin PO ’21 perform in “5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche” at Pomona College’s Seaver Theater this past weekend.

Mabel Lui “I’m a lesbian,” I shouted alongside my fellow audience members.

For one night, I was a sister of the Susan B. Anthony Society for the Sisters of Gertrude Stein, and together we experienced the freeing moment of coming out in the safe theater space (despite our actual sexual orientations).

This past weekend, Pomona College’s Seaver Theatre featured the student-directed production “5 Lesbians Eating A Quiche.” The Green Room, a theater initiative that promotes productions created by students for the 5C community, supported the production.

Set in 1956, sisters and widows Vern, Dale, Wren, Ginny, and Lulie (played by Miranda Mattlin PO ’21, Sullivan Whitely SC ’19, Tyra Popovich PZ ’21, Carolyn Williams SC ’21, and Mia Kania SC ’20, respectively) opened the play by welcoming the audience to the annual “Quiche Breakfast.”

However, during this special meeting, the Communists attack, and the five sisters are then trapped in the bunker for four years. In the midst of confusion, the characters (save for Lulie) all come out as lesbians in

powerful canon.

“The rules of society are thrown out the door, and they’re able to be whoever they want to be,” director Hershey Suri PO ’21 said.

At first, it all seemed like lighthearted fun. The dialogue was witty and amusing, with characters throwing comedic shade at audience members to create an engaging and interactive environment.

It’s made abundantly clear from the beginning that the characters truly like quiche — or rather the egg — as they glorify the savory tart as if it were their true savior.

Nonetheless, the show avoids painting its characters as comedic shticks by pushing further into the sisterhood dynamic and individual personality.

One particularly powerful yet vulnerable scene was when the naive Ginny was overcome by her desire for quiche.

As all five characters took a bite from Vern’s winning quiche, Ginny crawled onto the table, grabbing the plate as she licked it completely clean. Of course, she did this while simultaneously panting and making “ahh” noises — I’m sure you can imagine what she was trying to simulate.

Facial expressions and exaggerated physicality all lend themselves beautifully to the development of the relationships between the sisters, and the characters continue to surprise the audience.

Stranded together — perhaps as the last five humans on Earth — Dale and Wren come out as lesbians after showing off their matching bracelets.

Vern and Ginny follow suit, but just when we expect sister leader Lulie to do the same, she instead shocks the audience by exclaiming “I’m pregnant!”

What ensues is a bundle of hilarity as even more revelations reveal themselves. However, all events accumulate to a somewhat bittersweet, yet heartwarming ending — one that sees the sisters lose one of their own.

Ultimately, Suri’s goal as a director is to convey the importance of carrying an authentic self.

“As much as the world says you can be who you want to be, there are a lot of barriers, personal and external, that do bar you from [doing so],” Suri said. “I wanted to send a message that you can be whoever you want to be. As if you were living in a bunker. As if there were no social constructs.”

The women in the play had the

courage to come out as lesbians because they were finally free from expectations and constraints.

“There are not a lot of mediums out there in the entertainment world where the LGBTQ+ community is looked at in a positive light,” Suri said.

As a result, Queer Resource Center of The Claremont Colleges hosted talkbacks to facilitate LGBTQ+ representation and discussion, which helped audience members to further understand the play’s message and its gravity.

Suri expressed that she wanted to handle LGBTQ+ themes in a sensitive way and ensure that LGBTQ+ identifying people felt comfortable in the theatre space.

“I was aware that this show is a piece of queer theatre,” Suri said.

“So, I needed to make sure that the comedy was not super over-the-top so nothing came out offensively.”

The production was funny, provocative, and also inspiring. Suri summed it up perfectly.

“It’s a show about the LGBTQ+ community, but it’s also about sisterhood and being proud to be a woman, and being proud to be gay, and being proud to be human,” Suri said.

other’s hands. The Tongva gave us bundles of sage as parting gifts.

Gonzalez said he liked seeing how people gather in different ways but produce the same effect.

“For me being there in that circle … it kind of reminded me of [Catholic] church growing up,” Gonzalez said. “It’s kind of a peaceful time when you reflect on the past week and sing songs with people, and then, you go and eat food afterwards.”

While the Spring Equinox was actually last Tuesday, Miller said the day on which we celebrated it doesn’t matter.

“The importance here for us is it’s ceremonial,” Miller said. “As long as you do the honoring, as long as people are interested and involved … we’ll be more than happy with that.”

How can a teapot resist the status quo? How can clay push back against cultural homogeneity?

These are the kinds of questions Patsy Cox, the guest curator of this year ’s Scripps Ceramic Annual, is interested in exploring. This semester, she chose to showcase works from artists of a multitude of cultural backgrounds and identities.

Every spring, Scripps College’s Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery hosts an artist’s choice show, choosing a different leading ceramicist to curate each year.

Cox is a professor of visual art and head of the Ceramics Department at California State University, Northridge, where she was hired straight out of graduate school 18 years ago.

Growing up in Massachusetts and Missouri, Cox was born in Thailand to a Thai mother and a white American father, and has an African-American brother. Cox’s work consists of mostly installation-based sculptures, and she focuses on the urban landscape: the mixture of cultures, race, and identity.

Entering its 74th year this semester, the Scripps Ceramic Annual is the longest continuous exhibition of contemporary ceramics in the United States, which, Cox said, makes it an important survey of the field.

She wanted to include people who had not yet appeared in that survey and whom she felt deserved a place in it.

“One of the first things I did was look through [the Gallery’s] brilliant archive,” Cox said. “I looked through that archive and chose people who weren’t in it and who were making good art.

It sort of confounded me that they hadn’t been a part of that conversation.”

When Cox decided she wanted to put on this exhibition, titled “Stories without Borders: Personal Narratives in Clay,” President Donald Trump had just been elected.

“We had a new president talking about all of this stuff — about walls — so I chose work from artists from a multitude

of cultural backgrounds,” Cox said. “The response was: ‘Look, America is already great, and the reason we’re great is because we have all these different cultures, and we celebrate them.’”

The show, which opened Jan. 20, includes works from seven artists: Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Christina Erives, Steven Young Lee, Roberto Lugo, Kyungmin Park, Zemer Peled, and Roxanne Swentzell.

According to Cox, Lugo is a rising star in the ceramics world.

A self-proclaimed “ghetto potter,” Lugo pays homage to a variety of artists and thinkers of color through his ceramics.

His two pieces featured in this exhibition are a teapot and an urn, both of which are printed with ornate designs. The teapot features a collaged portrait of Frederick Douglass, and the urn an impressionistic rendering of a young Whitney Houston.

“His work is very timely,” said Kirk Delman, the gallery’s collections manager. “He’s reinterpreting ceramic tradition and using it as a vehicle for his personal beliefs.”

Kyungmin Park, a Korean artist, has four pieces on display at the gallery, one of which is a sculpture of two baby heads positioned against a speckled blob of hardened clay.

One of them, mouth agape and brow furrowed, points at the other, who is blank-faced and has snot running from his right nostril. The work is titled “Seriously, this one over me?!!” (2017).

For Minah Choi PO ’18, Kyungmin Park’s departure from what Choi considers traditional East Asian art struck a personal chord.

“I loved the Korean artist’s creepy babies with the snot coming out of one of their noses.”

Choi, who is Korean-American, said. “With Asian art especially, I feel like there’s supposed to be a refined air, this very delicate aesthetic. [Park’s pieces] weren’t that cute — they got away from that aesthetic, and I liked that.”

The Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery is open from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday during exhibitions. The ceramic annual will close April 8.

LIFE & STYLE MARCH 30, 2018

THE STUDENT LIFE

JEOPARDY: CMCer Relied On Instincts For Buzzer Timing

PAGE 5

CMC Country Singer Chases Musical Career, Talks Gender In Genre Maddie Wilson

Courtesy of BagoGames

Courtesy of Daniel Ludlam

Claremont McKenna College Senior Class President Daniel Ludlam CM ’18 recently appeared on the television show “Jeopardy.”

Continued from page 1 Ludlam said that, on the other hand, “the most difficult moment was at the end, when I was having such a hard time buzzing in.”

He explained the complexity of the buzzing system.

“There’s a very small window once Alex stops reading the clue … that the gates open and you can start buzzing in,” Ludlam said. “My problem was timing the buzzer. There were a bunch of questions that I got completely out-buzzed on.”

Regarding the strategies he used while competing, Ludlam said he relied on his instincts and not overthinking his responses.

“I played fairly aggressively, I took some risks and I rang up on some clues I didn’t know for sure,” he said.

There were also aspects of the show that Ludlam was not sure about beforehand, or had not expected.

“I hadn’t anticipated how much I would like the other contestants,” Ludlam said. “Everyone was absolutely qualified to be there. … I was quite pleased with the friends I made following the release of the episode.”

Ludlam also expressed surprise at how active people on Twitter were during his episode.

“I was watching comments

come in in real time based on the different time zones,” he said.

Ludlam also said he escaped a lot of bullying, describing the discriminatory comments the returning transgender champion received.

“I am shocked at some of the hate that came out of [being on] Jeopardy,” he said.

However, overall, Ludlam described his experience on television as “really cool, really empowering.”

In fact, Ludlam added: “I am really happy about how I portrayed myself on camera and how I answered the questions. I think I made CMC proud.”

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Musicians and artists at the 5Cs come in hefty numbers.

However, country artists are few and far between. An Albuquerque, New Mexico native, Teagan Stewart CM ’18 is embracing her passion for country music and utilizing her unparalleled talent to make a name for herself both within and outside the Claremont bubble.

At age six, Stewart’s adoration for music began to blossom. By the time she was 12, she was performing at events that her voice coaches helped coordinate, and writing her own music. With encouragement from her family, Stewart used this as fuel to continue pursuing a career in Country and Blues music.

“My family has been very supportive the whole time, which is rare,” Stewart said.

“They were always telling me ‘you should dive into this, you should see yourself as an artist, you should be writing more.’”

While the act of balancing roles as a student and a singer can be an arduous task, Stewart seems to be navigating the challenge with ease.

As an International Relations and Literature dual major, she splits her time between her duties as a Logistics Coordinator for Model UN and a consultant at CMC’s Center for Writing and Public Discourse. She also sings the national anthem at various basketball, baseball, and volleyball games, and performs at open-mics.

To cultivate a career for herself in music, however, Stewart says it is crucial that she intensify her focus and dedicate an ample amount of time to her development as an artist.

“I need to put 100 percent into my music, which is something I’ve never done before,” Stewart said. “I’m always doing 50 percent in school, 30 percent in dance team, and the rest in other areas … that’s kind of scary; I’ve never focused on one thing before.”

As she continues to forge ahead in her journey, the distinction between her role as an artist and a musician is an important factor in remaining authentic and unique in her work.

“A musician could also be an artist but they might not be; they can just make a living playing anything,” Stewart explains. “An artist has to be a creator with a vision for what they want their sound to be.”

Another vital component of Stewart’s advancement as an artist is maintaining a deep dedication to authenticity in all of her music ventures, and in doing so, preserving country music’s distinctive identity.

The initial pull toward country for Stewart came from an appreciation for the genre’s raw

Courtesy of Teagan Stewart

Teagan Stewart CM ’18 is embracing her passion for country music and trying to make a name for herself inside and outside of the Claremont community.

and honest truth through storytelling. With pop music currently on the rise, Stewart has noticed a slight loss of country’s authentic side, as a result of the increasing dominance of pop crossovers.

And while country music is believed by many to be on the decline in terms of its popularity, Stewart remains insistent on dispelling the myth that the genre has reached a dead end.

As the debate continues, one issue in particular has become increasingly apparent: an immense lack of female presence in the industry.

According to the most recent statistics, only 15 percent of female artists make up the country music charts.

“It’s more of a boys’ club than [that of ] the rest of the music industry,” Stewart said.

In writing her own music, Stewart hopes to continue to direct country music back to its

humble origins. March 2, she successfully launched a music video for her single “Water Wings,” which recounts an incredibly intimate and emotional narrative.

“It can be a general sense of watching someone you love go through a hard time,” Stewart said. “You do what you can do, and you can’t live their life for them. … there’s not really a victory moral; it’s kind of catharsis and raw, honest truth.”

Headed to Nashville in the fall, Stewart hopes to use what she’s learned over the past 15 years to advance her career.

When asked about advice that she would give to aspiring artists, she honed in on two points.

“Be nice to everybody because it’s such a tight network, and most importantly, take time to read and learn about the music business,” Stewart said. ”You have to be able to brand yourself and be a real entrepreneur.”

From Commentary To Classroom: CMC Professor Pitney Discusses His Political Party Shift Jaimie Ding “[I] was a Republican until election night 2016,” Claremont McKenna College Government Professor John J. Pitney, Jr. said.

“As soon as [Donald] Trump was declared the victor, I literally took out my laptop and immediately changed [my] registration to independent.”

Although he has been a lifelong conservative, you wouldn’t always know it from talking to him. “[Trump is] a disaster. He’s a disaster for the United States, he’s a disaster for the Republican party,” he said. “If we’re really lucky, we’ll avoid a nuclear war.”

Pitney has been teaching at CMC for 32 years. Another CMC government professor, Charles Kesler, remembers voting for Pitney when he was being considered by the hiring committee.

“We always put a premium on ... the teacher-scholar model,” Kesler said. “I mean, you have to be good at both, and he is good at both. But his teaching is extraordinary, as any student who’s had him would admit.”

Pitney grew up in a working class neighborhood up on the west side of Saratoga Springs, New York. His father was a milkman, and his mother a homemaker; neither attended college. His interest in politics was sparked when his grandfather told him stories of local political machines and corruption in the 1920s and 1930s.

His interest was further piqued through his experiences working for Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1968, during which he developed what would become a lifelong fascination with the president. He graduated from Union College in 1977 with a bachelor’s

degree in political science and went on to get his doctorate at Yale University in 1985.

Pitney’s political views and analyses have given him a broad national audience. He has been quoted on a variety of issues in articles for CNN, NPR, and The Guardian, and has also written columns for Politico and USA Today in the past year.

He attributed his popularity to several factors.

“I kind of have a knack for smart-ass remarks, and [reporters] like that,” Pitney laughed. He also noted that he responds to phone calls promptly and speaks in short sentences.

A defining moment in Pitney’s career was working on President George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign, during which he made connections that later gave him the opportunity to contribute a paragraph to Bush’s 1992 State of the Union address.

He still keeps in touch with his friends from the campaign, Pitney said, and he is writing a book about the 1988 election scheduled to be released later this year.

Before joining CMC as an associate professor, Pitney was a congressional fellow at the American Political Science Association 1983-1984 and a senior domestic policy analyst at the U.S. House Republican Research Committee 1984-1986.

However, “something in me always wanted to teach,” Pitney said. He also desired the financial stability of a professorship, as opposed to the volatile career of a congressional staffer.

Pitney teaches classes such as “Introduction to American Politics,” “Politics of Journalism,” and “American Political Parties.” It is

difficult for him to choose a favorite, however.

“It’s like asking which is my favorite child,” he said. The class he has been teaching the longest is U.S. Congress, which is a simulation of Congress. Pitney said many former students from that class have gone on to run for office and told him the class was a valuable exercise.

Pitney’s current and former students from across the 5Cs sing his praises.

“I think that Professor Pitney stands out because he cares so deeply about his students and he’s very devoted to them,” said Melia Wong CM ’19, a government major. “That comes across of course in mentoring, his email list about internships and jobs, and also his faculty advising.”

After teaching for so many years, Pitney has former students in a variety of impressive places.

Their names flow off his tongue one after another.

“It’s kind of like remembering family members,” Pitney said.

An especially fond moment for Pitney was when Kathryn Pearson CM ’93, a former student now a professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, placed the doctoral hood on another one of his students, Paul Snell CM ’08.

“If I had to pick top ten proud moments of my career at CMC, that would be it,” Pitney said. “It’s also a reminder I’m getting old.”

Another former student, Steve Bullock CM ’88, is the governor of Montana and a potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.

Pitney said he believes putting Bullock on the ticket could help Democrats’ weakness in rural areas.

Besides teaching, Pitney is inter-

Jaimie Ding • The Student Life

Claremont McKenna College Government Professor John Pitney poses in front of his bookcase. Pitney has been quoted in many articles for CNN, NPR, and The Guardian.

ested in researching autism as a political issue and how public policy deals with autism. He authored the book “The Politics of Autism: Navigating the Contested Spectrum,” released in 2015. He also maintains a blog, Autism Policy and Politics, which offers insights, analyses, and updates on recent events related to autism policy.

Outside of politics, Pitney said he only has one hobby: parenthood. Pitney spends his weekends going on Joshua Tree Girl Scout outings with his 11-year-old daughter and comic conventions with his 16-year-old son.

Pitney calls himself a “mouse

spouse,” since his wife works at Disney. The whole family loves Disney and they have two dogs named Mickey and Minnie. He often references popular culture and connects it to politics in his classes.

“I use a ‘Star Wars’ line: ‘this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause,’ and I relate that to the first Federalist paper,” Pitney said.

With regard to the politics in the real world, Pitney said he is incredibly pessimistic about the impact that Trump will have on the world and conservatism in America.

“The stench of Trump will be on the conservative movement for years to come,” he said.

So far, congressional Republicans have mostly fallen in line with Trump’s policies, according to Pitney. In response, as an antiTrump independent, Pitney said he will have to think more carefully about how he votes.

Voting Republican used to be his default option, but now he has to be “more selective,” he said.

“I never thought I would’ve said something like [this] a couple years ago, but I think it’s important to have a Democratic Congress to serve as a check on Trump,” Pitney said. “Because Republicans have fallen down on their constitutional duties.”

LIFE & STYLE THE STUDENT LIFE

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MARCH 30, 2018

Meet The King Of 5C Memes: Cade Niles PO ’20 Liam Brooks A stand-up comedian took the stage at Scripps College’s Motley Coffeehouse last month and opened one of his bits by saying, “I’ve found that social media has been changing a lot these days; like Reddit, Twitter, they’re pretty cool, but Facebook is kind of dying, in my opinion.”

Most people reading this article might have first heard this stand-up comedian’s name from Facebook.

Cade Niles PO ’20 is one of the most popular regular contributors to the “Meme Queens of the 5Cs” Facebook group, garnering hundreds of reactions and comments on the 68 posts he’s made since last August.

A year ago, Niles had nowhere near the presence that he now commands at the 5Cs’ cultural watering hole. That’s because he was over 1,500 miles away at Carleton College, which he attended for one year before transferring to Pomona College.

The story of how he wound up here and rose to fame is not just about Facebook. And it doesn’t start with his first meme. It begins, instead, with a shy 8-year-old with a penchant for comics showing a new side of himself in his first onstage performance. And it stretches geographically like a rattling-off of accent impressions: New York, California, Minnesota, Scotland, and the grimy corners of the internet.

Niles grew up as a “timid” kid, he told me during a long conversation in a study room at Pomona’s Dialynas Hall last Thursday. Now he speaks in an earnest, booming voice — a voice he had inherited, he explained to me earlier, from a theater teacher who commanded that he speak “LOUDLY, SLOWLY, CLEARLY.” Niles was born in Southern California, but soon after, his family moved to upstate New York for his father’s job at a boarding school there. Then, they returned to California to Danville before he started middle school.

In sixth grade, he dressed up as Wikipedia for Halloween, a website he’d become familiar with, as he began to use a computer for school assignments that made him also

begin to feel anxious as a recent retransplant to California.

He found himself overwhelmed with a new environment and the higher workload that comes with the transition into middle school.

“Coming from elementary school where so little was expected of me academically [and then] coming into sixth grade where I was doing problems sets and writing papers and essays and doing other homework assignments … It was kind of overwhelming,” Niles said. “I often found that comedy was a way for me to sort of unwind, a way for me to forget the stress I was feeling.”

By seventh grade, Niles had become a self-labeled class clown. He also began to pursue comedy and theater outside the classroom, at the encouragement of his parents. But it was during an abroad program at Gordonstoun, a boarding school in Scotland, that the role of entertainer truly locked onto his identity.

“While I was quiet and reserved for a few weeks at Gordonstoun,” a younger Niles wrote in a blog post while attending the program, “I slowly began to extrovert myself and make many new friends.”

Niles said Thursday that while he was 15 years old for the duration of the program, he felt as if he left as a 14-year-old and returned as a 16-year-old.

“I went from baby Cade to teenager Cade,” he said. “I also got my braces off.”

He continued with summer programs for sketch comedy and theater, including Cal Shakes, a Shakespeare camp in Southern California.

Niles, like perhaps some of the last students of our kind, did not grow up immersed in technology.

“I definitely wasn’t a child raised on the internet,” Niles told me. “I would say I was an adolescent who enjoyed the internet.”

Niles instead points to comics as an influential medium from his childhood — one that translates formally to the perfect meme template, he said, in that “it’s setup, setup, setup, delivery, in four panels.”

Around the same time he moved from New York City to Danville,

Niles began to frequent some of the internet’s meme breeding grounds like Reddit and 4chan, the latter of which he describes as “the disgusting ooze whence much of internet humor comes,” that he is open, if a bit ashamed, to admit he visits.

Niles readily acknowledges that Reddit and 4chan’s meme culture is often criticized for blatant offensiveness and shock-humor that marches in step with systemic oppression.

While he saw some of it to be funny at first as a middle-schooler, he’s come to see much of it as unnecessary and harmful, and points to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign as a turning point.

“I saw how a lot of the people engaging in that kind of purposefully offensive humor also held the beliefs that they were espousing supposedly ironically,” Niles said. “People who would make crude political jokes would also make crude political decisions.”

Niles has deleted several posts he’s made to Meme Queens — a joke about the “back” button on the Pomona web portal and the false missile alert in Hawaii, for example — either because people raised concerns in comments or private messages, or because they simply didn’t gain traction quickly. But he is sure-footed when defining his role and sense of humor as one that does no harm.

“I’m just trying to put some love in my comedy,” he told me, comparing his role to that of a court jester.

Then again, Niles can see meme posts as sometimes serving a grander purpose.

“I feel like I’m out there shaking a purple stick and making an ass out of myself sometimes, but sometimes engaging in satire, and in that way, maybe I’m engaging in some kind of social commentary,” he said.

The jester, after all, was considered the one person in the king’s court who could speak the truth.

But, “I’m certainly not the Joker,” he added. “I think he’s a terrorist.”

That weekend, I saw Niles at a birthday party for a mutual friend at Pitzer. It was held in the common room of a Mead Hall suite, which comes with some late-80s faux wood, blue-cushioned couches, and chairs.

Humanities Versus STEM Majors: Star-Crossed Lovers, Or Meant To Be? Maya Zhou I needed a radical break from the men of my past.

After blindly diving into various relationships with guys whose horizons of thought never moved beyond petty gossip and March Madness, I was craving an intellectual.

I had grown tired of inane questions like, “Do you think vegetables have feelings?” I was done with men who had, as Hermione Granger once aptly put it, “the emotional range of a teaspoon.”

Clearly, I wasn’t happy.

At long last, I decided that I deserved better than partners whose stubborn refusal to introspect and empathize led to heartbreak, stressinduced nail-biting, and tears of frustration (all mine). When I verbalized this to my closest female friends, they rolled their eyes in simultaneous relief and exasperation, as if to say “finally.”

This is where the boy (whom I will name “X” for anonymity) comes into the picture. Smart, sexy, and analytical, X was the answer. The night we met, he listened to me rant about the toxic potential of the 5C hookup culture, while responding with sensitivity and his own critiques.

Call me “crazy,” but it was like a slideshow of our future was unfolding before my eyes. I foresaw engaging conversations about politics, philosophy, spirituality, and everything in between, all melting together. It would be our version of pillow talk.

Then he uttered those fateful words: “Oh, I’m definitely a STEM guy. I’m not big into humanities.”

Cue the record scratch. My mental slideshow screeched to a halting stop.

I thought, “Could love really exist across disciplines that have traditionally been pitted against each other?

Were we fated to be the collegiate versions of Romeo and Juliet? Would we be like tectonic plates, constantly at friction with one another?”

To provide a little context, I’ve never considered myself a “science” type of gal. Sure, I did surprisingly well on my high school project on osteogenesis imperfecta, but this is all overshadowed by my abysmal track record with chemistry, physics, and higher-level biology.

I once mistakenly registered for Bio44 to fulfill my science general education requirement and dropped it within 15 minutes of the first class.

I have never felt so out of place in a classroom before.

And just somehow, I ended up falling headlong for an aspiring doctor majoring in molecular biology, who had won science accolades and

Ian Poveda • The Student Life

Cade Niles PO ’20 is far from falling out of touch when it comes to memes. The 5C Meme Queen persona has made a name for himself since his arrival to campus as a transfer student this year.

There was one new couch there, too — blue and just a bit bigger than a loveseat, pushed up against wall, on the left side of which Niles had posted himself by the time the party had peaked and begun to unwind.

A bit before midnight, he struck up a conversation with the person sitting to his right, Eli Fujita PZ ’19.

Fujita, he remembered, is a member of Without a Box, the 5C improv group Niles had opened for the month before.

Fujita, Niles learned, also calls East Bay home, and they shared some mutual acquaintances who had attended The Athenian School and some of the local public high schools.

A few minutes later, they discovered

they attended the same Shakespeare camp, and therefore own identical shirts with each other’s name printed on them.

Niles told me he has a hard time not having a role in a community. In middle school, he was the class clown; in high school, the wisecracker. He took on the roles of Shakespeare characters, celebrity impressions, accents, and cartoons.

At Carleton, secluded and cold, he was somebody but not a somebody.

Now, in Claremont, he’s recognized by name and endowed with the very name of the community within which he drew attention to his own: the Meme Queen of the 5Cs. In the time I spent with him,

Niles would constantly pull out his phone — not to check texts or social media, but to reference what we were talking about in real life — scrolling quickly to specific memes he made but didn’t post, or inspirations from elsewhere. Now, on a couch on a Friday night in a dim common room, he used it to call up photographs of Cal Shakes, comparing them to Fujita’s archives.

Niles had arrived that night wearing the same green flannel shirt over a tee like in his Facebook picture, but by then, had lost the outer layer. As he sunk into the couch, he became a bit more literally invisible and didn’t seem to mind one bit.

#Adulting Part II: A Self-Care Transformation Karen Song

Molly Antell • The Student Life

used to be the vice president of the chemistry club in high school.

My dating history might say otherwise, but I was the kind of person who believed that in order for a relationship to work, the two parties had to share the same passions.

As I fell further into the relationship, I started noticing small things that highlighted our differences.

“My mom always said I should date someone who’s also pre-med,” he casually said to me while we were doing homework together.

“Huh,” I responded.

Inside, I blanched, already picturing the look on his mom’s face when I would meet her for the first time and announce at the dinner table in front of his whole family that I was planning to be a journalist.

In a lot of Asian families, journalism is synonymous with career death.

I would bring up literature references with X, and he’d stare blankly back at me. He would rehearse his research presentation with me, and all I could say was, “Your poster looks very professional.”

“What’s a Foucault?” he asked me one day.

A few months into our relationship, we had our first big fight. I’ve already forgotten what we were fighting about, but the gist of it was that he thought I was being too idealistic, and I thought he was only seeing things in black and white.

This became the underlying tension between all our arguments.

While he dealt in “hows,” I dealt

in “whys.” He turned away from grey areas, and I immersed myself in an ocean of grey, in a multitude of shades that his eyes did not see.

He loved to piece things together like the branches of a molecule, and I loved to take them apart.

But all the while, we were trying. He would listen patiently to my philosophical musings about animal rights while we lay in bed.

I left him little notes with organic chemistry puns on them before all his exams, even though I had no idea what “diene” was.

Over time, the friction became bearable, even beautiful. He grounded me when I floated off with unanswerable questions in my head, and his rationality kept my over-worrying tendencies at bay.

I learned that interdisciplinary love was more powerful than anything I’d ever experienced because we were constantly challenging each other to grow and learn from one another.

I stopped holding onto the stereotypical dichotomy of STEM versus humanities, quantitative versus qualitative, and that left me to love freely and openly. X I are so much better together than separate.

It really is the perfect meeting of two minds.

Here’s another thing: I used to wax lyrical about the indescribable, overwhelming heat I feel between us whenever our skin touched, but he’s taught me that’s just chemistry.

In Korean, there’s a saying that can be loosely translated into: “The first time you feel lonely after you move out of your parents’ house is when you catch a cold.”

My mom said this to me constantly as I was moving into my senior year of high school because while my parents moved back to California, I had to live alone in Seoul to finish school.

At the time, I didn’t really take it to heart. I felt invincible.

I wanted so badly to be a ‘real’ adult.

I was excited to get a taste of the freedom that I would have an infinite supply of — once I went to college. Little did I know, this freedom would come at a cost.

Living alone far away from my parents — both in Korea and now as a freshman at Pomona College — has just been realization after realization that what I thought was ‘self-care’ my whole life was actually my mom telling me to take care of myself.

No one’s going to be there to force me awake every crushing morning. No one’s going to make sure I eat three meals a day. And if I get sick, there’s no one sitting by my bedside with hot Korean porridge, ginseng tea, and a handful of vitamins.

Self-care as an adult has not been what I had expected. I had never truly valued my physical health until halfway into this semester when I realized I was aching from my fourth feverinducing cold this year.

I realized that I had to take responsibility for my body and prioritize nutrition, for what felt like the first time in my life.

In all my time as a young adult, self-care only pertained to me in terms of mental health — allowing myself to be sad when necessary and finding opportunities to be happy as often as possible.

While this is still incredibly important to me, I recognize now that being a well-rounded adult means taking control of my health in every aspect.

And taking care of my physical health will translate into mental well-being much more than one would expect (despite it being emphasized at every wellness lecture, ever).

The disappointing reality of being an adult — something that I had looked forward to since I was in elementary school — is that surviving comes before thriving. Before I can even think to ‘dream big’ or imagine what I want to do in five years, I have to think about keeping my mind

Sean Ogami • The Student Life

and body fit for the task. I constantly get anxious about how I’m going to achieve my post-college goals even though I’m not even close to graduating.

That being said, in the first article of the “adulting” series, Maya Zhou SC ’19 said: “Adulthood is also about gaining a sense of belonging, finding your com-

munity, and carving out a little piece of the world for yourself.”

I may just be a small Asian girl trying to make it in the real world, but I’m glad I have a great community of aspiring adults here at Pomona — and a drawer full of NyQuil™ — to fight alongside me.

Milk & Honey Overrun by TSL

Ben Shapiro “The Claremonts do not have a podium low enough for Shapiro’s hateful ideas to be viewed.”

The streets will run red with

passionfruit tea

Pagz 4 Dayziz

Trying Our Fucking Best Since 1889

ECLAIREMOUNT, CA

DEADLINE O’CLOCK

VOL. XLVII NO. 47

Athenaeum Collapse Tied To Secret Tunnel System Dig Dog (Squirrel????)

During the Athenaeum talk on Thursday, listeners and speakers were forced to flee when the fire alarm sounded. Shortly after the building was vacated, the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum buckled and crumpled into a series of sinkholes. The distribution of the sinkholes formed the phrase “SMASH THE PATRIARCHY” on the ground where the Athenaeum once stood. No one was injured by the collapse.

The Claremont Police Department and Campus Safety arrived almost immediately to the scene to explore the cause of the outspoken sinkholes. Upon being lowered into the sinkhole area, CPD officers noted an trail of acorns to the north, and saw an opening just large enough for a human.

The tunnel led to a surprising place — behind the second washer from the right in the laundry room of Ellen Browning Residence Hall at Scripps College.

The entrance to the Ellen Browning Residence Hall laundry room follows a set of cement stairs and a slide-like structure into a low-ceilinged

Trouble In Schools: CMC Students Block Entrance To Athenaeum In Alleged “Total Lack Of Awareness Of Their Surroundings” Hershey Solomon A group of white male students at Claremont McKenna College blocked the entrance to the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum Thursday afternoon in an alleged attempt to remain oblivious to the needs of others at all times.

The group, which numbered somewhere between two and ten — it seemed larger than the sum of its parts, eyewitnesses said, and their pinstriped suits blended into each other like a flock of zebras — remained in the doorway long enough to sustain a loud conversation about how fucked up they were the night before.

One of the students reportedly bragged about blacking out, as did a second, and a third, and you know what they all did, ok, because you know.

“It always happens. I feel like I’m still hungover,” one student said, laughing.

They concluded their discussion by agreeing that the chef for the complimentary dinner that night was “the man,” more specifically “my man,” and that they were excited to sit down after standing in a doorway for what felt to them, and everyone else trying to get inside, like far, far too long.

One of the students, who identified himself to TSL only as “a Stag, like an actual fucking Stag” — “like, with the horns bro” — “I don’t think you understand [vomits bees]” — said that he didn’t notice anyone behind him.

But, he said he was “like, really sorry” when it was pointed out to him that a line of approximately

300 students, many of whom did not attend CMC, had been waiting patiently behind the group for several hours.

“I don’t get it,” another student told TSL under the condition of anonymity because he was “like so fucked up I forget my name, and also can’t tell you who’s president, but probably Reagan right?”

“There’s nobody blocking my way inside,” he said. “Why would it be any different for other students?”

“Why should I have to change my behavior,” he continued, “For something I can’t even see? Something I’m blind to unless I expended the Newtonian minimum energy required to think about something that doesn’t directly affect my liver or dick?”

By that point, the number of students waiting had stretched so far that Campus Safety officers erected fences to better manage the line.

One student arrived with a sound system, intending to play music to pass the time and drown out the talk of “brews and bros.” But a crucial audio cable was stolen by a student in the door-blocking group, whose arms extended well past the long arm of the law.

“Sorrry man I really need an aux cord for our trip to Coachella this year ssffplll,” he whispered, while his tendril-like forearms spanned the hundred-odd yards to the speaker setup in a feat of blatant disregard for the laws of physics.

“Why would a BMW not have Bluetooth, am I right?” he continued, not expecting a serious response that he didn’t plan on listening to, because that question was just a comment, and he spent a lot of time on it.

The fading light of the Southern California sun, which had been shining bright when the door group had first arrived, had at this point sunk near the horizon.

One student draped himself in an American flag to stay warm.

Soon after, a scuffle erupted near the entrance.

A professor attempted to push through the entrance, but was momentarily blinded by the fading sunlight reflecting off one student’s diamond watch face, or maybe it was one student’s forehead, which had grown sweaty at the thought that he would amount to nothing, a thought that had not once crossed his mind — let alone when he was wearing that suit.

“You trying to get in bro?” he asked.

“No,” the professor said, dusting off his jacket with a sigh. “Of course not. I don’t really want to hear Tim Kaine’s thoughts on peace in the Middle East.”

Around 7:00 p.m., when finally asked by a Campus Safety officer to “please allow other students inside to attend the talk,” the student who identified himself as a Stag reportedly jumped back at the sight of institutionally recognized authority, then popped his lapels back in place in a show of dominance.

“Fuck the police,” he was heard saying as he turned away and finally entered the building, shoving past those waiting for food.

“You showed that motherfucker,” said one companion, slapping him on the rear.

“Woah dude, don’t say that” said another, eyes widening. “My dad’s a cop.”

room with flickering lights.

According to a written history inscribed on a terracotta shingle found in the main tunnel, construction began after the official opening of the Athenaeum in 1983. The tunnels were allegedly constructed by a covert coalition of Scripps students who call themselves “The Matriarchy.”

The Matriarchy began recruiting for their tunnel project in January 1968, just days after the concept of an athenaeum was introduced to the board of trustees at CMC. According to a note delivered to the TSL office by Scripps carrier squirrel, the group felt obligated to act after hearing that a structure whose name was derived from “the Goddess Athena Herself” would

be attached to a space at a former men’s college.

The note also apologized for being the cause of the frequent and frustrating fire alarms in Browning Hall, often late at night. “Between us and the squirrels scraping through the ground and burning through fruit tree roots, a large quantity of smoke and flying dust would trigger alarms.”

In a second letter delivered to TSL by squirrel, an unidentified member of the organization wrote: “We apologize for the inconvenience of [these] alarms, but it was the most convenient time for us to meet without suspicion. Though we often completed Core readings before working, we never forgot about the more important issue at hand.”

The tunnel system was

“Smash the patriarchy” also found to have an entrance to the Cube, Collins Dining Hall, and the Kravis Center.

Seven current Scripps students are under investigation for allegedly tunneling to the Ath, and at least seventy-four aluma have been identified as participants in this fiftyyear plot.

Milk and Honey Workers Taken Hostage by TSL Staff Bobalicious Babe Four student employees of the student-run cafe out of the Sagehen Café Milk and Honey are being held hostage by several staff members of TSL newspaper at their office in the basement of the Walker building at Pomona College, the Claremont Police Department reports.

At approximately 9:32 p.m.

Mar. 29, Milk and Honey ran out of boba. When TSL staff arrived to make their weekly production night order of boba tea, they were informed they could substitute boba with red bean or aloe toppings instead.

A student studying at the Sagehen Café at the time witnessed the escalation of tension between the TSL staff and the Milk and Honey employees.

“One of the managing editors got really red in the face

and tied up his curly hair into a man bun,” the student said. “He rolled up his sleeves and cracked his knuckles — I could hear them crack all the way from the other side of the room.”

After the TSL staff and Milk and Honey employees yelled back and forth for several minutes, they started getting physical.

Another student who witnessed the scene said they “tore each other up like animals.”

After dragging bloodied, semiconscious bodies back to their office, TSL posted a ransom note on their website and printed hundreds of copies that they scattered in the wind. The ransom note stated: “TSL demands all funds raised

by Milk and Honey as well as $15,000 from the operating budgets of each of the 5C student governments to be turned over by 4:20 a.m. on April 1. The money must be in $20 bills and rubber

banded in stacks of $4000. Take all the money and place it in suitcases covered in issues of TSL. Do not leave a spot unwrapped.”

Below the typed statement was “OR ELSE YOU’LL NEVER SEE THEM AGAIN” written in cut out letters from magazines.

“That part was for dramatic flair,” an anonymous TSL staff member from inside the office admitted. There were TSL correspondents outside the office that were not involved in the crisis and were able to get in contact with staff members inside.

“TSL has suffered far too long.

We deserve to be recognized for our work,” the editor-in-chief said over megaphone from inside the office. “The least they could do was provide us with bubble tea every Thursday. And they can’t even do that. Milk and Honey has shown us blatant disrespect, as well as the 5Cs, and they must be punished.”

In Memorium: TSL’s Website

“CMC Under Protest for having notable manlet, Ben Shapiro as a Speaker” “CMC Under Protest for having notable manlet, Ben Shapiro as a Speaker” Controversial nerd and pundit Ben Shapiro has been scheduled to speak at Claremont McKenna College April 1. This announcement has been met with protest from students at Pitzer College stating that, “The Claremonts do not have a podium low enough for Shapiro’s hateful ideas

to be viewed.” This protest has triggered a counter protest lead by Tad Pennington the III CM ’21 who told TSL that “the libcuck snowflakes at Pitzer are simply afraid of Shapiro’s intimidating 5’4 height and nasaly voice.” TSL tried to reach out to Shapiro for a comment, but where unable to reach him as he had been given a swirly earlier that morning.

Clay Mortimer TSL’s beleaguered website keeled over and died early Friday morning.

Reached for comment, the website explained that life had become too difficult to carry on.

“First it’s ‘load this page,’ then it’s ‘load that page.’ Don’t I ever get a break? It’s too much. I’m done. Bye,” the page said.

The site had no suggestions for how TSL should publish its content going forward.

“502 Bad Gateway,” it said.

“nginx/1.10.3 (Ubuntu).”

Funeral services were held in TSL’s office. The staffer officiating the services kept her remarks brief. “Fuck our website,” she said, angrily shaking a fist at her laptop.

Other TSL staffers described the website as an unreliable colleague who frequently slept on the job.

“Every hour at the 33rd minute, it just crashed,” a staffer said.

“What the hell is that? Who chose 33? WHYYYYYY???”

Many 5C students took a philosophical approach to the death.

“If an article has been written but it doesn’t appear online, does it truly exist?” asked philosophy major Thomas Decartimus PO ’18.

“What is this ‘print’ you speak of?” he added.

Sources close to TSL indicated that the site was close to being laid off, and that TSL was actively working on replacing it.

If you are interested in helping TSL build its new Wordpress site, please contact editor@tsl.news. This is not a joke. Like actually, we’re desperate.

LIES & SLANDER PAGE 8

THE STUDENT LIFE

: P U P E T S O T S ’ C 5 E H T R O F E M I T S I !

IT ! ! !

S L A M I N A L L A R O F L O R T N O C H T BIR uel Redneck, Written by Sam

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Written by Leah

FEBRUARY 31, 2017

D8 NITE @ DA 5C’S

ffy Duck

Written by Da

Are you tired of just going to Hoch-Shanahan as a “date”? Can’t shell out 5 bucks for a T&Joy boba?? Too cheap for that Zipcar?? Even though Valen-

tine’s Day is over, that doesn’t mean you can’t flex those dating muscles and show your bae what tricks you’ve got up your sleeve!! Here are some brilliant and innovative ideas for what to do on a 5C date filled with excitement, cool

scenes, and passionate love

Take your date on a romantic ofo bike ride across the 5Cs with your new poppin membership Meandering through Marston Quad, enjoying the city view of CMC, picking the oranges at Scripps, harvesting a succulent at Pitzer, and doing absolutely nothing at Harvey Mudd, take your date on that bright happy yellow

sunshine bike and enjoy the brilliant views that the 5Cs have to offer. Take the exhilarating bike ride downhill back to South Campus and dump it behind

a building after the lovey dovey session you are bound to have after your date

falls head over heels with you from that adventure.

2. Treat your date out to a romantic meal at Jay’s Place

This affordable option gives you the best bang for your buck at the 5Cs. Treat her to 2.5 pizza roll orders for $1.95 per order, which is the same price

as one cup of literally just grapes at the Coop Fountain. You can even stop by the restaurant on your ofo tour — it gives you something to do at Harvey Mudd!

<3. Break into the Cube.

Relationship hitting a plateau? Things getting boring for you two? Relive your childhood CIA dreams and break into the Cube! We’ll even tell you how: Steal

a CMCer’s ID while they are completely drunk on a Thursday. Then, avoid the

water around the Cube because that stuff is nasty, and swipe into the Cube!

The atmosphere is perfect for some love action ;))))) 4. Take your honey to Milk & Honey!!11!

Yellow dim lights. Soft r&b music in the background. Blissful chatter of students suffering enjoying the atmosphere. Your date will undoubtedly enjoy the saccharine taste of the honey boba melding with a rose-flavored tea and

your company. For only $4.20, your drink will definitely be lit!

Kelly

A Day In The Life Of Officer Red Dogg Hello! My name is Officer Red Dogg and I am a doggy. I live with Campus Security officers in a station on the grounds of The Claremont Colleges. That’s because my grandpa is the Campus Safety director. His name is Stan Skipworth. But this story isn’t going to be about him because he isn’t very fun.

This story is about me because I am very, very fun. This is the story of my very special day.

My very special day started out like every other day. I woke up all alone, then I ate a fine doggy breakfast all alone, while I watched the news all alone. You see, sometimes old campus security offices are lonely.

After breakfast, I ran to the Honnold Mudd Library to look at the books and say, “Hello down there!” to the stressed-out college students. “Hello Scrippsie! Hello CMCer!” That is when I saw him. He was a big, fluffy doggy, with the floppiest floppy ears and the bushiest bushy tail. He was doggy beautiful. I was standing still, but being near him made me feel like my heart was still racing.

“My name is Red,” I said. “But my family calls me DOTCC. It’s short for Doggy of The Claremont Colleges. It’s a long story.”

“My name is Dig. And my family calls me Dig,” said Dig. Dig and I ran together all around the 5C campuses. We ran

“WAIT!!!” said a scary voice. “You can’t get married!”

We looked around and saw that the scary voice was coming from the Claremont Independent.

Let me tell you a little bit about the Claremont Independent.

The Claremont Independent was “in charge.” He was “important.”

None of the colleges could quite work out why he was in charge or how he was important, but he was. And that meant he made the rules. And that meant all the old white conservatives listened to him, even though he was (and this is true) very biased.

“Boy doggies don’t marry boy doggies!” said the Claremont Independent. “Boy doggies have to marry girl doggies!”

“But this is the dog I love,” said Dig. “And this is the dog I love,” said me, Officer Red Dogg. Just being next to Dig made me a little braver.

“Too bad!” said the Claremont Independent. “I am the most biased and I am very important. I am the most biased and I am in charge. Boy doggies marry girl doggies. Girl doggies marry boy doggies. This is the way it has always been. You are different and different is bad!”

“Oooh,” the others whispered nervously among themselves.

Timer, who was a squirrel, came forward.

“I am different too,” he said. “I’m not in ‘Meme Queens of the

through The Coop and grabbed some boba to go. We jumped over lazy students who weren’t ready to grow up and be responsible yet.

5Cs.’”

We ran over the Mounds and past Gwen and Scarlett, the chickens.

Once we ran all over the campuses, we didn’t want to stop run-

read campus newsletters.”

ning. So we ran right inside the dormitories, up and down the halls, and made beautiful barking songs together. We jumped into the swimming pools and chased each other back down Columbia Ave. We ran across the sports fields and through the TSL office and maybe left a few doggy poops.

We ran through very anxious classrooms with very anxious people.

It was a very good run. It was the best run. And I realized something. When I ran with Dig my old stuffy station didn’t feel very lonely anymore. At the end of our run, I said, “Dig, I don’t want to run without you ever again.”

And Dig said, “That’s funny. Because I never want to run without you, Red Dogg, ever again.”

And we both said, “We will get married. And run together forever.”

“Hello everyone,” we said to all the animals on campus. “Hello Gwen and Scarlett the chickens, and Timer” (who was a squirrel), “and Cecil” (who was a Sagehen), “and Ellen” (who was a pig), “and Mr. Pothead,” who was a very good cactus.

“Hello all of you! We are getting married so we can run together forever!”

“Hooray!” said Gwen and Scarlett the chickens, and Timer (who was a squirrel), and Cecil (who was a Sagehen), and Ellen (who was

Officer Red Dogg N Dig Dogg 4ever!!!

“I am different too,” said Cecil, who was a Sagehen. “I actually “I am different too,” said Mr. Pothead, who was a very good cactus. “Sometimes I eat Tide Pods and I don’t know why!”

“Everyone is different and different is not bad,” said Ellen, who was a pig. “Different is special.”

“Wait,” said Mr. Pothead, who was a very good cactus and also a very smart cactus. “Wait a minute. We get to decide who is in charge. We get to decide who is important. We can vote!”

And on this very special day, all the animals voted on who they thought was in charge. They chose not the Claremont Independent.

“Hooray!” said me, Officer Red Dogg.

“Hooray!” said Dig.

he so

precious when he

“Hooray!” said all of our friends, because that is what friends say.

“NO!” boomed the Claremont Independent. “Boy doggies can’t marry boy doggies!”

“You are not in charge!” said everyone.

So Dig and I got married. We had two handsome groomssquirrels named Melvin and Hiram, and a flower-doggy named Theo.

We ate and drank and danced the hokey pokey. Cecil was especially good. And the ceremony was performed by a chicken named Big Mama, who brought her wife as her date.

hit it from the back and drive him

boy i lose myself up in those

After we ate and drank and danced we went home. Together.

“We have to get some sleep, Red. Tomorrow we leave on our doggymoon.”

a pig), and Mr. Pothead, who was a very good cactus.

“Hooray!” said all of our friends, because that is what friends

Because it doesn’t matter if you love a girl doggy, or a boy doggy, or eat Tide Pods. Claremont Independents are temporary.

say.

Love is forever.

y h0 and Sarah

11 Graphics by K3

Wrong

SHOWER THOUGHTS MARCH 30, 2018 BCE

THE $TUDENT DEATH MEGAN VOICE Minnesotan-in-Chief KEN BOBA-RUNNING Man Bun Model ARIEL SO WHAT? Hype Woman

PAGE 1314341413

DA STOODENT LYFE

SAMANTHA BRESHIGH, #FAKENEWS MARK POLE, Love Bird #1 POPE LANEY I, Holy Roman Emperor BOB ROWSKY, Living in Style SAMUEL REDNECK, Livin’ & Stylin’ WHIRLY WATCH YA, Death & Cargo Pants DON’T EAT ALONE, Bad Cop EUREKA VILLAGES, Good Cop ED SNOWDON, Renaissance Man DAFFY DUCK, Señorita InDesign CLASSY WING, Señorita OutDesign MINE HUG FREE, Bad News Recipient HELP ME, YO, Lack of Style Highlighter CHRIS PINE, Angry Rant Facilitator JACK BAT CHUCK, Sporks Diner

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present

WHOLE LIVING FALSEDALE, Love Bird #2 A-KEY, copee editore EMILY DANG, C0pi 8Eet0r LOL WON’T LIE OBLIVION, copayyy ehdeetor JAIMIE READS, an editor of ze copy

502 Bad Gateway nginx/1.10.3 (Ubuntu)

SARA WRONG, Scribbles Lady LOOK, MIRRORS, High Tech Painter FORLORN CRAVINGS, Stock Photo Editor CRISP LOAFER YOU, Golf Cart Drag Racer PETERING IN, Keeper of da ca$h $$$$$ HERESY MCDONALDS, Clickbait Coordinator

period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a

CEASE AND DESIST DEMAND February 4, 2018 C.E.

Lack Of Creepy Basements Places Pitzer Solidly Behind Other Colleges DON’T EAT ALONE

Columnist

Jacksón Smith Editor-in-Chief of The Golden Antlers 470 Pyrite St. Claremont, CA 91711 RE: Denial of frivolous claims and affirmative statement of The Student Life’s rights Dear The Golden Antlers, This letter is in response to your February 3, 2018 C.E. email containing a cease and desist demand (hereafter “Bullshit”). After extensive consultation with our in-house legal counsel, we regret to inform you that we will not be complying with your Bullshit, and will continue to publish news, opinions, and — in our annual April Fools’ Day joke insert — satire for The Claremont Colleges community. We categorically reject the legally unsound claims in your Bullshit, and frankly question their sincerity.

As student journalists, we embrace our role as the 5C paper of record and commit ourselves to speaking truth to power at the 5Cs. On March 31, 2017 C.E., we did that by documenting for posterity Scripps College’s decision to offer free contraceptives to campus squirrels, and we wholeheartedly stand by our reporting. We are dismayed that you would disagree, and we perceive your Bullshit to be an attack on the free press rights enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. You are Fake News.

Therefore, pursuant to Title 17 Section 504 of the United States Code and Title IV Section 7 of The Claremont Colleges’ Disciplinary Handbook, we demand that you cease and desist from sending us any further cease and desist letters, and that you retract in full your Bullshit. We further demand that you compensate us for our legal fees by providing us with 47 coupons for a free drink at the Motley Coffeehouse (or the monetary equivalent of such coupons in Claremont Cash) so that we can caffeinate ourselves during production nights.

We request that you confirm your intent to acquiesce to these demands by replying to us (via email or carrier pigeon) within 14.7 seconds of your receipt of this letter. If you fail to do so, we are fully prepared to engage you in a trial by combat and confident in our ability to prevail.

Pitzer, let’s own up to it: our lack of creepy basements poses a serious issue. It’s almost like we’re not even trying anymore.

We’ve tried to be hip, modern, and eco-friendly and it’s worked. Skandera Hall (or whatever we’re calling it) — that’s an amazing work of architecture! It gets us in all the college-y magazines with their glossy photos and eye-catching headlines.

But with all our flashy new buildings, we don’t have something every college should: a plethora of creepy basements.

We need those basements. Our college just doesn’t feel… collegiate enough without them.

Seriously, where am I supposed to go and brood without a creepy basement or two? I could go on long walks to (and on) Walker Beach but it’s cold and even then I would just look weird. Creepy basements are the perfect solution. All of the quiet rumination space, none of the weirdness.

Need a place to catch up on your afternoon snooze when

your roommate is talking on the phone too loud? Creepy basement.

Need a place to exercise without people watching you in the gym? Creepy basement.

Need a place to just sit down and contemplate life? Creepy basement.

On one of those anti-tech kicks but still want to keep your phone in your pocket just in case? Creepy basement (since cellular data doesn’t reach down there).

We’ve got the stairwell near Benson in Avery Hall! We’ve got the stairwells in Mead! We’ve got the almost-too-clean restroom in the lower floor of Broad Hall!

But there just aren’t any creepy basements.

I’m pretty sure I’m not asking for a lot. Just… one creepy basement that isn’t occupied by anything. One basement with a mysterious history lost to the ruin of time and bad archival work!

The basement of McConnell is fine but there are people working down there that shouldn’t be disturbed by brooding students.

We could even have an ecofriendly basement by taking all the dirt we displace from making that basement and making another Mound. We could decorate the

basement with socially conscious posters made by our own students. The basement could serve as a multi-affinity group space.

We’re still looking for ideas about what to do with the Pit, right? Two words: Creepy. Basement. I’ve heard that we can’t erect actual buildings in the pit because of “flight paths” or whatever politicking we’re getting this time but you could have a basement under a tennis court. This isn’t a hard thing to do.

I know we’re lagging behind other colleges because of small things like “haven’t been a college for that long” and “being a tiny college that’s less than a square mile” but that’s not insurmountable. People construct period architecture all the time. Besides, any creepy basement we construct will be 100% better than Pomona’s brutalist hellscapes.

Pitzer, I sit here at 12:50 a.m. on Friday writing a plea for more creepy basements. This is a lofty goal but it is a worthy and achievable one. Together, our Provida Futuri can include creepy basements.

Donnie TC Denome is a Pitzer student. They are very, very tired no matter the time of day.

Please be guided accordingly.

Sincerely, Meghan Joyce Editor-in-Chief of The Student Life The Fishbowl, Walker Hall, Pomona College Claremont, CA 91711 cc: Samuel Breslow, Acting TSL General Counsel Stig Lanesskog, CEO of The Claremont Colleges, Inc. Donald Trump, President of the United States

Correction:

Influenced by the philosophy of Cartesian skepticism, TSL has come to realize that we’re all just brains in a vat. We therefore retract everything we’ve ever published.

TSL Regrets The Error.

Courtesy of a student who never came back from taking this photo, only his phone was left

A Letter To The Golden Antlers

Dear The Golden Antlers,

This communication serves as an acknowledgement that we are in receipt of your March 5 letter telling us to go fuck ourselves. We sincerely apologize for our delayed response — we were unfortunately impeded by something called “standards,” which dictated that we not debase ourselves to a level whereby we could reciprocate the sentiments you expressed. Fortunately, by virtue of this special date, we have been now been freed from the burdensome shackles of those standards. Therefore, please allow us to say the following: Fuck you, too.

Sincerely, The Student Life

ORTS-SPAY JUSTICE FOR BARB, and while we’re at it, FREE MEEKMILL

98.4% WAXING GIBBO

THE STUDENT LIFE

US

Town Hall Meeting Calls Into Question Hiram Chodosh’s Dedication To CMS Sports, To Which He Responded By Removing His Button-Down And Slacks, Revealing Full-Body Tattoos Chronicling Each CMS Win During His Tenure As CMC President J.R. Waterfront Pueblo & Zydrunas Ilgauskas

A town-hall meeting Wednesday night with Athletic Director Terrance Tumey and CMS college presidents turned sexual, when a question was asked of CMC President Hiram Chodosh.

An over-invested CMC football parent asked Chodosh, “How do you expect CMS athletes to be able to compete in the aging, worn-down, poorly constructed Robert’s Pavillion?”

He followed, “I sincerely question your dedication to our athletic programs.”

Instead of responding with words, the intellectual Chodosh slowly unbuttoned his plaid dress shirt, revealing the beginnings of a detailed tattoo masterpiece.

CMS fathers made feeble attempts to shield the eyes of their wives, gazing in awe themselves, as Chodosh continued taking off his clothes, quietly and calmly, almost as if he had done this before.

By the time Chodosh

had taken off his slacks, he stood in front of the crowd in only his boxer briefs and black dress socks. In doing so, the nearly-nude president revealed that he, in fact, had tattooed every single CMS Athletics final winning score onto his golden canvas of a body.

The tennis wins danced along his quadriceps, while water polo snuck its way up his obliques.

While Chodosh did not answer the specific question asked of him, he left zero doubt in the minds of those in attendance of his unwavering dedication to the Stags and Athenas.

Despite the stunned aura among the audience, Harvey Mudd College President Maria Klawe remained composed, as if she had known about Chodosh’s tattoos all along.

Raising her hand to gather attention away from the glow emanating from Chodosh, she slowly parted her hair, revealing the final score of the HMC 1987 robotics team’s victory at the Inaugural Helsinki Games.

Hiram Chodosh’s wife

Kyle Freeman PZ ’21 fouls off a pitch against Cal Lutheran March 24.

40,000 Pitzer Athletes Lost On Walk To Rains Athletic Center J.R. Waterfront Pueblo & Zydrunas Ilgauskas A strange phenomenon occured Feb 30, as all P-P teams noticed that they had their most free-spirited teammates missing from practice.

Quickly, they realized that nearly every Pitzer athlete had disappeared, with 40,000 missing in total.

Initially, theories suggested that they were simply caught up while attempting to match the embroidering on their socks to the hem on their extra skinny, low-rise chinos. Others considered the idea that maybe they had all overloaded on “mooks” and were going to take the month off to recover.

However, after actually going to look for them, P-P athletes found a disturbing site: thousands of vintage road bikes piled in a heap behind Stark Hall at CMC, exactly halfway between Pitzer and the P-P Athletics Center, Rains.

Further investigation concluded that the bikes were definitely the missing athletes’, as after sifting through the mess, hundreds of medical marijuana cards emerged.

This pointed to another critical problem; the overwhelming amount of Pitzer students that suffer from

“headaches” and “pain.” However, this was quickly forgotten in an effort to find the missing students.

By the time this issue went to print, the students still had not been found. If any information comes forward, please submit any tips to r.ainwater21@pitzer.edu, the

student heading the investigation.

We think.

It is imagined that they could be anywhere by now, but are most likely paying for everything with the Pitzer Senate credit card, so they should be relatively easy to find.

in scrumptious P-P’s

matchup

group Of straight, white cmc first-years change name Of 3-On-3 basketball team From ‘blue ballers’ to ‘blue ballees’ after realizing ‘that Was gay’ J.R. Waterfront Pueblo & Zydrunas Ilgauskas Three CMC first-years sat around a table at Collins during “snack,” feeling proud of the team name they had just created for their 3-on-3 intramural basketball team.

Brad Mitchell CM ’21, who came up with the name, exclaimed, “Blue Ballers is so funny. Ya know — like basketball and the sex thing.”

Chad White CM ’21 added, “yeah... nice.”

However, Thad Goldberg CM ’21 had a puzzled look on his face.

“Wait a minute,” he interrupted. “If we’re the ‘Blue Ballers’, doesn’t that mean we’re the ones giving blue balls? Doesn’t that imply that... we’re gay???”

Brad and Chad gasped in horror. Channeling Aristotle, they considered the idea, thinking back to their first semester philosophy class.

Thad concluded, after five minutes of silence, “Yeah, that

definitely means we’re gay.”

Chad said, “Shit.”

Brad added, “Fuck. We’re definitely not gay.”

However, Thad had a solution: “What if instead, we’re the ‘Blue Ballees”? Because then, that means we’re just getting the blue balls. Ya know, like how employ-

ers are different that employEEs. yeah.”

Chad exclaimed excitedly, “Yeah that totally works, cause we get mad numbers of handies!”

The group then proceeded to lose in the first round of the playoffs, after claiming all season that they were a “playoff team.”

Video courtesy of Collins Security Footage

LIFE & STYLE MARCH 30, 2018

THE STUDENT LIFE

PAGE 11

‘Tomb Raider’: Finally, A Decent Video Game Movie Sam Betanzos By rights, “Tomb Raider” ought to be a terrible movie. It’s the latest in a legacy of notoriously awful films based on video games which includes the “Silent Hill” and “Resident Evil” franchises, as well as the recent “Assassin’s Creed” and “Warcraft” adaptations.

That being said, I had a hard time hating “Tomb Raider ” as much as I had expected.

I don’t want to suggest that it’s a great film, or even a good one.

It is chock full of obligatory onedimensional side characters, tired cliches, and laughable one-liners.

But I can’t help feeling that I had some fun as I watched it.

The story is simple enough, and you’ll surely be one step ahead of the plot at every turn as you watch. Lara Croft (played

by Alicia Vikander) is a tough, smart, athletic young woman who wanders through life listlessly, still unable to come to terms with the mysterious disappearance of her father (played by Dominic West) seven years prior.

Lara stumbles upon her father’s underground lair, where she discovers his secret life as a worldtraveling Indiana Jones-esque adventurer. His final message to her is through a video in which he implores her to destroy all of his research on Himiko, a mythical Japanese queen rumored to have supernatural powers of global destruction.

Being the natural-born adventurer she is, Lara travels to the island with sailor Lou Ren in tow to search for her missing father.

Once there, she is captured by Matthias, the dangerous, nearlycrazy mercenary tasked by the evil global corporation, Trinity, with bringing the catastrophic powers of Himiko back to the mainland.

From there onwards, the plot consists of a predictable series of obstacles across which Lara must

traverse in order to reach the heart of the tomb and protect the world from Himiko’s evil power.

The film runs much like a video game in this way, with jungle obstacles and puzzles to solve that increase in difficulty as Lara works through the levels of the tomb.

Although my description thus far will probably make the plot seem drab, I actually think this is where the film succeeds.

“Tomb Raider ” incorporates the genre of video games into the very fabric of the film in a way that feels fresh and original. Still an untested adventurer, Lara faces sure death in the middle of a violent sea storm.

Lara looks around her in search of an escape route. Glancing upward, she notices a metal railing attached to the ship above her.

The camera tracks her gaze as she makes the decision to jump up, grab the rail, and swing to safety.

This scene plays like the tutorial level of a video game. Lara must learn about the world in which she operates by completing tasks that will later become second nature to her.

These moments of video-game mimicry are found throughout and are constantly charming. My favorite scene finds the rag-tag group trapped in a deadly puzzle within the tomb.

As the floor slowly falls from beneath them, they must collect brightly colored stones and place them, one by one, in front of a light source. When the right combination of colors is achieved, the floor stops falling, and a door opens, leading to the next puzzle.

This is a decidedly absurd premise. I found myself laughing as they frantically threw bright yellow, purple, and red stones around the room as through it made any sense.

But this is a characteristic video game situation, and the filmmakers translate it in literal terms

Courtesy of Tomb Raider

“Tomb Raider (2018),” the latest in a legacy of films based on video games, seems fresh and original, but it still missed the mark.

on the screen. They find kitschy humor in the awkward weirdness of the video game universe and embrace it to create a campy, fun adventure romp.

Other video game movies take their premises far too seriously.

Accordingly, “Tomb Raider” succeeds when it avoids this trap, and fails when it succumbs.

The worst element of “Tomb Raider ” is the relationship between Lara and her father. Al-

though the plot element is pivotal in motivating Lara to travel to the island, the execution onscreen feels forced and tiresome. West is a capable actor, but he struggles to piece together a poorly written character.

For example, Lara manages to find her father almost immediately upon reaching the island, yet their reunion is infuriatingly nonsensical. Lara weeps to find her father alive, but her father frowns and

scolds her for not burning his research on Himiko.

For the rest of the movie, they are, confusingly, quite angry at each other, and West ends up dragging every scene down with his relentless frowning.

The filmmakers missed an opportunity, too, with the villain, Matthias. I would love to have seen them capitalize on the tendency for video game villains to be eccentric and charismatic.

Ye Olde Student Life

But Matthias, like Lara’s father, scowls through every scene, exhibiting no distinction of character beyond his desire to leave the island. The role could have been accomplished with as much finesse by a piece of bread holding a pistol.

This is not a good movie. But I think it deserves some amount of praise for managing to avoid utter catastrophe. For your latest dose of mindless adventure cinema, catch “Tomb Raider.”

Capitalism has been a constant throughout TSL’s history, but marketing has come quite a long way over the years, and consumer tastes have changed more than a little. This semester, we’ll be looking back at TSL ads through the ages.

The promise of advertising has always been that if you just spend more money, you can buy your way out of whatever plight you are facing. In 1937, it seems the Parker Pen Company (makers of Quink!) expected some students to pay $130 to $170 in today’s dollars for the latest in pen technology. Life was tough before the ballpoint.

— Compiled by Samuel Breslow

OPINIONS PAGE 12

THE STUDENT LIFE MEGHAN JOYCE Editor-in-Chief KELLEN BROWNING Managing Editor ARIEL SO Managing Editor

SAMUEL BRESLOW, News Editor MARC ROD, News Editor LANEY POPE, News Associate MEGHAN BOBROWSKY, Life & Style Editor SAMANTHA RESNICK, Life & Style Editor WHITNEY WACHTEL, Life & Style Associate DONNIE DENOME, Opinions Editor ANIKKA VILLEGAS, Opinions Editor HANK SNOWDON, Sports Editor DAPHNE YANG, Senior Design Editor CASSIE WANG, Senior Design Editor MIN HYUNG LEE, News Designer KELLY HO, Life & Style Designer CHRISTINE LIN, Opinions Designer JILLIAN BATIUK, Sports Designer

The Student Life, the oldest college newspaper in Southern California, is produced and managed by students of the Claremont Colleges and published weekly.

The editorial board consists of the editor-in-chief and two managing editors. Aside from the editorial, the views expressed in the opinions section do not necessarily reflect the views of The Student Life.

E-mail letters, questions and concerns to editor@tsl.pomona. edu. email tips to liaison@tsl.pomona.edu; email advertising inquiries to ads@tsl.pomona.edu.

TSL SAYS

MARCH 30, 2018

THE STUDENT LIFE

OLIVIA TRUESDALE, Copy Chief AKSHAYA AMARNATH, Copy Editor EMILY JIANG, Copy Editor LORELEI BIVINS, Copy Editor JAMIE REID, Copy Editor

Financial Aid Must Subsidize Studio And Lab Fees

SARAH WONG, Graphics Editor LUKE MEARES, Photo Manager LAURYN CRAVENS, Photo Editor CHRISTOPHER HU, Distribution Manager PETER YAN, Business Manager FAITH MCDERMOTT, Social Media Manager

TSL welcomes letters to the editor, which can be submitted by mail, by email, or in person at the Fishbowl in Walker Hall.

Letters must be under 400 words (although when an issue is particularly salient, we reserve the right to allow letters to run at a longer length) and submitted by 4 p.m. Wednesday of the week of publication. We reserve the right to decline publication of submitted letters and will not accept anonymous letters, letters containing profanity, factually inaccurate letters or letters making personal attacks. TSL also reserves the right to edit for spelling, punctuation and grammar. Letters may be signed by a maximum of three persons. All letters become the property of TSL and may not be reprinted without prior permission from the editorial board.

Unopposed SAS elections Voting by process of elimination

Real Dogs Gotta luv em pupperz

Propaganda flyers I ate the flyer you handed me

‘Dig Dog’ Dogs belong in the home, not in the mines

Prospie Your suffering excites me

Explosions from 92.96 million miles away Stay gold, po(mo)ny boy

Huge tour groups “yeah,,,, I chose pomona for its small loving compassionate amazing community” *hairflip*

Explosion @HMC keep ur meth labs on campus

Weekly Comic

Elodie Arbogast • The Student Life

Sophie Samiee Columnist “We remain committed to meeting 100 percent of a student’s demonstrated financial need to ensure that Pitzer remains an affordable option for our families,” reads a brochure from Pitzer College’s Financial Aid office. While this is an admirable goal, the “100 percent” does not cover lab or studio fees for classes. Students unable to pay these fees on their own must take out loans to pay them or simply not take take courses that require extra fees, which severely limits their choices in a major.

According to the Pitzer ’s course catalogue, lab and studio fees can easily be $50 or more for a single class. Stud e n t s wa n t i n g t o m a j o r i n an art or STEM-related field will probably take at least one major-related course per semester, meaning that their total studio or lab fees could be several hundred dollars over the course of four years.

These costly fees contribute to segregating Pitzer into two tiers: those who can afford certain majors and those who can’t.

Institutions put individuals of lower socioeconomic standings in an inferior position when they restrict their access to education. These students are often forced to live with consequences of systematic failures that already discriminate against them.

Becca Zimmerman PZ ’21 and incoming Senate Presi-

dent-Elect Shivani Kavuluru ’19 are spearheading long overdue efforts to prevent these failings at Pitzer.

Zimmerman proposed the idea of creating a bill to subsidize STEM and art fees in late February after joining the Academic Standards committee of Pitzer Student Senate. Kavuluru later joined Zimmerman in developing and writing the bill.

“Although students may be able to afford to enroll in one or two of the courses, the additional fees accompanying the majority of classes in STEM or arts fields discourage students from pursuing a major in such fields,” Zimmerman said. “This reinforces a cycle in which socioeconomic and sociocultural characteristics directly or subconsciously influence and constrain the career and educational opportunities made available to certain students.”

Other colleges in the consortium already prevent this division by covering studio and lab fees. Pomona College’s 2018-2019 financial aid handbook states, “if you are taking a Pomona College P.E. course or other academic courses through one of the other Claremont Colleges ... that have an additional fee associated with the course, that is charged to your student account, financial aid scholarship will be provided to cover the cost of the fee.”

To this end, Kavuluru aims to help Zimmerman with the logistics of writing the bill, while relating this bill to past community discussions.

Kavuluru detailed a meeting from last year between Marco Antonio Cruz, the director of in-

stitutional research and academic assessment, and the student body. She recalled that many students complained about the fees that deter low-income and financial aid students from taking STEM and art classes.

“I think for a long time the student body has been pretty vocal about the fact that lab and studio fees are really expensive, and by virtue of that, they’re not as accessible to everyone,” Kavuluru said. “That is something to be mindful of, and I think that, if we can, we should definitely try to write bills like this [that support students in ways that the institution currently does not].”

The bill is currently in the making and has not been prop o se d t o t h e P i t z e r S t u d e n t Senate yet. However, if the bill was to pass, it would be a mark of solidarity between students: that all students at Pitzer are important and valuable.

Through this bill, Zimmerman and Kavuluru hope to force an end to the ways by which Pitzer forces people of certain socioeconomic standings to be repeatedly barred from privileges that other members of the community have access to. There are still many barriers left to demolish and many gaps left to fill. However, this bill marks an important first step.

It is time that not only Pitzer, but all academic institutions start supporting their students to achieve their academic success.

Starting with the 5Cs, institutions need to eliminate the unjust educational gaps and support all students, not just the ones that can afford it.

Kenken

Sophie Reingold • The Student Life

Dominic Frempong • The Student Life

OPINIONS MARCH 30, 2018

PAGE 13

THE STUDENT LIFE

We Should Be Asking More Questions Of Facebook Eli Cohen Columnist Lambasting Facebook is in vogue. It’s dangerous for our children. It’s making us all lonely. It’s even “ripping our society apart.”

Pundits, scientists and even former Facebook executives have all tried to explain the detriments of the site, but we each have personal experience that suggests otherwise: “I use Facebook, and I’m fine!”

It’s hard to see how Facebook might actually be a cause to society’s current problems because in admitting that fact, we also have to implicate ourselves. It’s easier to ignore Facebook’s obvious shortcomings, giving ourselves a free ride in the process.

But there are now 2.13 billion people on Facebook, almost one third of the world’s population.

Two in three users check the site every day. The aggregate of each of us turning a blind eye to Facebook’s flaws quickly becomes

willful negligence on a global scale. This assertion includes you and me.

Maybe you have a firm distinction of the world online and off. I certainly thought I did, so much so that I went without Facebook, while working in Washington D.C. last semester. After returning to campus, I was surprised by how little my friends told me about their respective semesters off-campus.

Though they had spent the past half-year in Indonesia, New Zealand, Cuba, and Morocco, I heard only one or two stories from their times abroad. I came to realize those conversations had already happened, in the form of photos shared, comments exchanged, and likes received: an online construction substituting for the real thing.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon reaches well beyond interpersonal relationships. New York Times technology columnist Farhad Manjoo, in a macabre halfjoke, once called Facebook’s News

Feed “the most influential source of information in the history of civilization.” Dark humor is funny because it reframes uncomfortable truths.

The internet has codified an age in which there is too much information for us to process. There are 440 million actively maintained blogs, not to mention 500 million tweets per day. Rather than spending all day scouring the web for the best content to consume, we instead have to rely on shortcuts.

Perhaps we put our trust in a name, like The New York Times or Sean Hannity. Another option is an algorithm. The Reuters Digital News Report for 2017 found that 64 percent of people under 35 had their news selected by an algorithm, while only 34 percent had the stories they read chosen by an editor.

I do not think algorithms are inherently bad. They are powerful tools that can expedite repetitive processes and augment difficult human decision making. But make

no mistake: The algorithm that decides what you see on Facebook is optimized for one goal alone — to ensure that you “engage” with whatever is put in front of you.

To that end, Facebook has become remarkably effective. Revenue generated per user climbed 27 percent in 2017. Executives have even started warning investors that they are running out of room in which to show us ads.

Facebook’s economic model was prescient of the digital age, one where we ourselves — our interests, habits, and patterns of behavior — became the product.

The payoff made a college dropout one of the wealthiest people in the world in little over a decade. Unfortunately, as the recent headlines about Cambridge Analytica have exposed, we are only beginning to reconcile the consequences of this new form of business.

To add insult to injury, I struggle to see what users receive in return: free access to a service riddled with flaws. The platform

has enabled, to degrees previously unseen, an unwitting passivity in how we see both ourselves and the world around us.

It is clear that Facebook is not an accurate representation of real life. We all know the site induces the imposter syndrome, the idea that when we constantly compare our internal conceptions of ourselves to the highly manicured online profiles of our friends, we cannot help but feel inferior.

We can logically deduce that our friends’ profiles are not real, but when peering through the online veneer, this is easy to forget.

Catalina Toma, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, discovered something I find even more troubling. Toma found that after only five minutes of scrolling through Facebook profiles, people often experienced a significant boost in self-esteem.

We know that our own profiles are not real. Yet, they are where we turn for affirmation — not our

close relationships, accomplishments, interests, or passions — to make ourselves happy. It is as if we only take comfort in the conception of ourselves, constructed for everyone else. We cannot claim that our online/offline distinction is as clear-cut as we want to believe.

Scrolling through Facebook exasperates a kind of voyeurism in which we gaze upon a world, assembled by programmers to exploit confirmation bias, and statistically weighted to ensure that we keep coming back. We resign to expressing our autonomy in “likes” and 12-word-comments, and hide in a self-conception that, while technically made by us, belongs to everyone else.

We now know that opportunists are actively exploiting the site to delegitimize political systems across the world. Yet, we stay on. We should be asking more questions, but the place to start is within ourselves.

Nancy Pelosi: Still Relevant And Still Important, Despite Tenure Jo Nordhoff-Beard Columnist Nancy Pelosi is a 78 year old, 15-term Congresswoman from San Francisco who, with pride, admits that her favorite food is chocolate. Pelosi was the first woman to serve as House Minority Leader and Speaker of the House, a major achievement for women in American politics, and has led the Democratic Party since 2003.

As Speaker, she helped push through major pieces of legislation like the Affordable Care Act and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, blocked Social Security privatization, and helped negotiate the Paris Climate Accord.

These laws, which have shaped American politics for the last 12 years, should be points of pride for other progressives and accomplishments around which to rally during the midterm elections in November.

However, Republican politicians are attempting to tie Pelosi to Congress’ seemingly neverending gridlock, and Democrats running in contested districts and Senate races do not want to associate with her for fear of alienating more moderate Republicans or “Obama-Trump” voters.

Up and coming Democrats’ choice to distance themselves from Pelosi may have short-term gains, but could prove futile and unwise as she is an effective legislator and skilled negotiator.

Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District, encompassing Pittsburgh and its suburbs, was perceived as a conservative stronghold until its representative Tim Murphy resigned after allegedly asking his mistress to have an abortion last year. Conor Lamb, a former Marine and Assistant U.S. Attorney, gradually gained on his opponent Rick Saccone in the polls and posed enough of a threat that Republi-

cans spent over $8 million on this special election alone.

Lamb ran as a traditional progressive in many ways, supporting background checks for people buying a gun and maintaining the Affordable Care Act. Lamb differed from other candidates by refusing to support Pelosi in her bid for Speaker of the House if the Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives this November.

Lamb won his election by 627 votes (.2 percent), a district that Trump won by 20 points in the 2016 election. Progressive politicians around the country were shocked by his win and lauded it as revolutionary, a claim made most by those in Congress that have been vocal in their desire for a change in Democratic leadership.

Lamb’s public distaste for Pelosi has been echoed by other democratic candidates running for closely contested positions as well.

Framing Pelosi as one of the most negative aspects of the Democratic Party cannot be solely attributed to sexism. It is unclear if Lamb would have focused on this issue as much if he had had a primary challenger instead of being appointed to run in this election, because then he would have to guide his message based on another candidate’s positions.

Representative Beto O’Rourke, running against current Texas Senator Ted Cruz for his seat, backed Representative Tim Ryan’s unsuccessful bid for Minority Leader against Pelosi in 2016 and has stated that he does not want Pelosi to campaign for him in his Senate campaign. Representative Seth Moulton from Massachusetts has called for new Democratic Party leadership while campaigning with multiple veterans running for Congress, like Conor Lamb.

Marie Newman, who lost her Democratic primary to incum-

bent Illinois Representative Dan Lipinski, one of few conservative Democrats, held off on completely supporting Pelosi during her primary campaign.

Other figures in Democratic leadership are the male equivalent of Pelosi: Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn are octogenarian men from predominantly liberal areas who have been in Congress for 37 and 26 years respectively.

A younger, junior member of Congress would have to have a broad coalition of support to even think about successfully challenging any of the three of them for a leadership position.

Perhaps, if this blue wave of new Democratic candidates comes to fruition in November through increased millennial voter turnout, there might be a large enough group of new Representatives who say that they will not support Pelosi for Speaker, which could then cause her to lose the vote of both parties and give the Speaker’s position to Republicans — the opposite of what Democrats want.

Nancy Pelosi has been one of the most effective legislators of the modern era, and to pin all of the Democratic Party’s failings onto her is not pragmatic for Democrats if they retake the House in seven months.

While lauding the accomplishments of Hoyer and Clyburn, it is important to acknowledge they still do not have the precedent and proven track record that she does. Politicians should think about short-term gains, but the course of history takes significant time and effort to change, which is why thinking about long-term strategy is more advantageous.

Losing Pelosi as the potential Speaker of the House could have long-lasting adverse effects on the Democratic Party’s trajectory for the next era of American politics, and new representatives maintaining doubts about Pelosi should proceed with caution.

Sarah Wong • The Student Life

Fighting Stigma Of Needing Help At College Letter To The Editor: Funding TSL Caitlin Gaylord Columnist

During my sophomore year, I often felt pride telling people about my heavy workload and involvement on campus. In addition to taking five academic classes, I was a peer mentor at Scripps College, the head baker for Challah for Hunger, a leader for On The Loose, a bike shop tech, and a Motley Coffeehouse student baker.

When I rattled off this list, people were impressed and astonished.

Peers and friends saw me as competent, academically driven, and determined — an image I desperately worked to uphold, even when it failed to reflect how I saw myself.

Anytime that image was confirmed by hearing, “Wow, you’re so on top of it,” or “That’s a huge workload, I don’t know how you get it all done,” it only reinforced my determination to maintain that reputation. Among other students at the 5Cs, I frequently felt competitive in how much I was doing, rather than how well I was doing.

During that year, I often thought that if I wasn’t at my absolute limit, I wasn’t working hard enough. I felt guilty for not satisfying the unrealistically high expectations I’d set for myself, or for feeling unmotivated and unhappy at an institution that prides itself on the quality of student life. I found it difficult to recognize and process my feelings of incompetence, sadness, or fear, when the stress of academic work and com-

mitments always dominated.

The spring of my junior year, after a series of tumultuous fallouts with friends and the end of a relationship, I hit a serious low point. I spiraled into patterns of thinking that I wasn’t deserving of love, or at fault for how those friends had treated me.

However, when people asked how my week was going, I chalked up my feelings to a stressful midterm season and extracurricular commitments, terrified of letting people see how poorly I was doing.

Talking about academic stress became the most common denominator in conversations with friends during meals, while working at the Motley, or seeing others around campus, because unlike my emotions, academic workload was quantifiable. Yet, the fact that even I didn’t understand the cause of my own loneliness or unhappiness meant I believed no one else would either.

So, I kept it to myself. Countless times I crossed paths with someone and told them I was “good,” only to return to my room in tears.

Scared of becoming a burden or not being taken seriously, I initially retreated from friends. I was afraid that reaching out for help would mean breaking the reputation I had carefully constructed.

However, once I finally made the choice to share the extent of how hard things had been, friends were immediately caring and validating. They made me feel heard and respected. No one ever told me I

was any less of a person or said they didn’t have time to help.

Over the last year, my ability to reach out to others and recognize cycles of feeling sad or worthless has only improved.

But less than two months ago, my best friend’s brother, a high school senior, committed suicide. His death was a complete surprise to everyone who knew him. Like me, my friend’s brother had close friends and a great relationship with his family. He was an active and beloved member of his communities.

In the days that followed, I was deeply saddened, shocked, and unable to focus on anything else. I found myself continually thinking about my own mental health over the past few years, and the importance of continuing to reach out to friends and remaining open about how I’m doing.

During a eulogy at the memorial service, his parents asked, “If he had come to you with his troubles, how many of you would have offered to help?” Every single person raised their hand. It likely wasn’t for a lack of an existing support system that he took his own life.

His parents’ question served as an important wake up call for me.

It reminded me that as difficult as it can be to push past the fear of people seeing me differently or the idea that needing help makes me weak, support is always available and worth seeking out.

Throughout my four years at

Scripps, trying to balance academic success and personal mental wellbeing has been a constant battle.

However, part of finding that balance began with being more mindful of interactions with those around me.

At the 5Cs, we often ask one another, “How’re you doing?” out of formality rather than genuine interest. Now, during meals with friends, I make an effort to start the conversation with something other than, “I’m swamped this week,” or “I’m really stressed about an assignment for class.”

Steering the topic away from work often leads to a more meaningful and worthwhile discussion.

I can learn what’s going on in my friends’ lives on a deeper level, not just how they’re feeling about an upcoming midterm.

Initiating conversations about mental health can be daunting, yet almost every time I have, someone else has voiced that they’re grappling with similar, if not the same, thoughts or feelings.

I know how challenging it can be to speak openly and truthfully about personal emotions, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. It is my hope that discussing mental health and sharing experiences more readily will help others change the assumption that everyone else is thriving, and promote an environment in which symptoms of depression and anxiety are no longer reasons for judgment.

David Gales Guest Columnist Dear TSL Editors — I visited Pomona a few weekends ago as a prospective student. I picked up the March 2 issue of TSL, read through it, and Lauren Ison’s column “College Presidents, It’s Time to Support Student Journalism” really caught my eye. I was interested in the dynamics between the student paper and the administration and student government.

The Student Life seems to have been financially deprioritized by the student governments at The Claremont Colleges as well as by the college administrations. This is a significant issue to me, especially because having a healthy student paper is critical to maintaining a balanced perspective on campus.

I wanted to share this opinion, since as a prospective student, one of the first things I do is pick up the student newspaper. Reading through each article helps guide my process of formulating opinions about the school.

When I read through TSL,

and particularly through Ison’s column, I was struck by my own positive and negative reactions. I was impressed, on the one hand, with the newspaper’s self-advocacy and awareness, and columnists’ willingness to vocalize their concerns and enact change within the community.

On the other hand, the piece raised questions about the financial state of the newspaper and seemed indicative of the student government’s priorities. As a prospective student interested in social sciences and journalism, I want to be confident that the school I end up choosing prioritizes the voices of the student community, and that the student government and administration work well together to ensure that student journalists can consistently publish a clear, wellrepresented set of perspectives.

I was very impressed with Pomona and the quality of the student newspaper. I hope by the time I graduate from high school in 2019 that some of these issues have been resolved and that the TSL staff find themselves on more solid ground.

Sincerely, David Gales Berkeley, CA

SPORTS PAGE 14 P-P GOLF

SCIAC-Hopeful P-P Golf Teams Battling Through Adversity Jacinta Chen

The Pomona-Pitzer women’s and men’s golf teams have faced some troubles this season.

This includes the recent replacement of head coach Bernard Walker with interim head coach Javier Bazurto. The men’s team is young and relatively inexperienced at the college level, and has failed to score consistently, while the women have been plagued with injuries.

Even so, the teams have persevered to record some notable finishes so far this year.

The Sagehen women beat their Claremont-Mudd-Scripps rivals at the Maurice Walker Championships in early February for the first time since the Walker Cup started in 2016, and finished second at the first SCIAC tournament Feb. 24 and 25. Since the beginning of the spring season, the women have finished in the top three at all but one of their tournaments.

Though they finished second to CMS at the SCIAC tournament by a difference of 18 shots, the P-P women bounced back with low scores in the second round after struggling in the first day of the tournament. Gabrielle Herzig PO ’21 took fifth overall with a score of 158, while Andi Chaloult PO ’20 and Priscilla Ki PO ’21 tied for eighth overall with scores of 159.

Sophia Hui PO’19 was especially proud of the team narrowing the gap with CMS during the second round.

At the George Fox/Westbrook Invitational in Peoria, Arizona,

two weeks ago, the women posted their lowest scores yet and finished second to George Fox University — the top-ranked team in the West region as of last fall — by 21 shots. Hui, who finished in fifth overall at the tournament, scored 148, her personal best in a two-day tournament. Herzig and Ki tied for 10th with scores of 154, while Catherine Lott tied for 13th with a score of 155.

Traveling to two tournaments over spring break helped raise the P-P women’s national ranking, yet the team has recently been struggling with injuries and sickness. “We have to prioritize our health so that we can continue competing and not have to withdraw from any tournaments,” Chaloult said.

Earlier this week, the women finished fourth at the Bulldog Classic, with 21 more shots than CMS. After the tournament, the women have moved up to be ranked thirteenth nationally. Ki took fifth with a score of 152.

The women’s team’s strong finishes have given them confidence for the remainder of their season.

“Beating CMS was the best way to start our season, and finishing second in Arizona proved to us once again that we definitely have what it takes to win SCIAC and make it to nationals.

Our team has depth and heart, which will hopefully take us far,” Hui said.

Though many golf teams struggle with consistency across their lineups, Chaloult believes that the Sagehen women are

P-P & CMS SWIMMING

NCAA: Hollimon Impresses With Two Top-Eight Diving Finishes For Stags

Continued from Page 1 through.”

It was a mixed bag for the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps men, who dropped from 14th last year to 25th this year as a team. The women fell from 21st in 2017 to 19th this year, and endured some heartbreak when their 400-yard freestyle relay team was disqualified in the consolation final.

“The team kept grinding throughout the weekend,” head coach Charles Griffiths wrote in an email to TSL. “We had some frustrating moments, but some transcendent moments, as well.”

Kendall Hollimon CM ’20 headlined the Stags’ NCAA performances, snatching a fourth-place finish in the three-meter dive and finishing

MARCH 30, 2018

THE STUDENT LIFE

solid.

“Our individual scores are always within a few strokes of each other which is unlike other teams in our league, and it’s a huge advantage being able to depend on my teammates,” she said.

Still, Ki thinks the team can score its “best possible lows” more frequently.

“We have so much potential to do well every round and a way to reach this is to get out in the course and focus on course management,” she said.

Hui is proud of the way her team has handled the loss of its coach.

“This year’s team is probably the most dedicated, committed, and focused team Pomona-Pitzer golf has ever seen,” she said. “We all have stepped up and worked together as [a] team to make sure that we stay focused and finish strong the rest of season.”

The women are just 19 strokes behind their CMS rivals and aims to win the SCIAC Championships. “Winning league is definitely within our reach, and if we do, then we will go to nationals for the first time as a team.”

Hui said.

Meanwhile, after finishing between fourth and sixth place in prior meets, the Sagehen men concluded the West Cup Mar. 26-27 with eight more shots than CMS. Conor Rooney PO ’19 won the Whittier Invitational in early February with a score of 70, while Owen Rosebeck PO ’20 placed in ninth with a score of 77.

But first round of the first

SCIAC tournament Feb.17 and 18 didn’t go as well as the P-P men had hoped; Sam Sawyers PO ‘20 was the only one to finish in the top ten with a total score of 146.

After a rough first round, the men redeemed themselves with the lowest scores of the day, including a score of 71 from Sawyers and Rosebeck, 72 from Jack Carrigan PZ ’20, and 73 from Rooney.

Rosebeck said “shooting the low round of the day” was one of the highlights of the season.

“We came in at one under par as a team,” he added.

The Sagehen men enjoyed playing in one of the strongest fields at the Desert Classic in Las Vegas and managed to beat several Division II teams, including Southern Indiana University and Hawaii Pacific University Rooney finished fifth at the three-day Masters Invitational with a score of 216, just seven shots behind the winner from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Though the team’s overall results have not been as strong, Rosebeck hopes the team can play with better consistency and place in the top three in SCIAC by the end of the season.

“We are a young team that, despite showing signs of brilliance, has struggled with consistency,” Rosebeck said. “The team has persevered through adversity and [is] in good form going into the last half of our season.”

No. 3 Athenas’ 16Game Win Streak Halted By No. 2 Williams, No. 1 Emory

Alec Lei • The Student Life

Kyla Scott HM ’19 and Juliette Martin HM ’21 wait for a serve March 24 in their match against Williams College.

Hank Snowdon Heading into last weekend’s matches, the Claremont-MuddScripps (16-2, 3-0 SCIAC) women’s tennis team was rolling. The Athenas had won 16 straight matches to start the season and were ranked No. 3 in the country.

That was before No. 2 Williams and No. 1 Emory came to town.

The Athenas faced off against the Ephs Saturday morning, and the match was exciting as anticipated.

After the teams split the first eight matches of the day, all eyes turned to the No. 6 singles court, where Rebecca Berger CM ’21 fell to Williams’ Julia Cancio in the tie-breaking match.

Although the loss to Williams stung, the Athenas needed to rebound quickly and prepare for their match Sunday morning against No. 1 Emory.

The Eagles and Athenas battled back and forth throughout, and once again, CMS found itself tied 4-4 with one match remaining. At No. 1 singles, Catherine Allen SC ’20 took on Ysabel Gonzalez-Rico.

The best players on two of the top teams in the country put on a show, trading punches until the final serve.

With both teams watching closely, Allen jumped out to a 4-3 lead in the deciding third set.

But Gonzalez-Rico won the last three games, taking the final set 4-3 and winning the match for the Eagles 5-4.

Though the weekend’s results were disappointing for CMS, the matches showed that the Athenas deserve to be in the conversation of the best teams in the country.

The Athenas will be back in action March 30, and face another tough match when the No. 4 Middlebury Panthers come to Claremont.

CMS GOLF

Stags, Athenas Shooting For NCAA Titles

seventh in the country in the onemeter dive.

“It is a joy to watch Kendall dive,” Griffiths wrote. “We expected that he’d be a force on the three-meter board and it was great to see him follow that up with an all-American performance on the one-meter board, as well. Kendall has achieved a lot, but his best is still to come.”

No Athenas made the championship finals, but Jocelyn Crawford CM ’20 won the consolation final, finishing ninth overall and scoring points for her team. Claire BaconBrenes SC ’20 placed 14th in the 100-yard breastroke, also scoring.

The women also won the 200-yard freestyle relay consolation final by one-hundredth of a second, setting a new school record.

Photo courtesy of CMS Athletics

The Claremont-Mudd-Scripps women’s golf team holds a trophy after winning the CMS Invitational earlier this season. Both the CMS women’s and men’s teams seem on track to continue their string of successes; both teams expect to make appearances at the NCAA tournament again this year.

Delaney Hartmann

Photo courtesy of PP Athletics

Menkhoff, left, poses with his relay team after receiving their trophies.

Coming off national championship appearances in 2017, the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps women’s and men’s golf teams both hope to return to the tournament this season and compete for an NCAA title.

The Athenas seem on track to reach their goal after an outstanding victory at the competitive Jekyll Island Invitational.

The March 18 invite was one of the most competitive tournaments CMS will attend before the national championship, and the Athenas took down the field of 23 teams. Of those teams, 17 are ranked in the top 35 nationally.

Margaret Loncki CM ’18 finished in second place and Emma Kang CM ’20 finished in eighth, leading the way for the Athenas at Jekyll Island. Last year was the first national championship appearance in CMS women’s golf history, and the Athenas

currently hold their highest-ever national ranking, sitting at the No. 2 spot in the country.

“We have created a really solid base, and are looking to do some big things at nationals this year,” Loncki said.

The team’s camaraderie and spirit has been a major factor in the Athenas’ success thus far. Though golf is an individual sport, Kang said being part of a team has made golfing more enjoyable.

“I love the golf team and the relationships that I have made, and I wouldn’t give it up for anything,” she said.

Being on the golf team can be a huge time commitment for student athletes, as competitions and practices — which all take place off campus — can take more time than other sports. However, the CMS women have fun and make the most of their time together.

“We are usually the loudest team on the course,” Kang said.

“At Jekyll Island, it was 6 a.m. and we could see the other teams

getting out of their cars in sleep comas. Our team was the only one that had the van music turned all the way up, and we were all jamming out and getting excited to play.”

Added Loncki: “There are a lot of opportunities in golf to be salty, because luck plays into it a lot more than in other sports. The way that our team collectively handles that adversity is really cool. We find ourselves laughing at times that I think most other teams wouldn’t be laughing.”

The Stags have not been quite as successful as their female counterparts this season, but are still ranked No. 8 in the country and plan to be contenders in the NCAA Tournament.

In 2016, the Stags won the first national title in program history.

The majority of that 2016 national championship team is still playing, and is squarely focused on another shot at a title.

For Jonathan Shaw CM ’18, a member of the 2016 team, winning

an NCAA championship was an unforgettable experience.

“We had put a lot of time, energy, and emotion into our performance, and having it all pay off to win a national championship was unbelievable,” he said.

Shaw believes this year’s team can recreate the success that led to a national championship.

“On paper, we should be better than our national championship team. We just need to stick the pieces together,” Shaw said.

“I don’t have any doubt in our ability to win nationals — we just need to stay focused throughout the season.”

Individually, Shaw is looking to clean up his game to help his team succeed.

“I think during every tournament I need to be really focused throughout every shot without any lapses in concentration,” he said. “In golf, all it takes [to mess up your score] is a couple small mistakes, [so] filtering those out is really important.”

SPORTS MARCH 30, 2018

PAGE 15

THE STUDENT LIFE

COMMENTARY

Keep An Eye Out For These Baseball Teams, Players In 2018 Danny Klain

Springtime is officially upon us. While the trees are blooming and 5C students are no longer worrying about “cold weather,” spring really means one thing: baseball is back.

Coming off one of the most entertaining World Series of all time, the MLB had a quiet offseason.

With a weak free-agent class that mostly consisted of older stars seeking their last major contract, teams were hesitant to hand out offers; stars like Mike Moustakas and J.D. Martinez didn’t reach deals until late in Spring Training.

However, Scott Boras’s complaining has now mostly silenced, and we are finally getting to the parts of baseball we love: the actual games. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some teams and players to watch.

TEAMS Washington Nationals: As a DMV native, maybe this is a little bit of hometown bias, but I can’t imagine a team with more pressure on them this year than the Nationals. After winning the terrible NL East three of the last four years, but losing in the NLDS each time, the window for a title is likely closing for the Nats.

Bryce Harper’s expiring contract, mixed with years worth of rumors of his imminent departure, is hanging like a cloud over this team, and the fact that they’re on the hook financially for a number of aging players is just more evidence that time is running out in D.C. The pain of these postseason losses has left scars on the Nationals franchise and fanbase. Tyler Clippard’s and Drew Storen’s bullpen collapses, the 2-1 18-inning loss to the Giants who went on to win the World Series, Clayton Kershaw coming in and closing out Game Five of the 2016 NLDS, Dusty Baker’s questionable pitching decisions and Max Scherzer’s fifth inning collapse last season are all painful memo-

ries that Nationals fans would like to forget, which would definitely happen with a World Series title.

The question is, if they don’t win it all this season, will they ever?

Philadelphia Phillies/Toronto Blue Jays: Read any MLB season preview and you’ll find these two teams as the sexy “underdog to sneak into the playoffs” pick.

Philadelphia, coming off five consecutive losing seasons, is emerging from the tanking tunnel.

Stocked with young talent like Scott Kingery, Rhys Hoskins, and Aaron Nola, the Phils went out and signed veterans Carlos Santana and Jake Arrieta to balance the inexperience on their roster.

With low expectations and lots of raw talent, the Phillies are in an incredibly weak NL East, so they could exceed their projected win total and sneak into the NL Wild Card. After all, looking at teams across the NL, it’s easy to see the establishment team at the top of each division: the Dodgers, the Cubs, and the Nationals. But it’s unclear who will come in second in each of these divisions, so the Phillies have a decent chance.

Toronto is very similar. The Blue Jays have the No. 2 prospect in the league, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (his dad was pretty good), and are still stacked with older offensive talent they gathered from the postseason pushes in 2014 and 2015. If infielders like Josh Donaldson, Troy Tulowitzki, and Justin Smoak can stay healthy, and their AL East competitors start to sell around the trade deadline, the Blue Jays could also sneak into the second wild card spot as well.

Los Angeles Angels: While the Dodgers get most of the highlights and headlines in Los Angeles, Anaheim’s professional baseball team might be the more intriguing club this year.

Mike Trout, the hands-down best player in baseball, is now 26, and is entering the years that are considered to be a professional athlete’s peak. If Trout hits even

the slightest uptick in his numbers these next few years, he’ll go from astounding to downright insane.

With just one postseason appearance, Trout’s all-time numbers have been appreciated by all the statheads, but truthfully have gone to waste.

While the Angels have continued to heavily invest in talent, with the sixth largest payroll in the entire MLB, they have struggled to get results. However, this year seems like it could be different.

This offseason, the Angels made the biggest splash of the winter by signing international sensation Shohei Ohtani. Ohtani gained prominence for his twoway ability in Japan, and many have dubbed him the “next Babe Ruth.”

While Ohtani has struggled in Spring Training, to the tune of a 27.00 ERA, the young superstar still has plenty of promise. If he can contribute, and new additions Zack Cozart and Ian Kinsler can bolster an already strong lineup, Mike Trout might finally get another opportunity to win a World Series.

PLAYERS Manny Machado: It’s on everybody’s mind.

Machado, a star infielder for the Baltimore Orioles, is entering the last year of his contract. Over the past year, many teams have tried to trade for Machado in exchange for young prospects, but so far the Orioles have been unwilling to part ways.

This looming saga of whether to trade Machado or not will only get more tense as the season goes on; if the Orioles continue to meddle around .500, the debate will be whether to push and grab talent for a postseason run, or just give up and trade him away and get young assets for the future.

If I’m the Orioles, I see a mediocre roster and a weak pitching rotation, and hop on the Sam Hinkie express to “tankville” and trade Machado.

Ronald Acuña Junior: Just like Philadelphia and Toronto, if you read any writer’s preview of baseball this year, it will undoubtedly mention Acuña.

Considered the No. 1 prospect

by Keith Law, ESPN’s minor league expert, and the favorite for NL Rookie of the Year, Acuña has garnered plenty of praise, despite never having played in a single MLB game. The 20-year-old outfielder has even received comparisons to Mike Trout, which really puts into perspective Acuna’s potential.

Despite a ridiculous spring, Acuña is starting the season off in Triple-A, but should get called up sometime before the All-Star break. So, if you want to sound smart when talking with your grandfather at your next family barbecue, bring up Acuña and you’ll earn major points.

Clayton Kershaw: It wouldn’t be a true Los Angeles article without mentioning the man of the hour. Kershaw has already solidified his legacy as one of the greatest left-handed pitchers of all-time, and even slightly shaken his postseason failures, but questions remain.

Over the past two seasons, Kershaw missed time with a number of injuries. Now, at age 30, I can’t imagine those injuries won’t pop back up again, especially with the workload Kershaw has given himself in season’s past. That’s not to say Kershaw won’t be outstanding; projections still place Kershaw with an ERA of 2.61, a WHIP of under 1, and 10 strikeouts per nine innings. However, it may be that we never see the Cy Young-version of Kershaw again if the injuries persist.

As the next chapter of the ace’s career begins, it will be interesting to watch whether Kershaw transcends age or quietly starts to head off into the sunset and decline. This, plus the Dodgers’ elusive quest for a championship, could shape Kershaw’s desires for the future.

Photo courtesy of Keith Allison via Wiki Commons

As baseball season approaches, prospective players like Bryce Harper (pictured) and teams such as the Philadelphia Phillies are must-watch.

COMMENTARY

The Dodgers Crush My Spirits Every Year, But I’m Still More Hopeful Than Ever This Opening Day

Hank Snowdon My passion for the Los Angeles Dodgers began when I was five.

I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and while most of my friends were loyal to the Reds or the Indians, I took a different path.

My parents were transplants from Los Angeles. Brought to Ohio for work, they still loved the Dodgers, and fully intended on passing that love down to me.

July 24, 2003, I went to Dodger Stadium for the first time, and I was enchanted. “Blue Heaven on Earth” captivated me then, and I’ve been amazed by it ever since.

That day, I sat in the upper deck with my family. The game was a pitcher’s duel, with the Dodgers going toe-to-toe with the Rockies.

Kevin Brown threw an eightinning scoreless masterpiece, but the Dodgers couldn’t place any runs to support him, and it went to extras tied 0-0.

That tie was broken in the 11th.

With Alex Cora on second, Shawn Green shot a single up the middle and Cora came around to score.

I remember the moment like it was yesterday. As soon as Green hit the ball, the stadium erupted, and my dad lifted me up so I could see past the now-standing sellout crowd. Cora crossed the plate, and I got my first dose of how amazing being a Dodgers fan could be.

I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

There have certainly been plenty of great times as a Dodgers fan throughout my life; every season has brought its own new storylines, players and moments.

Clayton Kershaw, Yasiel Puig, Manny Ramirez, Justin Turner, Cody Bellinger, Éric Gagné, Andre Ethier, Kenley Jansen, and others have always kept me coming back for more. Their ability to take over a baseball game have enthralled and amazed me, and I constantly fall for different star players.

I distinctly remember watching Steve Finley’s playoff-clinching walk-off grand slam on my mom’s

desktop, and Juan Uribe’s go-ahead homer to win the 2013 NLDS will be etched in my mind forever.

I was in the crowd for Justin Turner ’s walk-off bomb in the NLCS last season, and I bearhugged the strangers sitting next to me like they were family. I was there for Game One of the World Series, sitting right next to my dad, who flew out to see Kershaw win the Dodgers’ first Fall Classic game since 1988.

But overall, my life as a Dodgers’ fan has been clouded by horrific October heartbreak.

It started in 2004, with the Dodgers’ early NLDS exit at the hands of the Cardinals. My 6-year-old self sat at the foot of the TV watching in horror as Odalis Perez got chased after an inning and a third.

Little did I know how much worse it would get.

In 2008 and 2009, I was inconsolable in mid-October, as the Phillies’ three-headed monster of Cliff Lee, Roy Halladay, and Cole Hamels picked us apart in back-to-back NLCS matchups.

I watched floundering teams from 2010 through 2012, as the McCourt ownership fiasco wasted Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier’s best seasons.

While 2013 brought a whole new cast of characters and a return to the postseason, it also introduced to me a brand new monster: playoff Kershaw. My heart broke watching my favorite player get crushed in St. Louis, and the horror of Game Six that season will never leave me.

My nightmares returned the following year, as the Cardinals unleashed some sick déjà vu on me, once again defeating Kershaw in the most important moment.

It only got worse in 2015, as this time, Daniel Murphy and the Mets became the villain. Re-watching Murphy’s home-runs of Kershaw and Zack Greinke became my newest form of torture.

While some part of me knew all season long that the Cubs would win it in 2016, the Dodgers still found a way to make me believe,

and then break my heart again.

I was at Wrigley Field for Game One of the NLCS, and felt the century-old stadium shake when Miguel Montero sent Joe Blanton’s 0-2 pitch far into the Chicago night for a game-winning grand slam.

And once again, my Kershaw-inthe-playoffs nightmare reared its ugly head, this time in the deciding Game Six. Last fall, I moved to Southern California, and started my first year at Claremont McKenna College. The Dodgers were in the midst of one of their best regular seasons of all time, and things were looking good. And although I had become accustomed to the pain, and learned not to get my hopes up, I still somehow held a glimmer of hope.

This is how I found myself sitting in the top row at Game Seven of the World Series, watching the Astros celebrate on the field with 53,000 other silent Dodgers fans looking on.

My bank account was empty, having spent nearly everything I had on tickets to six of the eight home playoff games, and my head felt numb. I drove back to Claremont that night with an all-toofamiliar feeling of disappointment and loss.

I got back to campus and took a shower, trying to wash away the pain. I shaved off the disgusting playoff beard I’d been growing for a month, staring at myself in the mirror with a blank face. I then laid down in my bed and wrote an article about the game, ineffectively trying to relate my pain into words.

I felt like a zombie for weeks. A broke zombie.

However, as I’ve sat through this long offseason, I’ve had plenty of time to come to terms with what happened last fall. After deep consideration, I’ve come to the conclusion that last year was different.

For one, the Dodgers had come so much closer than I’d ever seen before.

I recall sitting in the stands that fateful November night, right

before first pitch, thinking to myself, “I’m nine innings away from witnessing a Dodgers’ World Series title. Holy shit.”

I could taste it.

And that made it so much worse when they fell short.

But 2017 also felt different for a completely separate, and somewhat unlikely reason: last season gave me hope.

I understand that my hope should be trampled, crushed, and destroyed forever. I’ve experienced so much heartbreak with this team

that I should never expect anything good to ever happen.

Yet, for some reason, as this season rolls around, I’m more optimistic than I’ve ever been. The Dodgers return a near-identical team to last season, and the difference between winning and losing the World Series came down to one measly game.

All they have to do is win one more game this year, and the World Series drought will be over.

This is why I’ll be watching Kershaw throw out the first pitch

of the season Thursday, with the unwavering hope that I’ll be seeing him hoist the Commissioner’s Trophy come October.

Ultimately, this is why I’ll always be a Dodgers fan, even if they keep breaking my heart. Because somehow, every single crushing, terrible finish leaves me more optimistic than I’ve ever been.

Call me stupid, or just blind to reality, but the Boys in Blue will always keep me coming back for more. And maybe, one day, we might just win a World Series.

Photo courtesy of Vostv

There are high hopes that the Los Angeles Dodgers, after losing in the World Series last season by just one game, will be able to get over the hump and snap their 30-season World Series drought.

SPORTS PAGE 16

THE STUDENT LIFE

MARCH 30, 2018

P-P BASEBALL

P-P Baseball Loses Weekend Set To Kingsmen, Bounces Back Against Middlebury Noah Shapiro

The Pomona-Pitzer baseball team (15-8, 6-3 SCIAC) finished off a busy weekend with two wins and two losses, falling in a threegame series to California Lutheran University (15-10, 5-7 SCIAC) after taking game one, then rebounding with a non-conference win over Middlebury College (4-7).

The Sagehens took down the Kingsmen 2-1 on the road Friday, thanks to a stellar performance on the mound by Tyler Yoshihara PO ’20, who was able to go all nine innings and only gave up three hits. P-P improved to 5-1 in games Yoshihara has started.

Yoshiara called the win “a product of commitment to our day-today process. A big focus for us as a pitching staff has been improving every day during catch play with our drill work, and I think it’s really showed for everyone this year.”

The game began as a defensive battle, with neither team able to put up any runs in the first five innings.

In the top of the sixth, a Nolan McCafferty PO ’20 double followed by a Jeremiah Quezada PZ ’20 single and a Seth Stone PZ ’21 walk loaded the bases for the Sagehens. One more walk from Duncan Skerrett PO ’18 brought home McCafferty, finally breaking the stalemate.

In the top of the ninth, the Sagehens’ bats awoke once again. After smacking a single into left field, Adam Hinthorne PO ’18, advanced to second off a sacrifice bunt from Andrew Phillips PO ’19. A single into right field from Brian Knapp PO ’20 sent Hinthorne to third and McCafferty’s second hit of the day brought him home.

This proved to be the game’s winning run after the Kingsmen were only able to muster one run off Yoshiara in bottom of the inning.

“Our offense has done a great job putting up runs all year,” Yoshihara said. “Even though we only scored two on Friday, we put some pressure on their pitchers throughout

the game and ended up getting a couple runs across late,” On Saturday, the Sagehens’ luck reversed as they hosted the Kingsmen for a doubleheader. The Kingsmen took the first game 9-3 after opening up a big lead, and won the second 5-3 after playing from behind for the first five innings.

In the first game, the Kingsmen built their lead in the fourth inning.

After loading the bases with no outs, Cal Lu pushed across four runs before the Sagehens were able to get out of the inning. The Kingsmen tacked on three more runs in the sixth, including a two-run home run.

Knapp responded for the Sagehens with a two-run shot of his own in the bottom of an eighth, and four consecutive walks brought in another run in the inning to pull P-P back within four. However, the Kingsmen tacked on two more in the ninth to seal it.

“They executed when they needed to and we weren’t able to do that,” McCafferty said.

In the second game of the day, the Sagehens came out aggressive despite the Kingsmen putting up a run in the top of the first. In the bottom of the inning, P-P quickly loaded the bases, and scored two runs off a walk and a sacrifice fly.

However, in the sixth, the Kingsmen were able to retake the lead: a two-run homer put them up 3-2.

They added to their lead in the eighth with two more runs, making the score 5-2.

With their backs against the wall in the bottom of the ninth, the Sagehens loaded the bases with one out.

McCafferty singled to bring home Hinthorne, and then advanced to second after a wild pitch. After Quezada struck out, Stone walked to load the bases, but Freeman struck out to end the game.

“I was confident that we would be at least able to tie it up with guys on second and third and one out in the ninth,” McCafferty said. “I am confident we will be able to get it

done when that situation comes up later in the season.”

Sunday, the Sagehens defeated Middlebury 4-2, thanks to two hits apiece from Quezada and Hinthorne.

“We were motivated to get back on the field after Cal Lu because we knew we needed to improve offensively,” Hinthorne said.

The game was scoreless through five innings when the Panthers loaded the bases with no outs. Jake Patterson PZ ’21 entered the game for the Sagehens for Luka Green PO ’20, and was instantly put in a high-pressure situation. Patterson delivered, getting out of the inning unscathed.

“I just wanted to go up there, throw strikes, and locate my pitches so that my defense could help me

P-P Athlete of the Week Men’s Swimming

out,” Patterson said. “Getting out of that jam gave me a huge shift of positive momentum.”

In the bottom of the eighth, the Sagehens finally opened up the scoring. An RBI double from Quezada brought home McCafferty for the first run. After Jack Hanley PO ’20 was walked, a double from Stone scored Quezada. To finish off the scoring burst, Hinthorne dropped a single into center field, bringing in Hanley and Cade Hulse PO ’18, who pinch-ran for Stone.

With the win, the Sagehens improved to 15-8 overall. After their series with Cal Lutheran they are 6-3 in SCIAC, good for fourth in the conference. P-P next plays Caltech (3-18, 0-12 SCIAC) Friday at home.

Lukas Menkhoff PO ‘21 Singapore

Lukas Menkhoff PO ’21 added a crowning accomplishment to his stellar first season for the Sagehens, winning the national championship in the 100-yard breastroke. Menkhoff finished in 53.39, easily beating his own program record, and taking home the first national title in P-P swim and dive history.

CMS Athlete of the Week Women’s Water Polo Jessica Gaffney CM ‘18 Santa Barbara, California

Jessica Gaffney CM ’18 erupted in a scoring outburst for the CMS women’s water polo team (13-8, 6-2) March 28 in an 11-7 win over Whittier College, netting five goals for the Athenas and carrying the team to victory. Gaffney scored seven goals total over the course of the week. CMS is next in action March 31, and will take on California Institute of Technology in a road matchup.

Chloe Ortiz • The Student Life

Kyle Freeman PZ ’21 fouls off a pitch in P-P’s matchup against Cal Lutheran March 24.

P-P WOMEN’S WATER POLO

Sagehens Undefeated In SCIAC With Whittier Looming Torrey Hart

As first-years, the PomonaPitzer women’s water polo class of 2018 fell 7-6 in the SCIAC championship game, losing in a heartbreaker to Whittier College.

They would win 19 conference matches and lose only three in the following two seasons — but two of the three total losses were at the hands of Whittier.

This year, the now-senior Sagehens are out for revenge.

With six wins and zero losses in 2018 heading into Saturday’s home game at Haldeman Pool, the team will play not only to protect its undefeated season, but to avenge its three losses to the Poets over the past four years.

“With Whittier coming up, we expect to win,” Morgan Stockham PZ ’19 said.

In their most recent meeting Feb. 28, the Sagehens walked away with a 20-7 victory, bolstered by a combined 15 saves from goalies Stockham and Haley Crabtree PZ ’21.

“We have been surprised by our goalie play,” head coach Alex Rodriguez said. “[Stockham] and [Crabtree] have been stellar in the goal.”

“Whittier has been our rival for the last few seasons, so it feels good to be at a level where we can get in the game, put in effort, and leave knowing that we beat them by 13 goals [two weeks ago],” Stockham said.

On top of the solid defensive

work in goal, senior Jocelyn Castro PZ ’21 has already posted three hat tricks this season, and put up two goals in Wednesday’s 9-4 win over California Lutheran University (15-6, 7-1 SCIAC) The Regals were arguably the Sagehens’ biggest threat in their quest for an elusive undefeated season, as the loss was Cal Lutheran’s first. Pomona-Pitzer led 4-2 heading into the fourth period, then posted an additional five goals to the opposition’s two, ending the chance of any other SCIAC team going undefeated.

The graduating seniors already have a 40-4 in-conference record thus far, but a win over the Poets Saturday would certainly serve poetic justice on behalf of their freshman selves.

Talia Bernstein • The Student Life

The Pomona-Pitzer team plays defense in the March 25 game against Hartwick College.