Image via Flickr. Copyright of Carpathiar.
In a 2016 essay titled How My Friends and I Wrecked Pomona College, alumnus Harry Stein recounts how he helped precipitate a surge of anti-war activism in 1960s Claremont. His most prominent revolutionary exploit concerned Pomona’s career services office, which activists determined must not be allowed to funnel the bright minds of Pomona College into “objectionable” employment: the spineless Dow Chemical, the imperial U.S. Air Force.
To make their stand, Stein and dozens of activist allies flooded the building when Air Force recruiters were due to host interviews in February 1968. Pomona had warned students that disrupting the interviews would be a “major offense” that would subject students to “suspension or expulsion.” Displaying some bravery—and a sensible understanding of civil disobedience—the activists proceeded anyway, and readily offered their names to the college judiciary council.
Stein and his allies knew they’d be found guilty; when their hearing came, they simply awaited their sentence “with grim resignation.” But what came was hardly a sentence. Stein was issued a “suspended suspension,” a punishment with all the grave symbolism of a suspension but without the practical headache of actually getting suspended.
Pleased as he was with the mere slap on the wrist, Stein writes of his bemused relief being “tinged with something oddly like contempt. Had we really gotten away with it this easily? For all our posturing, and much as we hated the war, on some level we still felt like children, testing boundaries and acting out. Were the college adults this unsure of their values?”
Shamefully, they were.
The Pomona of 2024, however, has chosen a new course, one on which the life of the university may begin to thrive and the endless, tiresome appeasement of activist megalomania may finally be put to rout.
On July 20th, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office brought criminal trespassing charges against the 19 students arrested during the April 5th “occupation” of Pomona’s Alexander Hall. This folly saw masked activists from Pomona Divest from Apartheid (PDfA) march into the building, sit themselves in Pomona president Gabi Starr’s office, and refuse to leave until the college agreed to a laundry list of anti-Israel demands. When asked, they refused to identify themselves. Starr warned them they would be suspended if they didn’t leave, yet they remained. Faced with their absolute intransigence, she authorized a call to the police.
Despite the students’ knowing defiance of Starr and the law, PDfA has reacted with horror at Pomona actually bringing a trespassing case against them. “Pomona is trying to set multiple dangerous precedents of deploying riot police on students, and now refusing to drop a criminal case against them,” they huffed indignantly on social media. “We know that this will impact generations of community organizers and funnel more people into the systemically-racist carceral system.”
I’m betting the activists’ rage arises from Pomona going farther than they counted on. They probably thought they would be cuffed, marched out of the building in front of all their friends, and released later that night to face only the feeble discipline of college administrators. They would have publicly made their brave stand against “the man,” briefly satisfied the longing for meaningful political conflict that underlies most half-baked campus activism, and forever earned a badge of honor in lefty circles. The cost would be only Harry Stein-level punishment. Pomona would never take them to court, right?
Wrong. Much to her credit, President Starr is proving more steadfast than her predecessors in 1968. By first calling the police and then refusing to drop the charges, she sends a clear message that activism antithetical to the norms of the university will not be tolerated. Marching into the president’s office and refusing to leave until your demands are met is a coercive act. The life of the university thrives on discussion and persuasion, never coercion.
College policy cannot be dictated by the demands of whatever student group has enough members to occupy the president’s office. I have a hard time believing that if a pro-Israel student group marched into Alexander Hall and refused to leave, PDfA activists would meekly accept that Pomona should let them stay, much less comply with their list of demands. When the students got coercive, Starr’s only option was to match them.
A skeptic might reply: couldn’t Starr have talked with them instead of resorting to the police? Wouldn’t that have exemplified the virtues of discussion and persuasion?
Such an approach might have been appropriate had the students not foreclosed the possibility of it. They made clear: We are not leaving until our demands are met. Those are not words conducive to discussion. They are the words of myopic zealots so blinded by their cause they forgot that the rules apply to everyone. President Starr is under no obligation to grant a hearing to anyone who marches into her office without an appointment, no matter how aggrieved they are. And, for what it’s worth, covering your face and refusing to identify yourself is not typically the behavior of those who just want to talk it out.
But why should Pomona actually press charges? Wouldn’t simply calling the police to clear the “occupation” and leaving punishment to the colleges suffice?
One practical reason to press charges is that Pomona would not have the chance to exact justice against all involved if they left the matter only to campus officials. Twelve of the 19 arrested were not Pomona students, to whom all Pomona could do was kick them off campus and turn over evidence of their involvement to their home colleges. If, for good reason, Pomona isn’t confident the other colleges will mete out the appropriate (or any) discipline, taking the matter to court is the only way to ensure that all participants actually face consequences for their crimes.
The more important reason, however, is the symbolic message to current students, prospective families, and other colleges. Pressing criminal charges against idealistic students righteously inflamed by genuine tragedy doesn’t look good or feel nice. It is a stinging slap of real-world consequences that may seem harsh to even a minimally compassionate onlooker.
Pomona has already faced a backlash. After the arrests, student tour guides went on strike, and even the scabs still gave a spiel to prospective families about the horrors of the college not making them feel “safe, seen, or heard.” There has been plenty of bad press, and the balance of coverage will likely remain negative no matter how many more op-eds the Independent can muster. Student and faculty referendums, with their typically erroneous invocations of free expression, have condemned the Pomona administration.
But Pomona is refusing to capitulate. Bad headlines be damned, their refusal to drop the case is an encouraging sign that the norms of liberal education have a defender in President Starr. With any luck, this decision will make current students think twice about disrupting the functioning of their college with illiberal tactics. Hopefully it will influence the college application choices of high school seniors, inviting those serious about deep inquiry for its own sake and repelling those who wrongly measure their college years by how effectively they distract institutional attention and resources away from liberal education and towards their pet political projects. And critically, perhaps it will offer a degree of cover to leaders of other colleges fed up with petulant student activists flagrantly violating viewpoint-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions but held hostage by the fear of backlash.
Liberal arts colleges like Pomona are not residential super-PACs whose vast financial reserves exist to advance the preferences of those powerful enough to seize them. They are educational institutions guided above all else by the pursuit and transmission of truth. Like Starr, their leaders should hold little patience for those seeking to blow them off course.
PDfA’s childish pressure campaign to drop the charges, the essence of which seems to be let us do what we want all the time without consequences, is surely not over. This fall, as the students actually go to court, there will undoubtedly be more demonstrations and indignant Instagram posts decrying the tyranny of Pomona prosecuting a crime to its conclusion. But the college has stood firm thus far, and we can hope it remains so. Stay resolute, Pomona.
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