Occidental Magazine Fall 2024 by Occidental College

Introducing Eight Members of the Class of ’28 Unseen Occidental:

Election Returns

Cady Carr ’27 and Rachel Obbard ’27 worked to canvass every vote in the heart of battleground Pennsylvania.

Cady Carr ’27 and Rachel Obbard ’27 worked to canvass every vote in the heart of battleground Pennsylvania. What are their takeaways from Campaign Semester?

What are their takeaways from Campaign Semester?

Associate Director Human Resources

Volume 46, Number 4 oxy.edu/magazine

OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE

Tom Stritikus

President

Kathryn Leonard

Interim Vice President for Academic Aﬀairs and Dean of the College

Vivian Garay Santiago

Interim Vice President for Student Aﬀairs and Dean of Students

Amos Himmelstein

Vice President & Chief Operating Oﬃcer

Suzanne LaCroix

Vice President for Institutional Advancement

Perrine Mann

Vice President for Marketing & Communications

Maricela L. Martinez

Vice President of Enrollment

James Uhrich

Vice President & Chief Information Oﬃcer

editorial staff

Dick Anderson

Editor

Marc Campos

College Photographer & Videographer

Rachael Warecki

Contributing Writer

Gail (Schulman) Ginell ’79

Class Notes Editor

SanSoucie Design Design

DLS Group Printing

OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE

Published quarterly by Occidental College

Main number: 323-259-2500

To contact Occidental magazine By phone: 323-259-2679 By email: oxymag@oxy.edu By mail: Occidental College Oﬃce of Communications F-36 1600 Campus Road Los Angeles CA 90041-3314

Letters and class notes submissions may be edited for length, content, and style. Occidental College online

Homepage: oxy.edu

Facebook: facebook.com/occidental Instagram: instagram.com/occidentalcollege TikTok: occidentalcollege X: @occidental

Cover photo by Marc Campos Oxy Wear photo by Marc Campos

Jacalyn Feigelman

Word President Stritikus on maintaining Occidental’s commitment to pluralism and dialogue. Also: Precious memories of the Oxy Gospel Choir, and new books and ﬁlms by Oxy alumni.

From the Quad A two-week institute led by Associate Professor Jane Hong and a “dream team” of educators brings 150 years of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Paciﬁc Islander history into focus

Talk

of Chemistry Emeria Eileen Spain’s new post-Oxy initiative. Also: The John Branca Institute for Music comes to life.

Last Page Professor of English Emeritus Eric Newhall ’67 recounts the fallout from his decision to oppose the Vietnam War in a memoir more than 50 years in the making.

Ground Game

For Campaign Semester students in battleground Pennsylvania and 13 other states, the road map to Election Day entailed knocking on every door.

Red States, Blue Fates

Election Day produced surprises, concessions, and a ballot box full of lessons to unpack back at Oxy.

Campaign Trails

Campaign Semester can be a gateway to a career in politics, advocacy work, or even elected oﬃce, as these seven seasoned campaigners will attest.

Farm to Film

Merging her interest in sustainability with her prowess behind the camera, Angelina Lee ’22 harvests a new documentary around permaculture.

Origin Stories

Introducing eight members of the Class of ’28 (and a transfer student) who discovered their superpowers in the classroom, in competition, and in service to their country

Unseen Occidental

From 1898 to 1914, Occidental College called Highland Park home— and a treasure trove of photos from the 1910s oﬀers a glimpse of campus life before the move to Eagle Rock.

A view of the Arroyo Seco Canyon in 1914, taken by then-Oxy senior Hugh McNary and discovered in a scrapbook on eBay more than 100 years later by Eric Warren ’69.

» FROM PRESIDENT STRITIKUS

Building Occidental’s Future Together

The end of the calendar year traditionally is a time for evaluating our accomplishments, planning ahead for changes yet to come, and envisioning the progress we hope to achieve as a community.

Although the outcomes of November’s elections will undoubtedly impact higher education, Occidental’s mission will not change—and neither will our values, our bedrock principles of inclusion and belonging, and our identity as a liberal arts college. The political divisions in this nation— apparent long before this election cycle— demonstrate that institutions such as Oxy, with our commitment to dialogue and pluralism, are more important than ever. We have a responsibility to prepare future leaders who are informed, compassionate, and courageous in addressing societal challenges, opportunities, and inequities. Occidental students and alumni are no strangers to working toward political change. From Congressman Jack Kemp ’57 to President Barack Obama ’83 to L.A. City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez ’96, alumni have served their constituents,

“Occidental has a responsibility to prepare future leaders who are informed, compassionate, and courageous in addressing societal challenges, opportunities, and inequities.”

introduced historic policies, and amplified get-out-the-vote efforts. Across the country, students in our Campaign Semester program canvassed voters in tightly contested races. And on Election Day, our students, faculty, and staff made their voices heard on national, state, and local issues that are important to our communities.

But voting is not the only avenue through which to enact change. One of my favorite parts of speaking with Occidental alumni is witnessing your passion, advocacy, and commitment, and understanding how

you use your talents and resources to improve your communities—including our community here at Oxy. Across a variety of ﬁelds and careers, so many of you are working hard to shape the world into a more just and humane society.

As we head into this next chapter of our nation’s history, I have no doubt that the work we do together will continue to build Occidental into an institution of which we can be proud—a place where we learn from each other, thrive, and create the future we collectively want to see.

» FROM THE READERS

The Gospel of Oxy Regarding “Precious Memories” (Summer 2024): I sang in the Occidental Gospel Choir as a student. Later, when I was choral director at Agoura High School, we were one of three choirs attending a festival invited to give a live performance at Walt Disney Hall with conductor Grant Gershon. We performed two selections: “The Battle of Jericho” by Moses Hogan and “Dirait-on” by Morten Lauridsen. We traveled to many festivals throughout the United States and I made a point to include a diﬀerent gospel tune each year. Many of the other choral directors asked me if I performed gospel music at my church, and I told them yes— but it was singing with the gospel choir at Occidental College that allowed my choir, with no Black children, to sing gospel music. The voice has no limits to what style of music it can perform.

John Mosley ’78 Reseda

Tom Stritikus

President Stritikus addresses alumni and parents during Homecoming & Family Weekend on October 19.

Photo

Marc Campos

Hear Our Stories: Campus Sexual Violence, Intersectionality, and How We Build a Better University, by Jessica C. Harris ’08 (Stanford University Press). Despite focused efforts to stop the perpetration of campus sexual violence, the statistic that one in four college women will experience such violence has remained steady over the last 60 years while the number of higher education institutions under federal Title IX investigation for mishandling sexual violence cases continues to grow. In Hear Our Stories, Harris demonstrates how preventive efforts often fall short because they lack intersectional perspectives, and often obscure how sexual violence is imbued with racial significance. Drawing on interviews with student survivors and staff, and documents from three universities, this book analyzes sexual violence on the college campus from an intersectional lens, centering the stories of women of color. Hear Our Stories challenges dominant approaches to campus sexual violence that too often stall the implementation of more effective sexual violence prevention and response efforts that could offer transformative outcomes for all students. Harris is associate professor of higher education and organizational change at UCLA.

holistic approach to caregiving, one that frames aging more positively as part of the larger context of human development. Writing for a general audience, MacNeil draws from both personal experience and the stories she collected from other caregivers to focus on the practical ways families can apply human development research to their everyday caregiving experiences, decisions, and dilemmas. MacNeil is founder and principal of MacNeil & Associates Consulting in Denver.

faith in herself. While illuminating the depths of anxiety and love, Jessica must ﬁnd the resilience it takes to persevere. From ﬂoundering to navigating, Keith’s memoir follows the unorthodox path of a Jewish woman working for a Muslim government. A psychology major at Occidental, Keith is a professor of cross-cultural communication at San Diego State University.

You, Your Parent, and Your Caregiving Journey: Strategies, Resources, and Inspiration to Guide the Way, by Carole MacNeil ’84 (Gatekeeper Press). MacNeil’s work and research has been focused on youth and community development, intergenerational partnerships, social justice, and peacebuilding all over the world, mostly in conﬂict zones and refugee camps. It was only through the personal experience of caring for four parents for nearly 12 years that she began to apply what she knew about human development to her “other” role as caregiver. You, Your Parent, and Your Caregiving Journey is grounded in a research-based,

Saying Inshallah With Chutzpah: A Geﬁlte Fish Out of Water Story, by Jessica Keith ’00 (Post Hill Press). Jessica Keith never believed she could walk down an aisle. With crippling anxiety fueled by unpredictable panic attacks, she said “I can’t” so many times she never thought she’d say “I do.” After ﬁnally setting a wedding date to Tyrone, her beau of eight years, Jessica made the impulsive decision to move

away, accepting an oﬀer to work for the Consulate of Kuwait in Los Angeles. The culture was unfamiliar territory—with a lot to unpack—and she felt lost in translation. Adrift in life and at work, nothing seemed to go right. When the rabbi refused to perform an interfaith ceremony— and her grandmother warned, “You can’t marry a Black man”— rather than speak up, Jessica found it easier to bite her tongue. But when she hears on the job, “Jews need not apply,” it shatters her

Creature: Poems, by Marsha de la O ’74 (University of Pittsburgh Press). Written during the last ﬁve years of her father’s life, de la O’s Creature is a book about love, destruction, and the self, all standing in relation to family and the natural world. The title poem recounts a quiet day when a hawk crashed through an open window in her home and found itself in her living room, creating terror, urgency, and a curious parallel: Who is the creature? Who is trapped inside? De la O is a lecturer in the English department at CSU Channel Islands, where she teaches poetry and creative writing. She is the author of Every Ravening Thing, Antidote for Night, and Black Hope. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Slowdown, and many journals, and she is a recipient of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize. She and her husband, Phil Taggart, live in Ventura, where they founded the Ventura County Poetry Project to support local poetry.

más y más y más ﬂores, the latest documentary short by César Martínez Barba ’17, was recently featured on the front page of The New York Times’ digital edition as part of its Op-Docs series. Barba’s ﬁlm is a poetic exploration on the marigolds that are so central to Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations, and by extension is a meditation on loss and memorial in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The documentary continues his exploration of social justice issues related to transnationality, borders, and migration, which he began while a media arts and culture major at Oxy.

Photo courtesy Carole MacNeil ’84

Carole MacNeil ’84 with her mom, Eleanor, in 2019.

FROM THE QUAD

Teachable Moments

Associate Professor Jane Hong and a “dream team” of educators bring 150 years of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Paciﬁc Islander history into focus

Before a group of middle and high school teachers in Cushman Boardroom, Associate Professor of History Jane Hong introduces the story of Chol Soo Lee, a Korean American immigrant who spent 10 years on Death Row after being wrongfully convicted in 1974 of murdering a Chinatown gang leader in San Francisco. “This is about the carceral system and what it does to people over time,” she says. “This is ultimately not a triumphal story. It takes a really long time, and he does get his conviction overturned. But spending years in jail is not something he just got over. He struggles for the rest of his life.”

The conversation that follows takes some unexpected turns, leading to a raw and real discussion about the role of a teacher when

violence intersects the lives of so many students, regardless of geography. After nine days in class together, these educators are clearly very comfortable with each other, addressing their classmates by their ﬁrst names as Hong and master teacher Karalee Wong Nakatsuka ’89, a 35-year veteran of the Arcadia Uniﬁed School District, facilitate the dialogue.

From July 7-20, Occidental hosted an NEH/Gilder Lehrman Summer Institute that gathered 36 teachers from across the United States, Alaska, American Samoa, and Hong Kong to study Asian American and Paciﬁc Islander (AAPI) histories that they can take back to their classrooms.

“Hosting an NEH seminar on the Oxy campus is remarkable in and of itself,” says

institute director Hong, who left a tenuretrack position at Seton Hall University to come to Occidental in 2014. “My own background had been at Northeast universities”— Yale, Brown, and Harvard, where she earned her B.A., master’s, and doctorate, respectively. “In the Northeast there isn’t as much attention to Asian American histories.”

During grad school, Hong spent about a year and a half in Los Angeles doing research. “If you study Asian American communities, Southern California has so many scholars and so many archives and resources,” she says. People take your topic seriously, and I loved L.A. as a community.”

Oxy’s History Department “is an amazing community of people because they’re excel-

Photos (pages 4-5) by Karalee Wong Nakatsuka ’89 and Thea Wilson ’24

Members of the Paciﬁc Crossings “Dream Team”: From left, Nakatsuka, Gilder Lehrman program coordinator Leah Baer, administrative assistant Thea Wilson ’24, and Hong.

lent teachers and mentors to students as well as top-notch scholars and historians who publish award-winning books,” Hong notes. “Colleagues such as Sharla Fett, Lisa Sousa, Alex Puerto, Michael Gasper, and Sasha Day have made the Oxy experience even better than I could have expected.”

In 2018, Hong led a weeklong seminar titled U.S. Immigration Through a California Lens, co-hosted by the Spencer Foundation in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. “We covered not only Asian immigration but also Latino/ Latina migration,” Hong says. Occidental proved to be a perfect setting for the conference, she adds: “It’s very user-friendly and well-located.”

The seminar was attended by 33 Califor nia public school teachers, including Nakatsuka, whose classroom is 70 percent Asian.) “Jane put together a great lineup,” she says. “On social media, my big tagline is #RepresentationMatters. When I met Jane, I thought, ‘Oh, the instructor looks like me.’ It’s not like I had not had any Asian American instructors before, but I was at a point in my career that it resonated with me.”

“At the end of the week, Karalee, of her own volition, put together a video compilation with highlights of the week, and then shared it with everyone,” Hong says. “It was an incredible amount of work. She’s really good with education tech as well.”

Nakatsuka’s contributions did not go unnoticed by her fellow teachers, one of who nominated her for Gilder Lehrman’s History Teacher of the Year award. (She won the honor for California in 2019.)

The youngest of four children and the grandchild of Chinese immigrants, Nakat-

suka opted for Occidental over Pomona in choosing a college. “Oxy just seemed to ﬁt me,” says the American studies major. “My parents knew I was a small liberal arts college kind of kid before I did.”

As a student at Occidental, Nakatsuka co-chaired the Asian Alliance as a junior, participated in faculty searches for professors of both Chinese and Japanese, and lived in the College’s ﬁrst multicultural residence hall as a senior. “I became more comfortable in my skin and found my community at Oxy,” she recalls. “It’s been sweet to come back here working with Jane and to be able to experience and enjoy it even more.

Nakatsuka and Hong were texting each other when news broke of the shootings of Asian women at Atlanta spas in March 2021. “Jane’s friendship and guidance as a history mentor, along with this teaching honor and my connections with teachers nationwide, motivated me to speak up during this challenging period,” Nakatsuka says. “All these things helped me to ﬁnd my voice.”

She ended up going on a podcast with three other Asian American teachers to discuss what it means to be an Asian American. “Lots of people don’t know how it feels to always be viewed as a foreigner—to be asked, ‘Where are you from?’ because they assume you’re from another country, or to be told how you speak English well, or how every time someone goes to have Chinese food they tell you about it. We had a really honest conversation on that podcast.”

In the aftermath of the pandemic, Gilder Lerman approached Hong about applying for an NEH grant on a topic of interest to her. “Initially our idea was to have a conference

top: Participants in Paciﬁc Crossings, the twoweek NEH history institute hosted by Occidental in July, on a ﬁeld trip to the Chinese American Museum. above: “A number of people commuted from L.A. and several drove in every day from Orange County, which is remarkable to me,” Hong says, adding, “Everyone was responsible for writing a lesson plan, and they all turned it on time.”

or institute focusing on Asian and Latino/ Latina history, immigration history, particularly,” Hong recalls. The curriculum would be based on two PBS docuseries: Latino Americans (2013) and Asian Americans, the latter of which features Hong. (In the 1960s, the Asian American movement was happening concurrently with the Black Power, Civil Rights, and Chicano movements, Hong notes: “That’s where the term Asian American comes from.”)

Hong’s initial proposal “didn’t get too far, because I think there was too much crammed into one week,” she says. “The feedback was that there was just too much. It was a great idea. People were on board, but it was just too much crammed into one week. And so that was where the idea to have a two-week institute came from. By that point, that was the time of anti-Asian violence and racism. And so we thought that it would be a good use of time to devote a twoweek institute to AAPI histories.

In recent years, many states began passing mandates for teachers to teach AAPI history in their curriculum. “I think that also made the case for Gilder Lehrman to think about providing training in AAPI history, because most K-12 teachers don’t have any,” Hong says. “I wanted to make sure we centered Paciﬁc Islander histories because the ‘PI’ part gets forgotten.” At Occidental, she’s teaching a ﬁrst-year seminar this fall on the creation of the AAPI category.

When her ﬁrst application didn’t quite go all the way, Hong tapped Nakatsuka to serve as master teacher and sought her feedback on the curriculum and structure, which would ultimately encompass nine guest speakers in the classroom and a pair of ﬁeld trips. “It was really dense but thoughtfully put together,” Nakatsuka says. “It resonated with people.”

“The number of programs and resources that Karalee introduced to the teachers was phenomenal,” Hong says. “There’s no way this could have happened without her expertise. Teachers know a lot that professors do not, and the skill sets are so diﬀerent. So, it’s really important to work together.”

“We had 323 applications from teachers for 36 slots,” Hong says. In choosing the cohort, “Among the criteria was are people going to have the opportunity to incorporate these topics into their teaching? Our No. 1 goal was to make these sessions really practical. If you can’t take them back to your classroom, then it doesn’t really impact students directly.”

Over the course of two weeks, Hong and a host of guest lecturers covered topics spanning nearly 150 years of U.S. history, from

Reconstruction and the Spanish-American War to the 1992 L.A. uprising and post-9/11 South Asian American experiences.

Hong’s approach to teaching the material closely mirrored her own approach. “In Oxy’s History Department, I’m the 20th-century U.S. historian,” she explains. “But until last year, I didn’t teach any speciﬁc Asian American-themed classes. So, when I teach Reconstruction, I teach debates over citizenship in Congress in the 1870s about whether the Chinese should be allowed to naturalize. When I teach 1920s nativism, I talk about Asian exclusion. When I talk about World War II, I frame Japanese American incarceration in terms of the U.S. war in the Paciﬁc.

“It’s all U.S. history, and that’s been my approach from the very beginning. Even if the majority of teachers do not teach ethnic studies, my hope is that they’re still able to integrate these histories into their curriculum.”

“We had the dream team,” Nakatsuka says. “Gilder Lehrman program coordinator Leah Baer was helping us prep before and then flew out and worked with us for the first few days. Even after she flew back, she would man the WhatsApp chat and pop up on our Zooms to make sure everything was well.”

The fourth member of the team was administrative assistant Thea Wilson ’24, a history and Spanish double major from Seattle, who spent the last two years working with the Occidental Special Collections’ Japanese American Relocation Project, with funding from the Grace Nixon Foundation. Wilson wrote her senior thesis on Japanese American Incarceration on the Colorado River Indian Reservation (1942-45).

“People typically think of ‘history’ as a static and ﬁxed grouping of facts and events that happened in the past,” Wilson says. “However, this group of lecturers shattered that stereotype and taught us about Asian American and Paciﬁc Islander histories using unique and personal pedagogies. It was a very humbling experience for me to learn from these wonderful educators.”

Thanks to the NEH grant, each teacher got a $2,200 stipend to oﬀset their expenses. Nearly two-thirds of participants stayed in Berkus Hall for the seminar, “so they got the full Oxy experience,” Hong says.

Despite the at-times humid conditions, “Cushman Boardroom was just perfect,” Nakatsuka adds. “Some people would come early and hang out and chat. It became our home.” The friendly atmosphere was further enhanced by fellow attendees who brought treats including coﬀee, pastries, and donuts.

From Santa Monica Beach to Dodger Stadium to the Hollywood Bowl, participants took advantage of the sights and sounds of Los Angeles. “There was a group that went to a Missy Elliott concert,” Hong says, and one teacher from Brooklyn, who moonlights as a musician, even played some of his compositions at an open mic night.

On the penultimate night of the conference, Cushman Boardroom hosted karaoke night. One teacher drove an hour each way in traﬃc to get samosas from Little India in Artesia. Other teaches made sangria in a bowl bought from Target.

“It was teacher initiated,” says Hong, who brought a karaoke mic she purchased on Amazon (although she didn’t sing that night). “They just wanted to hang out. They’d spent nine days together by this point. They liked exploring L.A. but they chose to come back and just hang out with each other in the same room that we’re in all day.”

“It was a really joyous moment—and kind of representative of our two weeks,” Nakatsuka says. “We were learning hard history but we built community so that we had the safety to enjoy it together. And the community forum is still going on. We send each other random things and meaningful things and talk about what we’re doing.”

At the close of the conference, everyone joined in to sing “That’s What Friends Are For.” “That was a highlight for me,” Hong says. “That’s my go-to karaoke song now.”

—DICK ANDERSON

Hong is one of 28 historians recently appointed to the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lectureship Program to promote understanding and appreciation of all aspects of American history.

Photo by Marc Campos

A STEM Grows in Ghana

Projects for Peace participants Eleanor Goddard ’25 and Stephen Amankonah

Sekyere ’27 bring

technology—and hope—to

Eleanor Goddard ’25 lived in Ghana for seventh and eighth grade and had been eager to return ever since. “Being in Ghana is more of a feeling—it’s like listening to your favorite song and thinking, ‘Everything’s going to be OK,’ ” says Goddard, a biochemistry major from Minneapolis. “The people of Ghana smile about everything. They put other people ﬁrst. They’re part of such an amazing community that it’s hard not to want to go there.”

Last fall, Goddard met Stephen Amankonah Sekyere ’27, an economics and mathematics double major from Kumasi, Ghana, at an information session for Projects for Peace, which has funded more than 2,000 grassroots student projects worldwide since its founding in 2007. (Occidental’s participation dates back to 2009, when three seniors received funding for a project in Honduras.) The two instantly hit it oﬀ, Goddard recalls. “We ended up walking around campus for hours talking about this project we wanted to do,” she says. “We immediately started breaking down everything.”

After much discussion, Goddard and Sekyere combined their twin loves—STEM and Ghana—and pitched a project to teach a STEM class to a group of Ghanaian schoolgirls. Subsequently, Projects for Peace awarded them $10,000 to fund their travel, resources, and related expenses, and this past August, they spent four weeks working with a small class of middle-schoolers at Alpha-Morning Dew Montessori School in Ablekuma.

“There’s a lack of resources in Ghana, especially for people who really want to do STEM,” says Sekyere, who was excited to bring computers to the classroom. “It’s going to cause many girls in Ghana to be part of this technological revolution,” he adds. “I felt so happy and so excited, seeing the joy, seeing the smiles on the faces of those girls, and I’ve been able to see them do amazing stuﬀ with these computers.”

middle-schoolers in West Africa

He and Goddard focused their lessons on teaching students how to use computers’ basic functions and how to research topics through technology. “We had a curriculum where they would do research on certain animals—their habitat, their life cycle, their predators, their prey—so that they could get interested in things that they don’t see on a daily basis,” Goddard says. “Polar bears or wolves are not going to be in West Africa. You really need that computer to connect your world with other worlds.”

In working with the students, Sekyere connected the applications of technology to their everyday lives, such as kitchen appliances, pens, or even eyeglasses. “All that they think of as technology was computers or laptops, but they didn’t know that technology is anything that makes work easier for humanity,” he says.

Goddard says Ghana’s culture of inclusion and welcoming nature is unique. “I would walk around and little kids would just come and hold two of my ﬁngers,” she says. “There was one day where there was a class activity to make envelopes and write letters. And now I have 20 envelopes in my dresser at home, because they all wrote letters like, ‘I love you. Auntie Ellie, please come back and be my teacher.’ ”

Sekyere believes their collaboration—as a Ghanaian going to college in America and a female student in STEM—inspired the class, making these students’ dreams of higher education seem attainable. “Seeing a white girl doing chemistry in college, girls in Ghana are so excited,” he says. “Eleanor was able to talk to them about growing up and what she went through as a girl in science.”

Overall, Projects for Peace showed how well the pair worked together and collaborated, bringing diﬀerent perspectives and skills. Their shared passions for STEM and Ghana brought excitement to the project.

“There’s something in our hearts that’s the same,” Goddard says. “We came to this project from very diﬀerent backgrounds, but we clicked immediately. You have to think that there’s a purpose for this.”

Goddard and Sekyere with the students of AlphaMorning Dew Montessori School in Ablekuma, top, and back on the Occidental campus this fall.

Top photo courtesy Eleanor Goddard ’25 | Bottom photo by Marc Campos

Ground Game

For Campaign Semester students in battleground Pennsylvania and 13 other states, the road map to Election Day entailed knocking on every door

By DICK ANDERSON Photos by MARC CAMPOS

N THE ALLENTOWN COMMONS

shopping complex, amid a steady stream of gymgoers to the neighboring Planet Fitness and the high-decibel denizens of an adjacent childcare center, Oxy sophomores Cady Carr and Rachel Obbard go about their work in the field office of three-term Representative Susan Wild—recruiting volunteers for canvassing shifts, setting up phone banking operations, and making final preparations for a big campaign rally that Saturday. If there’s any disagreement among their coworkers, it’s where the thermostat should be set.

With 25 days until Election Day, there is optimism among the Wild bunch: A recent Muhlenberg College/Morning Call poll gave the Democratic incumbent a six-point advantage over her Republican challenger, Ryan Mackenzie, in Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District. But in a race that was decided by a mere 1.6 percent margin in 2022—fewer

than 6,000 votes—nothing is taken for granted.

As deputy field organizers on Wild’s campaign, Obbard and Carr are among 23 Occidental students spread across 14 states participating this fall in Campaign Semester. The biennial program, unique to Occidental, immerses participants in the day-to-day operations of a battleground race for 10 weeks in the field, followed by five weeks back in the classroom with politics professors Regina Freer and Peter Dreier dissecting the factors that shaped the outcome.

While several Oxy students are striving to send Vice President Kamala Harris to the White House, 13 are working on congressional contests that could tip the balance of the House of Representatives. (Three of the candidates are looking to unseat Republican incumbents.) Wild’s seat is considered vital

to the Democrats’ prospects of toppling the slim Republican majority in the House, which could have long-lasting ramiﬁcations for reproductive rights for women, access to healthcare, and resources for public schools, among other issues.

Carr and Obbard chose the Wild campaign independent of each other but have developed a strong kinship over the last couple of months. “I heard about Campaign Semester on my ﬁrst tour of Oxy when I was in

my junior year of high school,” says Obbard, an undeclared major from Berkeley. “My tour guide was about to go on her Campaign Semester in Georgia. [Violet Appelsmith ’24 was a campaign fellow for Stacey Abrams’ 2022 gubernatorial bid.] And it sounded like such a neat program.”

“I really wanted to be on a house race because of the size and the ability to gain more responsibility,” says Carr, an undeclared major from Arlington, Va. She was already

committed to Campaign Semester when Harris replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president. “I felt like this was going to be the biggest election of my entire life,” she adds.

“Cady and Rachel are full members of our ﬁeld team,” says Campaign Semester alumna Ella Rubin ’24, campaign press assistant to Wild. “Each is assigned to a ﬁeld organizer that has their own turf. We have big buses of volunteers from out of state every

weekend and they get requested by name. They don’t want our ﬁeld staﬀ. They want Cady and Rachel.”

Rubin did Campaign Semester in fall 2022, when she interned in Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District for Rep. Angie Craig with her best friend, Ava Wampold ’24 (who is currently working as a political associate for the House Majority PAC, a super PAC focused exclusively on electing Democrats to the U.S. House of Representatives). The

Sophomores Rachel Obbard, left, and Cady Carr canvass a neighborhood in Allentown, Pa., on October 11. Opposite: Sadie Spletzer ’26, right, and canvassing partner MarceyLynn Teague at a UNITE HERE Philly rally on October 12.

below: Carr, center, and Obbard in the Allentown, Pa., field office of Rep. Susan Wild. right: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, left, at a fundraiser for Wild, right, in Lehigh Valley in October. bottom: Carr, campaign press secretary Ella Rubin ’24, and Obbard.

following summer, she got an internship in Washington, D.C., as press intern for Leader Hakeem Jeﬀries—“a truly incredible experience”—and went to work for Wild after graduating from Occidental last May.

“The research and problem solving that I fostered at Oxy is super-transferrable to a campaign,” Rubin says. “Every one of my professors in the Politics Department is so passionate and willing to help students navigate Campaign Semester or ﬁll out internship applications. Having that community behind me deﬁnitely was helpful in transitioning into my current work as well.”

Much as it did for Rubin, Occidental laid the foundation for Carr and Obbard to make the most out of Campaign Semester. “I took Politics 101 in my ﬁrst semester at Oxy, and I learned a lot in that class,” Carr says. “One of the most important things I learned was about PACs and super PACs, and knowing that going into this has been really impactful

and has really deepened and enriched this on-the-ground experience.”

“During my ﬁrst year at Oxy, I took a few Critical Theory and Social Justice classes and there was a lot of emphasis on critical thinking—taking in the perspectives of others and coming up with your own conclusions or solutions,” Obbard says. “I think having an open mind when listening to voters and being empathetic toward people is really important, especially when you’re talking to swing voters who just want to be heard.”

It’s Saturday morning in Wissinoming Park in northeast Philadelphia, a traditionally white working-class area that has been transformed in recent years by waves of Russian, Eastern European, and North African immigrants. (By some estimates, about 100 languages are spoken in a 5-square-mile area.) Twenty-four days before Election Day, hundreds of UNITE HERE canvassers, including Sadie Spletzer ’26, have clustered for a block party before a full day of door-knocking gets underway.

“There are very few roads to the White House that don’t go through the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes,” says Emiliano Rodriguez, secretary/ treasurer of UNITE HERE, Local 274, The hospitality workers union was formed in 2004 by the merger of Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE) and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE).

Nationally, UNITE HERE boasts more than 250,000 hotel, casino, and food service workers—overwhelmingly women and

peo ple of color. “Local 274 has about 4,000 members but we really punch above our class when it comes to politics,” says Rodriguez, an 18-year veteran of UNITE HERE, which operates independent of the candidates’ own campaigns. “We run political operations that are much bigger than the scale of the local union itself.”

Back in 2016, when Donald Trump won the Keystone State by a little over 44,000 votes, there were 238,000 registered Democrats in Philadelphia “who just stayed home,” Rodriguez notes. “We were volunteering in the campaign and assuming things were going to be OK. But when Hillary Clinton lost Pennsylvania to Trump, we were pretty shocked. And we said we would never let that happen again.”

UNITE HERE Philadelphia onboarded 150 paid canvassers at the beginning of July, including Spletzer, a politics major from Chevy Chase, Md. “Sadie has built a real rapport with her canvass team,” Rodriguez says. “It’s really excellent to see that dynamic between all these canvassers and people who are coming from very diﬀerent places in their lives, learning to work together and be out there on the doors.”

“Canvassing is basically getting a feel for what’s going on in the neighborhood and how people feel about the upcoming elections and who they’re actually going to vote for,” says Stazola “T1” Anthony, head safety oﬃcer of UNITE HERE Philadelphia. “Sadie is my best canvasser—she does an amazing job at her age,” he adds. “By the time she’s my age [a youthful 47], she can be running a campaign.”

With Occidental’s student employees having voted to form a union last spring, “It’s been really good to see how other unions function versus how Occidental functions and the diﬀerence between a school union and a hospitality union,” Spletzer says. “That’s been the most rewarding part of this experience.

“The biggest challenge has deﬁnitely been the stress,” she adds. “A lot has changed through the course of the campaign and it’s very hard, but it’s worth it. Campaign Semester is a wonderful opportunity and one of the reasons that I applied to Oxy in the ﬁrst place.”

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr., who spoke at Occidental in April 2022, published an eﬀusive endorsement of Campaign Semester in late May. “The Occidental model can be tweaked, but its objectives are hard to refute: Our colleges and universities should not be self-referential bubbles, our democratic system needs refreshment,” Dionne wrote, “and the next generation should know that our democracy welcomes its skills, its passions—and its impatience.”

Since Dionne’s column ran in more than 100 newspapers nationwide, “I’ve been getting calls from all over the country from professors saying, ’How the hell did you do that? How can we do it at our college?’” says Dreier, the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, who is retiring from Occidental next year. “The secret of success for this program is that students take the initiative. They decide what campaigns to work for. Most of them have had no campaign experience before, but they learn quickly.”

In sheer numbers, this year’s contingent of Campaign Semester is second only to the 2012 class, which saw 32 students fan out across 11 states. (Thirteen of them gravitated toward President Barack Obama ’83’s reelection campaign, while a solitary student toiled for Mitt Romney that fall—despite Dreier’s best eﬀorts, Campaign Semester has attracted only a handful of students to Re-

publican campaigns since its launch in 2008.) As measured by breadth, this year’s 23 participants are working in a record number of states and campaigns.

One area that has evolved over time is the issue of compensation. While Campaign Semester was conceived as a program where students would volunteer their eﬀorts to the campaigns and receive 16 course units in return, “The legal deﬁnition of intern has changed a lot over the last couple of years,” Dreier says. “For the most part, the campaigns are now paying the students a wage because there are these new laws that say if you’re doing the job of somebody who gets paid, you need to get paid.”

Some students begin their campaign experience during the summer, Dreier adds, “but most of them start concurrently with the beginning of the fall semester. The campaigns arrange for the students to get free housing—typically with a local volunteer who has a spare bedroom. The College helps pay for students’ travel to and from their campaign destination, supported by the Andy Beattie ’75 Campaign Semester Endowment, which was established in 2018.

Campaign Semester participants work full-time, although the hours and intensity of the work increase a few weeks before Election Day. “I just spoke to two Campaign Semester students today,” Freer says 11 days

left: Hundreds of UNITE HERE canvassers gather for a block party in Wissinoming Park in October. below: Wernel Martinez, left, is working his third campaign as a canvasser for UNITE HERE in Philadelphia. “I represent all the immigrants who are working hard here in the United States,” says the Dominican Republic native.

before the election. “They were both energized and talking like campaign operatives who have been doing this for years.”

Back in Wild’s Allentown field office, campaign volunteers drop off homemade meals on Thursdays—a three-cheese baked ziti was going fast when we paid the team a visit—and “Susan likes to bring us fruit and vegetables because she says we’re not eating enough of them,” Carr says.

“I deﬁnitely want to work on another campaign after this,” Obbard says. “My parents raised me in an environment where they told me that if I wanted to see change, I would need to do it myself. So, when I heard about Campaign Semester, I really wanted to participate. When I meet a candidate or have some interesting experience, my parents are very happy for me and just proud of the work that I’m doing.”

“My family has been incredibly supportive,” Carr adds before heading out for another round of knocking on doors. “My grandparents text and call me all the time and want to know how everything’s going. My dad actually let me borrow his car for this experience, so he doesn’t have a car right now.” Hey, everybody has their part in preserving democracy.

RED STATES, BLUE FATES

Election Day produced surprises, concessions, and a ballot box full of lessons to unpack back at Oxy

IN HIS BID TO UNSEAT TWO-TERM INCUMBENT

Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas, Rep. Colin Allred had no bigger champion than his wife, Alexandra Eber ’11, a politics major at Occidental. But he had some additional help on the Oxy front from Alex Woo ’25, a diplomacy and world aﬀairs and economics double major from South Korea, and Quinn Sumerlin ’26, a politics major from Arlington, Va.

Allred came up short on Election Day in ruby-red Texas, one of several high-proﬁle Senate races supported by Campaign Semester participants. In Columbus, Ohio, Katherine Lackey ’27, an undeclared major from Portland, Ore., worked on the Sherrod Brown reelection campaign—one of the most expensive Senate races in U.S. history. Brown lost his seat to Republican Bernie Moreno, who captured 50.2% of the vote.

On the plus side for the Democrats in Arizona, Rep. Ruben Gallego held oﬀ former TV news anchor Kari Lake to win an open Senate seat vacated by Independent Kyrsten Sinema. But the results were mixed in the Grand Canyon State, as President-elect Donald Trump avenged a 2020 loss to Joe Biden to win by more than 5 percentage points.

Rosa Hochschild ’27, a critical theory and social justice and politics double major from Berkeley, worked for UNITE HERE Arizona, the hotel and restaurant workers union that campaigned on behalf of Democratic candidates in swing states and districts. Reﬂecting on the pres-

idential race, she writes, “Part of me feels very disappointed that the election has turned out this way, but part of me is also really looking forward to a growing movement with the workers union. Just because we lost this election does not mean that the movement that fueled my campaigning ends.

“The most enjoyable part of this experience was getting to know the members of the workers union,” she continues. “It feels incredible to be surrounded by people from all walks of life who have been joined together by their shared values. I am leaving this experience with tons of friends, who I am lucky to have learned from and grown with.”

There was good news for several Tigers working on a number of congressional races. Sadie Medros ’27, an undeclared major from Arlington, Mass., was on political newcomer Eugene Vindman’s winning campaign in Fredericksburg, Va. Caden Slater ’27, an undeclared major from Danville, helped Rep. Jared Golden score a fourth term in Congress. The Marine Corps veteran has served in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District since 2019.

Likewise, Ana Byers ’26, a history major from Bainbridge Island, Wash., and Lelia Pedersen ’26, a politics major from Issaquah, Wash., helped Rep. Angie Craig win a fourth term as the U.S. representative from Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District. Fun fact: Craig has enlisted more Campaign Semester volunteers than any politician not named Obama. Why argue with success?

left: Newly elected U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego, left, with Rosa Hochschild ’27 in Arizona. center: U.S. Senate candidate Colin Allred, Quinn Sumerlin ’26, and actress Connie Britton at a campaign rally in Texas. right: Olivia Correia ’26 with members of Rep. Yadira Caraveo’s team in Northglenn, Colo.

top: Alex Woo ’25 with Allred. above: Caden Slater ’27 campaigned for Rep. Jared Golden, left, in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. Golden won reelection to a fourth term by 0.7% of a point.

Campaign Trails

By PETER GILSTRAP

Campaign Semester can be a gateway to a career in politics, advocacy work, or even elected oﬃce, as these seven seasoned campaigners will attest

HERE’S NOTHING glamorous about grassroots campaign work: Knocking on doors, spending long hours in makeshift rental ofﬁces, and making endless phone calls isn’t everyone’s idea of nirvana. But Samantha Sencer-Mura ’11 took to these tasks like Dan Rather to a metaphor.

“There’s a bug that many of us get on campaigns,” says the Minneapolis native and fourth-generation Japanese American, who majored in critical theory and social justice at Occidental. “You either drink the Kool-Aid and you love it, or you cannot understand why someone would be devoting three months of their lives to the madness that is any political election.”

Campaigning for presidential candidate Barack Obama ’83 in her hometown in 2008, Sencer-Mura guzzled the Kool-Aid. “It was a very exciting time politically,” she recalls. “I was really interested in the idea of getting hands-on experience in the ﬁeld. It felt like a great way to be engaged in this important moment in our country, and get more connected to the place where I grew up.”

After earning a master’s in education from Harvard University in 2017, SencerMura moved back to Minneapolis that year, volunteering for campaigns and getting involved in local races. In 2022, she ran for state legislature—and won, and now she is

representing South Minneapolis in the Minnesota House of Representatives. It’s quite a leap from knocking on doors during Campaign Semester, but Sencer-Mura hasn’t forgotten how it all began.

“Having campaigned for many cycles now, I have more of a perspective about how unique that moment was,” she says. “I would come to people’s doors and they would be crying about the importance of the election. And I think about what my ancestors would think about this moment and the progress that our country has made.”

Over the last nine even-year election cycles, 148 Oxy students have opted into Campaign Semester, which oﬀers participants a chance to take an active role in a living, breathing political campaign. Students get a full semester of class credit for their 10 weeks in the trenches—and for more than a handful of alumni, the program has been a gateway to a career in politics, advocacy work, and even elected oﬃce.

Many of them ﬁnd their way back to politics, such as Ben Dalgetty ’10, who lives in Seattle and serves as internal communications manager for Mayor Bruce Harrell, for whom he has worked since 2022.

“My earliest political memory was during second grade,” says Dalgetty, who grew up in Oakland. “When the Oakland Teachers

Union went on strike, my mom and I brought baked goods for the teachers on the picket line.”

His political passion continued as a student at Skyline High School. “I was involved in protests when the Iraq War started,” Dalgetty says. “Then a group of friends and I drove out to Reno, Nev., for a weekend in 2004 to knock on doors for John Kerry’s presidential campaign.”

Dalgetty enrolled at Occidental as a recipient of the Robert S. and Marianna Osborne Fuller 1926 Scholarship (“I’m forever grateful for that”). In April 2008, during primary season, he went to Philadelphia to volunteer for Obama: “I really liked what he was saying,” Dalgetty says, “and it didn’t hurt that he went to Occidental.”

top & above: Ben Dalgetty ’10 in the Oﬃce of the Mayor in Seattle and campaigning for Barack Obama ’83 in 2008.

left: Samantha Sencer-Mura ’11 in session during her ﬁrst term in the Minnesota House of Representatives.

Dalgetty continued with the campaign into the fall, under the auspices of the newly created Campaign Semester. He spent much of his time in Butler, Pa., as well as West Virginia. “It was great and unusual to get to do that in college and to still get credit,” he says.

Sixteen years later, he reﬂects often on his Campaign Semester experience: “It really exposed me to so many diﬀerent kinds of people,” he says. “It challenges you in a way that you’re just not going to get as part of your regular coursework.”

Elina Woolever ’22 made her ﬁrst foray into politics in her hometown of Brunswick, Maine. As a junior and senior at Brunswick High School, she served as a student representative to the local school board, dealing with issues ranging from “the curriculum to school safety and gun violence,” she says. “The stuﬀ we were talking about actually impacted me and my classmates.”

As a sophomore at Oxy, with COVID in full swing, Woolever realized her dream of studying abroad wasn’t going to happen. But Campaign Semester ﬁlled that desire and played to her love of politics.

“I liked that it was offering students fulltime campaign experience in a different location without having to take time off,” says Woolever, who worked for retired astronaut Mark Kelly’s Senate race in 2020, serving as a field organizer based in Tucson but traveling throughout southeast Arizona. “The majority of the role was phone banking and calling every voter, watching out for any kind of voter suppression,” she says.

After earning a master’s in geopolitics, resources, and territory from King’s College in London last year, Woolever is back in Tucson working for RISE, a youth-led advocacy nonproﬁt. “Our work focuses on making higher education more accessible and more aﬀordable,” she explains. “We feel we can

during Campaign Semester. left: Woolever (front, right) met Zoe Fisher ’22 (front, middle) as Oxy classmates; the Robertson-Fisher family, pictured, “is my main connection to Tucson,” she says. right: Robert Sandoval ’13 ran for Marin Municipal Water District this fall.

make a diﬀerence on the college aﬀordability crisis by getting more young people involved in the political process.”

California native Robert Sandoval ’13 has politics and public service in his DNA. His mother, Lori, was a project manager for the city of Pasadena, and his father, Jose, was a Santa Ana city attorney. “My earliest memories are sitting on the ﬂoor of the living room when the adults were talking politics, and realizing how impactful political decisions are on people’s everyday lives,” he says.

As a student at Glendora High School, Sandoval was “obsessed” with basketball, he says. But he also nurtured his political interests through a program called California YMCA Youth and Government, in which students engaged in mock government modeled after the California State Legislature.

In looking at colleges, Sandoval wanted to stay local, having never left the state. Occidental appealed to him for the intimate class sizes, diverse student body, and Campaign Semester.

Working for the Illinois Democratic Coordinated Campaign to elect candidates up and down the ballot, Sandoval “hit the ground running,” he recalls, helping manage a ﬁeld oﬃce on the southwest side of Chicago in a primarily Spanish-speaking area.

E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics Peter Dreier, who co-founded Campaign Semester, “pushed me to step out of my comfort zone,” Sandoval recalls. “I asked myself, ‘Am I really ready to spend time outside of California by myself working on a campaign?’ But the experience set me up for my educational and professional future.”

After completing his studies at the University of Chicago Law School, Sandoval moved back to his home state and became a California deputy attorney general, hired by then-state Attorney General Kamala Harris.

Currently Sandoval is a corporate attorney in San Rafael, where he’s vice chair of the San Rafael Park and Recreation Commission and board member with the Point San Pedro Road Coalition.

Ask Fernando Abcara ’14 where he grew up, and Los Angeles is the quick answer. But the longer reply is more nuanced: “I don’t think that I’ve lived anywhere for probably more than four years,” he says. “I moved around a lot, honestly”—a trajectory that includes Pico Rivera, South Los Angeles, Pomona, El Monte, Highland Park, and Eagle Rock.

Abcara’s parents migrated from El Salvador in the 1980s. They lost their home in the recession of 2008—an experience that has informed his career. “The work that I’ve done has centered around housing justice and housing policy,” he says. “My parents worked their whole life to buy that house.”

Abcara became aware of Campaign Semester as a sophomore at Oxy. “It coincided with my parents losing their home, and I was engaging in more politics courses at the time.” He took his talents to Miami (“very conservative, even among the Latinx community”) to work on President Obama’s reelection campaign in the fall of his senior year.

Much of Abcara’s outreach involved engaging with older Cuban migrants, and one evening, he was driving a volunteer named Pinky home. As they passed a dilapidated neighborhood elementary school that had been shut down, “Pinky said, ‘Once Obama is reelected, he’s gonna change all of this,’ ” Abcara recalls. “But I realized the chances of Obama changing that school were very slim. In that moment, I wished that I would have done a local campaign. I thought, ‘Community organizing is the thing for me.’ ”

After graduating from Oxy with a double major in politics and Spanish studies, Abcara got a master’s in urban planning at UCLA. In

far left: Elina Woolever ’20 in October 2020,

between, he spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar in El Salvador, and a second stint as a Fulbright Alumni Ambassador—the ﬁrst Oxy graduate selected for this honor.

For the last four years, Abcara has been a national ﬁeld organizer for the Right to the City Alliance, a group that supports local communities in creating grassroots power and dealing with gentriﬁcation and displacement, among other issues. “It’s ironic that now I do national work,” he admits, “but Campaign Se mester propelled me in this direction, which I’m honestly grateful for.”

Sunari Weaver-Anderson ’24’s hometown of Oakland has a long and storied history of political and social activism—and at age 14, Weaver-Anderson participated in the Standing Rock protests against the construction of an oil pipeline that threatened Native American water rights. “It was amazing to see folks my own age coming together, and nobody was telling us to do it,” she says. “We were angry, we were agitated, and seeing that agitation can turn into collective action was really powerful.”

In her hunt for a college, Campaign Semester “was honestly the reason why Oxy shot to the top of my list,” WeaverAnderson says. The politics major and Obama Scholar spent the fall 2022 semester in Pennsylvania working with UNITE HERE Philadelphia, the local hospitality and food service union, backing a Democratic slate that included John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro.

“I was trained to go door to door, meeting voters and being able to canvass them deeply, getting to know what’s important to them,” Weaver-Anderson says. “It was lifechanging.” (And shoe-changing: “I brought one pair of Converses and by the end of the campaign, the soles were detached. They were falling out on the airplane home.”)

After graduating from Occidental in May, WeaverAnderson went to work as a ﬁeld organizing lead with UNITE HERE Arizona, where she was responsible for training a team of up to 20 canvassers leading to the November election. (While Trump avenged his 2020 loss at the top of the ticket, a bright spot for Democrats was electing Ruben Gallego to the U.S. Senate.) After “working my butt oﬀ to bring home Arizona for the Democratic Party,” she says, “I’m hoping to keep going in the movement.”

Noah Sullivan ’24 took his ﬁrst dive into politics in his adopted hometown of Petersburg, Alaska, a locale of around 3,000 where the temperature seldom rises

, and his Mis

Arizona colleagues

left inset: After El Rancho High School teacher Jazmin Chavez-Diaz “nagged” him to apply to Oxy, Fernando Abcara ’14 ﬁnally did: “I’m really grateful that I made the switch.”

above 60°F. In the warmth of the TV glow, “I grew up watching Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart with my parents,” he says. “And I remember the energy of the 2008 election, and that exposure as a child set me on this path.”

Sullivan interned at the Alaska State Capitol in Juneau as a high school senior, and he worked on several races in Alaska in 2020. During the pandemic, his ﬁrst year at Oxy was remote, but he says Professor Dreier played a crucial part in his political development.

Sullivan spent his Campaign Semester working for Mission for Arizona, the state Democratic Party’s campaign to elect Democratic candidates vying for oﬃces from governor to Congress. They won every election across the board. Beyond participating in that triumphant sweep, Sullivan’s time there was a homecoming. “I was born in Mesa while my mom was getting her master’s, and I ended up knocking on thousands of doors all over that area.”

During the 2024 election season, Sullivan worked on Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s successful reelection to the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington state’s 3rd Congressional District. The Democrat incumbent narrowly held oﬀ Republican challenger Joe Kent in a rematch of the 2022 campaign.

“I applied at ﬁrst as a ﬁeld organizer, knocking on doors and making phone calls like I did in Arizona,” Sullivan says. But after a series of conversations with Gluesenkamp Perez’s campaign personnel, he accepted the role of deputy organizing director.

With the election in his rearview mirror, Sullivan is mulling over his next move. “I have gotten to know the 3rd District fairly well,” he says. “I’ve gotten sort of used to the environment and the politics here. Really, anything could happen.” Isn’t that always the case in politics?

Freelance writer Peter Gilstrap wrote “New Faces of 2027” in the Fall 2023 issue.

Sunari Weaver-Anderson ’24, far left, represents UNITE HERE at the annual Peoplehood Parade in Philadelphia in October 2022.

left: Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), second from left, with Noah Sullivan ’24, second from right

sion for

in 2022.

BY DICK ANDERSON

PHOTOS BY ANGELINA LEE ’22

Angelina Lee ’22 (photographed by Alexis Rowell, the subject of her documentary short) displays a crate of organic apples at La Grande Raisandière, a permaculture farm in France owned by Rowell and his partner.

Combining her interest in sustainability with her prowess behind the camera, Angelina Lee ’22 harvests a new documentary around permaculture

For her senior comps at Oxy, Angelina Lee ’22 made a 10-minute science ﬁction short titled Quercus, which is the genus name for the oak tree. The ﬁlm is set in a not-sodistant future where there are no trees due to pollution and other environmental disasters, driving people to live in underground bunkers. Through advanced technology, they have a museum exhibit that’s so immersive that they can see what trees were like. “To these future people, trees are these really weird anomalies—these giants that can’t move but are alive,” Lee says.

“Part of the idea for having an exhibit that’s so photoreal and immersive meant that we could ﬁlm outside,” adds the media arts and culture major, who employed the olive groves outside Keck Theater, a eucalyptus tree along the path to Fiji Hill, and a cluster of oaks on the Academic Quad among her locations.

Two years after screening Quercus, Lee returned to campus in April to premiere her ﬁrst documentary—and while she has traded science ﬁction for science fact, the environment remains very much top of mind in her choice of subject matter. Financed by a $10,000 grant she received as a 2022 Obama Fellow, The Big Raise is a “poetic portrait,” in Lee’s words, of a small regenerative agriculture farm in France, where she lived and worked for nearly three months after graduating from Oxy.

The 15-acre property was purchased in 2017 by Alexis Rowell, a BBC journalist turned sustainability consultant and business developer. Responding to the alltoo-real prospect that the Arctic ice caps would melt in his lifetime, Rowell and his partner, Blanche Lepetit, reimagined La Grande Raisandière (“The Big Raise”) as

a permaculture farm and learning center to train people in new ways to grow nutritious food while actively repairing the soil. The farm incorporates sustainable components such as solar panels, rainwater capture, forest gardens, composting, and more.

During her time at Occidental, Lee developed an interest in permaculture—the idea of creating sustainable human habitats and food systems—and regenerative agriculture, a particular approach to farming that focuses on improving the soil and repurposing waste from one element as food for another. “France is leading the way in permaculture, especially Bec Hellouin Farm in Normandy, where they’ve done so much research,” Lee says.

Growing up in the Midwest, Lee watched countless ﬁlms in high school and began thinking about movies critically. “At the same time, I was also really drawn to the visual image—I was taking pictures of everything,” she says. “For me, ﬁlms were this amazing way to learn about the world and hear people’s stories.”

Lee thrived as a media arts and culture major and was selected as an Obama Fellow as a junior. “I was part of the fellowship seminar led by Associate Professor Ryan Preston-Roedder my senior year,” she says. “We read some amazing texts and had a lot of fascinating discussions about the public good and its many facets. And my peers—the two Obama Scholars, as well as the other fellows—were inspiring.

“When I came to Oxy, I knew that I wanted to study ﬁlm because I would be in Los Angeles, so close to Hollywood and everything,” Lee adds. “But at the same time, I wanted to learn about sustainability—speciﬁcally looking for solutions that we can pursue to make the world a little better.”

3. A summer pumpkin from the

TOP TO BOTTOM:

1. Hollyleaf redberries ﬂourish at the Bette Davis Microforest in Griﬃth Park, designed by Seed to Landscape and created by the L.A. Parks Foundation.

The spiky shells of organic chestnuts begin to open at La Grande Raisandière.

farm’s vegetable garden.

She also got involved in a number of sustainabilityrelated activities on campus: changing out compost bins, helping with Oxy Ecossentials, and doing public relations work for FEAST.

hours of raw footage down to an initial 50-minute edit, then ﬁnally down to its 40-minute runtime.

Since premiering at Oxy last April as part of Earth Month, The Big Raise is making the festival circuit and was an official selection of the 17th Bushwick Film Festival in October. What does Rowell think of the finished film? “He said he liked the imagery,” Lee reports, “and that their cats, Thelma and Louis, are natural stars of the silver screen!”

TOP RIGHT: Lee places weed-suppressing cardboard sheets and straw mulch for a windbreaker hedge at the farm ABOVE: Alexis Rowell, founder of the permaculture farm and the primary subject of Lee’s documentary, picks seasonal beans from the garden.

Lee was developing a project for the Obama Fellowship around the idea of permaculture when she reached out to a number of farms, including Rowell’s, “and Alexis was interested,” she says. What made it extra feasible was the fact that he already had a system of wooﬁng, aka WWOOFing, in which volunteers provide farming and gardening assistance on rural farms in exchange for room and board. “That was what I had been hoping for, to be able to live on the farm as well, to get to know people better but also have more chances to ﬁlm.”

Coming from a mostly suburban background, Lee arrived at the farm “expecting a rural situation with very few people,” she says, “and I was totally wrong. There were tons of people coming and going at the farm at all times—neighbors, friends, and people you knew from town. That was really wonderful as. well.”

Over the course of The Big Raise, Lee methodically breaks down the diﬀerent component parts of how the farm operates, right down to the disposal of the “pee and the poo,” as they call it in the ﬁlm. Lee shaped about 18

In recent months, Lee has been in post-production on a feature-length environmental documentary, Making a Mini-Forest, about Europe’s mini-forest movement. After she finished filming at La Grande Raisandière, “I wanted to see Paris for the first time,” she recalls. A friend recommended to her Mini-Forest Revolution (2022), by nature and conservation writer Hannah Lewis, which covers the mini-forest movement around the world. “I was floored by how beautifully the book is written but also how this concept shares some affinities with permaculture, because microforests are doing a lot with a little bit of space.”

Subsequently, she contacted Boomforest, a Parisbased nonproﬁt association committed to creating natural spaces in urban spaces utilizing the very precise planting method developed by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki (more on him below). “I was interested in seeing their work,” Lee says, “and they invited me to one of their tree plantings in the suburbs of Paris. After being there for several hours, I was amazed by the electrifying energy that was there—the interest from volunteers who probably weren’t already specialists in tree planting.”

Lee came away from the planting with the seed of an idea for a larger documentary. “I knew from the book that there was a lot of this happening in Europe. So, I asked Boomforest, ‘Would you put me in contact with your friends who are doing this?’ And that started me on a journey of ﬁlming 10 diﬀerent groups in Western Europe.”

TOP LEFT: Designed by Katherine Pakradouni of Seed to Landscape, Ascot Hills Park in Monterey Hills is the largest microforest in L.A., spanning 10,000 square feet and containing more than 850 native trees and shrubs.

From November 2022 to June 2023, Lee ﬁlmed in France, the U.K., Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. “It’s a story of the power of the individual,” she says. “One person sparked the imagination of another, and another, until a highly interconnected network of foresters emerged.”

Along the way, she asked Lewis to narrate the documentary “and she was interested,” Lee says. “I am so glad of that because she connected me to even more people.” After Lee returned to the United States, she traveled to Minnesota to meet Lewis, record her narration, and visit the mini-forest project underway in St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood, a historically Black community whose residents had been given very little say in the construction and zoning happening there for decades. Lewis was working with area volunteers to plant a mini-forest at Pilgrim Baptist Church. “That project was amazing because it was bringing back native trees and shrubs in collaboration with the Rondo community,” Lee says.

Her ﬁnal travels on the documentary took Lee to the Far East. “There’s a group in India that has been doing mini-forests for more than a decade,” she says. “They invited me to document a workshop they were doing in Indonesia. Then, unexpectedly, an environmentalist connected me to resources to help me go to Japan and ﬁlm the start of the entire documentary, because the idea for these forests originates from the Miyawaki Method.”

Miyawaki (1928-2021) created the mini-forest, or microforest, concept in 1971—the same method utilized by Gretchen North, the John W. McMenamin Chair in Biology, and her students in developing a microforest on the Occidental campus last year (“Changing the Climate,” Summer). “I shed a lot of happy tears getting to see some of the original mini-forests,” Lee says.

After moving back to Los Angeles at the start of 2024, she commenced to editing The Big Raise. “In a weird way that was a blessing because I hadn’t seen the footage in so long,” Lee says. “It makes you a bit more objective in not just favoring the last shots that you made.

“I was trying to embrace a more nontraditional approach to documentary,” she notes. “Even though the

ﬁlm has a lot of explanatory audio, I wanted to just show the seasons pass and hopefully oﬀer a little bit of what it’s like to just be at that farm—to watch the tomatoes ripen and the plants evolve over time. I was emboldened very much by my media arts and culture professors who embrace trying new things, especially for documentary.”

In early December, Lee was preparing to travel to Saudi Arabia to premiere Making a Mini-Forest at the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertiﬁcation (COP16) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. As The Big Raise continues to reach bigger audiences, she looks back fondly on her time working on the farm. “I came into it a little bit worried because I accidentally killed houseplants before and I didn’t want to mess up their operations,” she says with a laugh. “Thankfully, it was ﬁne and it was really fun. Now, I have a better image of the garden that I’d like to plant one day.”

University.

ABOVE LEFT: Frequent farm WWOOFer Julien Roche scythes weeds in one of the restoration areas in order to sow green manure seeds to regenerate the soil.

ABOVE RIGHT: Rowell rejuvenated the pond next to the farmhouse and barn to store water and support biodiversity. LEFT: Rowell places a proper pumpkin from an autumn harvest.

ABOVE: Another view of Ascot Hills Park in Monterey Hills. The microforest is monitored for biodiversity and growth by the Center for Urban Resilience at Loyola Marymount

Origin Stories

By LAURA FERREIRO

by MAX S. GERBER

Before arriving at Occidental, these eight members of the Class of ’28 (and a transfer student from the Class of ’27) discovered their superpowers in the classroom, in their communities, in competition, and in service to their country

EACH FALL, AN INFLUX OF NEW FACES arrives on the Occidental campus—bringing with them new ideas, new dreams, and new visions that may shape our collective futures. Hyperbole, you say? It was 45 years ago that a freshman named “Barry” Obama joined the Oxy community. We introduce to you nine new members of the Tiger family—we don’t know where they’re going, but every hero has an origin story.

THE FACILITATOR

Madeline Fernandez

Los Angeles

While many teenagers were using their free time during the pandemic lockdown to watch TV or play video games, Madeline Fernandez founded the nonproﬁt Techy Teens 4 Seniors to help seniors navigate technology issues from emailing photos to using iPad-based systems at medical labs. Inspired by the struggles she saw her grandparents having, Madeline knew she wanted to help. So, she picked up the phone and started calling assisted living facilities and volunteering her services.

Things snowballed from there and now she leads a team of high school- and collegeage students who serve over 300 seniors per month. “People ﬁnd out about us through word of mouth,” explains Madeline. “Usually people have basic questions, like how do I send pictures or download a parking app. Now we have a lot of people who volunteer with the program and I manage all of it.”

Despite being busy running a thriving nonproﬁt, Madeline makes sure to prioritize academics. “I try to balance my time between studies and extracurricular activities,” says the L.A. native, who’s interested in majoring in cognitive science and possibly pursuing a

career in geriatric medicine. “I’m looking at doing more community-based physician work,” she says. “I want to be able to give back to my community.”

Madeline was born and raised in the Highland Park neighborhood surrounding Occidental and would often take walks on

campus with her family. “I was always aware of Oxy, and then someone from Oxy came to my high school and gave a presentation, and I fell in love with it. It’s full circle. I knew the academics and the research were so good here. Sitting in the presentation made me realize that this is where I needed to be.”

Photos

Zoey Hrabe

Kansas City, Mo.

It’s rare that a fateful sign comes in the form of a purple pole. But that’s what happened to freshman Zoey Hrabe, when a pole helped guide her toward one of her biggest passions. Although her high school, Barstow School in Kansas City, Mo., didn’t have a pole vaulting coach or much equipment, “They had this super old pole manufactured the year I was born tucked in a shed somewhere,” Zoey recalls. “I was the ﬁrst one to ever use it. It felt like a sign that it was meant to be.”

Zoey had run track at her high school since she was a freshman, and her mom suggested she try pole vaulting. “I was a gymnast and a lot of gymnasts pick up pole vaulting

very easily. I liked being in the air and the dynamic aspect of it.”

Flash forward a few years and Zoey was named the Kansas City Star’s Female AthleteScholar of the Year and is pole vaulting at Occidental—one of the things that attracted her here. “Oxy was my No. 1 choice,” she says. “The small campus is awesome. L.A. is so diﬀerent from where I grew up. I learned what freeways were when I came out here. We only have smaller highways in Kansas City. But the neighborhood I come from is similar to this neighborhood. It kind of feels like I’m still at home.”

Zoey was born in China and adopted by her parents, who brought her to Kansas City when she was 14 months old. “Growing up was a little diﬃcult because I didn’t understand the concept of race,” Zoey says. “It was me and my two white parents. Kids pointed

out it wasn’t my real mom. But I’m very grateful I’m adopted—it added a lot of great aspects to my life. There were three other girls at my high school who were also adopted from China. We started an Asian Paciﬁc Islanders Club.”

Zoey plans to major in biology and Chinese language with the goal of becoming an orthopedic surgeon. “I like how hands-on orthopedics is,” Zoey says. “It’s like putting a person back together!”

THE POLICYMAKER

Aiden Thatcher

Anthem, Ariz.

As a National Merit Scholar who earned the highest possible score on 12 AP exams and a talented cross country runner, Arizona native Aiden Thatcher had his pick of top-ranked universities, but for him there was no question: Occidental was where he wanted to be.

“I knew I wanted to go to a liberal arts school to tickle all my different passions,” Aiden says. Impressed by the abundance of experiential learning opportunities at Oxy, from undergraduate research programs to Oxy at the U.N., he felt confident in his decision. “I want to go into public policy; it’s an applied field and you need to be a problem solver,” he points out. “I like the idea of taking the concepts of the classroom and interacting

with them and making them useful. We leave the ivory tower to put ideas into practice.”

As a student at Boulder Creek High School in Anthem, Ariz., Aiden took the knowledge he gained in his Spanish classes to volunteer with an organization called Meaningful Teens doing phonics and literacy education. “There was a 6-year-old girl and it was her ﬁrst time on and she didn’t speak any English,” Aiden recalls of one of his students. “She was just six days into living in the U.S. having moved from El Salvador. I was able to connect with her. We worked on numbers and colors. That was a really impactful experience. People often don’t realize that their actions can inﬂuence the world. It showed me that my Spanish wasn’t just something I was learning in the classroom.”

Another real-life experience inspired his goal to earn a master’s in urban planning and a Ph.D. in urban geography as a path toward working as a government analyst or policy maker. “Part of my journey was getting hit by a car twice—both biking and running,” Aiden says. “It wasn’t too severe, but it made me question why it’s diﬃcult to get around without a car. Why is a car the only safe way? It’s all policy. It’s how things get built.”

In addition to pursuing a double major in urban and environmental policy and economics, he hopes to minor in geology so he can use GIS to understand physical landscapes and cities and incorporate elements of climate science into his work. “I want to have the most holistic skill set possible as a policymaker.”

THE CHANGEMAKER Aoife

Mokalla

Minneapolis

Growing up in Minneapolis, Aoife Mokalla was raised to speak up for what she believed in. She developed a passion for social justice and political activism at an early age, and wanted to address issues such as period poverty that are often stigmatized and not openly discussed.

Aoife and her classmates at Southwest High School wanted to create a safe space to discuss women’s issues, so they co-founded an organization called Gender Justice. On top of that, they raised more than $2,000 to provide free menstrual products in their high school bathroom to help end period poverty.

“None of our school bathrooms had period products in them,” Aoife says. “So we made a bunch of Costco trips to get the products and stock the bathrooms. We also did workshops on what period poverty is and how to address that.” Aoife also served as a liaison and partnered with the student council to help address gender justice. “Being part of both groups, I could help them work together,” she says.

Now Aoife is considering majoring in critical theory and social justice, biology, or sociology with a minor in public health. “I hope to do post-grad to work in reproductive rights of some sort,” she says. “With a public health minor it would be a good intersection of social justice and a speciﬁc cause. I’m interested in using it to raise awareness of period poverty.”

Outspoken and engaged, Aoife also served as student council president, debate captain, and dance captain at Southwest High School. When teachers and support staﬀ at the high school staged “Walkout Wednesdays” earlier this year, she stood by them on the picket line.

Despite being so involved as a student leader, “All of these groups are not what deﬁne me,” Aoife says. “It’s also about preparing future leaders to do the same thing. In high school I worked really hard to be passionate about all of these groups at once. In college and post-college, I’d like to focus on making meaningful and important change in one thing I’m really passionate about.”

THE PEACEKEEPER

Adam Pildal

Copenhagen, Denmark

Denmark native Adam Pildal spent two years living in Singapore as part of the United World Colleges (UWC) program prior to attending Occidental, interacting with students from all over the world.

As someone who could have gone almost anywhere on the globe to attend college, Adam was drawn to Oxy for its central location in a major metropolitan city that’s also close to the surrounding mountains, beaches, and desert terrain. The fact that his good friend from the UWC program (Aung Myat Thet) was also accepted to Occidental made it even more appealing.

“I love it here,” Adam says. “I love the academics and how easy it is to communicate with my professors during oﬃce hours. I really like my peers as well. I already feel I have a really strong community here.”

While studying in Singapore, Adam organized the Initiative for Peace in Timor-Leste. “Timor-Leste has a diﬃcult history,” Adam explains. “It was a Portuguese colony and then it was colonized by Indonesia in the 1970s. Now it’s independent. It has a pretty good education system, but there aren’t many

economic opportunities. It’s the poorest country in Southeast Asia. We provided a forum for people there around 18 or 19 years old to discuss issues going on in the country and how we can work to manage them … to get people thinking about how to work toward solutions.”

When he arrived at Oxy, Adam jumped right in to writing for The Occidental newspaper, and plans to pursue a career as a journalist. “I want to work to help get people’s voices out there as much as I can,” he says. “Random people posting on social media can’t sustain a population. I feel it’s so important to tell the stories of people whose stories aren’t being told.”

THE FACILITATOR

Jillian Wan

Shanghai, China

Jillian Wan knows ﬁrsthand what it feels like to be a ﬁsh out of water. Her father is Shanghainese and her mother is American, and Jillian’s experience moving from Los Angeles to Shanghai at age 6 had a big impact on her, as did a challenging transition to high school at the Shanghai American School (SAS), with an enrollment of more than 1,000 students in grades 9-12.

“After COVID, my high school no longer had a comprehensive orientation program for new students because of lockdown policies, so my experience transferring [to SAS] was a bit rocky,” Jillian says. “I was profoundly aﬀected by that experience, so I wanted to make a program in my school to help new students adjust better.”

Jillian founded and served as president of the New Student Council, which provided orientation for new students. “We gave them tours and info about the school and made sure it was a place they could feel safe and welcome,” she says.

In addition to being a student leader, dancer, and soccer player, Jillian channels her emotions into her music; she has recorded two ambitious original songs, “Wilted Roses” and “Imperfections,” that are available on streaming platforms.

“Music can inspire emotions within you, even with no words,” she says. “That’s the core of my passion for music—the way it can embody emotions so purely and potently.”

Another thing that sets Jillian apart is her experience with sustainable chicken farming in Shanghai. “My dad has a chicken hobby,” she explains. “We started with two chickens and now there are 45 of them. We don’t buy eggs from the store, we have so many. We feed them all of our leftovers and their

excrement is used to fertilize our garden. It’s very self-sustaining.”

Jillian was attracted to Oxy because of its proximity to Los Angeles, “a vibrant city ﬁlled with culture and life,” and to her childhood home in Altadena. “The people here are all so expressive, unique and interesting. There’s not one person here on campus who isn’t interesting in their own way.”

THE HURDLER

James Buellesbach

San Jose

Sometimes life can deliver happy accidents. Such was the case with James Buellesbach, who stumbled into hurdling after he got injured as a long and triple jumper and ended up becoming the fastest sophomore hurdler at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose.

“I learned to hurdle quickly, surprising even my coach, who’s been coaching for 30 years,” James says. “I think that my teachability and my ability to pick up skills and technique really make me an asset.”

Rob Bartlett, Oxy’s head track and ﬁeld and cross country coach, would agree. “He’s a phenomenal hurdler—actually the best we’ve recruited in my 19 years here,” Bartlett says. “James seems like a wonderful kid, too. We’re really excited that he’s a Tiger!”

James knew he wanted to go to a small school where he could pursue athletics and a major in marine biology, and Occidental ﬁt the bill. “Oxy had a similar feel to Bellarmine,” he says. “They have similar-size student bodies and an emphasis on connecting with the community. The groups I’ve hung out with have been super welcoming. I love that I can get anywhere within 10 minutes just by walking. I love the community, the campus, the teachers. It’s been aces so far.”

James has been fascinated by zoology and marine biology for as long as he can remember, interests sparked by a ﬁeld trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in sixth grade. “I knew I really wanted to work with animals, and that hasn’t changed much,” he says.

Now, as a Tiger, James is applying some of the lessons he learned as a high school athlete to his studies and college career. “I’ve learned that things come slowly,” he says. “It’s taken me four years to get where I am. Maybe you improve 2 percent a day, but over

a year that adds up. In track, you have to give yourself rest and recovery days. So don’t swamp yourself with homework and sign up for everything and expect to be able to do it. You’ve got to give yourself breaks and recovery days.”

THE ADVOCATE

Talia Kotovsky

Alameda

Growing up on picturesque Alameda Island in California’s San Francisco Bay, Talia Kotovsky took advantage of all the Bay Area had to oﬀer, from hiking in Muir Woods to seeing live concerts at local arenas. She also was very involved as a student board member of the Alameda Uniﬁed School District, Jewish Student Union president, and volunteer with sexual assault prevention groups.

“I experienced a lot of anti-Semitism growing up,” Talia explains. “There weren’t many Jews in Alameda, so my friend created the Jewish Student Union and I ended up joining. It was sweet to have somewhere to go and hang out, and the next year I ended up being president. It was nice to have an intentional community of people and connect.”

She also stayed active serving on the Youth Advisory Board of the School Based Health Center. “We’d do fairs with information on suicide prevention, sexual assault prevention, and mental health, and we’d run campaigns for preventing teen dating violence,” Talia explains. “I’m interested in learning and helping people and educating them, and I wanted to be involved.”

When it came time to choose a college, Talia was drawn to Oxy for a number of reasons. She wanted to stay in California and follow in her mother’s footsteps by coming

to Los Angeles. “My mom went to UCLA, so I thought it’d be awesome to be in the same city she was at the same age she was,” Talia says. “I’m not an L.A. type of person, but I really liked how small Occidental was. It’s a whole college campus in the city but still removed enough to feel like its own place. And I love how passionate the students seemed. Once I visited Oxy, I automatically loved it.”

Like other ﬁrst-years, Talia hasn’t declared a major, but psychology (one of the College’s most popular majors) has caught her interest. She hosts her own radio show on KOXY every Wednesday night, playing an eclectic mix of her favorite tunes from Paul Simon and Oasis to LCD Soundsystem and the Velvet Underground.

When Talia’s not studying or spinning tunes, she’s hiking and camping with the Oxy Outdoors Club. “I’m excited to do that because at home I spent a lot of time outdoors,”

she says. From Mount Baldy and Joshua Tree to the plethora of scenic beaches that dot the coastline, Talia is discovering that Southern California’s natural beauty rivals even its Northern neighbor.

THE DIPLOMAT

Levi Medina

Los Angeles

Decorated military veteran and transfer student Levi Medina brings a host of valuable real-world experiences to his sophomore year of studies at Occidental. An active-duty Marine for over seven years who was deployed in the Paciﬁc and the Middle East, Levi learned self-discipline, leadership skills, and teamwork during his military tenure.

When asked about the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal he received for

exemplary services, he’s characteristically modest. “It was very humbling to be recognized,” Levi says. “I like to say that any award is not a recognition of self-eﬀort. It’s recognition of the collective eﬀort of your team and all that you accomplished together.”

A native Angeleno, Levi attended Los Angeles Valley College for a year before enlisting in the military. He always knew that he wanted to ﬁnish college and become the second person in his family to complete his four-year degree.

“My oldest brother, Earl [a graduate of Cal State Northridge], set the example, and it felt necessary for me to become more academically enriched as well,” he says. “I wanted to show my mom that I could do it, too.”

Levi plans to pursue a major in diplomacy and world aﬀairs in pursuit of a career in the State Department. He also intends to participate in as many clubs as possible while at Oxy. “Occidental Run Club is healthy and fun. I want to play tennis and Ultimate Frisbee. The Mahjong Club sounds interesting. Hopefully by junior year, I’ll run for student oﬃce.”

Having grown up in L.A., Levi has several recommendations for his fellow Tigers who are new to the city. “Get out there and enjoy the cuisine,” he says. “Embrace the dynamic culture. Go to the beach. Hiking is a must. Venture out. SoCal has so much to oﬀer.”

Laura Ferreiro is a freelance writer in Los Angeles. This is her ﬁrst article for Occidental

UNSEEN

OCCIDENTAL

From 1898 to 1914, Occidental College called Highland Park home— and a treasure trove of photos from the 1910s offers a glimpse of campus life before the move to Eagle Rock

PROFESSOR OF CLASSICS WILLIAM D. WARD IS A seminal ﬁgure in the early development of Occidental College. He arrived at Occidental in 1906 as dean of faculty, having previously served as president of the College of Emporia in Kansas (which closed its doors in 1972).

Ward pivoted to the classroom in 1909, brought about the revival of Greek drama on campus, and personally discovered the site of Remsen Bird Hillside Theater when surveying the property that would become Occidental’s third and permanent home in Eagle Rock.

In a 1914 essay titled “Occidental College: Its Place and Purpose,” Ward wrote: “The ideal college is popularly supposed to be located near the eastern seaboard, miles away from the city, and overrun with the ivy and traditions of several generations. Accepting this as the orthodox view, the claims of Occidental must rest largely upon sheer nonconformity.

“To begin with, it stands on the border of Los Angeles, not only fronting the Paciﬁc, but purposely convenient to an urban population. Just below stretches a city of half a million, to which swift accretions are constantly being made from every part of the world. During the tourist season, the onlooker is forced to marvel at the human species,

Y Occidental’s new campus in 1913, with the frameworks of Johnson, Fowler, and Swan halls taking shape. Developers W.A. Roberts and James G. Garth purchased 200 acres of land in Eagle Rock in 1909, 75 acres of which they deeded to Occidental in January 1910. The College bought 13 additional acres soon after, and a gift of another 3 acres “completed what is now the beautiful new 90-acre campus, which prominent educators have pronounced second to no other college site in the country,” Roberts and Garth declared in an ad in the 1913 La Encina. The developers created two subdivisions totaling 306 lots surrounding the nascent campus, at prices ranging from $500 to $1,500.

Photos by HUGH M c NARY 1914 Text by DICK ANDERSON

Z Professor William D. Ward at his desk in the Hall of Letters on Occidental’s Highland Park campus. Ward is best remembered today as the co-author of “Occidental Fair,” which would supplant the oﬃcial College hymn, “Hail to Occidental,” by Dan S. Hammock 1905 and Williel Thomson 1910, as well as an earlier ode to the College composed by William Stewart Young and Walter S. Young titled “Occidental Mine!”

X President John Willis Baer hosts visitors at a reception in the Gymnasium. (Other student nicknames for the space were the Occidental Ballroom and Reception Hall.) During his decade-long tenure at Occidental (1906-1916), Baer oversaw the move from Highland Park to Eagle Rock. In her biography of Bear published in 2000, volunteer College archivist Jean Paule wrote that Occidental’s sixth president—fondly referred by students as “Prexy”—“deserves to be regarded as one of the College’s truly great leaders.”

W A lone horseman surveys the farmland in Eagle Rock against the backdrop of its namesake formation around 1912. (The road and bridge in the foreground were part of State Highway 134, which later became Colorado Boulevard.) Eagle Rock was incorporated in 1911 with a population of about 600.

apparently metamorphosed into birds of passage, and all winging their ﬂight to the same spot, drawn by the gentle luxe of the Southland.

“Here men are gathering, and here, as long as natural conditions remain the same, they will continue to gather here, if anywhere, their spiritual and intellectual needs must be met. It is a noble philanthropy, we admit, which, after planting a rustic Eden and hedging it about, oﬀers the student its shelter for the four years of the college course. And yet, not to mention the failure of the original Eden experiment and of many such experiments since, thousands of our future citizens must be educated in the city or not at all.”

Ward was nothing if not prescient in recognizing the potential growth of Los Angeles into a world-class city, and was quick to recognize the College’s place in it:

“In the new Occidental campus, various advantages of city and country are combined. Another 90-acre tract equal in charm and adaptability it would be hard to find in Southern California. Though reached by a five-cent trolley ride from any part of Los Angeles, it lives quite removed from the turmoil, and so close to nature, that it smells of the wildflowers. … Spread out among the hills, with the mountains in the background, and from its highest eminence, catching occasional glimpse of the sea, the situation is one of unsurpassed beauty well deserving the admiration bestowed upon it by visitor after visitor.”

Prior to moving to Eagle Rock, Occidental called Highland Park home on 23 acres of land in the heart of a developing community. What was campus life like in those days? Thanks to Hugh McNary of the Class of 1914—who studied in Highland Park and was part of the ﬁrst class to graduate in Eagle Rock—we have a window into that world.

A history and economics major at Oxy, McNary played football, ran track, and spent two years as photographer for La Encina, where a number of these images were ﬁrst published. He committed many more to a scrapbook—an album that was purchased on eBay nearly a decade ago by the Eagle Rock Valley Historical Society. Local historian Eric Warren ’69 worked with Special Collections to identify a number of the images at the time of his 50th reunion. Take a look for yourself: In the timeless words of Maya Angelou, “You can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you have been.”

W Built in 1904, the Hall of Letters —the academic center of the Highland Park campus in its heyday— still stands, much altered, near the corner of Avenue 50 and Figueroa Street. The ground on which the Hall of Letters and the Library stood was a gift to the College by Dr. and Mrs. J.A. Gordon and Mrs. Jayne Rutan, widow of former trustee L.D. Rutan.

Y OMA members Ray Schauer 1912, William Smart 1914, and Hugh McNary 1914 pose after their initiation into the fraternity.

Y Members of the Class of 1914 pose for a photo in 1911 on the Highland Park campus. (They were part of the ﬁrst class to graduate on the new campus in Eagle Rock.)

Among the highlights of the 1910-11 academic year: a “big” Glee Club concert at Temple Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles; a celebration of President Baer’s 50th birthday; and a lecture by Professor of Mathematics Ernest Allen on the total solar eclipse on April 28, 1911.

W Before there was Oswald, this was one of the earliest iterations of Oxy’s beloved bengal mascot—one of many similarities between the College and a certain Ivy League university. Maybe too many: In an open letter to the newspaper titled “Should Occidental Copy Princeton?” a number of “Occidental men at Princeton” bristled at the idea of their alma mater being referred to as “the Princeton of the West”: “It shows a humiliating lack of originality and self-respect to mimic another college, assuming, for the sake of argument, that we have the right to usurp what belongs to others.”

Y A small circle of friends from the Class of 1914 relax at a class lunch in another photo taken on the Highland Park campus in 1911.

Y An unidentiﬁed Oxy hurdler (quite possibly Harry Kirkpatrick 1914—more on him on page 31) clears the high hurdles during practice on a track in Highland Park. Coach Joe Pipal’s 1913 squad was considered to be “the best balanced team that Occidental has had in many years,” according to the 1914 La Encina. The Tigers continued to compete in Highland Park until construction on Patterson Field was completed in 1917.

X Tennis was the ﬁrst coed sport at Occidental, with the men and women competing in singles play against a common opponent. “Tennis is a ﬁne game and one that a person can follow all of his life,” La Encina declared in its 1913 edition. “More interest will be taken in this game from year to year.”

X 1914 graduate Harry Kirkpatrick played shortstop for the Tigers baseball team, but that’s just for starters. A mathematics and science major, Kirkpatrick lettered in track, football, and basketball as well. Kirkpatrick went on to have a career as an award-winning scientist and physicist, including working on a national research team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology that developed advanced radar weapons systems during World War II. He died in 1982 at age 90.

W Y The “Stag Rally” was a staple of the social calendar at Occidental, wherein the incoming class of male students got to know the upperclassmen and learn the precedents and traditions of the College. An Occidental newspaper article describes one such rally held in the gym on Sept. 29, 1913: “No one stands on formality, or wears collars and coats. Even the faculty (men only) come out of their shirt sleeves, and seem almost as human as the rest of the fellows.” (Sadly, the names of the freshman pugilists in the above-pictured boxing match have been lost to time.)

Y Two unknown women pose with an early-model Indian motorcycle, probably in Highland Park.

by Kevin Burke

To Chemistry and Beyond

After 28 years in the classroom and mentoring 74 students in her laboratory at Oxy, Professor Eileen Spain pivots to engage and prepare future generations of faculty in the physical sciences

As program director of Research Corporation for Science Advancement’s RCSA Fellows Initiative, Spain will support postdocs in physics, astronomy, and chemistry as they transition into their faculty careers.

Growing up in Sonoma County, Eileen Spain demonstrated a natural proclivity for math and science—aided, she says, by an “awesome” high school chemistry teacher. A ﬁrstgeneration college student, she majored in chemistry as an undergrad at Santa Rosa Junior College and Sonoma State University and as a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah, where she completed her doctorate in 1992.

“In my education in the sciences and generally throughout my college career, I appreciated excellence in teaching,” she says. “Not only was I learning from excellent instruction, but it was a model for me to think,

Photo

‘Oh, I want to be able to do that too.’ Teaching and chemistry have gone together for me since the beginning.”

After nearly three decades at Occidental, Spain—the Carl F. Braun Professor of Chemistry—retired from the College in August During a leave from the classroom in the 2023-24 academic year, she assumed a new role as program director for Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA), where she’s overseeing a new initiative to increase the number of faculty from underrepresented groups in the physical sciences.

RCSA “wanted a program that would support community building and job search preparation in the transition of postdocs into their faculty careers,” explains Spain, who’s now splitting her time between Los Angeles and Tucson. She reﬂected on her tenure at Oxy—and her new role at RCSA during a recent visit to campus. (Spain will be formally recognized with emeritus status at Commencement this coming May.)

How did you wind up coming to Oxy? I was looking for a faculty position in fall 1994 and hoping to locate in the western United States. I didn’t know much about Occidental at the time, but I heard about the reputation of the department striving for excellence in teaching and research with student collaborators and so I got intrigued and applied.

Was there anyone in the department who was a mentor? Of my colleagues, Mike Hill was closest to me in that he had only been at Oxy for a year—we were the two younger, early-career faculty. And all the senior faculty were very attentive and supportive and helping me understand how the department worked; how to support students and get my research program going; and how to do everything from writing a syllabus for my classes to how to think about grading and assessing student learning. I was fortunate to have such colleagues.

Did you have a favorite class? It’s hard to pick a favorite but I’m partial to lab teaching. You have the freedom of more time— you’re in the lab for three hours—so you can talk to your students and guide them and I like the opportunity of engaging with students one-on-one in the teaching laboratory.

You personally trained 74 students in your labs. Yes, and I also mentored four postdocs and two high school students.

You’ve been gone from Oxy for a year now. What prompted this career change?

The global pandemic was a time to reﬂect on just where I was at with my career and my personal life. I had just lost my mother. It was a moment where I was thinking about other things that I might do that center on equity, excellence, diversity, and inclusion with speciﬁc attention to early-career faculty.

The work that I did with the four postdoctoral scholars that I collaborated with at Oxy was really gratifying. And then this opportunity came to me. Research Corporation—which gave me my ﬁrst grant for my research at Occidental—wanted to start a new initiative to support diversity in the physical sciences among faculty in the United States and Canada. I thought that would be a wonderful set of activities to be engaged in, and now we are building a program to assist early-career faculty in physics, chemistry, and astronomy.

What do you like about your new job? I love that we are a nimble, ﬂexible organization supporting and seeding early-career faculty and helping them realize their ideas for transformative science and research innovation, while also helping to build broader participation in the sciences. For the strength and security of the United States, our lives really depend on a strong and healthy scientiﬁc workforce. We need to make sure we’re not missing talent or leaving anyone behind.

Right now, the postdocs that I’m working with have such fantastic ideas for science, teaching, mentorship, and inclusion. Anything I can do to support their advancement in their career is super exciting to me, because they are going to touch so many students’ lives and produce such great science.

What do you miss about Oxy? I miss a lot about the campus. Of course, I miss the important work of personally scientifically training the students that we talked about. I miss office hours and the one-on-one or small group settings talking with students, finding out what they think about, why they are here, and what they want to do with their lives. And I miss learning from my colleagues. [In addition to her teaching responsibilities, Spain recently served as the special assistant to the dean of the College for assessment and accreditation.] I’m just a much better person because of Occidental, its mission, and all my colleagues here both among the faculty and the staff and the administration.

Are there still things you want to study or research personally? I did a lot of think-

President John Brooks Slaughter, left, and thenRep. Xavier Becerra (now Secretary of Health and Human Services) honored Spain as recipient of the NSF’s Presidential Early Career Award at a ceremony on campus in November 1997. She was recognized for her contributions to synthesis of thin ﬁlms essential to the fabrication of reliable semiconductor materials and her eﬀorts to present laser laboratory opportunities to high school students.

ing about that before I made this move. I wouldn’t have a lab and I wouldn’t be doing my own research in chemistry. I might do some studies on how the postdoc-to-faculty transition is going, for example. That would be informative to the community, but that’s not scientiﬁc research.

I decided that I could be learning about forefront research across three disciplines: chemistry, physics, and astronomy. While that’s not the same as doing one’s own scientiﬁc research, it’s very exciting, too. It’s a trade-oﬀ.

A long-awaited renovation Norris Hall of Chemistry will commence in 2025. What will updated science facilities mean for Oxy? That the College can continue to attract top faculty. And that those facilities will allow them to do their very best research and attract funding which will carry their projects forward.

Occidental provides a great investment for new faculty. They give you a lab, startup resources, and some funding, but then you have to build on that as a faculty member. And even as you progress and become a tenured professor, you need to continue that work. Occidental’s science facilities are critical to the recruitment of top faculty and production of great science with those students who then go on and do great things with their lives.

Anything else you’d like to add? I’m super honored to be a member of this community. I gave a lot to Oxy and it gave a lot to me and it was a special part of my life.

—DICK ANDERSON

Photo by Nelson Green

The Sounds of Branca

A concert for the ages celebrates the generations-spanning clientele of music attorney John Branca ’72 and the launch of the John Branca Institute for Music

More than half a century of popular music came alive on October 18 as Occidental celebrated the establishment of the John Branca Institute for Music with an hourlong concert in Thorne Hall. In June, Occidental announced a $5 million gift from legendary attorney John G. Branca ’72—partner and head of the music department at Ziﬀren Brittenham, one of the world’s most respected entertainment law ﬁrms—that will establish the new music teaching and learning facility.

The Occidental Music Department ﬂexed its melodic muscle in performing some of the greatest hits of a handful of Branca’s mostrenowned clients, including Carlos Santana (“Oye Como Va,” “Smooth”) the Bee Gees (“How Deep is Your Love”), the Beach Boys (“Good Vibrations”), and Rodgers and Hammerstein (“It Might as Well be Spring”). Michael Jackson was well represented with the Occidental Symphony Orchestra’s performance of a special arrangement of “Human Nature”—one of seven top-10 singles oﬀ Jackson’s Thriller, which remains the bestselling album of all time—while the Glee Club

performed his gospel-tinged anthem “Man in the Mirror,” a No. 1 hit in 1988. All totaled, 84 students (including a few recent alumni) and eight faculty musicians, singers, or ensemble directors performed that night, bringing many in the audience, including Branca himself, to their feet with a standing ovation.

The concert oﬀered an appetizer of what Branca’s gift will mean to Oxy’s ascendant Music Department. “The Branca Institute will allow us to highlight in an academic way the study of popular music and the music in-

dustry, and to do so within the context of a liberal arts education,” says David Kasunic, associate professor of music, who will serve as the institute’s inaugural director.

In addition to underwriting renovations to Booth Hall (under the direction of Peter Grueneisen of nonzero architecture), the transformative gift will support the continued expansion of the Music Department with a wider focus on contemporary music and enhancement of the music business curriculum. In October, Billboard named Occidental to its annual list of top music business schools for the ﬁfth consecutive year.

The institute will also work with community colleges, in particular Los Angeles City College—where Branca completed a twoyear degree prior to transferring to Occidental—to increase transfer opportunities for students with diverse backgrounds and perspectives interested in furthering their education in music. The institute will also develop special programming and joint research activities in conjunction with the Harvard Negotiation Project, which is based at Harvard Law School and directed by Harvard Business School Professor Jim Sebenius.

From left, Associate Professor David Kasunic, President Emeritus Harry J. Elam, Jr., Trustee John Branca ’72, and President Tom Stritikus celebrate the launch of the Branca Institute of Music.

Chris Kim, the Choi Family Director of Instrumental Music, conducts the Occidental Symphony in a performance of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature.”

“Occidental College has a diverse student body and provides the best, most personalized undergraduate education in Los Angeles,” says Branca, who graduated from the College cum laude and with honors as a political science major. “As a trustee and alumnus, I am proud of the College’s mission and academic excellence.”

In October, the College announced a $500,000 gift from the Mike Curb Foundation to establish the Mike Curb Endowed Program in Popular Music History. The gift will underwrite a range of guest speakers and career development events for students and alumni, as well as the creation of the Linda and Mike Curb Fellowship, which will capitalize on Oxy’s proximity to the SoCal music industry and bring that talent to campus.

A longtime philanthropist and friend of Branca, Curb is former lieutenant governor of California (1979-83), a Grammy Awardwinning producer, 1972 Billboard producer of the year, and a BMI multi-award-winning songwriter. He continues to preside over his own independent record company, which has launched the careers of numerous stars.

Veteran music producer Michael Lloyd, who worked with 1970s pop stars including the Osmonds and Shaun Cassidy and oversaw the soundtrack for the 1987 ﬁlm Dirty Dancing, producing the Oscar-winning No. 1 hit “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life,” will be the inaugural Curb Fellow next fall. Curb Fellows will give talks, masterclasses, and workshops on popular music-making and history.

In addition, a $250,000 gift from the Ray & Vera Conniff Foundation will establish the Ray Conniff Oxy Jazz Ensemble Endowed Fund to provide programmatic and operational support of the Occidental College Jazz Ensemble and build and sustain a youth jazz ensemble to be composed of Northeast L.A. residents. The gift was facilitated by Conniff’s daughter, Tamara Conniff ’93, creative director of GoldState Music, the first female editor-in-chief of Billboard, and an inaugural member of the institute’s advisory council.

Expect more collaborations to follow. “John Branca is the ultimate connector and diﬀerence-maker in the music industry,” President Tom Stritikus said in his remarks. “The John Branca Institute for Music will solidify Occidental’s commitment to educational and industry partnerships that will beneﬁt our students.” To paraphrase the Beach Boys, we’re pickin’ up good vibrations.

Visit oxy.edu/magazine for IDs and additional photos from this year’s Hall of Fame ceremony.

Earning Every Stripe

The Occidental Athletics Hall of Fame adds to its ranks with a 10th outstanding class of inductees

The Occidental Athletics Hall of Fame welcomed ﬁve new inductees into its ranks on October 20. The Class of 2024 includes:

Andy Steben ’69, who won the NAIA Men’s Championship in each of his three tries (from 1967 to 1969), and placed ﬁfth in the 1968 Olympic trials. Steben has also served for the last 45 years as the College’s pole vaulting coach—a record untouched by any coach of any sport at Oxy.

Sue Rene Brazee ’82, the No. 2 singles player for the 1981-82 Tigers women’s tennis squad, which won the ﬁrst-ever NCAA Division III national championship in the sport in May 1982. A psychology major at Oxy, she completed a master’s in clinical psychology from Pepperdine in 2010 and is a licensed marriage and family therapist.

Trevor Moawad ’95, who played both basketball and soccer for the Tigers, earning All-SCIAC honors in soccer as a junior and senior. A politics major at Oxy, he was both director of mental conditioning and director of the IMG Performance Institute at the IMG Academies in Bradenton, Fla., from 2000 to 2012. In 2014, he formed Moawad

Consulting Group. Moawad died in 2021 after a two-year battle with cancer.

Finn Rebassoo ’03, who is the No. 2 alltime scorer for the men’s basketball program, ﬁnishing his career with 1,562 points. He led the Tigers to an unprecedented 14-0 record in SCIAC play and an overall 25-3 season that took Oxy all the way to Division III’s Elite Eight in 2003. A physics major at Oxy, Rebassoo has an M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from UC Santa Barbara and is a staﬀ scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The 2007-08 women’s basketball team, which notched their first SCIAC championship in 28 years—the first of five consecutive conference titles. Team members include: Stephanie Babij ’11, Bri Brown ’09, Natalie Kolodinski Greenhouse ’09, Kassy Griswold ’11, Asha Jordan ’09, Brittany Mally ’10, Laur Mohler ’10, Gillian Nugent ’10, Stacie Roshon Roller ’08, Madeline Rose ’11, Samantha Rossi ’10, Jenny Wilhelm Shore ’10, Zoe Walsh ’11, Dior Williams ’10, Caitlin Morgan Wright ’11, and Britinee Yasukochi ’10. Head Coach Jamie Hoffman and assistants Avi Meyerson and Anahit Aladzhanyan ’07 were also honored.

Resistance Remembered

Professor Emeritus Eric Newhall

’67 recounts the fallout from his decision to oppose the

Vietnam War

“Some people can publish books while they are teaching undergraduates,” says Professor of English Emeritus Eric Newhall ’67, “and I wasn’t one of those people.” But he had a story in him dating back to 1970, when he was released from prison after spending nine and a half months behind bars as a draft resister.

In Always Resisting: Choosing Prison Over Vietnam and Awakening to American Racism (McFarland), Newhall unpacks the events that led to his imprisonment for refusing to answer the call of mandatory military service when he received a draft notice in 1968, on the grounds that the United States was fighting a war that was, in his view, morally untenable. “I’m not a pacifist; a war against fascism is one that I would fight,” he explains.

By the spring of his senior year at Occidental, with U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War ramping up, “I had been thinking, ‘What am I going to do if I’m drafted?’,” Newhall recalls. “I’m somebody who looks ahead and makes plans. I read a whole lot about it, and this war did not make sense to me.”

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.—who spoke at Occidental on April 12, 1967, with Newhall in attendance—“gave the best sin-

gle short statement about why one should oppose the Vietnam War” only eight days earlier at Manhattan’s Riverside Church. King’s speech was published in newspapers all over the country, Newhall recalls: “Everything I’d been thinking about King crystallized—he made the argument [against the war] better than I could at age 21. From that point on, I pretty much knew that if I were drafted, I was going to refuse.”

On August 26, 1968, Newhall reported to the Portland (Ore.) Induction Center. Out of a group of about 400 men, he was one of four “troublemakers” who refused to accept induction into the U.S. Armed Forces that day.

Nearly seven months later, he was formally arraigned at federal court in downtown Portland and was sentenced to two years in prison a week after that. “Aside from my clothes, I remember boiling my life down to one cardboard box,” he says. “Then I went to Lompoc,” a federal correctional institution in Santa Barbara County.

The deﬁning event of his stint in prison came four and a half months into his time at Lompoc, when a long-fomenting strike shut down the prison for eight days. “That may

left: “I’ve been thinking about this book for a long time,” says Newhall, shown here in 2019. “I have a peace of mind right now about having ﬁnished this and I can go on and do other things.”

seem small from this vantage point,” Newhall says, “but at the time it seemed like a big thing. It got some public attention and 18 of us wound up in ‘the Hole’—instigating a riot was the charge.”

Among a prison population of around 1,200, there were 32 draft resistors, and the group as a whole “was absolutely racially divided,” Newhall says. “When I arrived at Lompoc, there were ﬁghts every day. The threat of violence was hanging in the air. Yet in four months, we went from that atmosphere to a strike that engaged everybody where before there was hostility and distrust.”

Describing life in “the Hole,” Newhall writes: “The food was bad, the air was stale with the smell of sweat and excrement, and we were allowed only one hour per week out of our cells to shower and exercise, walking up and down the tier.” Even so, “I felt the same sense of inner peace in the Hole that I felt on the day I refused induction.”

After three and a half weeks in the Hole, Newhall was transferred from Lompoc to McNeil Island Corrections Center in Puget Sound, Wash., about 200 miles from his parents’ home in Portland. He served out the remainder of his sentence there and was released in late January 1970.

When he retrieved his belongings before leaving Lompoc, his journal was nowhere to be found. “A dishonest guard stole the history of my time in custody from me,” Newhall writes, “and I contributed to the travesty by signing my name on a form, endorsing a lie.” Ultimately, he says, losing his journal “might even be a good thing, because I think my book is written better than my journal was.”

The publication of Always Resisting closes a chapter for Newhall, who will be speaking to multiple alumni chapters in the coming months, culminating in a book signing and talk at Alumni Reunion Weekend in June.

“All things considered, I think about those nine and a half months as a period of growth that beneﬁted the rest of my life,” Newhall says. “In addition to introducing me to these young men who came from backgrounds wildly diﬀerent from mine, I had this intense experience of solidarity that drove me the entire 44 years I was teaching.”

—dick anderson

Photo by Marc Campos

Snapshots From Homecoming & Family Weekend

1. George Buyers ’28 of Englewood, Colo., with his parents, Carole and William, at the Campus Corks wine social October 18. 2. Skylar Garnett ’28 of Beverly Hills and her mom, Jill Brooks-Garnett, also checked out the Campus Corks gathering. 3. The Out@Oxy event brought together generations of LGBTQIA+ students and alumni, including (l-r) Madison Fisher ’25, Daniel Woodruﬀ ’85, and Shae Campbell ’25 4. KOXY provided the soundtrack to some of the festivities in the Quad. Shown are (l-r) Keita Yamamoto ’26, programming director; Sophie Weil ’25, director of Springfest; Sadie Ballot ’26, giveaway and promotions manager; and Jaishri Vidyarthi ’25, station manager. 5. Jacqueline Slaughter expresses her appreciation to the panelists and audience attending an celebration of the legacy of her late father, President John Brooks Slaughter. 6. Clockwise from far left, sophomore musicians Liam Sampson, Alessandra Nefedenkova, Tai Huang, and Samuel Hjelmeset 7. APIDAA (Asian, Paciﬁc Islander, Desi American Association) members drove away with top honors in the Homecoming Celebration and Spirit Parade. 8. Temporary tattoos were very much the rage among the Oxy fashionistas. 9. Janine LaMar, far right, mother of Serena LaMar ’27, and her friends dressed to impress.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Occidental’s renewed sustainability eﬀorts, the nearly forgotten legacy of the Occidental Gospel Choir, remembrances of entertainment journalism icon Sam Rubin ’82, and 30 Tiger trivia teasers to test your Oxy knowledge are featured in the Summer 2024 Occidental magazine, which is exclusively online. For all of this and more, including an exclusive video feature on this fall’s Campaign Semester activity in Pennsylvania, visit oxy.edu/magazine

Coming Home

On October 1, Academy Award-winning actor and activist Jane Fonda spoke with Climate One founder Greg Dalton ’86 about her decades-long commitment to sustainability, climate justice, and voting rights, focused on supporting the next generation of leaders; changes in the media landscape; and the importance of storytelling. Fonda—who ﬁrst stepped onto the Oxy campus in fall 1959 to make her feature ﬁlm debut starring opposite Anthony Hopkins in Tall Story—was joined on the Thorne Hall stage by climate activists Emma Silber ’23 and Emma Galbraith ’25 and met with about two dozen Oxy students prior to the event. The full conversation can be viewed on Occidental’s YouTube channel.

Photos by Marc Campos | Cover illustration by Kathleen Fu

Ofﬁce of Communications F-36

1600 Campus Road

Los Angeles CA 90041-3314

Address Service Requested

Love Among the Fruit Flies

As a biology major at Occidental, Edmond Clinton III ’68 spent more than his share of time in the College’s science facilities. In fact, he met his future wife, Diane Grossman ’68, when they were lab partners in a class taught by Assistant Professor Joan McCune.

“We met in a genetics class studying fruit ﬂies [Drosophila melanogaster],” Edmond recalls. “Fruit ﬂy mating results in the lab helped us determine the location of certain genes on the chromosomes of these insects, such as stubby wings and eye color.”

Professor Frank Lambert “was instrumental in our understanding of organic chemistry—he took a very human interest in his students and made a diﬃcult subject fascinating,” Diane notes.

Professor John Stephens “taught a very interesting class in mammalian anatomical evolution. We learned rigorous study habits, which enhanced our academic success.”

The discipline the couple learned at Oxy opened the door for their eventual careers. Edmond studied medicine at USC and joined the staﬀ at Huntington Hospital as an internist in 1978, while Diane became a math teacher and administrator with La Cañada Uniﬁed School District. They raised two sons, Paul and Mark, and are enjoying retired life in La Cañada Flintridge.

Over the last decade, Edmond has written two books related to family history and is working on a third, all with the encouragement of his wife. The eldest grandchild of Cliﬀord Clinton, founder of L.A.’s legendary Clifton’s Cafeteria, Edmond worked in a number of Clifton’s locations during summers throughout college.

“To me he was ahead of his time,” says Edmond, who published Clifton’s and Cliﬀord Clinton: A Cafeteria and a Crusader (Angel City Press, 2015), which details his grandfather’s life as a restaurateur and leader in L.A.’s Progressive movement. In 2019, he published a second book about Diane’s great uncle, Major Harold Ferguson: Citizen-Soldier Meets Roaring 20s Los Angeles (Xlibris).

Each year, the Clintons attend Steffi Miller ’64’s holiday party, at which the Occidental Glee Club performs and interacts with the guests. Following one such soiree, they contacted the Office of Gift Planning and made their first gift to support Oxy’s Undergraduate Research Conference. They attend the conferences each summer and enjoy hearing the student presentations.

After recently visiting the lab spaces in Norris Hall of Chemistry—parts of which were last renovated more than 30 years ago—the Clintons were compelled to support the forthcoming renovation of the building through a planned gift to the College.

“Occidental students deserve a higher quality lab experience,” Edmond says, “and with all that the College has given us, we felt it was our turn to give back to Occidental.” To which Diane adds, “We hope that our support will inspire others to improve the opportunities for current and future Tigers.”

Photo courtesy Diane Clinton ’68

1968 graduates Edmond and Diane Clinton share a moment with their bengal buddy, Oswald.