Discussion Collective

On February 13th of this year, The Pomona College Advocates for Survivors of Sexual Assault, the 15 year old peer-to-peer support program, was unilaterally put on hold by the Pomona administration. Why exactly did they need to be disbanded immediately? When they are reinstated, what form will the program take? Why weren't the advocates given more forewarning? The decision felt drastic, and without clarity around the impetus behind the choice, left many students confused and angry.

But when viewed in context of the last decade of Claremont's constant cycle of crisis around Title IX, the decision feels more inevitable than unprecedented. Pomona College’s Title IX Advisory Committee is the third working group in just six years. Three of the five colleges have been named in Department of Education investigations. The college's have been sued by students on eight separate occasions.

For the third installment of our series on Sexual Assault at the Claremont Colleges, we're asking a simple question without any straightforward answer: how did we get here?

A project stemming from Aimee Bahng's Gender and Women's Studies class, in this bonus episode, Lucy Gold, August Khan, and myself look into derogatory language. More specifically, we want to see how offensive words are complicated by the process of "reclaiming language," or the re-association of typically demeaning words to empowering affirmations or even signals of solidarity and belonging.

When Orientation Adventure—Pomona's four-day outdoors trip for incoming students—was cancelled, campus activism sprung into rare form. Petitions were circulated, meetings were held, statements were drafted, and alumni were notified. Within exactly one week, the Dean of Students Office retracted their decision. Many students were relieved, but an equally large contingency was furious.