Big new buildings may draw more notice, but it's the housekeeping--the internal management of affairs--that allows an academic institution to thrive.
Dr. Robert E. Tranquada '51 had an important influence on both for nearly a decade as chair of the College's Board of Trustees.
It was a decade in which Pomona cemented its standing as a preeminent undergraduate school of liberal arts, improved its planning and provision for maintenance and renovation and strengthened its finances with an ambitious $150 million capital campaign. Then there are the new buildings: the Smith Campus Center, completed in 1999, and the high-tech Andrew Science Building for Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science, dedicated in February.
Tranquada, who in the spring stepped down as board chair, downplays his own role in the progress of the College.
"The new curriculum is probably the most important thing that happened, but the board can't take credit for that," he says. "Ninety-eight percent of the time, all the board chair has to do is stay out of the way of the useful and productive efforts of a fine administration and well-oiled board." His stewardship, he says, involved "more mundane things."
Others beg to differ. Tranquada's career as a physician, scientist, educator and administrator, say those who have worked with him, can be summed up in two words: helping people.
His contributions span decades of dramatic change in science and medicine. When he arrived at Pomona in 1947 with premed studies in mind, science students still crunched numbers with slide rules. There was a department of botany and a department of zoology, but none for biology. The structure of DNA had not yet been decoded, and it was not fully apparent that the life sciences were based on the same underlying systems.
"The interface between chemistry and biology is a marriage that was just beginning to dawn when I was a student," he says. "People knew there was a connection between organic chemistry and biology, but it's become increasingly important for us to be able to properly connect biology and biochemistry," a significant goal of the renovation of Seaver North, now under way.
Half a century after he graduated, the form of a Pomona education is markedly different, but not the function.
"The technology has changed profoundly, but the process has not," says Tranquada, a former dean of the University of Southern California School of Medicine, former chancellor and dean of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and former associate dean of the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine.
"The basic process," he says, "is still a log with a teacher on one end and a student on the other, although that's probably too simplistic--it's more a row of logs with a variety of students interacting with a number of professors. It's the interaction among all of them that makes a difference. And that's why the education that Pomona College offers will always be in demand."
Tranquada recalls no single defining moment from his undergraduate years. "I had my eyes opened to so many things," he says. "It was the whole experience."
The experience included meeting his future wife, Janet, also a member of the Class of 1951. Like her husband, Janet Tranquada is committed to community volunteerism. To honor both of them, trustees have initiated a fund to provide a full annual scholarship to a student interested in pursuing a career in medicine. It is called the Dr. Robert E. and Janet Tranquada '51 Scholarship Fund, and anyone may contribute to it.
Tranquada, who received an Alumni Scholarship at Pomona, credits Willis E. Pequegnat, chairman of the Zoology Department at the time, with fostering his appreciation of empirical research. He graduated summa cum laude, and went on to Stanford University's School of Medicine.
In 1965, Tranquada, then an associate professor of medicine at USC and commander of a medical battalion in the Army National Guard, led troops who treated casualties of the fiery disorder in Watts. Soon after, he returned to help found what would become one of the largest community health centers in the U.S. The venture, now known as the Watts Health Foundation, was beset by issues of race, politics and neighborhood involvement, and though ultimately successful, Tranquada later called it "probably the toughest experience I've had in my life."
He joined Pomona's Board of Trustees in 1968, while president of the Alumni Association. He was vice chair from 1987 until becoming chair in 1991.
"I had fabulous mentors," he says. Robert B. Coons was chair when Tranquada joined the board, and Coons was succeeded by H. Russell Smith '36, whose son Stewart R. Smith '68 is the board's new chairman. "Both of these men were the epitome of trusteeship," Tranquada says. "All I had to do was attempt to emulate what they had done."
But he also left his own imprint.
"The most important thing the trustees do is appoint the president," he says of the board's mission. "To a very large extent it will be the president and the faculty who will set the agenda for the board. The responsibility of the board is to monitor the activity, to establish policies that are consistent with the objectives of the College, to provide resources with which the programs can be maintained and improved, and to see all of this as a partnership."
At a community tribute in Pasadena in 1996, President Peter W. Stanley said Tranquada's achievements on Pomona's board "can be seen not only in his fair, high-minded and universally respected leadership and his national role in helping to define the appropriate scope of action for governing boards, but also in his insistence that Pomona always be the best it can be."
Because of his leadership, Stanley said, the College, among other things, instituted a regular cycle of major policy reviews, carefully appraised its policies on tuition, renewed its commitment to pluralism and diversity and reaffirmed its determination to have an academic program second to none. Stanley said Tranquada also more fully integrated Pomona's academic program and business operations with those of the other Claremont Colleges. But Tranquada says much more should be done.
"We have an enormous potential advantage in Claremont, and that is in the collaboration of the colleges," he says. "The problem is, we have not taken adequate advantage of that potential. There are many areas of collaboration from which we could benefit in academic planning, faculty recruiting, curriculum construction and the development of an all-Claremont old-boy, old-girl mentality that would substantially expand the advantages to all alumni of having been part of the Claremont experience.
"Within the Claremont consortium, we need to identify the responsibility to provide the continuing leadership to make this happen."
Tranquada has devoted his professional career and countless hours of volunteerism toward making things happen, as exemplified in the Watts Health Foundation, and in health care consultancies from Santa Monica to Sri Lanka, and in service on boards such as the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, better known as the Christopher Commission, established after the Rodney King beating in 1991.
He also has long been an outspoken advocate for national health care reform. In 1983 he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. The academy advises the government on scientific and technical matters, and its roster includes the most eminent authorities in their fields.
At 69, Tranquada says he may now find a little more time for his interests outside of academia and public service. An accomplished woodworker, he has two cabinets in the dining room he made himself, and a nick in his finger to show for his hobby.
But he is not about to forsake civic engagement. He remains a trustee at Pomona, and also is a board member of the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences and the Claremont University Center, along with other local, regional and national organizations.
"People typically measure colleges by characteristics such as the size of their endowment, the number of books in their library, or the SAT scores of entering students," Stanley said at the dinner honoring Tranquada's community service, which drew academic and civic dignitaries from across the nation. "In truth, however, the heart of a college is its people: their integrity, wisdom and commitment to what is good. Whenever and wherever these are the criteria, I want Pomona College to be judged by Bob Tranquada."
Tranquada says it is actually the other way around.
"I've had experience on a number of different governing bodies, with some struggling organizations and some not so struggling," he says, "and I can't identify another experience I've had that can match the one with Pomona. It has been a class act all the way. Not because I was there, but because that's the way the institution is."
--Michael Balchunas
