Public Events Committee
Our Mission
The Public Events Committee takes its mission to be the enhancement of intellectual community at Pomona College. We mean to facilitate campus-wide, cross-disciplinary intellectual and social exchange among students, faculty, and staff.
There is already a vast and varied array of intellectually stimulating lectures, exhibitions and performances on campus each year. However, the sheer quantity of these events and their attachment to individual departments or programs inhibit their capacity to generate a broad and diverse audience. The result is an absence of campus-wide interdisciplinary discussion of any particular public event. Therefore, the Public Events Committee seeks to sponsor or co-sponsor events that will increase our store of shared intellectual experience and provoke more multidisciplinary discussion throughout the College.
Our Methods
We are eager to hear your ideas as to how we can accomplish our mission, but for starters we are doing the following:
Highlighting certain events already fully funded but rich with potential for discussion beyond the sponsoring body and its usual constituency. For example, in the past, we have:
- helped to bring Pulitzer Prize Winner Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, to campus for a lunchtime seminar and an evening reading;
- paid transportation costs to "Nickel and Dimed" at the Mark Taper Forum for a class in which Ehrenreich's book was a required reading;
- organized, publicized, and provided honoraria for a Blue Room faculty panel on issues related to the performance of the musical "Hair," and
- provided funding for the 2010 10-Minute Play Festival.
In the future, highlighting might also include publicizing the events we sponsor in an annual Public Events calendar-poster and discouraging the scheduling of any other events at the same time. While we do not wish to diminish the profusion of events that currently characterizes intellectual life on this campus, we do mean to draw special attention to six to ten public events each academic year.
Highlighting and providing funding for certain events that come with a built-in constituency and strong departmental and/or program ownership and are likely to be of interest to a broad segment of students, faculty, and staff. For example, we have:
- helped fund a lecture by Kenji Yoshino, author of Covering;
- helped fund The Albert McNeil Jubilee Singers of Los Angeles who performed in Carolyn Lyon Garden to an audience of over 330 people; and
- helped fund the Pomona Student Union debate between Erwin Chermerinsky and Kenn Starr.
Working with student representatives of the Associated Students of Pomona College (ASPC) in order to combine faculty and student funding sources for public events when such events serve the mission of the Committee as stated above.
Seeking proposals for the Fall of 2012: Securing certain speakers and performers require scheduling at least a year in advance. So, too, does some of the related curricular and extra-curricular activity of the sort described above. Use our on-line proposal form to request highlighting and/or funding. The Committee will select events based upon their wide appeal and their potential for sparking broad discussion on important questions. The application deadline for a Fall 2012 event is 5:00 p.m. on Friday, April 13, 2012.
If you need funding assistance for an event that you know to be of interest primarily to your own colleagues and constituency, please apply to Associate Dean Katherine Hagedorn. Her office has a modest public events fund for such use.
Please get in touch with any member of the Public Events Committee, listed below, if you have questions, reactions, or ideas of your own for accomplishing what we have outlined above. Obviously, the mission we have set for Public Events cannot be accomplished without your support and participation.
2011-12 Public Events Committee: Jonathan Matsui (chair), Jack Abecassis, Mark Allen (fall), Graydon Beeks (fall), Laurie Cameron (spring), Jay Chung, Drew DiPalma, Miriam Feldblum, Kathleen Howe, Cynthia Peters, Christopher Waugh
Resources
To have paper advertisements (i.e. table tents, flyers, and/or banners) made for your event, you can contact the ASPC Office, where there is a Graphic Artist Request Form to be completed for these purposes.