As we begin the academic year 2003-2004, it is my pleasure to welcome students, faculty and staff back to the College, and especially, to welcome the first-year students of the Class of 2007. A few warnings to the first-year students may be in order. Alongside the e-mail virus Blaster is a sort of huge human tall tale, spun by the upper classes--even sponsors and R.A.’s--at the expense of you first-year students. Here’s how it begins: A sponsor is leading first-year students across Walker Beach, points to the patio area just north of the Walker Lounge, and announces that only last year a huge greenhouse was right there, filled with wonderful plants and small trees, and students used to eat their meals in the greenhouse. As preposterous, as absurd, as such an idea is, you can’t believe how many first-year students are falling for it. Next they’ll be telling you about the indoor swimming pool in Harwood, or the brewery that Professor Steinmetz runs in the basement of Seaver North! Don’t believe these myths or the 47 others like them. As you can see, your skepticism, your critical inquiry skills, are not something that you’ll need after Pomona; it is a critical tool that you must use to successful negotiate this wonderful community.

Skepticism is not generally a trait one associates with happiness. And “happy” is a term that, justly or not, is applied to at least the returning students. For the second year in a row, the Princeton Review has marveled at how happy Pomona students are, ranking us number 2 in the U.S.A., behind DePaul University. I don’t know about the first year students, much less the faculty, but our alums seem downright unhappy about this happy ranking. I want to read to you from Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich, who happens to be a Pomona alumna, class of ’75.

"As it turns out, the second-happiest campus in the nation, down from a previous rank of No. 1, is my alma mater, Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. As a proud alum who would recommend Pomona enthusiastically, this high score should make me happy.

"Instead, I'm thinking, "What is wrong with kids today? Whatever happened to the ecstasy of agony? In my day, it was being miserable that made you proud! Get it together, people. You can be happy when you're older. Now is the moment to wallow in torment!"

"A good college education will prepare you for patches of happiness later in life--it will introduce you to people and passions that stick for good--but a good college experience is not necessarily one that in the moment you'd call happy.

"Dostoyevsky, sad songs, dorm food, your first serious excursion into loneliness. Now that's the grim college stuff of which happiness is built--later. In college, as in the rest of life, it's often misery that shows the way to understanding what lights and lightens the heart."

Even if one doesn’t want to embrace Schmich’s “ecstasy of agony” I think most of us would sympathize with the point she is trying to make.

At Pomona we hope that happiness is not the goal of your education, but rather, is a starting point. We don’t want either happiness or its opposite to stifle your hunger to learn more, or to improve and refashion yourself, or cultivate your imagination, or understand the world around you, or identify with others. To the extent that happiness helps launch a new aspect of you, then it deserves to be blessed.