May 17, 2026
Four hundred two graduates received their diplomas at Pomona College’s 133rd commencement on Sunday, May 17, 2026. President G. Gabrielle Starr presided over the ceremony on Marston Quadrangle.
Senior Class President Marilyne Makendi ’26 and Senior Class Speaker Lexi Duffy ’26 addressed the Class of 2026. Goodwin Liu, Jane Olson and Daniel Ziblatt ’95 also spoke along with receiving honorary degrees.
Goodwin Liu
Goodwin Liu is an associate justice of the California Supreme Court and a visiting professor at Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford law schools; before joining the court, he was professor of law and associate dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. The son of immigrants from Taiwan, Liu grew up in Sacramento. He received his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and earned a master’s at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. After graduating from Yale Law School, he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He is an elected member of the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, of which he is chair, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Law Institute, where he serves on its governing council. He previously served in the U.S. Department of Education and helped launch the AmeriCorps national service program.
Jane Olson
Jane Olson has traveled the world as a volunteer with organizations dedicated to humanitarian work and the promotion of human rights. Her endeavors have taken her to Nicaragua and El Salvador during the Contra Wars, Bosnia during the 1990s ethnic cleansing, and the Caucasus region, also in the 1990s, during conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, Olson’s work has focused on landmines, HIV/AIDS, the condition of refugees, human rights abuse, and the suffering caused by conflict and extreme poverty. From 2004 to 2010, Olson chaired the International Board of Trustees of Human Rights Watch, an organization on whose behalf she has worked since 1988. She published the book World Citizen, Journeys of a Humanitarian in 2022. Olson is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Daniel Ziblatt ’95
Daniel Ziblatt ’95 is the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he also directs the university’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He authored Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (2017) and Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (2006). Ziblatt and co-author Steven Levitsky have published two New York Times bestselling books, How Democracies Die (2018), which has been translated into more than 30 languages, and The Tyranny of the Minority (2023). Ziblatt’s writing appears frequently in journals such as the American Political Science Review and World Politics and in media such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and Die Zeit. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.