Why Did My College Call the Police on Its Students?

Pomona College exists in a consortium of four other private liberal-arts colleges in Southern California. It was the first West Coast institution to order the arrest of student protesters — a sunny April 5, nearly two weeks before the Columbia encampment and the wave that followed. The deterioration of administrator-student relations was slow, sudden, and then violent. Like many students now, I am telling myself the story of how we got here in order to feel better about the here, which has escalated to a shaking pinnacle yet feels drained of possibility. When did a series of antiwar protests become such a threat to the administration?

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I submit this insufficient explanation: In October and November, some organizers called for a statement from Pomona condemning the slaughter in Gaza. After all, the school had put out a statement when Donald Trump was elected and when George Floyd was murdered, so why not now? Pomona tolerated this kind of low-ABV activism, but the institutional supplication soured by December, when protesters shut down our annual Harry Potter dinner. Promised butterbeer and appropriately costumed dining workers, disappointed Harry Potter fans had to eat at the four other dining halls freely available to students (the fifth was closed). The administration was incensed, and the judicial board tried its first students.

The cork finally popped in early April. Seniors had returned from a college-sponsored trip to Las Vegas, and we spent the first half of the week finishing our theses as we detoxed. On one pretty afternoon — afternoons are always pretty here, and we have good lives — administrators accompanied staff members as they attempted to take down a wall of art protesting the war in Gaza. When I stopped by at 3 p.m., few staff members were visible, and 30 or so students had taken to chanting, “The people united! / Will never be divided!” It had the regular flavor of student protest. But when I returned half an hour later, I heard a budding whine of police sirens. Twenty students were sitting in the lobby of President G. Gabrielle Starr’s office, and they were refusing to leave.

Video captured the scene inside: Starr, waving a can of Perrier as a disposable scepter, exhorted students to clear the building or face suspension. After 5 p.m., 20 cruisers, two paddy wagons, and numerous motorcycles from the cities of Claremont, Pomona, La Verne, and Azusa arrived to save our president from the insurgent office-sitters, whom she later compared in a faculty meeting to terrorists. The police came armed with the requisite riot gear and crowd control weaponry. Fifteen concerned onlookers turned into hundreds of students and faculty. All of this was a tiresome human mathematics — multipliers of force in a baton or a riot shield, the hope of pricking their conscience with your numbers or making sense of the theatric crush of police vehicles. We followed them to the Claremont police station and yelled until the last student was released at 1 a.m. People brought food and blankets. A friend of an arrested student later told me that only two bored young women were there to process them. The rest of the officers stood behind the gates in TV-perfect riot formation until we left.

I was impressed by the police’s ability to liquefy my own courage. Just as wearing a keffiyeh could transform me into a different sort of person, the sight of the officer’s baton put me back in front of a police cruiser in Alaska, being screamed at to never do anything unless I tell you. It echoed the common refrain I have heard from conservatives: that playing games is over, that I am in the “real world,” which is supposed to end on campus and begin in jail. But I have not taken my earrings out, and nobody “learned their lesson” that night, least of all the arrested. We felt the awful flowering of a collective anger instead.

Starr was not in any danger that afternoon. Nobody is in any danger here on this gorgeous campus, aside from the arrested and suspended, and the semantic insecurity of some students, real as it may be, has not manifested in any shouted slurs or broken windows. I am not surprised that we have arrived here, though. When I matriculated in 2019, Starr had been president for two years. She promised a new kind of university, concomitant with a new kind of education, where administrators, taking on the rhetoric of faculty from decades prior, could undo the mistakes of the past. She gave $13,000 of her discretionary fund to an “intuitive empath.” We students read the right books and dutifully ignored the ones we heard were bad; weren’t we simply undoing the same institution the administration set out to destroy? Starr, a markedly progressive president, outlined a “strategic vision” for Pomona with “transformative knowledge and creativity, equity, and access and flourishing and inclusion” as its focus. Almost every student protest I have seen has invoked this listicle of values. No matter: The language we used against them could be used against us. In this case, it manifested as a galley of police cruisers.

Our institution is eminently comfortable. I have no problem with that. I like being comfortable. I genuinely believe that it helps us learn. But the relentless insistence on comfort in Pomona’s institutional culture — 310 administrators for 175 faculty — has wrapped around onto itself, into this absurd situation, the first in my mind where semantic “violence” on campus was met with the real kind. A dean set up a “healing committee” in response.

Alumni weekend just passed at our school. We have a tradition: They buy us a keg, we let them onto the roof, and we all go until late at night. This year, Campus Safety showed up to shut it down for the first time, citing noise and security concerns. The students and thirty-somethings slumped their shoulders. We headed downstairs before dispersing in streaks. The energy was as easily lost as we conjured it — another victory for secure student life. The man is wise and the system works well, and it can swallow anything we feed it.

This article first appeared in The Point as part of a series of dispatches on the campus protests and encampments.