�鶹��ý

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Readings

Krizia-Dion Oasin — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 18:01:42 +0000

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Readings

March 9, 2022

Krizia-Dion Oasin Wed, 03/09/2022 - 10:01

The Biology Department is committed to addressing racial injustices within the biological sciences and proactively working towards inclusion and unfettered access to science.

The Biology Department faculty and staff have read several articles and books to educate themselves on the historical and current practices of racism in science. We want to share some of these materials and continue these discussions to move toward a more inclusive, anti-racist community. We invite your additional thoughts and ideas, your voices and concerns, and we pledge to listen and engage with you every step of the way.

Books

Superior: The Return of Race Science | Angela Saini

The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks | Rebecca Skloot

Articles

"Without inclusion, diversity initiatives may not be enough" | Puritty et al 2017

"Grappling with racism as foundational practice of science teaching" | Sheth 2018

2019 Glee Club Welcome Concert

aredford — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 05:42:41 +0000

2019 Glee Club Welcome Concert

The �鶹��ý Glee Club welcomes you to the new academic year with selections from their 2018-19 season!

aredford Sun, 08/25/2019 - 22:42

2019-08-27T22:00:00-0400

203

This concert is free and open to the public. Stay afterward for an informal reception with Glee Club members and director Desiree La Vertu.

Presented by the �鶹��ý Music Department.

Arts

Add to Calendar 2019-08-27 19:00:00 2019-08-27 19:00:00 2019 Glee Club Welcome Concert The �鶹��ý Glee Club welcomes you to the new academic year with selections from their 2018-19 season! Herrick Memorial Chapel & Interfaith Center �鶹��ý info@kwallcompany.com America/Los_Angeles public

The War at Home

Richard Anderson — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 21:59:50 +0000

The War at Home

From �鶹��ý magazine, Winter 2002: As shock and disbelief gave way to courage and resilience, the Oxy community came together in the face of tragedy of the 9/11 attacks

Richard Anderson Tue, 09/08/2026 - 14:59

Watching the harrowing images of jetliners exploding into the World Trade Center, Anthony Williams ’02 shook his head and struggled to fathom the unfathomable. “If I saw this in a movie, I wouldn’t be able to take it as fact,” said the kinesiology major from Chicago, “It doesn’t look real. I just don’t know what to do with myself.”

“I’m just now starting to believe it,” said Mark Cummings ’02, whose aunt felt the explosion in her brownstone 10 blocks from the Twin Towers. The economics major from Los Angeles learned of the tragedies in a wake-up call from his father, who was holding a family portrait taken on the World Trade Center observation deck when Mark was 3.

Julia Sitko ’02, a history major from Denver, could think only of reaching classmate and U.N. program participant Minara Mardakhayeva ’02, a diplomacy and world affairs major from Santa Monica Sitko left a frantic message on Mardakhayeva’s cellphone, then another, then a third urgent plea beseeching her friend to call. On the fourth try, Mardakhayeva picked up. Sitting in the Tiger Cooler, a relieved Sitko set her phone on speaker as a handful of students gathered to hear Mardakhayeva’s voice: “It looks like a war out here,” she told her friends back in Eagle Rock.”

For the current generation of �鶹��ý students, most of them too young to have previously experienced their nation in crisis, Sept. 11, 2001, marked the birth of a frightening new era fraught with vulnerability. Williams, Cummings, and Sitko were among the dozens of students who sat in a semicircle around a Tiger Cooler television in the hours after the attacks. The news was grim, the recurrent video footage graphic. Some students cried, while others wondered aloud what could prompt such horror. As was the case with many Oxy students far from home, Sept. 1l started with early morning wake-up calls from friends and relatives. The question was always the same:

“Are you OK?”

In a campuswide community meeting two days later, President Ted Mitchell called on students and employees alike to show “the kind of strong, analytic courage and thoughtful citizenship that is needed most at times of crisis.” “There is little good that we can point to in this tragedy,” he continued, “but I hope that as we think of our own lives, we can find in this week’s events a renewed sense of purpose in our work here and be reassured of the value of that work in building the understanding of ourselves and others that is the foundation for harmonious coexistence, whether in our small community or in the world at large.”

The Oxy community wasted no time heeding Mitchell’s call. On the night of Sept. 13, more than 150 students, employees, and area residents participated in a candlelight vigil that offered prayers for those killed or injured in the attacks, including Capt. Charles F. Burlingame III, the older brother of Brad Burlingame ’74. Charles was in the cockpit of American Airlines Flight 77, the hijacked airliner that crashed into the Pentagon. Vigil participants gave an hour of personal testimonials in front of the Tiger Cooler, then walked to Gilman Memorial Fountain to continue their reflections.

“Seeing everybody here together makes me feel like I’m part of a really special community,” said Nathaniel Deknatel ’02, a history major from Brook-line, Mass. Also speaking was Mohamed “Rali” Badissy ’02, a diplomacy and world affairs major from Seattle. Badissy, who is of Moroccan descent, reminded classmates that most Arab-Americans don’t condone terrorism. “I feel like everybody else—I’m grieving for what’s happened,” Badissy said. “But I’m worried about the power that fear and anger have to make people do unreasonable things, and I realize this is just the beginning.” (He subsequently aired his views in two appearances on the late-night ABC talk show Politically Incorrect, appearing alongside Ali Hasan ’04 of Pueblo, Colo., who has family living in Pakistan.) Following the vigil, Mitchell and Associated Students of �鶹��ý president Vlad Milev ’03 took part in a “Tiger Talk” on campus radio station KOXY.

On Sept. 14, a multifaith prayer program was held on campus in conjunction with the National Day of Mourning proclaimed by President Bush. Prayers from Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and other traditions were offered. More students than usual visited Herrick Memorial Chapel in the week following the attacks, and 100 students signed up for a new campus club called Students United for Peace, according to Interfaith coordinator Anne Cohen.

Immediately after the attacks, the College posted an online resource page in which nearly 100 alumni in the New York and Washington, D.C., areas listed their names to inform classmates that they were safe. (While a number of graduates in or around the Pentagon and the Twin Towers miraculously escaped injury or death in the Sept. 11 attacks, sculptor Michael Richards—a good friend of Kira Lynn Harris ’85—was one of the more than 4,000 people to die in the attacks that day. Richards worked in a studio on the 92nd floor of the north tower.)

On campus, teach-ins drew hundreds of people to hear analyses by politics professor Derek Shearer, U.S. ambassador to Finland from 1994-97; Larry Caldwell, Cecil H. and Louise Gamble Professor in Political Science; Jane Jaquette, Bertha Harton Orr Professor in the Liberal Arts; and Movindri Reddy, assistant professor of diplomacy and world affairs. In a speech on campus Sept. 27, U.S. Congressman Xavier Becerra urged Americans to seek justice, not revenge: “We have to realize that there will be consequences to everything we do internationally.”

Profiles

New York Stories

From Winter 2002: The horror, the heroes, and the hole in the sky: Seven Oxy alumni share their tales of the city on 9/11

As a nation readied itself for war in the weeks that followed, a student-organized “peace-in” Sept. 26 gave students the chance to discuss responses to the terrorist attacks “in the name of nonviolence.” And while many professors found students rattled and unable to focus on their studies immediately following the attacks, classroom life has returned to relative normalcy. “I’ve brought it up in the context of class material and students don’t seem to get animated or distressed,” observes psychology professor Nancy Dess. “I guess the happiest view of it is they’ve taken it in stride and gotten past the acute distress.”

To English and comparative literary studies professor Eric Newhall ’67, the campus climate on Sept. 11 was uncannily reminiscent of Nov. 22, 1963—the day President Kennedy was assassinated. “It’s a sense of déjà vu,” said Newhall, who was an Oxy freshman at the time. “For this generation, there’s a sort of innocence that’s been penetrated.”

Top photo: By order of President George W. Bush, the American flag flew at half-staff nationwide in the aftermath of 9/11 until Sept. 22, 2001.

Andy Faught

Photo by David Roberts

December 21, 2001

Archive Oxy History Features

Brewing Up a Comeback

Richard Anderson — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:50:31 +0000

Brewing Up a Comeback

A $1 million gift from Doug Odell ’75 is giving �鶹��ý track and field a boost as it improves its facilities, strengthens its roster, and aims to compete at a higher level

Richard Anderson Wed, 08/12/2026 - 14:50

The last time �鶹��ý purchased new hurdles, track and field and cross country coach Rob Bartlett was an exchange student from England. “They came flat-packed to the staff and you had to screw them together,” he recalls. “One hundred hurdles arrived and every person on the team had to come out and spend half an hour over lunchtime putting those hurdles together.

“That was 23 years ago,” he says. “In order to have enough money for a purchase like that, you either need to save up for a very long time, or you need a generous donor.”

�鶹��ý Track and Field Hall of Famer Doug Odell ’75 in action.

Doug Odell ’75—an �鶹��ý Track and Field Hall of Famer and co-founder of Odell Brewing Company in Fort Collins, Colorado—is just such a donor. �鶹��ý recently secured a $1 million gift from Odell to support the track and field program. Half is designated for the team’s endowment, and the other half for current expenditures to enhance the student-athlete experience over the next five years.

“Doug’s generosity is enabling us to do things we don’t often get to do,” Bartlett says. “Modern hurdles are not going to make someone a better hurdler, but they will make those hurdlers feel special and give them more pride in being an �鶹��ý hurdler.

“When we are hosting track meets, we’ve always had the most beautiful track, but now we’ll have the best equipment too. We want to instill pride in our students in being an �鶹��ý Tiger.”

Odell ran track as a student at Eagle Rock High School. “We lived a block down the street on Ridgeview, so I could walk to campus in a minute and a half,” he says. “When I graduated from high school, I wanted to go to Northern California. I liked the Bay Area.”

After a year and a half at Menlo College, he transferred to �鶹��ý. Menlo was just a two-year school at the time, he says, and “it just seemed logical to go back to Oxy, with the track program being what it was.”

A third-generation Tiger, Odell arrived at �鶹��ý during the heyday of track and field. His coach was Steve Haas ’63, himself an Oxy track standout who set school records in the 100, 220, 440 and 880 as a senior. During Odell’s three years with the team, �鶹��ý won its 28th, 29th, and 30th consecutive SCIAC men’s track and field titles.

Odell contributed to the program’s continued success, becoming a two-time NAIA champion in the 440 hurdles and a member of the 1,600-meter relay team (Gene Taylor ’76, Odell, Malcolm Cleary ’77, and Sam Young ’76) that still holds the school record of 3:07.7. He’s still in touch with Cleary, who also ran the 800 meters as a Tiger.

“I came out of �鶹��ý with a lot more confidence than when I started there, growing into who I am and experiencing a high level of success in track and field,” says Odell, who, with his wife and sister, started Odell Brewing in 1989 in a converted grain elevator and sold a majority stake to the company’s management team in 2015. “One of my motivations for this gift is that our track team is kind of mired in the middle of SCIAC. I wanted Rob to have more funding to do what he needs to improve the track program—and just to pad the overall budget.”

For Bartlett, the impact is both emotional and tangible. “First and foremost, it makes the student-athletes feel special,” he says. “That’s very qualitative, but the fact that they know that someone cares enough about their experience to do something this generous, it adds an extra layer of belonging and meaning. More quantifiably, it’s going to enable us to improve our facilities in a way that would take us decades without this gift.”

One long-sought improvement that is nearly within reach is a new scoreboard for Patterson Field and Jack Kemp Stadium, giving track a permanent scoreboard suitable for its meets. “We wanted it this year, but we put a pause on it,” says Director of Athletics Shanda Ness. “This is our one chance to get it absolutely right.”

James Buellesbach ’28 reacts after winning the conference title in the 110 hurdles at Redlands. (Photo by Nathan Simon ’29)

Several of Oxy’s peer institutions already have large video scoreboards, bringing immediacy to the drama inside the stadium. When James Buellesbach ’28 won the conference title in the 110 hurdles at Redlands, Bartlett says, “There’s a great photo at the finish line of him just losing his mind. Within a couple of seconds of him crossing that line, everyone’s looking at the scoreboard and the times are flashing up, and you can see the emotion in James’ face: He knows that he won and that he ran a personal record. Without a scoreboard, you lose that a little bit.

“I’ve had scoreboard discussions for 15 years,” Bartlett adds. “We’ve known that this is something that would improve the experience for a really long time.” But the project was always prohibitively expensive, and funding it would mean taking money away from other priorities. Odell’s gift changes that equation. “We can still go on that travel trip. We can still buy the new javelins—all the basic stuff that you have to do. We can still do that, and now we can make this a reality.”

“Doug’s generosity gives us the foundation to purchase a scoreboard that will improve the in-person experience not only for track and field but for Oxy’s soccer and lacrosse programs as well,” Ness says. Because Odell’s gift is designated for several priorities, additional funding is needed to bring the $300,000 scoreboard project to completion by the start of the 2027-28 academic year.

Dating back to the Payton Jordan era—a decade during which Division III Oxy regularly competed against Division I titans such as USC and Stanford—the Tigers won 41 SCIAC titles in men’s track and field between 1946 and 1990. �鶹��ý’s most recent men’s championship came in 1998, while the women last won the conference in 1991.

The competition has leveled up dramatically since Bartlett joined the program as an assistant to then-head coach Troy Engle in 2005. With the addition of longtime Division II member Azusa Pacific University this fall, the SCIAC will have 10 full-time member schools, up from eight in 2005. Of the 42 Division III conferences nationwide, Bartlett says, “The SCIAC has gone from close to the bottom of the pyramid to near the top. Now to win a conference title as an individual, you’re probably performing at an All-American level.”

Case in point: �鶹��ý sent two men’s track and field athletes to the 2026 NCAA Division III Outdoor Track & Field Championships in May. SCIAC Track Athlete of the Year Shane Kawakami-Williams ’27 competed at Nationals for the second consecutive year, qualifying in the 100 and 200 meters. In March, he posted a program and personal best 10.40 in the 100, the fastest time in Division III at the time. Buellesbach made his first NCAA Championships appearance after setting the fastest 110-meter hurdles time in Oxy history at 14.15 seconds. He finished 13th at Nationals, earning Second Team All-America honors.

Both athletes will return to the Tigers in 2027. “This is going to be the best team we’ve had in a decade in terms of quality and in terms of depth,” Bartlett says. “This year, we’ll have 104 student-athletes on our roster. We have depth, we have talent, and we have student-athletes who are invested.

“Winning and losing is an outcome we can’t control,” he adds. “The metrics we can track are a little different. We track things like, how many of our athletes are getting all-time Oxy top 10 marks? Or how many of our kids are going to Nationals? How many of our kids are getting on the podium at conference? All of those things have been going up for the last few years.”

The most visible change to the Tigers this year will be the new home and away uniforms for both track and cross-country—thanks again to Odell’s generosity. Between getting married and recruitment calls, “I haven’t ordered them yet,” Bartlett admits—but with the start of the school year just weeks away, he’s close to choosing a final design. “All my players will have new uniforms,” he says. “Change is good.”

Top photo: Shane Kawakami-Williams ’27 raced to victory in the 100- and 200-meter dash in the SCIAC Quad Cup Championship at Claremont-Mudd-Scripps on March 28. (Photo by Sam Leigh/Sam’s Photo Services)

Dick Anderson

August 19, 2026

Summer 2026 Athletics From the Quad

Kat Meets World

Richard Anderson — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:35:36 +0000

Kat Meets World

From Tel Aviv and Beirut to Minneapolis and Washington, NPR reporter Kat Lonsdorf ’09 follows the news wherever it leads, covering some of the defining stories of our time

Richard Anderson Mon, 08/10/2026 - 10:35

On a recent overseas assignment for NPR, correspondent Kat Lonsdorf ’09 and her field team traveled to central Beirut amid a ceasefire in Lebanon. The pause in fighting followed the war’s deadliest day, when Israeli airstrikes on what the Israeli military identified as Hezbollah targets killed more than 350 people across Lebanon in 10 minutes. Lonsdorf spent two days with the family of 26-year-old Zahraa Abboud, who went missing when the apartment building where she had been staying was destroyed in the airstrikes.

Lonsdorf reporting from war-torn southern Lebanon in April 2026.

“When we first visit the site five days later, a giant mound of rubble spills onto the sidewalks. It’s littered with broken glass and personal items,” Lonsdorf reported. “There’s stuffed animals, toothbrushes, shoes, backpacks. There’s a couch, a fridge. You can just see little glimpses of all the people’s lives who lived in this building.”

A few days later, Zahraa’s remains were identified through DNA testing. A week after filing her initial report, Lonsdorf attended Zahraa’s funeral in the Abboud family’s village in southern Lebanon.

Experiences like this have shaped Lonsdorf’s approach to reporting. “I’m usually sent somewhere where news is happening, and when someone talks to me about one of the worst days of their lives, it’s a huge responsibility to boil it all down to two or three minutes and tell it to our audience,” she says from NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C. “It’s their emotions and their thoughts, and I’m always trying to make sure I do that as best I can.”

That responsibility also comes with extraordinary access. “The coolest part of the job is getting a pass to talk to anyone as long as they will talk to you. It’s opened up the world to me in a totally different way than just traveling. I’ve sat in Bedouin huts for interviews. I’ve had people take me inside their homes in remote villages in northern Kenya.” Even after visiting nearly 60 countries—“I have never really counted”—there’s no shortage of places she’d still like to experience.

Growing up in a tiny town outside Madison, Wisconsin, Lonsdorf applied to �鶹��ý sight unseen and enrolled “with a nice little scholarship.” “I was a study-abroad student in Japan in high school, so it’s not like I had never left Wisconsin. But being out of my comfort zone of high school friends and my little town was a lot.

“A lot of the building blocks of my career started at �鶹��ý, even if it was a winding path,” Lonsdorf adds. She majored in diplomacy and world affairs and took journalism courses with Adjunct Assistant Professor Bob Sipchen. “There was no journalism major, but in some ways that was great, because I always tell aspiring journalists that they should focus on something other than journalism.”

Lonsdorf was a freshman in high school when 9/11 happened, sparking an interest in the Middle East “because it was always in the news,” she says. Having learned Japanese in high school, Lonsdorf turned to Arabic in college, taking multiple classes at �鶹��ý and studying at the University of Jordan during a year of study abroad. While most of her time was devoted to intensive Arabic instruction, she explored a region that would eventually become central to her reporting, traveling throughout Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Qatar. When Lonsdorf returned to campus for her senior year, she secured a yearlong internship with ABC News in L.A., working with producer Julia Seifer ’85.

Lonsdorf on the set of NPR's popular Tiny Desk Concerts series in June 2026. (Photo by Dennis Drenner)

But graduating into the Great Recession in 2009 made a journalism career seem increasingly out of reach for Lonsdorf. For nearly eight years, she worked in the restaurant industry in downtown Los Angeles, first as a server and later as a bartender. A couple of times a year, she’d pick up contract work with ProjectExplorer, a U.S.-based nonprofit that produced short online educational videos. “I would take two weeks off at the bar and go to Zambia and film,” she says.

Lonsdorf now credits those years with sharpening one of her most important reporting skills. “I think that my time working in the service industry has made me a much better reporter,” she says. “I can talk to anybody.”

In the fall of 2015, Lonsdorf enrolled in Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. (“That was a bit of a Hail Mary—I applied at 3 a.m. one night,” she recalls with a laugh.) She received a scholarship, completed the yearlong master’s program, and landed a postgraduate internship at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C.

At 29, she was an intern in a cohort of 21-year-olds. “It was a humbling experience,” she says. “But that was OK. As soon as I walked in the NPR building, I said to myself, ‘I’m not letting them let me go. I’m going to figure out a way to stick around.’”

After her internship, Lonsdorf spent several months temping before joining All Things Considered as an entry-level producer, where she worked with veteran journalists Ari Shapiro and Mary Louise Kelly. Traveling with them, she watched experienced correspondents ask probing questions and navigate difficult stories with empathy and precision.

In February 2020, Lonsdorf reported from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear exclusion zone as the recipient of NPR’s Above the Fray fellowship (Photo by Claire Harbage/NPR)

Those lessons prepared her for opportunities of her own. In February 2020, Lonsdorf traveled to Japan as the recipient of NPR’s Above the Fray fellowship, awarded annually to one early-career journalist. Co-sponsored by the John Alexander Project, the fellowship gave her the time and resources to pursue an underreported global story. She chose to report from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear exclusion zone, examining the area’s long-term recovery after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and accompanying nuclear disaster.

The bulk of her reporting became the multipart series “Recovering Fukushima.” Reporting from inside the exclusion zone, Lonsdorf donned protective gear to visit the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, carrying a Geiger counter and dosimeter to document lingering radiation concerns. The series explored the difficult choices facing displaced residents and the slow reopening of communities within the exclusion zone, capturing both the enduring trauma of the disaster and the resilience of those rebuilding their lives.

“That was a big moment for me,” Lonsdorf says. While reporting from Japan, she covered the country’s early response to the COVID-19 pandemic, filing stories on the eerily quiet Tokyo Marathon—reduced from nearly 38,000 runners in 2019 to just 200 elite athletes the following year—and the annual bloom of Fukushima’s 1,000-year-old Takizakura cherry tree during Japan’s first state of emergency. After returning to Washington, she says, “I think the newsroom maybe saw me a little bit differently.”

From there, Lonsdorf started getting more opportunities to report internationally. She went to Israel as a producer in 2021 during the Israel-Palestine crisis. When Russia invaded Ukraine the following year, “That was an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Lonsdorf says, “so I was cycling in and out of Ukraine during the first year of the war a lot. I was mostly producing, but then eventually one of those cycles, my bosses said, ‘Do you want to go as a correspondent for a month?’”

After primarily working as a producer, Lonsdorf picked up more duties as a correspondent covering Ukraine in 2022.

In 2024, Lonsdorf moved to Tel Aviv for a year to become a full-time correspondent for NPR to help cover the region. Since returning from the Middle East, Lonsdorf is based in Washington, D.C. She primarily covers a broad mix of domestic stories, including the aftermath of the ICE shootings in Minneapolis earlier this year, with the occasional assignment abroad as news dictates. “It’s nice to be back in your own space, but I still travel a lot,” says Lonsdorf, who lives with her fiancé, Ben Swasey (a political editor at NPR), and their dog, Ellie (“not an NPR employee, sadly”).

Following the flash floods in Central Texas in July 2025 that took 119 lives in Kerr County, Lonsdorf was reporting from Ingram, Texas. “Again, you’re walking into one of the worst days or weeks of a lot of people’s lives,” she says. “So you’re trying to figure out who might be willing to talk to you in this moment.”

While walking around the remains of a trailer park next to the Guadalupe River, Lonsdorf met Sherry Sweeney, who had driven more than five hours overnight to help people find their lost pets. “We went out all day just looking for people’s cats and dogs that might have run away in the storm.” Together, they came upon 71-year-old Cindy McCarthey, a recent widow who was picking through the wreckage of her house looking for her lost cat, Rambo.

“We were there for the moment that we found her lost cat, who was hiding in some nearby wreckage,” Lonsdorf says. “We got the moment on tape that they were reunited, which was really sweet. It’s these little glimmers of happiness in these otherwise dark times that are nice.”

Dick Anderson | Photo by Dennis Drenner

August 14, 2026

Summer 2026 Profiles Features

Bringing Joy to Her Community

Richard Anderson — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:32:33 +0000

Bringing Joy to Her Community

Joy Shigaki ’94 turned her lifelong commitment to social justice and community building into a career dedicated to creating inclusive public spaces—and Seattle’s Waterfront Park is her most ambitious project yet

Richard Anderson Mon, 08/10/2026 - 10:32

As the eyes of the soccer community turned to North America for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Seattle took center stage as one of 11 U.S. host cities. Lumen Field hosted six matches, including the United States’ Round of 16 loss to Belgium on July 6 that ended the team’s World Cup run. Just a mile away, Waterfront Park hosted free watch parties for 10 matches, drawing a single-day record of 84,767 visitors on June 19—a festive mix of soccer fans and Juneteenth celebrants.

Pier 62 at Waterfront Park in Seattle. (Photo by Erik Solhather)

That diversity gets to the heart of Waterfront Park, which has been described as Seattle’s “front porch” since its opening last September. The new urban park offers 180-degree views of the primeval Olympic Peninsula and the equally breathtaking Mount Rainier. The Waterfront Park Promenade invites visitors to explore the waterfront along elevated walkways and restored piers.

For Joy Shigaki ’94, however, building a beautiful urban park was only the beginning. For the past four years, Shigaki served as president and CEO of the nonprofit Friends of Waterfront Park. With the support of her board, she guided Friends through the completion of a $172 million campaign for the $806 million project while shaping the young organization around partnership, community building, cultural programming, and connection to place.

The finished park is a mile-long, 20-acre space featuring lush gardens and plantings, an elevated Overlook Walk, a beach, play spaces, permanent art installations, bike lanes, and the revitalized Pier 58 and Pier 62, home to everything from fitness classes to local vendors.

“‘If you build it, they will come’ is a false mantra,” Shigaki says. “The question is, who are you building it for? As cities across the country are investing in new urban parks, how do we create an inclusive, welcoming, and safe public space for locals—especially communities of color and other marginalized groups that don’t always feel that sense of belonging? This is what makes the work of Friends important and relevant.”

To that end, Shigaki and her team work alongside community organizations, businesses, and artists to create free programming featuring Indigenous culture and history along with festivals, performances, and recreational programs that highlight the diversity of Seattle. “You have to be intentional,” Shigaki says. “You have to build trust. You have to build programming that reflects the communities you want to see there.”

Shigaki didn’t set out to create inclusive public spaces. After graduating from �鶹��ý with a degree in American studies, “I wanted to be a social worker to empower young people, and be of service to my community,” she recalls. “Things evolve and opportunities came into my path. I’m very much a big-city person, and one thing that has always been at the center of everything I’ve done is working for social and racial justice and investing in solutions to big-city issues.”

Shigaki (pictured in the 1994 La Encina) majored in American studies at �鶹��ý.

Her senior comps examined the Japanese American experience during World War II. Shigaki’s research deepened her understanding of her own family’s and community’s history: Relatives had been forced from their homes and livelihoods in Seattle and spent more than three years and five months at Idaho’s Minidoka War Relocation Center. Nearly 14,000 Japanese Americans lived in cramped, tar-paper barracks surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers. They were prisoners in their own country with no due process.

“It was so formative to my worldview given the grave injustice, but also the resilience of my ancestors,” says Shigaki, a fourth-generation Japanese American (Yonsei) and Seattleite. “�鶹��ý gave me the space to keep exploring my history and sharing my experience with other students. This included being shaped by other social movements locally and internationally and seeing the connections in our collective struggles for liberation and justice.”

“Joy stood out as an extraordinarily able, dynamic, and well-rounded student, with unusually good judgment for one so young, especially on issues related to social justice,” recalls her adviser, Professor of American Studies Xiao-huang Yin. “I still remember clearly how she argued passionately and persuasively for the rights of immigrants to pursue happiness in our class debate on the changing view of the American Dream.”

Before returning to Seattle, Shigaki was director of campaign and fundraising initiatives at Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, raising $103 million for the Presidio Tunnel Tops campaign. (The 14-acre park, which connects the city to the Golden Gate Bridge, opened in 2022.) Earlier, she spent a decade in senior fundraising leadership roles with the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City and Coro New York Leadership Center. She also led the campaign to establish the Wing Luke Museum’s first permanent home.

Waterfront Park is one of the most consequential public spaces in the Emerald City since the construction of Seattle Center for the 1962 World’s Fair. For more than six decades, sweeping views of the Cascade and Olympic mountain ranges, as well as Elliott Bay and Puget Sound, were blocked behind the Alaskan Way Viaduct, a double-decker elevated highway, which literally and figuratively cut off Seattle from its waterfront.

Waterfront Park on opening day in September 2025. (Photo by Brandon Patoc)

After more than 15 years of public discussion, planning, and design, construction began in 2018. The multifaceted effort involved tearing down aging infrastructure, rebuilding a damaged seawall, rerouting traffic underground, and creating the park above the new roadway. Then the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the project’s momentum. When Shigaki was named president and CEO of Friends of Waterfront Park in September 2022, a new narrative was needed.

“We had to become storytellers, to capture people’s imagination and help them see themselves in this new space,” she says. That meant showing up at community meetings, business forums, and cultural events. It meant cultivating relationships with local organizations, artists, donors, and residents. And it meant inviting them to help shape the park. The message got through: The park’s opening drew 50,000 people.

As director of community engagement for the Gates Foundation, which contributed $15 million to the Waterfront Park project, Amy Carter P’27 worked closely with Shigaki over the last four years. Shigaki ably managed the “staggering complexity of a public-private partnership in a city known for its challenging, at times overwrought, planning and execution processes,” says Carter, whose son, Will, is a religious studies major at Oxy.

A Dinner with Friends event held in November 2025 celebrated the completion of Waterfront Park. (Photo by Brandon Patoc)

“Joy balanced public and private fundraising, opinions, construction timelines, and many invested parties, never losing her cool or optimism that it would all happen—and in time for Seattle to have its moment on the world stage as a host city of the World Cup,” Carter adds. “She is the epitome of servant-leader.”

Growing up in Seattle, Shigaki fondly remembers enjoying picnics featuring her mom’s rice balls and chicken at Discovery Park, running wild while her dad played softball at Rainier Playfield, and gathering for birthday parties and community events at Seward Park. As she embarks on a sabbatical that will include rest, travel, hiking, making ceramics, spending time with family and friends, and perhaps taking some dance classes, she looks forward to making new memories in the park to which she devoted the last four years.

Looking ahead, she says, “I’ll definitely work again. My calling in the world has been about living my values and bringing my unique approach to leadership to a range of generational projects. My hope is that I’ve left the places I’ve lived—and the communities within them—better and more deeply connected.”

(Photos courtesy Friends of Waterfront Park.)

Andy Faught | Photo by Brandon Patoc

August 13, 2026

Summer 2026 Arts Profiles Features

Rhapsody in Blue

Richard Anderson — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:23:32 +0000

Rhapsody in Blue

Elliot Tuttle ’22’s microbudget debut feature is one of the year’s breakout indie films—but getting there was its own odyssey

Richard Anderson Mon, 08/10/2026 - 10:23

The screensaver on filmmaker Elliot Tuttle ’22’s phone is a still of Nicole Kidman from a photo call for the 2004 movie Dogville. “She is my hero—I love her,” he says. “I don’t play about her.”

Kieron Moore in Blue Film, written and directed by Elliot Tuttle ’22.

For many theatergoers, Kidman’s face is one of the last things you see prior to the start of a film at the nation’s most popular theater chain. Yet Tuttle’s debut feature, Blue Film, never played at an AMC theater. The unrated film’s logline might explain why: Fetish camboy Aaron Eagle agrees to spend the night with an anonymous client, only to discover a disturbing tie to his past.

Instead, the film followed the indie route, playing at smaller chains such as Laemmle and Landmark and at art-house theaters across the country. There were moments when Tuttle, 26, wondered if anyone would ever see it. “I wrote Blue Film when I was 23, made it when I was 24, and had its festival premiere when I was 25.” After a limited run in theaters, Blue Film landed on streaming platforms in mid-June, where it is likely to reach even more viewers.

From an early age, Tuttle aspired to be a film critic. Using Weebly, he built a website where he posted “a million reviews”—give or take—from his home in Bangor, Maine. As a budding cineaste, “I had a teacher who did an independent study with me on French New Wave cinema,” Tuttle recalls. He was also reading a lot of Cahiers du Cinéma, which was the launching pad of critics-turned-filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. “That was around the time when I felt like I could make movies if I wanted to.”

As a media arts and culture major at Oxy, he took film-related classes with Aleem Hossain, Vivian Lin, and Diana Keeler ’09 and art history electives with Professor Amy Lyford. His work-study job was manning the MAC Cage, the equipment checkout room (“I spent most of the time watching movies and waiting for someone to come in”). Not far from campus, he had an internship with Duplass Brothers Productions, working with his mentor, actor and indie filmmaking icon Mark Duplass.

Tuttle returned to his longtime workplace, Vidiots, for an advance screening of Blue Film on May 2. (Photo courtesy Vidiots)

Tuttle’s education was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, when the College pivoted to remote learning for more than a year. During that time, he took a script he had written in one of Hossain’s classes and made it into a three-part narrative podcast, Lina’s Song, with Duplass as executive producer.

Tuttle returned to campus as a senior and developed his MAC comps film soon after. The short—about a writer struggling for material and the sex worker he hires to tell him about her life—shares some thematic DNA with Blue Film. (“No one will ever see it again,” he adds with a laugh.)

Over the course of developing Blue Film, Tuttle lived in East L.A. and worked at Vidiots, the nationally renowned nonprofit video store that relocated to Eagle Rock in 2023. (Vidiots gets a shoutout in the credits and hosted a screening of the film before its theatrical release.) “I was very happy to spend three years of my life there,” says Tuttle, who recently moved to New York.

In thinking about his debut feature, Tuttle wanted to make something producible—an intimate chamber piece that had two characters in a room. He was inspired by the work of French filmmaker Catherine Breillat, many of whose films explore adolescent sexuality. “I was also journaling a lot about my own experiences and thinking about having a crush on my teachers in middle school,” he says.

As the screenplay evolved, “It also became a film about loneliness, especially as a gay man in a big city. Internet culture finds its way in there,” he says. “There's also a lot about a generational gap in the way that we think about love.”

Making his first feature on a shoestring budget gave Tuttle a sense of creative freedom. “I knew that if it was terrible, I didn’t have to show anybody,” he says. “All my producers [including Waylon Sall ’22 and Will Youmans ’20] were very helpful in guiding me, but no one was ever really stopping me.”

When did he know that what he was making was not terrible? “It takes a long time. On set, it felt kind of like collecting diamonds to hopefully be able to make a necklace afterward. You don't know if it's good or not until at least the third cut.”

Tuttle trimmed Blue Film down to a lean 82 minutes from an initial cut of an hour and 50 minutes. “I was so attuned to the rhythm of the film and the rhythm of every scene that if something didn’t feel like it fit to me, I would cut it,” he says. “Once we had a cut of the film that my team and I were proud of, we thought that the process would be smoother than it was.”

“When I saw the rough cut, I was like, this is gonna be explosive,” Duplass said on his TikTok page. “This is exactly the kind of movie that film festivals need to be showing—new voices, cheap cinema—and everybody rejected it” because of the film’s “dangerous” subject matter. “And I kept thinking, that’s exactly why we need to be telling these stories.”

After more than a dozen “no’s” from festival programmers, including Sundance and SXSW, Blue Film got its first “yes” from the Edinburgh Film Festival, where the film premiered on August 16, 2025.

The film is anchored by veteran actor Reed Birney, a Tony Award winner in 2016 for The Humans, and British actor Kieron Moore (Vampire Academy, Boots). “Sometimes I think about when we first sent the script out,” Tuttle says, “who would have trusted a microbudget film made by a just-out-of-college, first-time feature filmmaker with this subject matter? These actors were so much braver than I realized. So I feel very grateful and lucky to have them.”

Following a buzzy advance piece in Vanity Fair, Blue Film launched in Edinburgh to critical raves, and it continued to gather momentum on the festival circuit throughout the fall. In February, Obscured Releasing picked up Blue Film for theatrical distribution in the United States and Canada, opening it in limited release in early May. (The film has since secured international distribution in the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and across Latin America.)

Tuttle at an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences screening of Blue Film in Los Angeles. (Photo by Wally Skalij/The Academy)

Armed with a 91% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metacritic score of 86, Blue Film received a rave review from The New York Times’ Wesley Morris, who wrote: “Some of what feels good about Tuttle’s movie is that, for all of the places it’s bold enough to go, I couldn’t describe it as fearless. It’s full of fears, and it’s daring us to face them.”

Among the first theaters to screen it was the IFC Center in New York City, which holds special meaning to Tuttle: “I grew up driving down to New York from Maine and seeing movies at the IFC Center with my dad.”

At a time when many movies quickly disappear from theaters, Blue Film played at the IFC Center for nearly eight weeks. “It’s kind of the Wild West right now for indie distributors and this industry is constantly changing,” says Tuttle, who has been supporting Blue Film’s rollout through interviews and in-person screenings. “Every week you have to adapt.”

In an audience Q&A during opening weekend in Los Angeles, “There was this one woman who said, ‘I haven't been to a theater in six years, but I really wanted to see this movie.’ I loved hearing that,” Tuttle says. “That makes me happy.”

Top photo: Tuttle, second from left, with actors Reed Birney and Kieron Moore at a screening of Blue Film at the IFC Center in New York City. (Photos courtesy Obscured Pictures)

Dick Anderson | Photo by Mettie Ostrowski

August 14, 2026

Summer 2026 Profiles Arts Mixed Media

Postcards From Amy Lyford

Richard Anderson — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:08:20 +0000

Postcards From Amy Lyford

After the Eaton Fire upended her life, the longtime �鶹��ý professor reflects on finding a new home, returning to her research, and reconnecting with her community through art

Richard Anderson Mon, 08/10/2026 - 10:08

Eighteen months after losing her longtime Altadena home to the Eaton Fire, “Things are a lot better in some ways,” Amy Lyford says. “Sometimes I still can’t believe all the things that happened.”

After bouncing around multiple locations in the weeks and months after the fire (“Life After Fire,” Spring 2025 issue), Lyford, who retired from teaching in July as a professor of art and art history and Arthur G. Coons Professor in the History of Ideas, ended up renting a place in Silver Lake until October 2025. With insurance money, she was able to buy a new house in Echo Park, a 1921 structure that has been renovated several times.

Just before the move, she had to put down her rescue Doberman, Angus—and her remaining dog, Kaya, a Rhodesian Ridgeback, has seemed “depressed” for the last year and a half, she says. “There’s been a lot of change for her and for me, but I’m kind of getting used to it,” Lyford says. “Everything’s different. The saddest thing is I don’t go up to Altadena that much. And I’ve lost track of a lot of people.”

Art and art history major Isabel Norsten ’20 discusses her summer undergraduate research project with Lyford at Cafe de Leche in Highland Park in July 2019.

Since moving to Echo Park, she misses the serendipitous neighborhood encounters that once defined daily life in Altadena. “Now it has to be planned. It’s less spontaneous. There’s your circle of friends. But there’s also a community of people whose names you may not know right away, but you know their faces and you travel in the same circles and you have interactions—and that’s missing.”

At her new home, she’s building a yard that evokes the feel of its predecessor. “Now there’s some patio space and stairs that go down to the lower part of the yard. I want it to be native and drought-tolerant and have some citrus trees, similar to what I had at my other house. It’s in no way like the other place, but I’m trying to create a beautiful environment.” She’s also found herself painting watercolor postcards and mailing them to friends around the country, another way of reconnecting after the fire.

For Lyford, another source of renewed energy has been the art that has emerged from the tragedy. On May 2 at Des Artistes gallery in Culver City, Lyford moderated an artist panel—including Oxy resident assistant professor and sculptor Camilla Taylor—for the exhibit Post-Fire 1, which featured recent works by 22 Altadena-area artists created after the Eaton Fire.

Over Memorial Day weekend, Lyford attended Field Set, a sound installation and series of sculptural interventions using recordings and materials from the site of Kelly Akashi’s former Altadena home and studio. The exhibit included a life-size rubbing of Akashi’s chimney, Lyford says, “which she thinks of as a sculpture.”

Given everything that’s happened in the last year and a half, is this a good time to be leaving Oxy? “Yes. The main reason I decided to do early retirement is that after my husband died suddenly [in 2017], I really felt like, ‘The future’s now.’ There’s no wait for me ever again. The fire reinscribed this on me. It’s like, I have to do what I’m going to do now and take advantage of it. I want to focus on my research and my writing.”

Lyford at the opening of Chicana Photographers LA, sponsored by Oxy Arts, at the Weingart Gallery in October 2017.

Her next book is about Surrealist photographer Dora Maar (1907-1997), whose innovative work has often been overshadowed by her association with Pablo Picasso. In a successful grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lyford wrote: “Maar’s expressive, unflinching approach enabled her to invent a powerful visual critique of how bodies and social spaces might express alternative gender, class, and identity positions in the 1930s.” Lyford will be reading from the manuscript at the Conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism at the University of Glasgow in August.

She also contributed an essay to the exhibition catalog for the High Museum of Art’s exhibit Isamu Noguchi: “I am not a designer,” which opened in April in Atlanta—the artist’s first design retrospective in nearly 25 years. Lyford published Isamu Noguchi’s Modernism: Negotiating Race, Labor, and Nation, 1930-1950 (University of California Press) in 2013.

During her last semester, Lyford taught a class on Surrealism and Women, a 200-level art history course, as well as a first-year seminar titled Photography, Film, and Surrealism—“two courses that were right up my alley,” she says. “I’m happy I got to teach these courses in my final semester. I will definitely miss some of my students.”

Looking ahead, she’s collaborating with Oxy Arts director Meldia Yesayan on an exhibition exploring the friendship between painter Arshile Gorky and sculptor Isamu Noguchi, two artists who worked outside the cultural mainstream. “Their work almost seemed like it was speaking a language that was just between them,” Lyford says. “I’ve never curated an exhibition before, so that’s exciting, and I love collaborating with Meldia.”

She also presented a talk on Gorky and Noguchi at Hauser & Wirth in West Hollywood in April in conjunction with the exhibit Arshile Gorky: Horizon West. After the talk, she says, “Some people came up to me crying because I was talking about how these two artists had to deal with racism, xenophobia, and discrimination.” (Gorky died by suicide in 1948.)

After 27 years in an Oxy classroom, she says, “The detaching process is a very interesting one—not that it’s difficult. I really want to do other things. I want to make my own art. I’m going to start practicing piano again—I haven’t done it since I started teaching at Oxy. I love going to hear live music, so I can go as much as I can and obviously travel for research or fun. I’ve had to grapple with the idea that my time is completely my own.”

A pair of watercolor postcards painted by Lyford.

One uncertainty still hanging over much of the Altadena community is the resolution of a class-action lawsuit against Southern California Edison, which more than 10,000 plaintiffs have blamed for the 2025 wildfire. Pending a settlement, any plans for her property in Altadena are on hold. Lyford imagines creating a small community-oriented space on the land—a place where people could gather amid gardens and shared greenery.

After the fire, former �鶹��ý colleague Laura Nasrallah (now a professor of religious studies at Yale) sent Lyford postcards and handwritten notes nearly every week for eight months. “It meant a lot to me,” she says. “That’s what got me thinking about the idea of using postcards to reconnect with friends and family across the country.

“While I was grading—maybe this is the perfect image of transition—I was reading student papers and giving comments, and between papers I’d swivel around, paint a quick watercolor postcard, then go back and read the next paper. Making the postcards helped me come back to the papers feeling refreshed.”

“As my chapter at Oxy came to a close, Professor Lyford was right by my side.”

Mckenzie Locke ’23: During Opening Convocation in August 2019, I stumbled into Thorne Hall, confused and slightly overwhelmed by the unexpected size and grandeur of the ceremony. One memory stands out: seeing an art history professor with a fabulous streak of blue in her hair being recognized for her dedication to her teaching and to Oxy. It was Professor Amy Lyford, who was presented with the Janosik-Sterling Award for Service to the College. I didn’t yet know Professor Lyford, but she seemed very cool. I also didn’t know that she would become a foundational presence and a throughline in my time at Oxy.

Early in my first year, I jumped at the opportunity to take Professor Lyford’s CSP course about revolutionary art and muralism in Mexico and the United States. As our relationship grew and I took more classes with her, I was honored when she asked me to assist her with her book, Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning. And as my chapter at Oxy came to a close, Professor Lyford was right by my side when I presented my senior comps essay, providing invaluable support until the very end.

I completed my comps under the guidance of Professor Lyford alongside fellow art history major Alex Kawawaki ’23. I will never forget having weekly meetings with the two of them and feeling so grateful to be working on what is often the most stressful project of a student’s time at Oxy with such an incredibly supportive and collaborative team. (I do hope there have been many more art history majors since our class of two.)

In Professor Lyford’s classes, she frequently pushed for her students to have the best possible academic experiences—a meaningful guest speaker, an unexpected field trip, a unifying class project—and she often came up with last-minute ideas for other “happenings” based on suggestions from her students. She even tried to find a way for me to travel to Japan to conduct firsthand research for my comps on site. Beyond her academic generosity, she remained a trusted adviser who always had my back. Her passion for feminist, surrealist, modernist, and dematerialized art—coupled with her honesty, optimism, encouragement, and sincerity—made a lasting impact on me and many others, I’m sure. Thank you always, Professor Lyford.

Mckenzie Locke ’23 is an interior design project manager living in Los Angeles.

“The questions she encouraged students to ask—and the ways of seeing that she cultivated—demonstrate liberal arts at its finest.”

Madeline Wander ’08: When I arrived at Oxy as a student in 2004, I was incredibly fortunate to be placed in Amy Lyford’s first-year seminar “Architecture, Urbanism, and the Politics of Space in Los Angeles.” Even though more than 20 years have passed since I took that class, I know the title by heart as I continue to traverse and take in Los Angeles. This course, or more specifically, Professor Lyford, expanded the very way I think—and launched what became my lifelong passion for urban planning and social justice.

My story is not unique. Professor Lyford’s students walk away from her courses, and their interactions with her, having been challenged and inspired to think critically and capaciously about what they observe in the world. The questions she encouraged students to ask—and the ways of seeing that she cultivated—demonstrate liberal arts at its finest. As Amy turns her attention to new endeavors, may we honor her legacy at Oxy by continuing to ask difficult questions, challenge conventional thinking, and engage the world with the same curiosity, rigor, and creativity that defined her teaching.

Madeline Wander ’08 is an assistant professor of urban and environmental policy at �鶹��ý.

Top photo: Lyford, photographed outside Weingart Hall in October 2021.

Dick Anderson | Tributes by Mckenzie Locke ’23 and Madeline Wander ’08 | Photos by Marc Campos

August 16, 2026

Summer 2026 Academics Faculty Features

A Round of Applause for Tsung Chi

Richard Anderson — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:06:26 +0000

A Round of Applause for Tsung Chi

After 35 years at Oxy, the politics professor looks back on a career shaped by remarkable mentors, devoted students, and a deep belief in a liberal arts education

Richard Anderson Mon, 08/10/2026 - 10:06

Several years ago, in the middle of the semester, Tsung Chi’s students in his Chinese Politics course gave him a round of applause. “That’s my favorite class to teach,” he says—one that compares the democracies of Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan with China’s one-party state. “For the last 35 years, I’ve taught that class almost every year,” he says.

The spontaneous applause at the end of his lecture took him by surprise. “It was an amazing moment,” Chi says, one that he recalls experiencing only six or seven times in his career. “I hope that’s not self-promoting,” he adds with a smile.

Does he remember what he was talking about?

“No, not at all.”

In his second year of study at National Chengchi University (NCCU) in his native Taiwan, Chi changed his major from applied mathematics to political science. He made lifelong friends in college, many of whom went on to graduate school in the United States. All but Chi eventually returned to Taiwan.

Tsung Chi as an undergraduate (right, holding the books) in front of Chengchi’s library in a 1979 photo.

Toward the end of his Ph.D. coursework at Michigan State University in 1991, Chi received three job offers, including a tenure-track position in �鶹��ý’s Politics Department. As a graduate student, he says, “I heard about �鶹��ý from one of my former professors, but I had zero knowledge about liberal arts education.” He chose Oxy over schools in Ohio and Tennessee because “the weather here is unbeatable,” he says. “From the very beginning, I knew I would retire here. It’s a great campus in a great location. And Oxy is family.”

One of the most common definitions of politics is “the authoritative allocation of resources.” That shaped Chi's doctoral dissertation, which compared how China and Taiwan allocate scarce political and educational resources—a question that would remain central to his scholarship for decades.

At �鶹��ý, Chi found mentors in three “giants” of the Politics Department: Roger Boesche, Larry Caldwell, and Jane Jaquette. “I’m grateful for all three of them, especially Larry,” he says.

After receiving tenure in 1998, following Oxy tradition, Chi became chair of the department the next year—and Caldwell gave him a piece of advice that has stayed with him ever since: “You have to leave a mark during your chairship.”

“Every day I thought about that,” Chi says. In the decades that followed, he served three terms as Politics chair and twice as chair of East Asian Studies, as well as master of a residential college in Taiwan. “I’ll always remember Larry’s words: You have to leave a mark when you take some administrative responsibility.”

Of Boesche, Chi says, “Roger was a serious scholar and professor. I learned a lot from him just sitting in his classroom when we were team-teaching.” �鶹��ý typically places an emphasis on interaction between professor and student, but “Roger was unique. He talked continuously during his teaching, like an iconic scholarly figure. His students were mesmerized, and so was I.”

As for Jaquette, he says, “We were very close, and Jane helped me correct my correspondence. English is not my first language, you know, and I was very eager to publish at the time. I learned about writing from her in very specific details.”

By Chi’s estimate, diplomacy and world affairs and East Asian studies majors accounted for maybe half of his students. “I got students from all walks of life—from politics to the sciences to the arts,” he says.

Another “special group,” Chi says, were the students who came to �鶹��ý from China. At the height of the influx of Chinese students nearly a decade ago, perhaps 10-15 percent of the students in his Chinese Politics class were from China. He offered them a window into their homeland and a different perspective on what was happening there. “They were very serious students.”

Chi leaves the Politics Department at a moment of transition. After a period of significant turnover, the department has begun to stabilize, with three new faculty members recruited in the last four years to build a foundation for the future.

“Thank God we have Regina Freer, who’s the cornerstone of the department,” Chi says. “I really admire her leadership.” He’s optimistic about the department’s younger faculty, calling Assistant Professor Isaac Hale ’11, who returned to his alma mater in 2022, “our next-generation leader. It’s a young, growing department.”

Chi’s immediate plans for retirement include traveling and writing. One destination is particularly meaningful: “I want to go back to Agriculture Hall at Michigan State, to the classroom where I began my teaching career 39 years ago—from Agriculture Hall to Johnson Hall at Oxy.”

He also hopes to write something nonacademic for publication: a book-length alternate history of China. He envisions China Without Communism as a thought experiment rooted in his training as both a political scientist and a sinologist, as well as his family history. Chi’s parents fled to Taiwan just before the Communist Revolution in 1949, meaning that without communism, “chances are they would not have met in Taiwan and raised a family there.”

Chi in 2011 during his time as master (the equivalent of dean) of National Chengchi University’s nascent Residential College of International Development. (Photo by Ruei-chi Huang)

The book would detail a world without the division between China and Taiwan, without the Korean and Vietnam wars, and without the current tensions between the United States and China. “I will begin with a very small piece—a long essay to test the waters before expanding to a book,” he says. “I want to publish it both in Chinese and in English. One of the reasons I want to write the book is to show how I feel about communism.”

Chi’s commitment to liberal arts education extends well beyond the classroom. Looking back at the last 35 years, one of the highlights of his career was the time he spent away from Oxy to establish a residential college at National Chengchi University (NCCU) in Taipei. The Residential College of International Development was an experiment in bringing the liberal arts model to a public research university. Students lived on campus and took general education “core” classes designed to expose them to a wide breadth of ideas and perspectives.

“I left Taiwan in 2014 to return to �鶹��ý, and the experiment was discontinued one year later,” he says. “Oxy was so generous to let me go for four years.” Since then, NCCU has tried similar approaches under a different name, but the program Chi helped establish “just vanished.”

The experience did not diminish his faith in the model he had learned at �鶹��ý. “I had zero knowledge about liberal arts education before coming to Oxy in 1991,” he says. “Now I’m a deep believer. �鶹��ý is the gold standard of liberal arts education and community-based learning. And L.A. is the best location for it.”

“He made an increasingly complicated world feel a little less distant and a great deal more understandable.”

James Steinberger ’25: My friendship with Professor Chi began in the fall of my sophomore year at �鶹��ý, when I took his Contemporary Chinese Politics course. I entered the class leaning toward a politics major, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier that year had left me searching for a deeper understanding of international affairs. I wasn’t sure I had found the global perspective I was looking for in the politics major. That changed when I took Professor Chi’s class.

Immediately, I was struck by his unique ability to teach the complex and fascinating political landscape of China while drawing connections to the political forces at work in our own society. He showed me that, however different countries may appear, politics is ultimately about how people organize power—their incentives, institutions, and relationships—and that these underlying dynamics are remarkably universal. He made an increasingly complicated world feel a little less distant and a great deal more understandable. I left that class not just with a strong foundation in Chinese politics, but with a deeper appreciation for what it means to be a thoughtful citizen of a global community. That perspective gave me the confidence to spend a semester abroad in Spain, and it continues to shape my desire to engage with the world around me.

When I declared politics as my major and chose Professor Chi as my adviser, his decades of experience at �鶹��ý meant he always seemed to have the perfect course recommendations for me. More importantly, that experience gave him the ability to guide students through the many decisions that define their college journey. When we first discussed my interest in law school, he offered both pragmatic guidance and idealistic encouragement, candidly explaining the challenges of pursuing a legal career while encouraging me to think deeply about the kind of impact I hoped to make through that work. Professor Chi always challenged his students to question not only what happens but why, regardless of whether we were analyzing the decisions of world leaders or reflecting on the choices we make for ourselves. And no matter the paths we ultimately chose, no one celebrated our accomplishments more enthusiastically than he did.

While I am saddened by the void that Professor Chi’s retirement creates at Oxy, I am encouraged that his legacy will live on through the countless students he has inspired to think critically, engage with the world, and become better people. I hope we all continue to carry forward the lessons he taught us and make him proud.

Professor Chi, congratulations on a phenomenal career. I feel immensely fortunate to be able to call you a friend. I’d be hard-pressed to find someone more deserving of a wonderful retirement.

James Steinberger ’25 is a J.D. candidate at UC Berkeley School of Law.

“He’d simply widen the frame until I understood more upon walking out than I had walking in.”

Ty Lyman ’27: I enrolled at �鶹��ý in the fall of 2025 as a 32-year-old transfer student from Pasadena City College, “non-traditional” in nearly every sense of the term. I felt a bit out of place as I crossed the Quad that morning, a foreign entity attempting to navigate to my very first class at Oxy: Contemporary Chinese Politics with Professor Tsung Chi.

China’s history, its hegemonic rise and fall and resurrection, its peculiar political transformation—all these had pulled at my curiosity for years, and this course was my first real chance to wade in. Professor Chi greeted me that morning with a smile unmarked by cynicism, a kind demeanor that made this stranger’s classroom feel like home. He was a man delighted by ideas, tender toward his students and family, and quietly sentimental (a yellow legal pad on his desk still held the scrawled notes from his very first semester of teaching).

His lectures were precise, built with care, but always with room for questions and discussion. His meticulously crafted charts were particularly impressive. To untangle the complex differences and similarities between democracy, totalitarianism, and authoritarianism would usually require an entire textbook chapter, but Professor Chi somehow managed to synthesize it into one slide. Still, he made room for every hand, every tangent, every argument. Office hours with him had no clock. He’d sit with a question, turning it over, for as long as it needed.

My favorite memories live in his office in the corner of the Politics Department, half the books already boxed for retirement, where we argued, gently and frequently, about political theory, history, Jiang Qing, the strange machinery of revolution, and where the world’s contemporary geopolitical rearrangement was taking us. I was wrong more than I’d like to admit, but he never let it sting. He’d simply widen the frame until I understood more upon walking out than I had walking in.

He conveyed his intellect without ego; he was quick with a laugh, quicker with encouragement when it was earned. He carried me through my first year, and it was an honor to sit in his last two classes before he closed out 35 extraordinary years at Oxy. I hope these words return a fraction of what he gave. Congratulations on a remarkable career, Professor Chi. It was an honor to have you as a mentor and teacher.

Ty Lyman ’27 is a politics major from Los Angeles.

“I’ll make sure to do you proud.”

Elliott Jen ’28: Despite initially dreading the 8:30 a.m. time slot of Professor Chi’s East Asian Politics course, I was immediately fascinated and engaged by his inspirational personality and fierce dedication to deepening our understanding of comparative politics. One might expect a retiring professional to ease off the gas somewhat after 35 highly successful years, but he would likely take offense at such a notion. It can be said with certainty that no matter the time or place, Professor Chi is unabashedly himself: a champion for problem-solving and a believer in the future through honest education. I fondly recall his unfiltered yet optimistic teaching style accompanied by light humor (ask him about the long-necked dinosaur drawing), and what seemed like a chore to wake up early for class quickly turned into the best part of my day.

Beyond the classroom, an important connection I share with Professor Chi is our Taiwanese heritage. On the first day of class, when Professor Chi took attendance and called my last name with its authentic Mandarin pronunciation, I was shocked. Although that moment may seem minuscule, it sparked an appreciation and curiosity about my heritage that continues to this day. I admired his ability to remain unbiased yet proud when discussing Taiwan’s political affairs, which further inspired me to continue researching and staying up to date on all things Taiwan.

Even in retirement, Professor Chi will doubtless remain the most influential figure Oxy has ever provided me. His class and advising have rerouted my career pursuits in positive ways and instilled in me a philosophy that emphasizes seeking to understand while remaining humble through it all. Thank you for everything, Professor, and enjoy your retirement. I’ll make sure to do you proud.

Elliott Jen ’28 is a politics major from Sammamish, Washington.

Dick Anderson | Tributes by James Steinberger ’25, Ty Lyman ’27, and Elliott Jen ’28 | Photo by Kevin Burke

August 16, 2026

Summer 2026 Academics Faculty Features

Alicia González Is Always Learning

Richard Anderson — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:03:19 +0000

Alicia González Is Always Learning

Oxy's longtime resident senior instructor of Spanish welcomed every new generation of students—and found that teaching itself is a lifelong education

Richard Anderson Mon, 08/10/2026 - 10:03

It may come as a surprise to learn that Alicia González is not a native speaker of Spanish—the language she has taught to thousands of students over the last 25 years at �鶹��ý. She majored in international studies and Spanish at Stanford before pursuing graduate work in linguistics at UCLA.

“I love studying languages,” says the seventh-generation Angeleno. “I’m the only one in my family who speaks Spanish after all these generations. I love the Spanish language and all the historical, cultural, literary, artistic, culinary, and musical richness that goes with it.”

Throughout her career, González taught primarily first- and second-year Spanish. Even so, she says, the courses never became routine. “Students change, and times change. The material you focus on changes over time. There’s a second-year course that I have probably taught more often than anyone at Oxy, and I crafted a lot of it around my own interests, with a lot of art and some poetry. What the students are interested in has changed dramatically because of what’s happening in the world.” A decade ago, students gravitated to Velázquez and connected with the more optimistic poetry of the period, she says. Today, they’re captivated by Goya’s dark paintings and identify more with existential modernist verse.

González was in her 40s when she started teaching at Oxy. “I was probably younger than most of my students’ parents,” she says. “Now I’m closer in age to their grandparents. You get older every year, and your students don’t. It forces you to stay current.” Take tattoos. “Twenty years ago, it was so unusual to see an undergraduate at Oxy with a tattoo,” she says. “Now it’s like, ‘Oh, hey, what a nice tat.’ Or, ‘I like that hair color. Purple looks good on you.’”

Before coming to �鶹��ý, she was teaching Spanish at Marlborough School—far away from her home in Malibu. She had recently divorced, was raising a young son, and needed a more flexible work schedule. A graduate school classmate from UCLA, Anne Hills, was leaving a teaching position at Oxy and encouraged González to apply. “At first it was a good job,” González says, “but then it became a career.”

Over time, she says, Oxy became “my home away from home.” She points to the lunchtime gatherings outside the fourth-floor offices in Johnson Hall, where language faculty met three days a week. Those friendships extended beyond campus with museum visits, outings to the Huntington, and evenings at the Hollywood Bowl. Her colleagues were especially accommodating of her schedule as a single mother.

Alonso Olvera-González ’23, an eighth-generation Angeleno, walks with his mother through the historic Olvera Street plaza in Downtown Los Angeles. Behind them is “The Blessing of the Animals,” a mural painted by artist Leo Politi in 1978.

Although her son, Alonso Olvera-González ’23, grew up on �鶹��ý’s campus—attending the Childhood Development Center for two years and often accompanying his mother to work—he long insisted he would never attend Oxy. After a professional ballet career was cut short by a series of foot and ankle surgeries, he enrolled at Santa Monica College with plans to transfer to a UC campus. When the pandemic forced classes online, Alonso decided that �鶹��ý’s small classes and close faculty relationships, combined with his familiarity with the campus, would offer a better experience. “That knocked me over with a feather,” González recalls with a smile. “He only spent two and a half years here, but he received an incredible education.”

Looking back over the last quarter-century, González sees her time at the College framed by moments that reshaped the world at large. She arrived just weeks before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which transformed campus life in unexpected ways. When she brought her son to preschool the next morning, she recalls, “They were doing a duck-and-cover drill. He’s 3 and his world changed overnight. And what do you say to 20-year-olds during that?” More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic and the emergence of artificial intelligence have each altered the course of higher education. “Those are pretty big changes in 25 years,” she says.

Over the years, González says, “I’ve had students who were accepted to top Ivy League schools and chose Oxy instead. They were brilliant students and have gone on to incredible careers. I love that they’re from all over the country and around the world and have interesting backgrounds.” Teaching first-year language courses gave her a window into her students’ lives, as vocabulary lessons about family, daily routines, and hometowns naturally helped her get to know them better.

“Professor González was an amazing professor, and I loved having her my freshman year,” says Kiera Ashcraft ’27, a media arts and culture major from Los Angeles. “On Admitted Students Day back in 2023, I actually sat in on her class. She was one of the reasons I chose Oxy, because she was so welcoming. I have visited her office hours periodically, and she always had great advice and was a joy to be around.”

After Bad Bunny was announced as this year’s Super Bowl halftime performer, it only made sense for González and her students to hold a watch party in the foyer and atrium of the McKinnon Center for Global Affairs inside Johnson Hall. “It was really fun,” González says. “When we have any downtime in the classroom, we’ll put on some music, and I’ll play whatever the students want to listen to, as long as the lyrics are in Spanish.”

González lives less than 10 miles from where she grew up. Regardless of where her work took her, Malibu was always home. “I have told people many times that no one in their right mind would take a job at Oxy and then decide that they’re going to live 37 miles away,” she notes with a laugh. “But I already owned a home in a community and a neighborhood that I love.”

How is she going to spend her retirement? “Oh my gosh,” she replies, “how am I not? I’ve already signed up to take a poetry class. The class is in English, but I’ll write in both English and Spanish. I am a bit of a social activist. I will continue to be very active in social justice and environmental issues. I’m big on gun violence prevention, too. So, activism, volunteerism, a lot more hikes, long beach walks, and keeping a life of the mind. I’ve been doing those things all along, but now I’ll have more time for them.

“I’ve been fortunate enough to attend what I think people would consider some of the top California schools—Stanford and UCLA,” González says. “I consider Oxy on par with any college in the country. It’s been a wonderful home to me—small and intimate. I think it’s still a bit of sleeper school. People who appreciate it really get it.”

“I am going to miss having an excuse to spend time with my mother at Oxy, my second home.”

“Ding!” The Otis elevator settles itself and opens its doors to the fourth floor of Johnson Hall. I turn the corner to the sounds of laughter and conversations in different languages from across the globe. Whether I’m stepping off that elevator as a 5-year-old in the pre-renovation Johnson or as a graduating senior on my last day at Oxy, I am home. If you’ve ever taken a foreign language class at Oxy, then you know there’s a special feeling to Johnson’s fourth floor that can’t be found elsewhere on campus.

Admittedly, I am biased since this is where my mother, Profa González, had her office for the last 25 years, but the openness, inclusivity, and joy that are palpable on that floor are alluring, and a highlight of my Oxy story. I also know for a fact that my mother has continually been instrumental in that magical fourth-floor ambience, as evidenced by her extensive career at Oxy, and the lifelong friendships she’s established with other faculty members who I consider my “tíos y tías.” In fact, every Spanish language professor attended my graduation in full regalia, and I chose to celebrate that occasion afterward on the fourth floor instead of with my classmates.

I am going to miss having an excuse to spend time with my mother at Oxy, my second home, and I am certain that the faculty, staff, and students are going to miss Profa González’s presence on campus. It was a privilege to see all of the effort she put into her work: late nights grading papers, preparing guacamole early in the morning as part of a lesson, sharing stories over lunch with colleagues. If it wasn’t for my mother’s time at Oxy, I never would’ve had the fortune of earning both my preschool and college degrees from such an incredible institution, nor gained another place in Los Angeles to call “home” for 25 years.

Alonso Olvera-González ’23 majored in psychology at �鶹��ý, graduating summa cum laude with departmental honors and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He is currently pursuing opportunities in healthcare-related fields.

Dick Anderson | Tribute by Alonso Olvera-González ’23 | Photos by Kevin Burke

August 14, 2026

Summer 2026 Academics Faculty Features

�鶹��ý

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Readings

2019 Glee Club Welcome Concert

The War at Home

Further Reading

Brewing Up a Comeback

Kat Meets World

Bringing Joy to Her Community

Rhapsody in Blue

Postcards From Amy Lyford

“As my chapter at Oxy came to a close, Professor Lyford was right by my side.”

“The questions she encouraged students to ask—and the ways of seeing that she cultivated—demonstrate liberal arts at its finest.”

A Round of Applause for Tsung Chi

“He made an increasingly complicated world feel a little less distant and a great deal more understandable.”

“He’d simply widen the frame until I understood more upon walking out than I had walking in.”

“I’ll make sure to do you proud.”

Alicia González Is Always Learning

“I am going to miss having an excuse to spend time with my mother at Oxy, my second home.”