Dean Quinley Is Like a Nuclear Bomb
By David Lydon
Opinions Staff Writer

OK. For this week’s TSL, I wrote a wonderful article about Pomona’s snack policy. This article made the argument that snack should stay on South Campus, and brilliantly attacked the strange and creepy concept of “snack privilege” with which upperclassmen, due to some strange and ill-defined superiority of theirs, would deny snack to a numerically superior group of freshmen who had more desire for it anyway. This article was articulate, and humorous, and relevant. It was also completely neutered by the e-mail that Dean Quinley sent out Monday, announcing that snack will move to North Campus every Thursday. It seems a good compromise, but it sort of killed my article, which, being less than 24 hours old at that point, had only recently broken out of the egg of my mind, and had yet to learn to fly into the realm of TSL-going-to-print-immortality. Yes, that was a rather convoluted bird metaphor, which I guess makes Dean Quinley a cat. Or, more appropriately, a nuclear bomb.

The nuclear-bomb comparison is appropriate because Dean Quinley’s E-mail didn’t merely kill my article. It also killed the only issue that anyone cared about in today’s ASPC elections, leaving most of the candidates in the unenviable position of not having any really strong issues to campaign on. Just like every other semester.

Personally, I only really cared about the campaign for Sophomore Class president, which pitted Chrissy, who is really cool, against Michael Owen, who is my editor, and thus someone I really ought to do a better job sucking up to. I voted for Chrissy, though, so I guess I still have a lot to learn about journalism. (But you’ve probably figured that out by now, seeing as I’m about to launch into my third paragraph, and I still have no idea what in God’s name I’m writing about.)

Anyway, I was very interested in the outcome of the race for sophomore class president, which made me unique among the people I was voting with, who were more interested in the race for communications commissioner, which had only one candidate on the ballot. Someone joked that this was rather undemocratic. Now, it’s a well-known fact that political systems in which there is no choice over the leaders who hold power over you is undemocratic; that said I’m pretty sure the ASPC elections are safe, because I’m fairly confident that the ASPC communications commissioner has absolutely no power over you, me, or anything. With all due respect to the new commissioner, the fact is that I have no idea what the commissioner, or the ASPC in general, does, which is pretty sad when you consider that we’re talking about the communications commissioner.

Not that this is the fault of ASPC. Though they’ve never succeeded, they do try really hard to get us to care about them, which totally makes sense seeing as they do actually wield a good bit of power. It’s just that we go to Pomona College, and things are far too nice for us to get all uppity about anything, let alone the student government. I mean, the entire mountain range to our north is currently on fire, and many people that I talk to haven’t noticed. “Oh, that’s why it seems so smoggy today!” they say.

Me, I’m aware of the fire. Last night, I went up to Harvey Mudd with some friends to watch the mountains burn for an hour or two. Watching the fire burn was very strange and majestic and creepy. The fire had already come over the mountain and was moving south, so by the time this goes to print I’m pretty sure everyone will have noticed it. Or maybe not. “Gee, Harvey Mudd seems pretty burnt down today!” they’ll say. Plus, now that I’ve mentioned the fire, there’s a very good chance that I’ll wake up tomorrow morning only to discover that it was eliminated by order of Dean Quinley while I was sleeping.

Although that would be a very good thing—with a sprinkler/student ratio of 89:1, Pomona’s safe, but there are homes that are threatened, and people in danger, and it’s all a little freaky. But it’s also useful, in that it can segue into the one and only opinion of this opinions article: Fire can be very neat when it’s in a fireplace, and 100-foot flames can be very neat when they’re five miles away, but I do not support forest fires.