Inauguration Lights Gaudy, Unnecessary
By Peter Douglas
Staff Writer

Last Thursday evening, as I walked out of a classroom onto Marston Quad, I was visually assaulted, not by streaking students exuberantly celebrating the weekend, but by a college-sponsored test of the light arrangement for Saturday’s inauguration festivities. This was no ordinary collection of colored lights, however; every building within striking distance of the quad was coated in a cacophony of bright neon lights, while the quad’s trees were washed in green light, giving them the look of a haunted, yet well-lit, forest. While many students were impressed by the light show, I found it unbearably gaudy; in the words of Sinead Hunt ’05, it was “utterly over the top.” The inauguration weekend as a whole was a spectacular success, but the lights that accompanied it were not. Instead they were a distracting display of tackiness and a ridiculous waste of energy and money.

First of all, the lights on Marston Quad were not appropriate for the inauguration of a college president. They were more reminiscent of Las Vegas, or for me, personally, of my high school prom. While both the prom and Vegas are wonderful in their own ways, the atmosphere of hedonism and sexual abandon that surrounds them wasn’t exactly fitting for this event. While an inauguration should not be a somber event, it should have a certain degree of class. Marston Quad on most nights is the most beautiful place on campus: walking south from Smith, the dimly lit façade of Little Bridges evokes a sense of calm and quiet that is amazingly refreshing in the hectic college atmosphere. Highlighting the calm beauty of the quad with subtle lighting would have been the perfect way to welcome President Oxtoby into the Pomona College community, a haven of beauty and calm rationality in a crazy world. Instead we decided to bombard Little Bridges and the other buildings nearby with hundreds of megawatts of pink, blue, green, and purple. And what was the reason for this lighting? I suppose it was to show that we could; to show that we had the money and audacity to turn Pomona College into a mini-Disneyland. It doesn’t make any sense to me.

In addition to being garish and brutal on the eyes, the inauguration lights were a waste of both energy and money. While I have no idea how much the lights cost, they must have been much more expensive than a reasonable and attractive light display would have been. Meanwhile, the spectacle used vast amounts of energy to create, and energy in Southern California is both scarce and produces pollutants that wreck our lungs and warm the globe. This waste of energy was exacerbated when the lights were left on all night during a test two days before the inauguration.

The waste caused by the lights is only one of the many examples of excessive use of resources and money at Pomona. The list runs from the obvious instance of trucking snow to campus on an eighty degree day to more subtle but pervasive problems such as watering the sidewalks, circulating tons of junk mail through the mail room, and leaving the dining hall lights on all night. Pomona seems to be strongly committed to bringing snow to campus once a year and having impeccable lawns, yet my guess is that if you asked students what was important about their Pomona experience, these things would not come up. In many cases, money would be more beneficially spent on financial aid or student programs, and while the college is increasingly committed to reducing its environmental impact, it is clear that this commitment needs to be more fully integrated into everyday decisions. If the costs of dramatically lighting Marston Quad had been considered in a broader context, would it still have been done the same way? I hope not.

I don’t want to be the Grinch of the Inauguration. It was a wonderful event and. in almost every way. very well-planned. The lights on Marston Quad, however, because of their gaudiness and waste, are in direct contradiction with what I believe Pomona College represents. I hope that in the future those planning special events can find ways to celebrate them without turning the quad or any part of the college into a ridiculous spectacle of colored lights.