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All Along Walker Wall: Pomona Plays with Your Food
“There must be some way out of here,” the joker tells the thief in Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” After over two years on the Claremont Colleges news beat, Emilio Bankier’s new column “All Along Walker Wall” promises to be the final nail in the coffin for his relationship with administrators, fellow students, and his editor. A tribute to Walker Wall, Pomona’s free speech wall, Bankier hopes the column will remind readers that, even at Pomona, they have a right to be honest, even too honest.
In this debut issue, Bankier explores Pomona College’s recent dining fiascos and interviews head of Campus Services Bob Robinson, uncovering the secrets of Pomona’s “great game.”
There is a great game at Pomona College. It is not the Sixth St. Rivalry game against CMS, or the now-defunct rivalry game with Occidental College, or even the distant tradition of the Sophomore–Frosh rivalry. Pomona’s Great Game is a seemingly never-ending contest between the College’s various administrative offices. The objective? To make students’ lives harder.
Though they have faced tough competition from the Office of Financial Aid and runners-up Student Affairs, Pomona’s Dining Services—a part of the Office for Facilities and Campus Services—was already winning the game comfortably when, at the start of the fall semester, through novel innovation which is sure to forever change the way the game is played, they blew the competition away.
Past highlights from the reigning champions include the unexplained closures of Frank Dining Hall near the end of semesters and the highly unpopular decision to switch Cafe 47 from Peet’s Coffee to Starbucks under a contract with Nestle—not to mention the generally shambolic state of the Coop Fountain, which in all my time as a Pomona student has never been open for a full semester.
Last semester Facilities and Campus Services increased their lead by some margin when they planned to shut down the Coop Fountain during (and after?) the multi-year construction of Pomona’s “Center for Global Engagement” to run catering services out of the student restaurant. The scheme was dropped after backlash from students and faculty, and probably Student Affairs staff, who, apparently, were never informed of the plans. Though the idea itself won them points, the failure to execute the audacious proposal left Facilities and Campus Services short of an uncontested win.
Clearly, Facilities and Campus Services Assistant VP Bob Robinson and former (we’ll get there) Dining Services General Manager Jose Martinez learned from their mistake. Over the summer, with students far away, they discovered a new strategy to get ahead in the great game. Instead of inconveniencing students merely by reducing or worsening their services without explanation, they realized they could also just sort of lie to them about it.
In an Aug. 31 email titled “Understanding your Pomona Dining Plan,” Robinson informed students of “several updates and enhancements to the Pomona Dining Plan designed to provide greater flexibility, convenience, and access to dining throughout the day.” The email begins by announcing that Dining Services was “pleased” to share that “over the past year, [they] have listened to student feedback” and reviewed how dining works at Pomona, culminating in work “to make the Pomona Dining Plan easier to understand while continuing to provide a wide variety of dining options both at Pomona and across The Claremont Colleges.”
What was the result of this work? Robinson doesn’t say. Instead, he repeats what Pomona students have believed to be true since it was explained to us during First-Year Orientation: that we have unlimited swipes at Pomona dining halls, and that we can also eat at the other Claremont Colleges’ dining halls. No actual changes to the dining plan are mentioned, and the rest of the email only explains the College’s commitment to “enhancing the Pomona dining experience,” and Dining Services’ vaguely forthcoming work with students on “reviewing menus and food variety, expanding convenient dining options, improving communication about meal plans and services, and identifying opportunities to make our dining locations welcoming places.”
At the end of the email, Robinson added a link that would help answer "frequently asked questions.” The link takes the curious-clicker to a webpage titled “Understanding your meal plan,” where the ever-critically-thinking-and-close-reading Pomona student will spot the changes that Bob Robinson neglected to mention in the email itself: Pomona students do not have limitless swipes anymore, they have one every 30 minutes (accounting for the dining halls’ hours, that comes out to 21.6 meal swipes a day, which is not “unlimited” meal swipes) and, whereas they once had 14 cross-campus swipes, they now had 10. “Greater flexibility, convenience, and access to dining throughout the day,” indeed.
A rare animal, the Pomona student who reads all their emails, will have learned this prior to Robinson’s devious link-dropping. ASPC’s President informed the student body of the changes in an email a day before Robinson’s went out, writing that the student government was “disappointed that there was no direct communication to students about the change,” which had until then been disseminated only through informal channels.
ASPC was not formally consulted on the changes, the President wrote, and was voicing its concerns to the college administration. ASPC’s Commissioner for Facilities and Environment, however, does sit on the recently formed “Facilities Advisory Committee,” which multiple people familiar with the committee called Robinson’s “way to avoid working with ASPC,” which has its own “Food Committee.”
In an hourlong interview, Robinson told me he had convened the committee twice over the summer to discuss the changes, adding that feedback from those discussions led to the 30 minute timer to be cut down from 45. The Commissioner disputes this claim, and says there was only one committee meeting related to the dining plan and that she later had a one-on-one meeting with Robinson. Both times, she said, the feedback from students was universally negative, with concerns about Pomona’s lack of options for students with dietary restrictions at the forefront.
The commissioner also emphasized that Robinson had presented the changes as a proposal. He never followed up with her or the committee to share that the proposal would go into effect, she told me.
Last year, Pomona’s Board of Trustees adopted a set of “Shared Governance” documents. Belabored by a committee of students, faculty, staff, and an outside consultant for a year, the documents were intended to enshrine better practices of student and faculty involvement in college affairs. At public discussions of the documents, Cafe 47’s switch from Peet’s Coffee to Starbucks was referred to multiple times as an example of why shared governance was necessary.
Anyone familiar with Pomona’s student body and its political inclinations would have been able to warn Robinson that a switch to Starbucks under a contract with Nestle—two companies unpopular with students for causes both environmental and social—would have been disastrous. Indeed, a Cafe 47 boycott in place since the switch has made deep cuts into the coffee shop's revenue, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
Curious to see why Robinson was once again making changes with little student input despite the documents having been adopted by the College, I asked him what he thought of Shared Governance.
“What you call shared governance, I call shared input,” he said. When I asked him to explain this definition, he struggled to answer before asking me how I saw shared governance. I told him I was more interested in his vision, to which he said “Well, you read Shared Governance, I didn’t.” After a moment’s silence, he added, “I shouldn’t say that. I have read Shared Governance.”
Facilities and Campus Services operates out of Kenyon House, a converted residential home on the southern edge of Pomona’s campus, past a parking lot, far away from students and professors. Inside, a framed message hangs across from the entrance, gilded letters reading:
Mission
Build and maintain an environment that shapes the Sagehen experience.
Vision
Be a recognized leader by prioritizing our commitment to excellence and innovation.
Values
Collaboration—Accountability—Respect—Efficiency—Service
“Pomona students should eat at Pomona as much as possible,” Bob Robinson told me at the beginning of our conversation. He bragged that Pomona students had “continuous feeding,” all while having the cheapest dining plan in Claremont. I imagine that this fulfills a combination of “excellence” and “efficiency.” Robinson’s tone changed though, when I pointed out that Pomona students’ “feeding” was not continuous: At the beginning and end of the semester, Coop Fountain, the only late-night option available to Pomona students, is closed, and even when it is open, it closes at 11 pm (Robinson was under the mistaken impression that it was open until midnight). And it isn’t open on weekends.
“Business doesn’t justify” having the Coop (and Cafe 47) open consistently, he told me. “Dining operations is a business with a fiduciary responsibility,” he explained, adding that he had a budget and cost targets to meet. Robinson seemed surprised when I told him the price of Pomona’s dining plan had gone up by nearly 22% in the last 4 years, before answering, “Perhaps it has.” When I asked him why, he said the prices were set by the treasurer’s office (his boss). “Do you have input?” I asked. “I do.” Robinson couldn’t give me a ballpark number on how much Dining Service’s costs have increased in the same period.
As the conversation continued, Robinson did begin to admit that Dining Services may not have lived up to “excellence” in the recent past: “We recognized the issue with the dining program last year,” he said. In response, he commissioned a new “Dining Services Master Plan” from consultants Webb Food Services. The consultants, who came to campus in February 2026 and spoke to faculty, staff, and students, were to create a report on the dining situation. Though they came to campus over half a year ago, no report ever surfaced.
When I asked about the missing report, Robinson told me he’d received it in June, but decided not to share it publicly because “nobody’s here in June, nobody cares.” I pointed out to him that students get almost weekly emails during the summer from Dining Services about Dining Hall hours, even though most of them are far away from campus. “But that’s programming,” he answered, not appearing too convinced by my argument that the report which would inform the “Dining Services Master Plan” was of greater consequence to students than Frary’s summer hours. “Sure,” he answered when I asked him if the report would ever be public. Asked about a timeline, he said, “probably at the end of the month.”
Why had it taken until last year for Dining Services to acknowledge and fix “ills” (as Robinson described them) that had been apparent since I arrived on campus three years ago?
“Why is there air?” Robinson answered. I brought up General Manager Jose Martinez’s frequent refrain that staffing issues were the cause of inconsistent hours and Coop closures. Robinson explained that “Pomona has the most generous paid time off program in the world,” and that the issues were caused by too many staff taking time off at once. “25% of the regular work hours, or 500 hours, are PTO,” he told me. (A spokesperson for Pomona College did not confirm this astonishing figure when asked for comment, only stating that “[Pomona’s] benefits compare very favorably with those offered by peer institutions.”)
Making an educated guess that a solution to “staffing issues” might be hiring more people, I asked Robinson whether Dining Services had done so. He answered that there had been no net change in the number of dining staff in the last four years. (The College’s spokesperson also acknowledged that “staffing challenges can affect [Pomona’s] ability to maintain desired service levels.”)
What is being done to fix Pomona’s dining issues, then? Robinson explained that, buried in the cuts to the dining plan, students had gained a $7 meal equivalency at Cafe 47 (CMC students get $11.50 for breakfast and $15.15 for dinner at the Hub and Daybreak Cafe), and changes to the swiping system now meant they could swipe into a Pomona dining hall and immediately after swipe into another schools’ (a helpful change given the noticeable drop in Pomona’s food quality this semester). Robinson also described a change from Coop Fountain meal "equivalency" to a meal “swap.” He conceded after some back and forth that for students, there had been no actual change, and the “swap” was identical to how meal equivalency previously worked (students get to choose between two—sometimes three—never-changing options).
Robinson also said there were plans to improve the quality of dining hall food by doing more “batch cooking,” which Robinson described as “more food made on the spot rather than in a pan,” and expanding “expo” options.
The casual observer will remark that these service improvements are not a good way to play Pomona’s Great Game—which Facilities and Campus Services appear to have a natural advantage at compared to other administrators, since, as Robinson told me, “we’re the only ones on campus every day. Everyone else works from home.”
Read it again, though: “Plans…” Whenever improvements to services came up, Robinson had plans. He has plans to improve the number of options for Coop meal “swap,” plans to improve quality, and yes, he even told me he might think about making plans to extend the Coop’s hours. What comes first, though, is Robinson’s bottom line. Profit and loss. A budget. He’s running a business, with “fiduciary responsibility,” remember?
But what any second-year economics major who has taken intermediate micro can understand is that Robinson is not running a business, or at least not a normal business. Putting aside that Pomona College is a non-profit with a mutli-billion dollar endowment, Robinson is also running a quasi-monopoly.
Robinson’s goal is that “Pomona students should eat at Pomona as much as possible.” This is a fair goal. In a normal context, one could see Robinson achieving this by finding the right balance between quality and price, or, in short, creating an attractive, competitive product. But Robinson doesn’t need to compete. He has no incentive to. If he’s losing to the competition (other 5C dining halls), he can limit Pomona students’ ability to access them, and force them to go to Pomona dining halls.
Can’t students just choose a cheaper meal plan or no plan at all? No. All Pomona students living on campus (so virtually all students) are required to buy the Pomona Dining Plan (it used to be called the “Ultimate Meal Plan”).
So when Robinson makes an “improvement” that doesn’t improve anything at all and instead just reduces students’ options, remember that in his reality, when students don’t use Pomona’s dining halls or the Coop or Cafe 47, something must be wrong with the students, not with his “business” and what it offers. It’s the students who need fixing, not dining services.
Over the summer, the automated coffee machine in Frary disappeared. Where students could once get (not very good) espresso, lattes, and more, they could now only get (even worse) matcha and Vietnamese coffee. On the surface, it’s an innocent attempt to cater to current trends. But why get rid of the old machines? Well, now if you’d like an espresso shot or any other basic brewed coffee, you have to go to Cafe 47 and pay for one. A little like a low-cost airline, Dining Services gives you something you don’t really want while taking away the essential and putting it behind an extra fee. (I imagine the decision to institute a $7 meal swipe equivalency was similarly motivated by the need to boost Cafe 47 sales amid the student boycott, which has allegedly caused a 50% drop in sales.)
As for the cross-campus swipes, Robinson told me that the main purpose of cutting the limit down to 10 was to lower the sum of money Pomona pays other schools for students’ swipes into their dining halls. Exactly how much money this would have kept safe in Robinson’s coffers is unclear, given that he himself handed me a sheet of data showing, among other things, that Pomona students only used an average of 4 cross-campus swipes a week. (Robinson did not give me data on how many students were using more than 10 swipes a week despite multiple requests.)
Regardless of the amount, the principle is the real gem: the money saved could then be invested into improving Pomona’s dining halls. In other words, Robinson's strategy consists of making things worse before making them better. Or “planning” to make them better.
The ASPC President announced via email on Sept. 14 that Dining Services had shut down Milk and Honey, a student-run boba tea shop that operated out of Cafe 47 two nights a week. “On Thursday September 10th at 10:41 AM Milk and Honey Managers received a request to meet with Dining Services at 11:00 AM. At this meeting, they were abruptly informed that the program would be discontinued.” Funded by Dining Services, Milk and Honey was operated entirely by students, and according to the email, served over 100 students a night. “Milk and Honey consistently recoups their cost of labor, and only required $6170.45 in supplemental funding from dining last year,” the ASPC President claimed, linking to a petition to have the program restored.
Another win goes up on the chalkboard for Bob Robinson, right? The Great Game forever won?
No, not from where we sit today. Five days after Milk and Honey employees were told their program was shutting down, Robinson told The Student Life that “As a result of” everyone obviously being upset about this, “the College has decided to reverse the planned closure, while [it works] with students to evaluate a range of options for its long-term future.”
And on Sept.14, in an email to students, Robinson announced that there would be “an adjustment to provide greater flexibility.” “Effective immediately,” the 14 cross-campus swipes he had reduced to 10 would be restored.
Did it never occur to Robinson—who has been at Pomona since 2009—that students, faculty, and very likely, his bosses in Alexander Hall (or working from home), would push back on the dining plan changes and the Milk and Honey closure? Surely he would have thought through his strategy for the great game a little further? ‘Too ambitious,’ the casual observer might say, images of Icarus Robinson flying too close to the sun flashing through the mind.
But Bob Robinson is no fool. He is tireless, cunning, and above all, ruthless. And in his greatest masterstroke, he had us all thinking that ‘cut student services and lie about it’ about it was the strategy. He had us thinking, when he was forced to reverse his changes, that he had lost and that we had won.
On Wednesday, September 23, an ASPC senator emailed Dining’s General Manager Jose Martinez to ask about Milk and Honey. The reply came instantly. “José Marinez [sic] is no longer employed by Pomona College. Please contact Robert Robinson with questions about dining operations.”
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist,” Verbal Kint says in “The Usual Suspects.” The back and forth was the plan all along. The stress, the agitation, the hours ASPC senators spent making Google Forms and writing emails to solicit feedback, the erosion of trust in the school’s administration. Bob’s bumbling and bungling is the strategy: indifference enhanced by incompetence. When things went too far, he sacrificed Martinez, one of his own, to keep playing. The result? Permanent uncertainty—fear. What will Robinson take next? What will it take for him to give it back? Soon enough, you forget that—for $100k a year—he was never giving you enough anyway.
Bob Robinson is a master of Pomona’s Great Game not because he plays so well, but because he has found a way to play forever.
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