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Pomona Fails Conservative Students
The results of Pomona’s latest campus climate survey came out last week. Those of us concerned by the abysmal state of political pluralism at Pomona awaited the findings with trepidation—the previous survey, conducted in 2020, found that only 2% of Pomona students were conservative, the number of conservative faculty was too small to represent on a bar graph, and that “Antagonism Against Conservative Viewpoints” was a thematic problem.
I regret to say that the 2026 report’s findings on political belief are far worse than I’d imagined. That is to say, there are no findings. The report fails to follow up on the damning results of the 2020 survey or even provide basic data about the political affiliations of students and faculty.
The 2026 survey asked respondents to designate their party affiliations and political beliefs. Where did this data go? Nowhere, it seems. Why were analyses not performed on students’ experiences as members of different political groups, just as they were for every other conceivable dimension of identity? It can only be chalked up to Pomona’s abject refusal to look under rocks that might hide uncomfortable truths.
The climate survey’s questions and areas of focus were selected by a working group comprising staff, faculty and students. The result is a report chock-full with data on the experiences of “gender expansive” individuals, disabled persons (broken down by single disability, multiple disabilities, and “neurodivergent/mental health”), first-generation and low-income students, “queer-spectrum” students, “respondents of color,” transfer students, Jewish students, and “MENA” (Muslim and Middle Eastern/North African) students.
The decision to exclude political identity as a dimension of analysis was made by the working group’s student members, a staff participant of the group told the Independent. That the administrative and faculty members of the working group neglected to intervene on behalf of conservative students does not absolve them from responsibility. While the working group’s student members were not present for the previous campus survey, many of the staff and faculty participants were—or even served on the 2020 working group themselves—and possessed full knowledge of its finding that “political marginalization on campus was a concern” and “those who were particularly marginalized held more conservative perspectives.”
Though it may be convenient to blame the working group’s student contingent, the adults in the room certainly would have stepped in if the students were to say, for example, that they did not care to inquire about the experiences of racial or gender minorities.
The working group’s reasoning, according to the staff member the Independent spoke to, was that there would be too few conservative students to satisfy the survey’s minimum group size of fifteen. Any fewer, and anonymity concerns ostensibly preclude publishing a group’s data and responses.
This excuse falls flat. For one, the 2026 report includes thematic analysis of a group smaller than fifteen: transfer students, of which there were only eleven respondents. And the 2020 survey evidently met the threshold for reporting qualitative data from conservative students. There is no reason to believe that this would not continue to be the case in 2026.
“I've frequently been called a racist, fascist, a ‘capitalist pig’ and been told that my ‘cis-white presence’ is hateful because of my views,” a conservative student said in the 2020 report. “I remember arguing the intellectual merits of racism against whites and being told that indeed I was racist for contending that the phenomenon could theoretically occur.”
If the working group genuinely believed they wouldn’t be able to get fifteen conservatives out of Pomona’s 1,700-strong student body to respond, that itself constitutes a staggering indictment of Pomona’s political monoculture.
Why are there so few conservative students at Pomona? As one administrator (who also served on the working group) told me point-blank last spring, Pomona would “probably not” admit a student who expressed any conservative views (such as being pro-life or anti-DEI) on their application.
The 2026 report’s one and only attempt to represent the experience of conservatives at Pomona does more to obscure than to illuminate. “Conservative employee respondents had higher levels of comfort with the overall Pomona climate than liberal employee respondents,” the report avers. This statement could be described as misleading at best and intentionally deceptive at worst.
The bucket of “employee” contains not only faculty and administrators, but also the hardworking staff that keep Pomona’s students fed, dorms and classrooms clean, and our campus well-manicured. These workers make up almost the entirety of respondents to this question (58 conservative respondents total, with the 2020 survey indicating that fewer than five faculty members are conservative). It should come as no surprise that those who are insulated from Pomona’s politically toxic academic culture are less inclined to rate the climate as subpar. I would also hazard that Pomona’s (overwhelmingly liberal) professors may be of a more delicate, sensitive constitution than their conservative staff counterparts who have real, labor-intensive jobs.
If Pomona actually wanted to know whether conservative students and faculty felt free to express their views, the category they would’ve evaluated is academic, combining conservative faculty and students. They do this for racial and disability categories by reporting those groups’ perceptions of “classroom climate,” distinct from their perceptions of “overall climate.”
While Pomona failed to interrogate political issues with any specificity in the 2026 report, it is undeniable that the College has a political expression problem. The report’s underwhelming “Freedom of Expression” section found that only 41% of respondents felt “free to express [their] political views on campus without fear of professional or social consequences.” Of respondents who observed exclusionary conduct, the majority of faculty (60%) and a plurality of students (35%) said the basis was “political views”—ranking above racial identity, ethnicity, and gender identity.
These findings are in line with those of the preceding survey. A plurality (39%) of 2020 respondents who observed exclusionary or hostile conduct said that the basis was the target’s political views.
“The absence or self-censorship of conservative or even moderate voices in public and private debates here leads to a climate where ignorance and hatred of our fellow citizens are ubiquitous,” a student said in the 2020 report. “The lack of empathy for conservatives and moderates is chilling, and it drives substantive political discussions out of public spaces and onto the internet, underground circles, and other unpleasant echo chambers.”
Faculty members, too, expressed concern in the 2020 survey about the ostracization of conservative viewpoints at Pomona. One faculty member commented that to improve the climate, Pomona needed to “allow for more expression of conservative world-views.”
“The school needs to develop and implement a plan to assure that students expressing more conservative political viewpoints feel honestly accepted into conversations--and not simply grudgingly tolerated (if even that),” another faculty member wrote in 2020.
No such “plan” was implemented. In the six years following the 2020 survey, the College instead undertook three (evidently unsuccessful) initiatives to improve political discourse on campus. Let me rephrase that. The college undertook one initiative to improve political discourse on campus. The other two are partnerships with other colleges.
Pomona’s on-campus initiative is the “Dialogue” event series, which could be described charitably as a complete and utter failure. Dialogue talks have included “Navigating Big Feelings in Uncertain Times,” “Disagree Better: Surfacing Commonality in Conflict,” “Navigating Political Passion,” and “Holiday Hell: How to Navigate Post-Election Discussions over Thanksgiving,” all of which were poorly attended. None of these events themselves are “dialogue”; they are instead dialogue about dialogue. If Pomona really wanted to spur “dialogue,” they could’ve brought in a conservative to speak to students, which is something they have never done in my nearly four years at the College.
The first of Pomona’s off-campus boondoggles is the “Bridging the Gap” program, which sends Pomona students to “conservative Christian” Biola University and brings Biola students back to our own campus to engage in “facilitated conversations and activities where opinions may drastically differ.”
Think about that for a second. To expose Pomona students to conservative viewpoints, Pomona has to literally bus students to another college, and then bus that college’s conservative students back to our campus. Replace “conservative” with any other identity (female, black, low-income) and the proposition is preposterous.
The second off-campus venture, which Pomona is participating in for the first time this year, is the “Reconciliation League.” The League brings together select students from “very different” colleges in a summer fellowship to “learn not only to examine unfamiliar ideas, but also to engage thoughtfully with those who hold different perspectives, while developing the skills needed to build dialogue in service of society.”
Pomona’s participation in the League is an admission that there is indeed something that needs “reconciling” on our campus. Why reconciliation must be offshored to Easton, Pennsylvania, and cannot occur on our own campus, eludes me.
Rather than confront its political pluralism problem head-on, Pomona conducts meretricious “campus climate” surveys and sends students on “dialogue” vacations. The real solutions are simple. Invite conservatives to speak on campus. Hire conservative faculty. Enroll conservative students—or at the very least, don’t disqualify applicants on the basis of their political views.
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