An Appeal to My Alma Mater

Zhang, who will be a senior in the fall, is among a growing cohort of students at Pomona College who are trying to alter how technology affects campus life. These Pomona students and professors are hardly unique in reacting to a new reality. At the same time, Pomona is better suited than most institutions to scale back technology’s place in campus life. Still, she said, for many college students, going off TikTok and Instagram seems like social death, because their main source of social capital is online. Elijah Quetin, a visiting instructor in physics and astronomy at Pomona, told me about a creative low-tech experiment that he already has planned.