2020: A Year in Review
- Isaac Cui
- Dec 31, 2020
- 21 min read
The year is winding to a close, and I thought I’d take some time to think about what happened this year and to set out thoughts for next year. I realized I’ve never actually gone through and systematically reviewed a year before, so I’m actually kind of excited to write this post.
To try to preserve some semblance of order, I figured I’d split this post into three parts: first, a synopsis of what happened to me this last year; second, some reflections on the year; and third, a few thoughts on goals for next year.
I. What Happened
To make this section more manageable, I’m going to break it up into a few chunks — winter break (2019–20), spring semester (pre-covid), spring semester (post-covid), summer, and then my time in London.
Winter Break. Winter break my senior year was actually, I think, a really productive time. In part, it had to be. Every senior politics major at Pomona has to compile a book list — twelve books, or suitable substitutes (mine was eight books, three law review articles, and three Supreme Court cases), dealing with some topic that reflects the senior’s education in politics — and then write three essays about the list. The essay is due on the first day of the spring semester, so usually winter break for politics majors is spent reading those books. And I was actually really happy with the pieces I chose. My list had to do with rights in American constitutional practice, and a few of the pieces — Jamal Greene’s 2018 Harvard Law Review foreword, The Federalist, Mary Ann Glendon’s Rights Talk, and Michael McCann’s Rights at Work — became really impactful for how I think about law and politics.
That break was also filled with other kinds of work. The law journal was hosting a symposium, planned for February — we solicited and edited pieces that all dealt with a common theme (migration), and it was really cool to put the issue together since every writer was approaching the topic from a very different perspective. A few professors, peers, and I had successfully persuaded Pomona’s Curriculum Committee to okay a new class (Physics 9) focused on peer mentoring, and it was a class that a friend and I were leading. So we also spent a lot of time during the break preparing the syllabus — reading pedagogy pieces, preparing lesson plans, recruiting students to sign up for the class, and so on. My student government (ASPC) role meant that I was also scheming with my team about politicking at Pomona — we resolved to push for a policy of “shadow grading” students’ first semester, with the idea that new students at Pomona would benefit from (1) a less stressful environment that would allow them to explore their interests, rather than sticking to courses that they’re confident they can succeed in; and (2) a more level playing field, since students come in with very disparate backgrounds, and so their first-semester GPAs can look very different solely based on their preparation.
My main project that break was research with Professor Haddad on international human rights treaty monitoring. I had begun working for her the previous winter break, and we came up with a new paper idea over the summer. So the break was devoted to researching for and drafting that paper, which we planned to bring to a conference at the beginning of February. The research was really intellectually stimulating — my focus was on the constitutional law implicating foreign affairs and federalism (e.g., what role, if any, do states have in the nation’s foreign affairs?).
On a more personal note, that break was a mixed one. A few friends came to visit Portland, and it was great to meet up with them. I also feel like I did a decent job of calling and keeping up with other friends over that break. I also remember feeling quite sad especially toward the beginning of that break, though, because of friends who were graduating that semester or who were going abroad the next semester.
Spring Semester (Pre-Covid). Looking back at this period of time kind of amazes me, because my calendar was just so filled compared to how it is now-a-days. And I think it was also a pretty exciting half semester.
The semester started off fairly normally. We had to get the law journal running again and planning for the semester’s events; we had to host a spring training of JBoard (Pomona’s student disciplinary system), which ended up being really fulfilling, if stressful (February 1); and we began politicking for the “shadow grading” initiative (in other words, I had a lot of thirty-minute meetings with random professors — it was actually quite fun in hindsight, even if at times confusing).
The first big event was the conference (February 7), where Professor Haddad and I took our paper on human rights treaty monitoring. I think most of the conference attendees were law professors, and their reactions were, to put it bluntly, brutal. The paper just didn’t land very well (a lot of “this paper is ‘interesting’”). And it was pretty sad for me because the paper was written in two parts — the first more a political science/policy argument, and the second a legal argument — and the legal argument (which I was mostly responsible for) was eviscerated. More on this below, though. The bright spot of that weekend, though, was that one of my friends who was going abroad that term visited campus, so at least I got to see her.
The next weekend, I presented my booklist and later got to meet Eric Holder (!) (February 15), and then the next day flew out to attend my mom’s wedding (!!) (February 16). The wedding was quite pleasant and enjoyable; it’s always nice to see family again. Las Vegas was a fun place to explore, although it felt dystopian — it gave me strong gilded-age, shallow-consumerism vibes, and I felt rather relieved to leave by the time I came back to Claremont (February 18).
The weekend after (February 23), one of my professors took us to see “What the Constitution Means to Me,” a play that weaves an individual woman’s experiences — with high school debating, abortion, domestic violence — with thinking about the role and meaning of the Constitution in our lives. (It turns out a video of the play is now on Amazon Prime; I would recommend it.) That week, I also had my politics oral exam, the capstone of the book list project I mentioned above (February 26). It was actually a really fun experience — it was just two professors, whom I really liked and respected, asking me questions about a topic I liked thinking about. Then, that Friday (February 28) was packed with two big events. First, Physics 9 helped the Physics Department host some middle school students to try to get them interested in STEM. We organized a few different stations — a classroom of demos of wave phenomena, a planetarium show, a to-scale solar system (we spread out the planets along the walkway at Marston Quad) — and the goal was just to entertain these students and plant a seed of curiosity. It’s hard to know whether the project was successful, but it was certainly a fun (and stressful!) experience. It was absolutely hilarious, however, to hear about how brutal the students were toward some of our volunteers. Jake was dubbed “Jake from State Farm,” and Aman was “your mom.” Second, that afternoon was the day of the law journal’s symposium — each of our four writers gave a presentation about their paper, and then we had a conversation about their thoughts on the broader topic. I was really proud of the writers, who all did wonderful. Here's a picture of them presenting:
The next two weeks were fairly quiet, which in hindsight is odd given what we all know would happen. We sent the referendum on shadow grading to the Student Body for a vote (March 1–3), and we ended up with a resounding victory: seventy-three percent of students supported moving to a shadow grading system for the first semester. We continued lobbying various professors. I also remember that weekend (March 7–8) thinking about what to do for “senior week” — basically, in the week after grades are due and before graduation, seniors traditionally go do something fun off campus (e.g., renting a beach house in San Diego or backpacking in the mountains).
By that Monday (March 9), though, I think we were talking incessantly about the new disease, and the College told us on March 11 that we needed to leave campus within the week. The next day was the traditional “senior dinner,” where the President invites all graduating seniors to a fancy dinner. With everything happening, I was surprised we still did the event (although as far as I’m aware, no one contracted the virus). It was a predictably chaotic event; just imagine placing four hundred twenty-year-olds in a room with an open mic, plenty of alcohol, and an expectation that most of us wouldn’t see each other again. There was a kind of nihilistic despair, I think, from the sense that we were about to lose everything we’d been building up to for the last few years.
I remember spending those next few days trying to fill my time with friends: JBoard people, the Physics Department, my Politics professors, Claremonters, and so on. We went to my happy place: Alex’s Tacos (truly one of the great institutions of the Pomona Valley). And very quickly, campus emptied out. It was quite eerie.
Spring Semester (Covid). I got home on March 17 to a two-week quarantine, which ended up being okay because I filled my time with calls to old friends (especially the ones whom I had lost contact with during the semester — old high school friends, people I met in college who weren’t Claremont students, and so on). The immediate question was how to adjust to the new circumstances with distance learning, and it makes me proud to remember that Physics 9, our mentoring reading group, still met that week (which was technically Spring Break) to try to figure out how to adjust. Similarly, the next week (March 22), everything else began kicking into gear — JBoard needed to figure out how to do disciplinary hearings remotely; we had lots of questions with the law journal; and, because of my position on ASPC, I had to reach out to the faculty governance structure to look into how to grade that semester (March 26), which kicked off a big grading debate.
In hindsight, the grading debate actually didn’t last too long — I reached out to the faculty on March 26 and Pomona decided its policy on April 17. But those weeks felt neverending. A group of students across the colleges, including me, opened a survey to get data on students’ experiences (e.g., their learning environment, motivation, and opinions on grading the semester), and the survey (March 29–31) ended up with 2,587 responses. Our report was published a week later (April 5), and it ended up being a thirty-two page report with twenty figures. Simultaneously, as part of ASPC, we had obligations to do Pomona-specific analyses: we hosted a two-hour forum for students (April 3), we opened our weekly meetings (April 2, 9) to students, we conducted a Pomona-specific survey (467 responses), and we were soliciting feedback through private messages, too (in the end, we got some seventy-six written comments between March 31 and April 5).
All of this was really tiring, but the forum in particular was difficult. Politics in this kind of community feels peculiarly personal. On the one hand, you know many of the people who are speaking, and you know them to be good and wise and kind people. And on the other hand, you see them mud-slinging and lambasting each other (and me — someone accused me of tone policing for asking people to stop harassing one of my ASPC colleagues!). And you’re in front of two-hundred people on a recorded call, so you know everything you say will be preserved. You’re trying to maintain neutrality — our job was to listen and make sure people felt heard — while being pulled from every side. I learned from that forum that I’m probably not suited for politics. (One of my professors later told me that I care too much that other people like me. Guilty as charged, I suppose.)
I remember getting off that student forum call and going straight to the faculty forum, which was held in parallel and was equally divisive (if more respectful). I then called a professor after that forum and argued with him for about an hour. And I knew later that day that I had to host another call to coordinate data analysis of that big 2,587-response survey — a report that I’d be drafting over that weekend. In those few hours between calls, I felt completely overwhelmed and honestly couldn’t stop crying. I wrote to one of my professors, who had reached out earlier in the day: “Everything here is fine, but I just got off five straight hours of forums and arguing with people, and it just … didn’t feel good. I’m not even sure why, but for some reason, I’m just feeling a deep sense of sadness when I think I just need to pull everything together.”
That weekend was full of writing and meetings because I and two other ASPC members also had to prepare a report by Sunday (April 5) in the lead up to the ASPC Senate’s vote on what grading policy to endorse. We notified students and faculty on April 6 of ASPC’s position, and the President and Dean of the College invited the three of us to present to the entire faculty on Wednesday (April 8). We decided to take a relatively strong position in that speech. I remember writing a line for the ASPC President to deliver: “As a whole, the student body has spoken loudly and clearly: our endorsement is for an A/A- policy, a policy that is almost universally popular among the students we heard from. The ball is in the faculty’s court, now, to decide what to do with our recommendation.” And then we fielded questions for around half an hour from the professors. The faculty had their own forum that Friday (April 10), and the leadership of the faculty were ready to deliver a proposal to go to an all-faculty vote by the following Monday (April 13).
By that weekend (April 11–12), the faculty leadership had essentially told us that they didn’t need more student input, which was disheartening from the perspective of shared governance. But I also didn’t want to blow everything up and accuse them of reneging on their promise to consult students throughout the process. Perhaps naively, I had faith that the faculty would deliver us a reasonable policy and that we could defend the process for coming to that decision, such that the faculty could adopt a clean grading policy and then everyone could finish with the process. (If you can’t tell, I was tired of the grading debate by this point.) So myself, the ASPC President, and the ASPC Commissioner for Community Relations decided we’d defend the faculty leadership’s decision, and we wrote an endorsement of their policy (April 13).
The funny thing with the April 13 email is that professors and staff loved it, while students . . . did not. That letter extolled the virtues of the process — our reports, our forum, our deliberations — and urged students to feel represented in it. Many, I think, did not feel so (I don’t have the email anymore since it went to my ASPC email, but I remember someone emailing me, writing something to the effect of: “I blame you personally for everything that went wrong this year”). The next week was very ugly. Social media blew up with students attacking each other in what amounted to, in my view, mass cyber bullying. (The grading debate had essentially reduced, in some students’ eyes, to “if you want grades, you’re racist or have no empathy for students who are marginalized by the pandemic, and therefore you deserve to be shamed and kicked out of our community.”) Also, many students were organizing mass-emails to professors. The political scientist in me would say that our student representatives lost legitimacy, so a lot of students tried to do an end-run around our endorsement in favor of direct lobbying.
By the next ASPC meeting (April 16), the Senate voted to reject the position from our April 13 email. (I’ll just note that that email was signed off by three of us, but the Senate vote was 14–1 in favor of a different position. I was a bit shocked that I was alone.) The faculty had a concomitant challenge to its leadership’s legitimacy; two faculty members brought alternative motions to the faculty leadership’s motion, and going into the meeting, we were really unsure which might win (hence, mass student lobbying). The faculty leadership, though, clearly had a better finger on the faculty’s pulse (or the faculty are just less rebellious than students are), and they made a decision on April 17, putting an end to that saga (and an end to my rambling about the saga, which I’m sure you’re thankful for).
Parallel with the grading debate were two other stressors. First, we had to hire the next year’s leadership for JBoard. And hiring decisions, I’ve learned, are really, really hard. The process had been going on for about a month, but the major week was April 6–10, when we interviewed our finalists and then, on April 10, had a big meeting to select our candidates (in the end, it lasted four and a half hours). In part, I think what made the hiring process difficult was that I was already in a fragile state of mind from the grading debate. But also, it’s just so hard to hire people when you know almost all of them and need to try to separate personal views from a professional evaluation.
A second stressor was that I had two theses to write — and hadn’t made much progress until April. My physics thesis was due first; the final draft had to be in by April 29. Luckily, the thesis itself wasn’t too long or complex, so it was fairly manageable to get that finished by the deadline. My politics thesis, on the other hand, was a whole other beast. I was tackling a topic (habeas corpus and history) that touched on a lot of my thinking going back to middle school, and I really wanted to do justice to this complicated and fascinating topic. I did end up finishing that thesis, turning it in on May 6, but it took a lot of coffee and late nights.
After that, the semester died down very quickly. I had my final piano lesson on May 5 (Zoom-based music lessons are difficult, but my wonderful professor was still so good at teaching, even when I was barely practicing); I conducted my last (poorly attended) mentor session on May 6; the physics thesis presentations were May 8–9; the final JBoard meeting was May 13; the Politics and Physics Department celebrations were May 16; and I gave a politics thesis talk on May 26.
Summer. By this point, life for me changed into a series of longer-term projects. Right after the end of the school year, I met with Professor Hollis-Brusky (May 18) to begin our research on the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel; this was my main work throughout the summer, and we have continued the collaboration. By September, we took a draft paper to a virtual conference (much better reception of this paper than the February conference!). We also teamed up to write a piece for the Washington Post on my thesis topic (the Supreme Court’s decision in Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam). Additionally, I met with Professor Haddad to look back at our human-rights treaty paper (May 21); we revised it and submitted a draft for review (July 30). Physics 9 continued into the summer all the way through August 1, and we transitioned leadership to the next generation of students. A few of us also tried to keep a sense of community among the Physics Department, doing weekly documentary nights, movie nights, socials/happy hours, and town halls. I spent some time reconnecting into Claremont politics to help with some policing reform efforts from June through July.
By late July, I began focusing more on transitioning to the UK — coming here was beginning to feel less dream and more scary reality. I hadn’t meaningfully been out of the United States since I was really young, and I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I began searching for housing, and events from LSE/the Marshall community began picking up around this time. One of the logistical difficulties with getting to the UK was meeting its immigration requirements — specifically, I needed a biometric appointment at a USCIS office. And it turned out that each office was only doing a single appointment a day, so getting an appointment was really hard. I ended up having to do a day trip to Boise, Idaho in order to get the fingerprinting (an appointment that took around twenty minutes) (August 21). But it was actually kind of a blessing. I got to meet up with a friend from Pomona, who showed me around Boise (it was quite a charming place, to be honest), and then I went to the Bay Area to help my brother and his wife move out. It was a good break from the months of spending all day reading law review articles, and I got to see some more Pomona friends while I was in the area. By the beginning of September, we had driven back up to Portland, and then I flew out to the UK on September 13.
Time in London. By this point, life is pretty well documented through this blog, so I’m not going to bother writing too much. (Ha! You’re probably thinking that everything I write is too much. Early on in college, a law journal friend described me as “verbose.” Again, guilty as charged.)
Quarantine ended up passing surprisingly quickly, and once I got out, I was clearly pretty eager to explore and meet people, whether reconnecting with old friends or making new ones with other Marshalls and people in my LSE program. After a while, though, life began to look very cyclical — readings and classes for half the week, calling people in the evenings, writing this blog, and exploring London in leftover time. Some highlights from my UK experience that I’ve written about previously: our epic walk to Greenwich (October 10); exploring Westminster with a friend from high school (October 17); Camden Market with a new Marshall friend (October 30) as well as Halloween celebrations with the Physics Department (October 31) and visiting Cambridge (November 3); visiting Ely (December 18). In early November, Professor Haddad and I got some great news — the human-rights treaty paper got accepted for publication (November 10) with only minor suggestions by the reviewer! By late November, I also began rekindling the OLC research with Professor Hollis-Brusky (November 20), and we’re hoping to have a paper or two to submit sometime in the next few months (famous last words).
The flat has emptied out — one flatmate left early November (November 3), and the other in December (December 13). Since then, it’s been much quieter, especially with the break and more stringent lockdowns. But I don’t have too much to complain about. I’ve had really good friends to keep me company (special shout-outs to one of my Yale friends, with whom I watched the Queen’s Gambit — surprisingly good! — and now we’re doing the Great British Bakeoff, as well as the LSE friend whom I’ve been biking with). I’ve been able to take long walks and to continue to explore London. I’ve also had good books — I finished Foner’s The Fiery Trial (it was so captivating), as well as Biskupic’s biography of the Chief Justice (good read but not super worth it if you follow the Court already) and Pitkin’s book on representation (a great, if difficult, read). I’m currently working on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (probably the most influential academic treatment of nationalism ever written — a surprisingly fun read, but again a difficult one), and I’m hoping to get through a few more books before classes start again. I’ve also been wasting so much time with TV and movies — I’ve been watching Designated Survivor (truly a generic political drama), and I also managed to rewatch all three Lord of the Rings movies (not the extended editions though). Hopefully January will be more productive — I think I have a few leads on the OLC research, which is making me more excited to do work. And also, I graduated college (December 19)! The Physics Department hosted a virtual get-together for the event, and it was fun to see everyone. Here are some pictures from the break.
II. On 2020
Thinking back about this year, two themes pop out at me, one mostly positive and one mostly negative.
To start positive, I think I’ve spent a lot of this year feeling a sense of wonder. I began the year reading fascinating stuff: on the history of Magna Carta, on foreign-affairs federalism, and so on. One rabbit hole I remember vividly was staying up late searching in TR’s autobiography about a dispute over a San Francisco anti-Japanese educational ordinance to make a point about foreign-affairs preemption. The research was so captivating. The rest of the year similarly left me wonderstruck. I was amazed at the volunteers for our middle-school physics event in February; at the sight of our campus completely evacuated in March; at the rancor and chaos of campus politics during the grading debate in April; at the scale of the events I witnessed throughout the year, from the BLM protests to the fires across California and Oregon, from the pandemic to the election and the President’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat; at the tomes of writing on habeas for my politics thesis; at the kapok on the silk-floss tree’s seeds that I studied for my physics thesis. And of course, since being in London, I’ve often been awe-struck by all the sights, from the centuries-year-old pubs to the huge parks. There were a lot of curiosities this year that made me want to learn more and think harder, and also a lot of curiosities that left me wanting to stand there in silence, contemplating their unknowability.
I think a second theme from this year is that I’ve felt a lot more doubt than last year. Since being in DC, I’ve felt a strong conviction that I want to pursue a career in public interest law, and I think many of the things I’ve done, from internships to the law journal, have led me to believe that that is a plausible career path. Getting raked over the coals by a bunch of law professors shook that confidence, though. (A line from one of their comments that still haunts me: “This is clever lawyering, it’s just not persuasive.”) It felt like one of the first times that I was being tested by people who were trained in this way of thinking, who were familiar with the case law and literature — and the response was that my work was a resounding failure. My experiences in DC are a good juxtaposition — when you’re an intern in DC, everyone expects you to be incompetent, so when you do something even mildly competent, they’re ecstatic. In contrast, when you’re presenting to a bunch of law professors, they’re expecting meaningful academic contributions rather than weak historical analysis (in hindsight, the originalist argument was truly bad) and use of questionable sources (it turns out that a lot of the literature I was citing was very politicized, and that I was taking from a very niche group of scholars — which I think I hazily knew but hadn’t fully thought about).
The doubt wasn’t limited to the February conference, though, or to my aspirations to being a lawyer. I don’t think I did a very good job at campus politicking (even during the shadow-grading referendum, I remember talking to a friend who called my views “simplistic” and then walked away), and certainly I spent a lot of time worrying about my judgment after the spring grading debate and the JBoard hiring process. The BLM protests and the filling of Justice Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court pushed me to doubt my instinctual conservatism when it comes to institutional questions. The current state of our politics, especially since the election, and American governments’ responses to the pandemic have shaken a lot of my faith in our constitutional democracy.
Doubt, of course, isn’t always a bad thing. I’m certainly reading more diverse perspectives than I previously did (I don’t think I would’ve read Fanon or Gilroy but for all that has been happening). In mild amounts, doubt leads you to seek more knowledge and certainty, which is I think a good thing. But there are some topics that I just feel skittish about after this year, and I feel much more wary about law school than I did at the beginning of 2020.
III. On 2021
In terms of next year, I’ve been thinking about what might be good resolutions (or at least aspirations) to set.
First, there are a lot of topics that I wish I knew more about, so one resolution is to read at least one book on each of the following topics/people (and, to be honest, some of these are topics about which I’ve already bought book(s) — so, in part, the resolution is just to read the damn things):
1. The history of London
2. Reconstruction
3. Magna Carta
4. Frederick Douglass
5. Nelson Mandela
6. The Religion Clauses of the First Amendment
7. English constitutional developments in the seventeenth century
8. Malcolm X
9. Edward Coke
10. Indian independence
11. The 2007–08 financial crisis
12. The Gilded Age
13. Pauli Murray
14. Justice Ginsburg (I’m so excited for the upcoming book by her and Amanda Tyler)
15. Antitrust law in the Progressive Era
16. Fiat currency and exchange rates
17. At least one of Caro’s books on LBJ
18. The history and development of political parties in the United States and Great Britain
19. The legal history of corporations (and especially municipal corporations)
20. Educated, by Tara Westover
21. Abraham Lincoln
Second, I found it really valuable to write my Thanksgiving post, and talking to one of my good friends about the importance of gratitude made me realize that I ought to routinize the practice. So in addition to my normal rose-bud-thorn and future topics at the end of each blog post, I’m going to write about something that I’m thankful for each week. The first thing I’m grateful for? My friend who inspired the idea and who has been such wonderful company over the break.
Third, I’ve sent a few postcards since being in the UK, and I’ve enjoyed looking for appropriate cards to send. In part, it’s a fun challenge to find a card that’s sufficiently British while also being a good reminder of some shared experience. But also, I like sending postcards because it helps keep old friends at the front of my mind — you have to wrack your brain to find some good connection (although I have found two cards that really made me think of specific friends). It’ll be a good way, I think, of heeding Taylor Swift’s wise advice: “Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you.” A third resolution, then, is to send at least twenty-one postcards to people. (If you’re interested in a card, do let me know — just send a mailing address!)
Fourth, and a bit more idealistic — I want to get better at writing. I know of at least three ways to do this: read books that are written well, review and critique your own writing, and get feedback. I think the first method is meaningfully covered by my general reading (I’m finding the London Review of Books to be a source of consistent good writing, for example), and I’m hoping to do a few posts over the next year reviewing my previous posts to satisfy the second method. But I’m going to ask for your help, dear reader, on the last front. If you’d be kind enough, I’d love it if you would email me feedback on my writing whenever something hits you (anything from “that was an awkward sentence” to “this paragraph structure doesn’t make sense” to “this post is poorly conceived” to “I liked that adjective”). I’ve never written as much and as consistently as I am now with this blog, and so I figured I ought to use the opportunity to improve.
Thanks so much for joining me for these last few months. Here’s to a new year.
Comments