This thesis is not intended to be an indictment of our leaders — well, not entirely, anyway. This thesis is meant to be an exercise in listening. I talked to a lot of people on every side of this issue, and tried hard to listen. I obviously have my biases, but I did my best to understand where everyone was coming from. I tried to evaluate groups instead of individuals as participants in this issue. My interviewees were requested to express views on behalf of the community group to which they belonged. I tried to find the opinions that best defined the majority of each group. Sometimes these came from resolutions, sometimes surveys, and other times analyses of local newspaper letters. In writing this up, I hoped to express the the voices I heard from a common ground. It seems that we've let our voices become antagonistic — that we've lost the will to embrace new opinions and engage in debate. I hope that people reading this might listen to the voices that are speaking — understand where they come from instead of preparing a rebuttal of their opinions. Consider our own actions and how they affect the situation. Think about whether we’re prepared to let this battle divide our community into the dreamers who get their way and those who don’t — or if we are ready to listen to one another, offer compromises, and do what really benefits this community the most. This thesis is an effort to explore different perspectives on a common issue and document the voices that have been cast aside and ignored. I originally wanted to speak for the Bernard Field Station, because I wasn’t sure how much longer it would be around to speak for itself. But I now realized it is futile. If you are willing to listen, the place speaks for itself ... and the story it tells is remarkable.

This thesis explores 5C dietary-restricted college students’ reiteration of a “lack of [food] options” in the dining hall and at on-campus, institutionally-sponsored events of particularly Scripps College. Given that Scripps specifically has in the past responded to dietary-restricted student needs, and that it offers an admittedly broad variety of foods for a college dining hall, dietary-restricted students’ dissatisfaction with “food options” presents an interesting problem. Situated within broader Claremont College community discussions, this ethnographic work hopes to better understand not just what students want, but what they need to socially and culturally sustain themselves while dwelling in the residential 5C community. I argue that when my dietary- and non-dietary-restricted interlocutors narrate their desire for, request, and provide food options, they are engaging in efforts to facilitate access to membership and participation in all aspects of the “residential college experience.” In the spirit of interlocutors’ enduring determination to exist in a space of possibility with regard to their identities and the necessary food options that could exist, this thesis also contains Scripps-specific suggestions to better include those with dietary restrictions in the Scripps College residential community.

In response to the German occupation of Belgium in World War I, future U.S. president Herbert Hoover and a handful of his colleagues in the mining engineer industry founded the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB). The CRB engineered one of the greatest relief movements in history partly on account of its successful public appeals; nevertheless, the success of these appeals has never been fully explained due to a remarkable dearth of scholarship on the topic. This paper seeks to fill in the gap by analyzing salient documents in the Mudd Family Papers, located in Honnold/Mudd Library’s Special Collections section. The artifacts ultimately evince that the CRB tailored its appeals to the American upper and middle classes, appropriating their respective motifs and lexicons to successfully mobilize both groups; that rumors of wartime atrocities against Belgian children augmented its appeals to the middle class; and that it issued targeted messages to its American supporters after the United States’ entry into World War I, maintaining vital public support. The findings of this paper promise to add invaluable knowledge to an exceedingly understudied historical subject.