$530 million originals: Janet Inskeep Benton and Ranney Draper break ground on college’s global future
On a Saturday afternoon in Claremont, three people in blue hard hats put shovels into the ground where the Oldenborg Center once stood.
In the middle was Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr. On one side was Janet Inskeep Benton, Class of 1979, who chairs the college’s Board of Trustees.
On the other was Ranney E. Draper, Class of 1960, a trustee emeritus whose family has been tied to Pomona for more than a hundred years.
More than 120 students, faculty, alumni, and friends watched. Each of the two trustees had given $10 million to the building rising on that spot.
Together they marked the public start of the most ambitious fundraising effort in the college’s history.
The effort is called Originals: The Campaign for Pomona College, and its goal is $530 million.
The name honors the independent thinkers who have shaped the college.
Pomona had quietly gathered leadership gifts for three years before it said anything publicly.
By launch day, nearly 10,000 alumni, families and friends had given about $247 million, roughly 47 percent of the goal. The campaign will run for about five more years.
At the center of the celebration is the $125 million Center for Global Engagement. It is Pomona’s largest capital project to date.
Planned at 100,000 square feet and scheduled to welcome its first residents in fall 2028, the center will put academic life, residential life and global programming under one roof.
It replaces Oldenborg, which was home to the college’s language immersion and international education programs for six decades.
Oldenborg had reached the end of its useful life and came down this summer.
The trustees would not approve the new building until the college had raised $50 million toward construction, a bar they set in 2022.
Benton’s and Draper’s gifts were the lead commitments that helped meet that goal.
For Benton, the gift is about the hours students spend outside the classroom. She has spoken of residence halls as more than places to sleep.
To her, they are where friendships form, where views widen, and where a conversation from a seminar keeps going long after class ends.
Her support goes to the center’s residential and community spaces. Those spaces will house more than 200 students in nine living-learning communities.
Seven will focus on language immersion and be led by language residents, and two will focus on global themes.
The center’s 60,000-square-foot residence hall will also make room for 60 more students to live on campus.
A dining forum and event space will carry the day’s ideas over dinner.
“Pomona has always been a place where original ideas and original people come together in powerful ways,” Benton said.
“The Center for Global Engagement represents the next chapter in that story—one that embraces our world and the promise it holds.”
Benton founded the Frog Rock Foundation, and she has been a steady presence on Pomona’s board for years before becoming its chair.
At a luncheon before the groundbreaking, Starr thanked her for “visionary leadership and generosity in championing the CGE from its earliest conception.”
The phrase captures a trustee who backed the project long before anyone could see it.
Draper’s gift comes from a different place: love, memory, and family.
He and his late wife, Priscilla, made the commitment together.
It will name the outdoor plaza at the center’s west entrance, between Sumner Hall and the new building, the largest plaza on campus.
The space reflects Priscilla’s love of gardens and her belief that well-designed outdoor places bring people together.
“The college’s founders set out to build a college in a garden, a place where the landscape would be part of the Pomona experience,” Draper said.
“Priscilla loved gardens, too, because of the way they brought people together. It feels meaningful that her name will represent a space where students can gather, connect, and make memories of their own.”
His bond with Pomona goes back to before his student days.
His parents, Ranney C. Draper, Class of 1925, and Virginia Draper, Class of 1926, were longtime champions of the college, and his father was also a trustee emeritus.
Draper captained the Pomona-Pitzer football team and ran track. He went on to serve on the Board of Trustees for more than 25 years.
His family’s giving already shows across campus, in the Draper Center for Community Partnerships, which pairs Pomona courses with local schools and neighborhoods, and in a challenge gift for the renovation of Merritt Field.
Starr called him “our treasured friend,” and he now holds an emeritus seat on the campaign committee.
The two lead gifts sit inside a wider show of commitment from the board. Every current trustee has given to the campaign. Trustees emeriti have committed nearly $84 million, almost twice what they gave in the last campaign.
Board and emeriti support for the Center for Global Engagement alone, beyond the two lead gifts, comes to more than $36 million.
The campaign is also drawing in new major donors. One hundred forty-seven people made a first-time major gift of $100,000 or more, for a combined $112 million.
The campaign is chaired by Sam and Emily Glick, both Class of 2004. Sam led the Board of Trustees for eight years, and the couple has long championed students from middle-income families.
“Every moment at Pomona is part of the Pomona education,” Sam Glick said.
“Originals is about investing in all of those moments and ensuring that Pomona remains a place where every qualified student can see themselves and realize their full potential.”
That belief shapes the whole campaign.
The largest share, $190 million, will support the annual fund, planned giving, and the endowment, keeping Pomona strong and independent for the long run. Another $175 million goes to academic excellence: new faculty positions, faculty-student research, emerging fields of study, and global learning through the new center and the Global Gateways program.
Pomona will commit $105 million to financial aid.
That includes a new middle-income initiative for families who earn too much for significant aid but still struggle with the cost, along with programs that put laptops and course materials in students’ hands from their first day.
A $52 million commitment will support wellness, mentorship, athletics, and belonging.
The remaining $8.1 million will create new ways for Pomona’s 27,000 alumni to mentor students and share what they know.
The need is clear in this year’s first-year class.
A record 29 percent are first-generation college students, and 63 percent receive financial aid.
Starr put the goal simply: Pomona should remain a place where remarkable students can thrive “regardless of financial circumstances.”
In two years, students will move into the new center to speak, cook, argue and laugh in languages from across the world.
Some will cross Priscilla Draper’s plaza on their way to class.
Others will keep a seminar debate going late into the night in the residence halls Janet Benton helped build.
Most will never meet the people who made those rooms possible, which is exactly what Vice President for Advancement Maria Watson meant when she described the campaign as “investing in students we may never meet, ideas that have not yet been imagined, and opportunities whose impact may not be known for decades.”