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*[[Louis Menand]]
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Revision as of 23:31, 28 October 2006

Pomona College
Pomona College Mark
TypePrivate
Established1887
PresidentDr. David W. Oxtoby
Academic staff
175
Undergraduates1550
Postgraduates0
Location
Claremont
,
CA
,
USA
CampusSuburban, 160 acres (0.65 km²)
EndowmentUS$1,155,000,047
MascotCecil Sagehen [1]
Websitewww.pomona.edu
File:149-4933 IMG.JPG
The Smith Campus Center Fountain at Pomona College during the inauguration of College President David Oxtoby

Pomona College is a small private residential liberal arts college located 30 miles (48 km) east of Downtown Los Angeles in Claremont, California. It was founded in 1887 in Pomona, California and moved to Claremont in 1889 to the site of a donated hotel. At the time of Pomona's first graduating class, in 1894, there were 47 students enrolled. As of 2003 the school's enrollment is approximately 1,500.

Pomona is the founding member of a local consortium of colleges, the Claremont Colleges. The Claremont Colleges strive to deliver the closeness of a small college while also providing the resources of a large university.

Academics

Admissions to Pomona is highly selective. Of the students applying to the Class of 2009, fewer than one in five were admitted. For the Class of 2010, according to Pomona's student newspaper "The Student Life," that rate of admission fell to 16%, further cementing the fact that it is one of the most selective liberal arts colleges in the United States.

The price of a Pomona education is comparable to the cost at other liberal arts schools. In the 2006-2007 school year, tuition, room, board and textbooks will cost about $44,000.

Reputation

Pomona College is a top-notch liberal arts college, as rated by U.S. News and World Report. It consistently ranks among the top 10 liberal arts colleges in the United States. In many of the past years, it has been ranked as having the nation's happiest students, according to the Princeton Review.

Student life

There are a few local fraternities (some of which are co-ed or open to students of the other Claremont Colleges), and no officially recognized national fraternities or sororities. Fraternities play a limited role in the school's social life.

There are several newspapers operated at the consortium, including The Collage and The Student Life, which is the oldest college newspaper in Southern California.

Virtually all students live on campus for all four years.

Unique traditions

47

The number "47" has held mystical importance for Pomona students for forty years. Two different stories about its roots exist. Campus lore suggested that at some time in the 1960s Pomona math professor Donald Bentley produced a convincing mathematical proof that 47 was equal to all other integers, and that other faculty members and senior students could not disprove his equation at first sight. (By the 1970s oral history had grown this tale into a 1950s McCarthy-era exercise by an unnamed professor, and that it was a symbolic attack on the "big lie" political style of the Red-hunters of the era.) Another version — later verified by Bentley — holds that two Pomona students on a summer grant project in 1964 hypothesized that 47 occurred far more often in nature than random number distribution would explain. Soon the entire school was looking for 47s... and of course they found them! Crowds began to cheer at football games when the ball was on the 47 yard line, when basketball game scores for either team reached 47, or when 47 seconds were left on a game clock. Interestingly, Pomona College is located off exit 47 on Interstate 10.

Over time the phenomenon built on itself. Writer Joe Menosky, a 1979 alum, included the number 47 in the show Star Trek: The Next Generation when he joined in its fourth season: damaged shields fell to 47 percent strength; 47 colonists were missing; 47 minutes would display on a timer. The traditions continued through Deep Space Nine and Voyager. The web link for a full list of Star Trek 47s is below.

Video games, especially those by Intellivision, also displayed 47s regularly on screen and on game boxes. This turned out to be the work of Pomona graduates and Intellivision game designers Don Daglow, Eddie Dombrower and Dave Warhol; Daglow and Dombrower also made 47 the number on the batter's uniform in the seminal Earl Weaver Baseball game from Electronic Arts. Additionally, main character in the game Hitman is called "Agent 47", or simply "47".

Ski-Beach Day

Uniquely situated in the foothills of San Gabriel Mountains, Pomona College takes advantage of its location to host an annual "Ski-Beach Day" each spring. While the origin of this tradition is unclear, professors and various campus staff have noted that it has been around for at least twenty years. Some hypothesize that the day is a salute to other liberal arts colleges, as most of them are on the relatively frigid East Coast or in the Midwest.

Students board a bus in the morning and are driven to a local ski resort where they ski or snowboard in the morning. After lunch, they are bussed down to an Orange County or Los Angeles County beach for the rest of the day. The trip is widely popular and is considered one of the things you must do during your time at the school.

'Mufti'

Rooted somewhere in the mists of the 1940s, originally the outgrowth of an unhappy group of women students protesting on-campus policies, Mufti is a secret society of punsters-as-social-commentators. Periodically their 5x7 sheets of paper are glued to walls all over campus, with double-entendre comments on local goings-on: when beloved century-old Holmes Hall was dynamited to make way for a new building in 1987, the tiny signs all over campus announced "BLAST OF A CENTURY LEAVES THOUSANDS HOLMESLESS." Although nominally vandals under constant threat of punishment by the school if caught, Mufti are actually celebrated as part of the school's tradition on the Pomona website. As the school states: "The adhesive used to plaster the sheets over campus is not easily removed, and College administrators have tried many tactics to persuade the group to make their statements less permanent. At one point, former Dean Shelton Beatty offered to post the Mufti fliers himself, just to ensure that the glue would not damage the buildings. A few days after his offer, a stack of Mufti fliers appeared in his locked office. The message simply read, 'Mufti comes unglued.' True to his word, Dean Beatty made his rounds of campus, posting the fliers with a more water-soluble adhesive. However, this compromise did not last. The following week, sheets again appeared with the message, 'Mufti stuck up again.'"

Ponding

Also known as "fountaining," students celebrating their birthday can expect to be taken by their friends, usually when they least expect it, and thrown into one of the five fountains on campus. As a precautionary measure, all fountains on campus are now chlorinated, as a benefit to the well-being of this tradition's victims.

Athletics

The school's athletic program participates, in conjunction with Pitzer College (another consortium member), in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and the NCAA's Division III. The school's sports teams are called the Sagehens.

Notable alumni

Pomona College in winter

Famous dropouts

  • John Cage
  • Twyla Tharp
  • Frank Zappa Zappa, then a resident near Pomona College in San Bernadino County, would occasionally bring samples of his scores to Prof. Karl Kohn. This was not part of a normal undergraduate program, nor was it some form of school-sanctioned visiting student arrangement, but simply informal private lessons. By 1970, Pomona publications referred to Zappa having studied there, and Kohn's name appears on the cover of Freak Out! (1966) under the heading "These People Have Contributed Materially In Many Ways To Make Our Music What It Is. Please Do Not Hold It Against Them". Zappa contributed to the renovation of Pomona's Bridge's Hall of Music, and one of the seats in the hall bears a plaque with his name.

Majors

The Pomona sign

Humanities and Fine Arts

Natural Sciences

Social Sciences

Interdisciplinary Programs

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