Pomona College

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

Unique Traditions

The college has two unique -- and some might say bizarre -- traditions:

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'47' This number holds mystical importance for forty years of Pomona students. Two different stories about its roots exist. Campus lore suggested that at some time in the 1960's 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 1970's oral history had grown this tale into a 1950's 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 47's... 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.

Over time the phenomenon built on itself. Writer Joe Menosky 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 . The web link for a full list of Star Trek 47's is below. It is unclear whether the story that the name of the Borg race in Star Trek is based on the maze-like foreign language dormitory Oldenborg Center is accurate or apocryphal.

Related Topics:
Joe Menosky - Star Trek - The Next Generation - Deep Space Nine - Borg

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Video games, especially those by Intellivision, also displayed 47's 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.

Related Topics:
Intellivision - Don Daglow - Eddie Dombrower - Dave Warhol - Earl Weaver Baseball - Electronic Arts

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'Mufti' Again rooted somewhere in the mists of the 1960's, the 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.'"

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