CAMPUS

Organic Farm Made Official

The College’s student-conceived and student-built Organic Farm went from being a guerrilla enterprise to an officially sanctioned part of the campus after Farm supporters successfully challenged a portion of the College’s master plan that would have required it to be relocated to make room for planned athletic facilities. In May, the Board of Trustees approved a compromise that slightly reshaped the Farm’s boundaries while giving it official status. In part, this was made possible by the adoption of the Farm by the new Environmental Analysis Program and the creation in fall 2006 of the new Farms and Gardens course. The Farm’s origins are unclear, but it seems to have been started in the late 1990s by students and community members who took over a plot of fallow campus land in the Wash in secret and created a garden.

Museum of Art Renovated

The Pomona College Museum of Art was renovated in 2006, including the addition of a new, more inviting, glass-fronted opening.

First LEED Rating 

Pomona’s Seaver Biology Laboratory was awarded a silver certificate from the U.S. Green Building Council under its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) criteria. This placed the building in the top 1 percent of all academic laboratory buildings in the country in terms of environmentally responsible design. This was the first LEED rating received by a College building, but only the first. In the years to follow, all new construction projects included a goal of LEED certification and ended with gold or platinum certificates.

Top Wired College

PC Magazine rated Pomona as one of the Top 20 Wired Colleges of 2007.

ACADEMICS

General Education Reform

Pomona’s 12-year experiment with a set of 10 skills based general education requirements, known on campus as the PAC (perception, analysis and communication) requirements, came to an end when the faculty decided to return to a simpler set of breadth of study requirements beginning in 2006. 

CONSORTIUM

Johnson’s Pasture

The member institutions of The Claremont Colleges pledged to make voluntary contributions totaling about $2,450,000 to the City of Claremont for the purchase of an 183-acre recreational area known as Johnson’s Pasture in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains north of the city, provided that voters approved Measure S, empowering the city to make the purchase. The voters passed the measure, and the city purchased the land in 2007 to protect it from development. 

ELSEWHERE

• Israeli troops invaded Lebanon in response to a Hezbollah kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers.
• Twitter was launched.
• Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging by an Iraqi special tribunal.