Pomona College

Pomona College's much-debated alma mater, "Hail, Pomona, Hail," has been restored as the school's official song -- with restrictions. In April, the college suspended the singing of it at graduation and other official events after concerns were raised about its history. The song does not contain any racist language although its lyrics apparently were written for a 1910 blackface minstrel show that was a baseball team fundraiser. A committee of faculty, alumni and students called for it to be replaced by a new school hymn.

Dining hall workers at Pomona College have voted to unionize, culminating a three-year campaign that thrust the small liberal arts college into controversy over immigration policy and labor rights. In the election Tuesday, 83 members of the dining hall staff cast ballots, voting 57 to 26 to join UNITE HERE, Local 11, a union that represents about 20,000 hospitality and food service workers in Southern California. “I feel very happy we made it,” said Benny Avina, 46, a catering chef who has worked at the college for 27 years, starting as a dishwasher.

Dining hall workers at Pomona College have voted to unionize, culminating a three-year campaign that thrust the small liberal arts college into controversy over immigration policy and labor rights. In the election Tuesday, 83 members of the dining hall staff cast ballots, voting 57 to 26 to join UNITE HERE, Local 11, a union that represents about 20,000 hospitality and food service workers in Southern California. “I feel very happy we made it,” said Benny Avina, 46, a catering chef who has worked at the college for 27 years, starting as a dishwasher.

On a recent evening, students at Pomona College feasted on chicken pot pie, steamed veggies, biscuits and rice. And, as is often the case, there were plenty of leftovers in the dining hall, enough for about 100 extra meals. Those leftovers, however, weren't destined for the dumpster. Instead, they were carefully packaged by dining hall workers, handed to a group of students and driven to nearby Inland Valley Hope Partners, a nonprofit shelter for people in need. Pomona College's efforts to keep prepared food from going to waste are part of a nationwide coalition of student groups called the Food Recovery Network, which estimates that about 22 million meals are thrown away at U.S. colleges every year.

The protest at Pomona College on Friday was much like a big outdoor celebration. Tables were set in the middle of the street, a mariachi played, and electrical and grocery union workers served carne asada. But beneath it simmered a dispute between dining hall workers and the administration that has placed the small liberal arts college on the map of the nation's battles over labor and immigration policy. The quarrel over a unionization effort, which had endured for two years, took a dramatic turn in December when the school fired 17 immigrant workers because they could not provide proper paperwork.

Frederick E. Sontag, a professor of philosophy and venerated mentor to three generations of students at Pomona College, where he made headlines nine years ago for forgiving a mentally ill student who had stabbed him in the neck, died Sunday at Pilgrim Place Health Services Center in Claremont. He was 84. The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Grant.

Remembering Gates Re "The warrior chief," Editorial, April 17 It's little wonder The Times' circulation keeps dropping. Your editorial blasting a devoted public servant — former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates — had nary a kind word about a man who spent decades trying to serve and protect. Surely the man did something decent in all the countless hours he worked in the Los Angeles Police Department. If I didn't know any better, I'd say The Times would think the only good thing Daryl Gates did was resign.

Pomona College has announced plans to construct new buildings, renovate and expand others and demolish Holmes Hall and Harwood and Olney dining halls. College spokesmen said a new administration building is planned on the site of Holmes Hall in the center of campus, consolidating offices now in three other buildings. A teaching theater with an auditorium, studios and offices is planned at Bonita and Amherst avenues.

A few hundred immigration activists descended Sunday on Pomona College to protest Arizona's controversial anti-illegal immigration law and the policies of commencement speaker Janet Napolitano, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Demonstrators said Napolitano has continued to expand immigration programs that they say were precursors to Arizona's law, which requires police officers to check the immigration status of anybody they stop and suspect may be here illegally.

Paulette F. Bierzychudek , associate professor of biology at Pomona College, has been awarded a $1,000 Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership Award by the Sears, Roebuck Foundation. She is one of 700 faculty members nationwide selected for the award for resourcefulness and leadership as a private college educator.

• Stanford University: Write a note to your future roommate that reveals something about you or that will help your roommate - and us - know you better. • Carleton College: Have you ever tossed around a Frisbee___, a hot potato___, an idea___? • Connecticut College: Tell us about your favorite place and why it holds special meaning for you. It can be close to home or on another continent, your kitchen or a mountaintop. • Pomona College: You are walking down the street when something catches your eye. You stop and stare for a long while, amazed and fascinated.

In a rare example of finding a meeting point between fine art and college athletics, the intramural sports field at Rice University will be retooling its lights during the next month in order to conflict less with a James Turrell Skyspace. The issue with the lights became apparent earlier this year when the field had to be closed to accommodate sunset shows at the university's Turrell Skyspace, which opened to the public in June. The piece uses the light of the sun to create two "shows" at sunrise and sunset that offer visitors a view of the sky on a large white roof over a grass berm through a 14-by-14 opening that changes colors depending on the sun's position.

Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is her latest report. The Pomona College Museum of Art has saved the best for last: the final installment of its Pacific Standard Time series, “It Happened at Pomona,” is the most engaging (often literally) and surprising of the three exhibitions.

Karl Benjamin, a painter of dazzling geometric abstractions who established a national reputation in 1959 as one of four Los Angeles-based Abstract Classicists and created a highly acclaimed body of work that celebrates the glories of color in all its variations, has died. He was 86. Benjamin died Thursday of congestive heart failure at his home in Claremont, said his daughter Beth Marie Benjamin. His work had been displayed last year in "Karl Benjamin and the Evolution of the Abstraction, 1950-1980" at the Louis Stern Fine Arts gallery in West Hollywood as part of the region-wide Pacific Standard Time exhibitions.

The last of an absorbing trio of small Pacific Standard Time shows charting an especially rambunctious moment at Pomona College between 1969 and 1973 looks at the work of nine artists who were either students or on the school's faculty. Ranging from accomplished to unresolved, the paintings, photographs, sculptures and installations often ricochet off one another in form and content, underscoring an era of ferment. At the Pomona College Museum of Art, senior curator Rebecca McGrew and Getty Research Institute specialist Glenn Phillips have chosen 53 works for Part 3 of "It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles, 1969-1973.

The protest at Pomona College on Friday was much like a big outdoor celebration. Tables were set in the middle of the street, a mariachi played, and electrical and grocery union workers served carne asada. But beneath it simmered a dispute between dining hall workers and the administration that has placed the small liberal arts college on the map of the nation's battles over labor and immigration policy. The quarrel over a unionization effort, which had endured for two years, took a dramatic turn in December when the school fired 17 immigrant workers because they could not provide proper paperwork.

Martin G. Ramirez has been appointed to the Pomona College faculty for one year as part of a program to attract minority scholars to careers in academia. Ramirez, a lecturer in biology, holds a doctorate from UC Santa Cruz. As a postdoctoral fellow, he will teach one course per term.

Pomona College is the only college in the West and one of 15 colleges nationwide chosen to receive a $480,000 grant that will create a new computer database to strengthen interdisciplinary studies. The Pew Memorial Trust Liberal Arts Enrichment Program, which last year granted $45 million to encourage academic excellence, is designed to develop curriculum innovations that will be shared with other colleges and universities.

The leading rusher in college football gets no special privileges on campus. He doesn't even have an athletic scholarship. "Definitely, there's no perks here," said Luke Sweeney, a junior running back at Division III Pomona-Pitzer. "We have to wait in really long Taco Tuesday lines at the dining hall. " The leading rusher in college football, who's averaging 203.3 yards a game for the Sagehens, isn't enrolled in remedial basketweaving. He's taking two hard-core courses in economics, his major, and one in linguistics.

Chemist Corwin Hansch, who pioneered the field of relating a molecule's chemical structure to its biological activity, an approach widely used in developing new drugs and other commercial chemicals, died in Claremont on May 8. He was 92 and had suffered from a prolonged bout with pneumonia. Hansch was known as the "father of computer-assisted molecule design" for his development of Quantitative Structure Activity Relationships, known colloquially as QSARs, which allow chemists to modify drugs and other molecules in a predictable manner to achieve desired characteristics.