title: Alexander Haig

text: On January 5, 2006, Haig participated in a meeting at the White House of former secretaries of defense and state to discuss U.S. foreign policy with Bush administration officials. On May 12, 2006, Haig participated in a second White House meeting with 10 former secretaries of state and defense. The meeting included briefings by Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice and was followed by a discussion with President George W. Bush. Haig's memoirs—"Inner Circles: How America Changed The World—"were published in 1992.


title: Alexander Haig

text: On February 19, 2010, a hospital spokesman revealed that the 85-year-old Haig had been hospitalized at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore since January 28 and remained in critical condition. On February 20, Haig died at the age of 85, from complications from a staphylococcal infection that he had prior to admission. According to "The New York Times", his brother, Frank Haig, said the Army was coordinating a mass at Fort Myer in Washington and an interment at Arlington National Cemetery, but both had to be delayed by about two weeks owing to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A Mass of Christian Burial was held at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., on March 2, 2010. Eulogies were given by Henry Kissinger and Sherwood D. Goldberg.


title: Alexander Haig

text: President Barack Obama said in a statement that "General Haig exemplified our finest warrior–diplomat tradition of those who dedicate their lives to public service." Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described Haig as a man who "served his country in many capacities for many years, earning honor on the battlefield, the confidence of presidents and prime ministers, and the thanks of a grateful nation."


title: Alexander Haig

text: Alexander Haig was married to Patricia (née Fox), with whom he had three children: Alexander Patrick Haig, Barbara Haig, and Brian Haig. Haig's younger brother, Frank Haig, is a Jesuit priest and professor emeritus of physics at Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland.


title: Alexander Haig

text: 2009, General and Mrs. Haig were recognized for their generous gift in support of academic programs at West Point by being inducted into the Eisenhower Society for Lifetime Giving.


title: Raj B. Shetty

text: Raj B. Shetty is an Indian actor, director, and screenwriter who works in Kannada film industry. He has directed and acted in the films, "Ondu Motteya Kathe" and "Garuda Gamana Vrishabha Vahana".


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Hirschfeld was educated in philosophy, philology and medicine. An outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and World League for Sexual Reform. He based his practice in Berlin-Charlottenburg during the Weimar period. Historian Dustin Goltz characterized the committee as having carried out "the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights". He is regarded as one of the most influential sexologists of the twentieth century.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Hirschfeld was targeted by Nazis for being Jewish and gay; he was beaten by "völkisch" activists in 1920, and in 1933 his "Institut für Sexualwissenschaft" was sacked and had its books burned by Nazis. He was forced into exile in France, where he died in 1935.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Hirschfeld was born in Kolberg in Pomerania (Kołobrzeg, Poland since 1945), in an Ashkenazi Jewish family, the son of highly regarded physician and Senior Medical Officer Hermann Hirschfeld. As a youth he attended Kolberg Cathedral School, which at the time was a Protestant school. In 1887–1888, he studied philosophy and philology in Breslau, and then from 1888 to 1892 medicine in Straßburg, Munich, Heidelberg, and Berlin. In 1892, he earned his medical degree.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: After his studies, he traveled through the United States for eight months, visiting the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and living from the proceeds of his writing for German journals. During his time in Chicago, Hirschfeld became involved with the homosexual subculture in that city. Struck by the essential similarities between the homosexual subcultures of Chicago and Berlin, Hirschfeld first developed his theory about the universality of homosexuality around the world, as he researched in books and newspaper articles about the existence of gay subcultures in Rio de Janeiro, Tangier, and Tokyo. Then he started a naturopathic practice in Magdeburg; in 1896, he moved his practice to Berlin-Charlottenburg.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Hirschfeld became interested in gay rights because many of his gay patients took their own lives. In the German language, the word for suicide is "Selbstmord" ("self-murder"), which carried more judgmental and condemnatory connotations than its English language equivalent, making the subject of suicide a taboo in 19th century Germany.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: In particular, Hirschfeld cited the story of one of his patients as a reason for his gay rights activism: a young army officer suffering from depression who killed himself in 1896, leaving behind a suicide note saying that despite his best efforts, he could not end his desires for other men, and so had ended his life out of his guilt and shame. In his suicide note, the officer wrote that he lacked the "strength" to tell his parents the "truth", and spoke of his shame of "that which nearly strangled my heart". The officer could not even bring himself to use the word "homosexuality", which he instead conspicuously referred to as "that" in his note. However, the officer mentioned at the end of his suicide note: "The thought that you [Hirschfeld] could contribute a future when the German fatherland will think of "us" in more just terms sweetens the hour of my death." Hirschfeld had been treating the officer for depression in 1895–1896, and the use of the term "us" led to speculation that a relationship existed between the two. However, the officer's use of "Sie", the formal German word for you, instead of the informal "Du", suggests Hirschfeld's relationship with his patient was strictly professional.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: At the same time, Hirschfeld was greatly affected by the trial of Oscar Wilde, which he often referred to in his writings. Hirschfeld was struck by the number of his gay patients who had "Suizidalnarben" ("scars left by suicide attempts"), and often found himself trying to give his patients a reason to live.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Magnus Hirschfeld found a balance between practicing medicine and writing about his findings. Between 1 May–15 October 1896, the "Große Berliner Gewerbeausstellung" ("Great Industrial Exhibition of Berlin") took place, which featured nine "human zoos" where people from Germany's colonies in New Guinea and Africa were put on display for the visitors to gawk at. Such exhibitions of colonial peoples were common at industrial fairs, and later after Qingdao, the Mariana Islands, and the Caroline Islands became part of the German empire, Chinese, Chamorros, and Micronesians joined the Africans and New Guineans displayed in the "human zoos". Hirschfeld, who was keenly interested in sexuality in other cultures, visited the "Große Berliner Gewerbeausstellung" and subsequently other exhibitions to inquire of the people in the "human zoos" via interpreters about the status of sexuality in their cultures. It was in 1896, after talking to the people displayed in the "human zoos" at the "Große Berliner Gewerbeausstellung", that Hirschfeld began writing what became his 1914 book "Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes" ("The Homosexuality of Men and Women"), an attempt to comprehensively survey homosexuality around the world, as part of an effort to prove that homosexuality occurred in every culture.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: After several years as a general practitioner in Magdeburg, in 1896 he issued a pamphlet, "Sappho and Socrates", on homosexual love (under the pseudonym Th. Ramien). In 1897, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee with the publisher Max Spohr (1850–1905), the lawyer Eduard Oberg (1858–1917), and the writer Franz Joseph von Bülow (1861–1915). The group aimed to undertake research to defend the rights of homosexuals and to repeal Paragraph 175, the section of the German penal code that, since 1871, had criminalized homosexuality. They argued that the law encouraged blackmail. The motto of the committee, "Justice through science", reflected Hirschfeld's belief that a better scientific understanding of homosexuality would eliminate social hostility toward homosexuals.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Within the group, some of the members rejected Hirschfeld's (and Ulrichs's) view that male homosexuals are, by nature, effeminate. Benedict Friedlaender and some others left the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and formed another group, the "Bund für männliche Kultur" or Union for Male Culture, which did not exist long. It argued that male-male love is an aspect of virile manliness, rather than a special condition.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Under Hirschfeld's leadership, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee gathered 6000 signatures from prominent Germans on a petition to overturn Paragraph 175. Signatories included Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, Käthe Kollwitz, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, August Bebel, Max Brod, Karl Kautsky, Stefan Zweig, Gerhart Hauptmann, Martin Buber, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Eduard Bernstein.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: The bill was brought before the Reichstag in 1898, but was supported only by a minority from the Social Democratic Party of Germany. August Bebel, a friend of Hirschfeld from his university days, agreed to sponsor the attempt to repeal Paragraph 175. Hirschfeld considered what would, in a later era, be described as "outing": forcing out of the closet some of the prominent and secretly homosexual lawmakers who had remained silent on the bill. He arranged for the bill to be reintroduced and, in the 1920s, it made some progress until the takeover of the Nazi Party ended all hope for any such reform.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: As part of his efforts to counter popular prejudice, Hirschfeld spoke out about the taboo subject of suicide and was the first to present statistical evidence that homosexuals were more likely to commit suicide or attempt suicide than heterosexuals. Hirschfeld prepared questionnaires that gay men could answer anonymously about homosexuality and suicide. Collating his results, Hirschfeld estimated that 3 out of every 100 gays committed suicide every year, that a quarter of gays had attempted suicide at some point in their lives and that the other three-quarters had had suicidal thoughts at some point. He used his evidence to argue that, under current social conditions in Germany, life was literally unbearable for homosexuals.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: A figure frequently mentioned by Hirschfeld to illustrate the "hell experienced by homosexuals" was Oscar Wilde, who was a well-known author in Germany, and whose trials in 1895 had been extensively covered by the German press. Hirschfeld visited Cambridge University in 1905 to meet Wilde's son, Vyvyan Holland, who had changed his surname to avoid being associated with his father. Hirschfeld noted "the name Wilde" has, since his trial, sounded like "an indecent word, which causes homosexuals to blush with shame, women to avert their eyes, and normal men to be outraged". During his visit to Britain, Hirschfeld was invited to a secret ceremony in the English countryside where a "group of beautiful, young, male students" from Cambridge gathered together wearing Wilde's prison number, C33, as a way of symbolically linking his fate to theirs, to read out aloud Wilde's poem "The Ballad of Reading Gaol". Hirschfeld found the reading of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" to be ""markerschütternd"" (shaken to the core of one's being, i.e. something that is emotionally devastating), going on to write that the poem reading was "the most earth-shattering outcry that has ever been voiced by a downtrodden soul about its own torture and that of humanity". By the end of the reading of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", Hirshfeld felt "quiet joy" as he was convinced that, despite the way that Wilde's life had been ruined, something good would eventually come of it.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: In 1905, Hirschfeld joined the "Bund für Mutterschutz" (League for the Protection of Mothers), the feminist organization founded by Helene Stöcker. He campaigned for the decriminalisation of abortion, and against policies that banned female teachers and civil servants from marrying or having children. Both Hirschfeld and Stöcker believed that there was a close connection between the causes of gay rights and women's rights, and Stöcker was much involved in the campaign to repeal Paragraph 175 while Hirschfeld campaigned for the repeal of Paragraph 218, which had banned abortion. From 1909 to 1912, Stöcker, Hirschfeld, Hedwig Dohm, and others successfully campaigned against an extension to Paragraph 175 which would have criminalised female homosexuality.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: In 1906, Hirschfeld was asked as a doctor to examine a prisoner in Neumünster to see if he was suffering from "severe nervous disturbances caused by a combination of malaria, blackwater fever, and congenital sexual anomaly". The man, a former soldier and a veteran of what Hirschfeld called the ""Hereroaufstand"" ("Herero revolt") in German Southwest Africa (modern Namibia) appeared to be suffering from what would now be considered post-traumatic stress disorder, saying that he had done terrible things in Southwest Africa, and could no longer live with himself. In 1904, the Herero and Namaqua peoples who had been steadily pushed off their land to make way for German settlers, had revolted, causing Kaiser Wilhelm II to dispatch General Lothar von Trotha to wage a "war of annihilation" to exterminate the Herero and Namaqua in what has since become known as the Herero and Namaqua genocide. The genocide came to widespread attention when the SPD leader August Bebel criticized the government on the floor of the "Reichstag", saying the government did not have the right to exterminate the Herero just because they were Black. Hirschfeld did not mention his diagnosis of the prisoner, nor he did mention in detail the source of the prisoner's guilt about his actions in Southwest Africa; the German scholar Heike Bauer criticized him for his seeming unwillingness to see the connection between the Herero genocide and the prisoner's guilt, which had caused him to engage in a petty crime wave.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Hirschfeld's position, that homosexuality was normal and natural, made him a highly controversial figure at the time, involving him in vigorous debates with other academics, who regarded homosexuality as unnatural and wrong. One of Hirschfeld's leading critics was Austrian Baron Christian von Ehrenfels, who advocated radical changes to society and sexuality to combat the supposed "Yellow Peril", and saw Hirschfeld's theories as a challenge to his view of sexuality. Ehrenfels argued that there were a few "biologically degenerate" homosexuals who lured otherwise "healthy boys" into their lifestyle, making homosexuality into a choice and a wrong one at that time.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: At the same time, Hirschfeld became involved in a debate with a number of anthropologists about the supposed existence of the "Hottentottenschürze" ("Hottentot apron"), namely the belief that the Khoekoe (known to Westerners as Hottentots) women of southern Africa had abnormally enlarged labia, which made them inclined toward lesbianism. Hirschfeld argued there was no evidence that the Khoekoe women had abnormally large labia, whose supposed existence had fascinated so many Western anthropologists at the time, and that, other than being Black, the bodies of Khoekoe women were no different from German women. One Khoekoe woman, Sarah Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus", did have relatively large buttocks and labia, compared to Northern European women, and had been exhibited at a freak show in Europe in the early 19th century, which was the origin of this belief about the Khoikhoi women. Hirschfeld wrote: "The differences appear minimal compared to what is shared" between Khoekoe and German women. Turning the argument of the anthropologists on their head, Hirschfeld argued that, if same-sex relationships were common among Khoekoe women, and if the bodies of Khoekoe women were essentially the same as Western women, then Western women must have the same tendencies. Hirschfeld's theories about a spectrum of sexuality existing in all of the world's cultures implicitly undercut the binary theories about the differences between various races that was the basis of the claim of white supremacy. However, Bauer wrote that Hirschfeld's theories about the universality of homosexuality paid little attention to cultural contexts, and criticized him for his remarks that Hausa women in Nigeria were well known for their lesbian tendencies and would have been executed for their sapphic acts before British rule, as assuming that imperialism was always good for the colonized.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Hirschfeld played a prominent role in the Harden–Eulenburg affair of 1906–09, which became the most widely publicized sex scandal in Imperial Germany. During the libel trial in 1907, when General Kuno von Moltke sued the journalist Maximilian Harden, after the latter had run an article accusing Moltke of having a homosexual relationship with the politically powerful Prince Philipp von Eulenburg, who was the Kaiser's best friend, Hirschfeld testified for Harden. In his role as an expert witness, Hirschfeld testified that Moltke was gay and, thus, what Harden had written was true. Hirschfeld – who wanted to make homosexuality legal in Germany – believed that proving Army officers like Moltke were gay would help his case for legalization. He also testified that he believed there was nothing wrong with Moltke.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Most notably, Hirschfeld testified that "homosexuality was part of the plan of nature and creation just like normal love." Hirschfeld's testimony caused outrage all over Germany. The "Vossische Zeitung" newspaper condemned Hirschfeld in an editorial as "a freak who acted for freaks in the name of pseudoscience". The "Mūnchener Neuesten Nachrichten" newspaper declared in an editorial: "Dr. Hirschfeld makes public propaganda under the cover of science, which does nothing but poison our people. Real science should fight against this!" A notable witness at the trial was Lilly von Elbe, former wife of Moltke, who testified that her husband had only had sex with her twice in their entire marriage. Elbe spoke with remarkable openness for the period of her sexual desires and her frustration with a husband who was only interested in having sex with Eulenburg. Elbe's testimony was marked by moments of low comedy when it emerged that she had taken to attacking Moltke with a frying pan in vain attempts to make him have sex with her. The fact that General von Moltke was unable to defend himself from his wife's attacks was taken as proof that he was deficient in his masculinity, which many saw as confirming his homosexuality. At the time, the subject of female sexuality was taboo, and Elbe's testimony was controversial, with many saying that Elbe must be mentally ill because of her willingness to acknowledge her sexuality. At the time, it was generally believed that women should be "chaste" and "pure", and not have any sort of sexuality at all. Letters to the newspapers at the time, from both men and women, overwhelmingly condemned Elbe for her "disgusting" testimony concerning her sexuality. As an expert witness, Hirschfeld also testified that female sexuality was natural, and Elbe was just a normal woman who was in no way mentally ill. After the jury ruled in favor of Harden, Judge Hugo Isenbiel was enraged by the jury's decision, which he saw as expressing approval for Hirschfeld. He overturned the verdict under the grounds that homosexuals "have the morals of dogs", and insisted that this verdict could not be allowed to stand.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: After the verdict was overturned, a second trial found Harden guilty of libel. At the second trial, Hirschfeld again testified as an expert witness, but this time, he was much less certain than he had been at the first trial about Moltke's homosexuality. Hirschfeld testified that Moltke and Eulenburg had an "intimate" friendship that was homoerotic in nature but not sexual, as he had testified at the first trial. Hirschfeld also testified that, though he still believed female sexuality was normal, Elbe was suffering from hysteria caused by a lack of sex, and so the court should discount her stories about a sexual relationship between Moltke and Eulenburg. Hirschfeld had been threatened by the Prussian government with having his medical license revoked if he testified as an expert witness again along the same lines that he had at the first trial, and possibly prosecuted for violating Paragraph 175. The trial was a libel suit against Harden by Moltke, but much of the testimony had concerned Eulenburg, whose status as the best friend of Wilhelm II meant that the scandal threatened to involve the Kaiser. Moreover, far from precipitating increased tolerance as Hirschfeld had expected, the scandal led to a major homophobic and anti-Semitic backlash, and Hirschfeld's biographer Elena Mancini speculated that Hirschfeld wanted to bring to an end an affair that was hindering rather helping the cause for gay rights.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Because Eulenburg was a prominent anti-Semite and Hirschfeld was a Jew, during the affair, the "völkisch" movement came out in support of Eulenburg, whom they portrayed as an Aryan heterosexual, framed by false allegations of homosexuality by Hirschfeld and Harden. Various "völkisch" leaders, most notably the radical anti-Semitic journalist Theodor Fritsch, used the Eulenburg affair as a chance to "settle the accounts" with the Jews. As a gay Jew, Hirschfeld was relentlessly vilified by the "völkisch" newspapers. Outside Hirschfeld's house in Berlin, posters were affixed by "völkisch" activists, which read "Dr. Hirschfeld A Public Danger: The Jews are Our Undoing!". In Nazi Germany, the official interpretation of the Eulenburg affair was that Eulenburg was a straight Aryan whose career was destroyed by false claims of being gay by Jews like Hirschfeld. After the scandal had ended, Hirschfeld concluded that, far from helping the gay rights movement as he had hoped, the ensuing backlash set the movement back. The conclusion drawn by the German government was the opposite of the one that Hirschfeld wanted; the fact that prominent men like General von Moltke and Eulenburg were gay did not lead the government to repeal Paragraph 175 as Hirschfeld had hoped and, instead, the government decided that Paragraph 175 was being enforced with insufficient vigor, leading to a crackdown on homosexuals that was unprecedented and would not be exceeded until the Nazi era.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: In 1914, Hirschfeld was swept up by the national enthusiasm for the "Burgfrieden" ("Peace within a castle under siege"), as the sense of national solidarity was known where almost all Germans rallied to the Fatherland. Initially pro-war, Hirschfeld started to turn against the war in 1915, moving toward a pacifist position. In his 1915 pamphlet, "Warum Hassen uns die Völker?" ("Why do other nations hate us?"), Hirschfeld answered his own question by arguing that it was the greatness of Germany that excited envy from other nations, especially Great Britain, and so had supposedly caused them to come together to destroy the "Reich". Hirschfeld accused Britain of starting the war in 1914 "out of envy at the development and size of the German Empire". "Warum Hassen uns die Völker?" was characterized by a chauvinist and ultra-nationalist tone, together with a crass Anglophobia that has often embarrassed Hirschfeld's modern admirers such as Charlotte Wolff, who called the pamphlet a "perversion of the values which Hirschfeld had always stood for".


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: As a Jewish homosexual, Hirschfeld was acutely aware that many Germans did not consider him to be a "proper" German, or even a German at all; so, he reasoned that taking an ultra-patriotic stance might break down prejudices by showing that German Jews and/or homosexuals could also be good, patriotic Germans, rallying to the cry of the Fatherland. By 1916, Hirschfeld was writing pacifist pamphlets, calling for an immediate end to the war. In his 1916 pamphlet "Kriegspsychologisches" ("The Psychology of War"), Hirschfeld was far more critical of the war than he had been in 1915, emphasizing the suffering and trauma caused by it. He also expressed the opinion that nobody wanted to take responsibility for the war because its horrors were "superhuman in size". He declared that "it is not enough that the war ends with peace; it must end with reconciliation". In late 1918, Hirschfeld together with his sister, Franziska Mann, co-wrote a pamphlet "Was jede Frau vom Wahlrecht wissen muß!"" ("What every woman needs to know about the right to vote!") hailing the November Revolution for granting German women the right to vote and announced the "eyes of the world are now resting on German women".


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: In 1920, Hirschfeld was badly beaten by a group of "völkisch" activists who attacked him on the street; he was initially declared dead when the police arrived. In 1921, Hirschfeld organised the First Congress for Sexual Reform, which led to the formation of the World League for Sexual Reform. Congresses were held in Copenhagen (1928), London (1929), Vienna (1930), and Brno (1932).


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Hirschfeld was both quoted and caricatured in the press as a vociferous expert on sexual matters; during his 1931 tour of the United States, the Hearst newspaper chain dubbed him "the Einstein of Sex". He identified as a campaigner and a scientist, investigating and cataloging many varieties of sexuality, not just homosexuality. He developed a system which categorised 64 possible types of sexual intermediary, ranging from masculine, heterosexual male to feminine, homosexual male, including those he described under the term transvestite (Ger. "Transvestit"), which he coined in 1910, and those he described under the term "transsexuals", a term he coined in 1923. He also made a distinction between "transsexualism" and intersexuality.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: At this time, Hirschfeld and the "Institute for Sexual Sciences" issued a number of transvestite passes to trans people in order to prevent them from being harassed by the police.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Hirschfeld co-wrote and acted in the 1919 film "Anders als die Andern" ("Different From the Others"), in which Conrad Veidt played one of the first homosexual characters ever written for cinema. The film had a specific gay rights law reform agenda; after Veidt's character is blackmailed by a male prostitute, he eventually comes out rather than continuing to make the blackmail payments. His career is destroyed and he is driven to suicide.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Hirschfeld played himself in "Anders als die Andern", where the title cards have him say: "The persecution of homosexuals belongs to the same sad chapter of history in which the persecutions of witches and heretics is inscribed... Only with the French Revolution did a complete change come about. Everywhere where the Code Napoléon was introduced, the laws against homosexuals were repealed, for they were considered a violation of the rights of the individual... In Germany, however, despite more than fifty years of scientific research, legal discrimination against homosexuals continues unabated... May justice soon prevail over injustice in this area, science conquer superstition, love achieve victory over hatred!"


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: In May 1919, when the film premiered in Berlin, the First World War was still a very fresh memory and German conservatives, who already hated Hirschfeld, seized upon his Francophile speech in the film praising France for legalizing homosexuality in 1792 as evidence that gay rights were "un-German".


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: At the end of the film, when the protagonist Paul Körner commits suicide, his lover Kurt is planning on killing himself, when Hirschfeld appears to tell him: "If you want to honor the memory of your dead friend, you must not take your own life, but instead preserve it to change the prejudices whose victim – one of the countless many – this dead man was. That is the task of the living I assign you. Just as Zola struggled on behalf of a man who innocently languished in prison, what matters now is to restore honor and justice to the many thousands before us, with us, and after us. Through knowledge to justice!" The reference to Émile Zola's role in the Dreyfus affair was intended to draw a parallel between homophobia and anti-Semitism, while Hirschfeld's repeated use of the word "us" was an implied admission of his own homosexuality.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: The anti-suicide message of "Anders als die Andern" reflected Hirschfeld's interest in the subject of the high suicide rate among homosexuals, and was intended to give hope to gay audiences. The film ends with Hirschfeld opening a copy of the penal code of the "Reich" and striking out Paragraph 175 with a giant X.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Under the more liberal atmosphere of the newly founded Weimar Republic, Hirschfeld purchased a villa not far from the Reichstag building in Berlin for his new "Institut für Sexualwissenschaft" (Institute of Sexual Research), which opened on 6 July 1919. In Germany, the "Reich" government made laws, but the "Länder" governments enforced the laws, meaning it was up to the "Länder" governments to enforce Paragraph 175. Until the November Revolution of 1918, Prussia had a three-class voting system that effectively disfranchised most ordinary people, and allowed the "Junkers" to dominate Prussia. After the November Revolution, universal suffrage came to Prussia, which became a stronghold of the Social Democrats. The SPD believed in repealing Paragraph 175, and the Social Democratic Prussian government headed by Otto Braun ordered the Prussian police not to enforce Paragraph 175, making Prussia into a haven for homosexuals all over Germany.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: The Institute housed Hirschfeld's immense archives and library on sexuality and provided educational services and medical consultations; the clinical staff included psychiatrists Felix Abraham and Arthur Kronfeld, gynecologist Ludwig Levy-Lenz, dermatologist and endocrinologist Bernhard Schapiro, and dermatologist Friedrich Wertheim. The institute also housed the Museum of Sex, an educational resource for the public, which is reported to have been visited by school classes. Hirschfeld himself lived at the Institution on the second floor with his partner, Karl Giese, together with his sister Recha Tobias (1857–1942). Giese and Hirschfeld were a well-known couple in the gay scene in Berlin where Hirschfeld was popularly known as "Tante Magnesia". "Tante" ("aunt") was a German slang expression for a gay man but did not mean, as some claim, that Hirschfeld himself cross-dressed.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: People from around Europe and beyond came to the institute to gain a clearer understanding of their sexuality. Christopher Isherwood writes about his and W. H. Auden's visit in his book "Christopher and His Kind"; they were calling on Francis Turville-Petre, a friend of Isherwood's who was an active member of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. Other celebrated visitors included German novelist and playwright Gerhart Hauptmann, German artist Christian Schad, French writers René Crevel and André Gide, Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, and American poet Elsa Gidlow.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: In addition, a number of noted individuals lived for longer or shorter periods of time in the various rooms available for rent or as free accommodations in the Institute complex. Among the residents were Isherwood and Turville-Petre; literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin; actress and dancer Anita Berber; Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch; Willi Münzenberg, a member of the German Parliament and a press officer for the Communist Party of Germany; Dora Richter, one of the first transgender patients to receive sex reassignment surgery at the institute, and Lili Elbe. Richter had been born Rudolf Richter and being arrested for cross-dressing had come to the institute for help. Hirschfeld had coined the term transvestite in 1910 to describe what today would be called transgender people, and the institution became a haven for transgender people, where Hirschfeld offered them shelter from abuse, performed surgeries, and gave otherwise unemployable transgender people jobs, albeit of a menial type, mostly as "maids".


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: The Institute and Hirschfeld's work are depicted in Rosa von Praunheim's feature film "Der Einstein des Sex" ("The Einstein of Sex", Germany, 1999; English subtitled version available). Although inspired by Hirschfeld's life, the film is fictional. It contains invented characters and incidents and attributes motives and sentiments to Hirschfeld and others on the basis of little or no historical evidence. Hirschfeld biographer Ralf Dose notes, for instance, that "the figure of 'Dorchen' in Rosa von Praunheim's film "The Einstein of Sex" is complete fiction."


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: In March 1930, the Social Democratic chancellor Hermann Müller was overthrown by the intrigues of General Kurt von Schleicher. "Presidential" governments, responsible only to the President Paul von Hindenburg, pushed German politics in a more right-wing, authoritarian direction. In 1929, the Müller government had come very close to repealing Paragraph 175, when the "Reichstag" justice committee voted to repeal Paragraph 175. However, the Müller government fell before it could submit the repeal motion to the floor of the "Reichstag". Under the rule of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning and his successor, Franz von Papen, the state became increasingly hostile toward gay rights campaigners such as Hirschfeld, who began to spend more time abroad. Quite apart from the increased homophobia, Hirschfeld also became involved in a bitter debate within the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, as the repeal bill championed by Müller also made homosexual prostitution illegal, which badly divided the committee. Hirschfeld had always argued that "what is natural cannot be immoral" and, since homosexuality was in his view natural, it should be legal. Connecting the question of the legality of homosexuality to the legality of prostitution was a blurring of the issue, since these were different matters. Brüning, a conservative Catholic on the right-wing of the "Zentrum" party, who replaced Müller in March 1930, was openly hostile toward gay rights and the fall of Müller ended the possibility of repealing Paragraph 175.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: In 1930, Hirschfeld predicted that there would be no future for people like himself in Germany, and he would have to move abroad. In November 1930, Hirschfeld arrived in New York City, ostensibly on a speaking tour about sex, but in fact to see if it was possible for him to settle in the United States. Significantly, in his speeches on this American tour, Hirschfeld, when speaking in German, called for the legalization of homosexuality, but when speaking in English did not mention the subject of homosexuality, instead urging Americans to be more open-minded about heterosexual sex. The "New York Times" described Hirschfeld as having come to America to "study the marriage question", while the German language "New Yorker Volkszeitung" newspaper described Hirschfeld as wanting to "discuss love's natural turns" – the phrase "love's natural turns" was Hirschfeld's way of presenting his theory that there was a wide spectrum of human sexuality, all of which were "natural". Hirschfeld realized that most Americans did not want to hear about his theory of homosexuality as natural. Aware of a strong xenophobic tendency in the United States, where foreigners seen as troublemakers were unwelcome, Hirschfeld tailored his message to American tastes.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: In an interview with the Germanophile American journalist George Sylvester Viereck for the "Milwaukee Sentinel" done in late November 1930 that epitomised his "straight turn" in America, Hirschfeld was presented as a sex expert whose knowledge could improve the sex lives of married American couples. The "Milwaukee Sentinel" was part of the newspaper chain owned by William Randolph Hearst, which initially promoted Hirschfeld in America, reflecting the old adage that "sex sells". In the interview with Viereck, Hirschfeld was presented as the wise "European expert on romantic love" who had come to teach heterosexual American men how to enjoy sex, claiming there was a close connection between sexual and emotional intimacy. Clearly intending to flatter the egos of a heterosexual American male audience, Hirschfeld praised the drive and ambition of American men, who were so successful at business, but stated that American men needed to divert some of their energy to their sex lives. Hirschfeld added, he had seen signs that American men were now starting to develop their "romantic sides" as European men had long since done, and he had come to the United States to teach American men how to love their women properly. When Viereck objected that the U.S. was in the middle of the Great Depression, Hirschfeld replied he was certain that United States would soon recover, thanks to the relentless drive of American men.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: At least part of the reason for his "straight turn" was financial; a Dutch firm had been marketing Titus Pearls ("Titus-Perlen") pills, which were presented in Europe as a cure for "scattered nerves" and in the United States as an aphrodisiac, and had been using Hirschfeld's endorsement to help with advertising campaign there. Most Americans knew of Hirschfeld only as a "world-known authority on sex" who had endorsed the Titus Pearls pills, which were alleged to improve orgasms for both men and women. Since Hirschfeld's books never sold well, the money he was paid for endorsing the Titus Pearls pills were a major source of income for him, which he was to lose in 1933 when the manufacturer of the pills ceased using his endorsement in order to stay in the German market. In a second interview with Viereck in February 1931, Hirschfeld was presented by him as the "Einstein of Sex", which was again part of the marketing effort of Hirschfeld's "straight turn" in America. At times, Hirschfeld returned to his European message, when he planned to deliver a talk at the bohemian Dill Pickle Club in Chicago on "homosexuality with beautiful revealing pictures", which was banned by the city as indecent. In San Francisco, Hirschfeld visited San Quentin prison to meet Thomas Mooney, whose belief in his innocence he proclaimed to the press afterward, and asked for his release. Unfortunately for Hirschfeld, the Hearst newspapers, which specialized in taking a sensationalist, right-wing, populist line on the news, dug up his statements in Germany calling for gay rights, causing a sudden shift in tone from more or less friendly to hostile, effectively ending any chance of Hirschfeld being allowed to stay in the United States.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: After his American tour, Hirschfeld went to Asia in February 1931. Hirschfeld had been invited to Japan by Keizō Dohi, a German-educated Japanese doctor who spoke fluent German and who worked at Hirschfeld's institute for a time in the 1920s. In Japan, Hirchfeld again tailored his speeches to local tastes, saying nothing about gay rights, and merely argued that a greater frankness about sexual matters would prevent venereal diseases. Hirschfeld sought out an old friend, S. Iwaya, a Japanese doctor who lived in Berlin in 1900–02 and who joined the Scientific-Humanitarian committee during his time there. Iwaya took Hirschfeld to the "Meiji-za" to introduce him to the Kabuki theater. Hirschfeld become interested in the Kabuki theater, where the female characters are played by men. One of the Kabuki actors, speaking to Hirschfeld via Iwaya, who served as the translator, was most insistent about asking him if he really looked like a woman on stage and was he effeminate enough as an actor. Hirschfeld noted that no one in Japan looked down on Kabuki actors who played female characters; on the contrary, they were popular figures with the public. Hirschfeld also met a number of Japanese feminists, such as Shidzue Katō and Fusae Ichikawa, whom he praised for their efforts to give Japanese women the right to vote. This greatly annoyed the Japanese government, which did not appreciate a foreigner criticizing the denial of female suffrage. Shortly before leaving Tokyo for China, Hirschfeld expressed the hope that his host and translator, Wilhelm Grundert, the director of the German-Japanese Cultural Institute, be made a professor at a German university. Grundert joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and, in 1936, was made a professor of Japanese studies at the University of Hamburg and, in 1938, become the chancellor of Hamburg university, all the while denouncing his former friend Hirschfeld as a "pervert". In Shanghai, Hirschfeld began a relationship with a 23-year-old Chinese man studying sexology, Li Shiu Tong (also known by his nickname Tao Li), who remained his partner for the rest of his life. Hirschfeld promised Tao that he would introduce him to German culture, saying he wanted to take him to a "Bavarian beer hall" to show him how German men drank. Tao's parents, who knew about their son's sexual orientation and accepted his relationship with Hirschfeld, threw a farewell party when the two left China, with Tao's father expressing the hope that his son would become the "Hirschfeld of China".


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: After staying in the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia), where Hirschfeld caused an uproar by speech comparing Dutch imperialism to slavery, Hirschfeld arrived in India in September 1931. In Allahabad, Hirschfeld met Jawaharlal Nehru and gave speeches supporting the Indian independence movement, stating "it is one of the biggest injustices in the world that one of the oldest civilized nations... cannot rule independently". However, Hirschfeld's Indian speeches were mainly concerned with attacking the 1927 book "Mother India" by the white supremacist American author Katherine Mayo, where she painted an unflattering picture of sexuality in India as brutal and perverted, as "England-friendly propaganda". As Mayo's book had caused much controversy in India, Hirschfeld's speeches defending Indians against her accusations were well received. Hirschfeld, who was fluent in English, made a point of quoting from the articles written by W. T. Stead in "The Pall Mall Gazette" in 1885, exposing rampant child prostitution in London as proving that sexuality in Britain could also be brutal and perverted: a matter which, he noted, did not interest Mayo in the slightest. Hirschfeld was very interested in the subject of Indian sexuality or, as he called it, "the Indian art of love". Hirschfeld's main guide to India was Girindrasekhar Bose and, in general, Hirschfeld's contacts were limited to the English-speaking Indian elite, as he did not speak Hindi or any other Indian languages. While staying in Patna, Hirschfeld drew up a will naming Tao as his main beneficiary and asking Tao, if he should die, to take his ashes to be buried at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: In Egypt, where Hirschfeld and Tao traveled to next, arriving in November 1931, Hirschfeld wrote "to the Arabs... homoerotic love practice is something natural and that Mohammad could not change this attitude". In Cairo, Hirschfeld and Tao met the Egyptian feminist leader Huda Sha'arawi-who stopped wearing the Muslim veil in 1923 and popularized going unveiled which, for Hirschfeld, illustrated how gender roles could change. In a rebuke to Western notions of superiority, Hirschfeld wrote "the average ethical and intellectual levels of the Egyptians was equal to that of the European nations". Hirschfeld's visit to the Palestine Mandate (present-day Palestine and Israel) marked one of the few times when he publicly referred to his Jewishness saying, as a Jew, it was greatly moving to visit Jerusalem. Hirschfeld was not a religious Jew, stating that "Gottesfurcht" ("fear of God", i.e. religious belief) was irrational, but that he did feel a certain sentimental attachment to Palestine. In general, Hirschfeld was supportive of Zionism, but expressed concern about what he regarded as certain chauvinist tendencies in the Zionist movement and he deplored the adoption of Hebrew as the "lingua franca" saying, if only the Jews of Palestine spoke German rather than Hebrew, he would have stayed. In March 1932, Hirschfeld arrived in Athens, where he told journalists that, regardless of whether Hindenburg or Hitler won the presidential election that month, he probably would not return to Germany, as both men were equally homophobic.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: On 20 July 1932, the Chancellor Franz von Papen carried out a coup that deposed the Braun government in Prussia, and appointed himself the "Reich" commissioner for the state. A conservative Catholic who had long been a vocal critic of homosexuality, Papen ordered the Prussian police to start enforcing Paragraph 175 and to crack down in general on "sexual immorality" in Prussia. The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft remained open, but under Papen's rule, the police began to harass people associated with it.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: On 30 January 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor. Less than four months after the Nazis took power, Hirschfeld's Institute was sacked. On the morning of 6 May, a group of university students belonging to the National Socialist Student League stormed the institution, shouting ""Brenne Hirschfeld"!" ("Burn Hirschfeld!") and began to beat up its staff and smash up the premises. In the afternoon, the SA came to the institute, carrying out a more systematic attack, removing all volumes from the library and storing them for a book-burning event which was to be held four days later. In the evening, the Berlin police arrived at the institution and announced that it was closed forever.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: By the time of the book burning, Hirschfeld had long since left Germany for a speaking tour that took him around the world; he never returned to Germany. In March 1932, he stopped briefly in Athens, spent several weeks in Vienna and then settled in Zurich, Switzerland, in August 1932. While he was there, he worked on a book that recounted his experiences and observations while he was on his world tour and it was published in 1933 as "Die Weltreise eines Sexualforschers" (Brugg, Switzerland: Bözberg-Verlag, 1933). It was published in an English translation in the United States under the title "Men and Women: The World Journey of a Sexologist" (New York City: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1935) and in England under the title "Women East and West: Impressions of a Sex Expert" (London: William Heinemann Medical Books, 1935).


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Hirschfeld stayed near Germany, hoping that he would be able to return to Berlin if the country's political situation improved. With the Nazi regime's unequivocal rise to power coinciding with the completion of his work on his tour book, he decided to go into exile in France. On his 65th birthday, 14 May 1933, Hirschfeld arrived in Paris, where he lived in a luxury apartment building on 24 Avenue Charles Floquet, facing the Champ de Mars. Hirschfeld lived with Li and Giese. In 1934, Giese was involved in a dispute by a swimming pool that Hirschfeld called "trifling", but it led French authorities to expel him. Giese's fate left Hirschfeld very depressed.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: A year-and-a-half after arriving in France, in November 1934, Hirschfeld moved south to Nice, a seaside resort on the Mediterranean coast. He lived in a luxurious apartment building with a view of the sea across an enormous garden on the Promenade des Anglais. Throughout his stay in France, he continued researching, writing, campaigning and working to establish a French successor to his lost institute in Berlin. Hirschfeld's sister, Recha Tobias, did not leave Germany and died in the Terezín Ghetto on 28 September 1942 (the cause of death entered in her death certificate was "heart weakness").


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: While in France, Hirschfeld finished a book that he had been writing during his world tour, "Rassismus" ("Racism"). It was published posthumously in English in 1938. Hirschfeld wrote that the purpose of the book was to explore "the racial theory which underlines the doctrine of racial war", saying that he himself was "numbered among the many thousands who have fallen victim to the practical realization of this theory."


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Unlike many who saw the "völkisch" ideology of the Nazi regime as an aberration and a retrogression from modernity, Hirschfeld insisted that it had deep roots, going back to the German Enlightenment in the 18th century, and it was a part of modernity rather than an aberration from it. He added that, in the 19th century, an ideology that divided all of humanity into biologically different races – white, black, yellow, brown, and red – as devised by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach – served as a way of turning prejudices into a "universal truth", apparently validated by science. In turn, Hirschfeld held the view that this pseudoscientific way of dividing humanity was the basis of Western thinking about modernity, with whites being praised as the "civilized" race in contrast to the other races, which were dismissed for their "barbarism"; such thinking was used to justify white supremacy.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: In this way, he argued that the "völkisch" racism of the National Socialist regime was only an extreme variant of prejudices that were held throughout the Western world, and the differences between Nazi ideology and the racism that was practiced in other nations were differences in degree rather than differences in kind. Hirschfeld argued against this way of seeing the world, writing "if it were practical, we should certainly do well to eradicate the use of the word 'race' as far as subdivisions of the human species are concerned; or if we do use it in this way, to put it into quote marks to show it is questionable".


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: The last of Hirschfeld's books to be published during his lifetime, "L'Ame et l'amour, psychologie sexologique" [The Human Spirit and Love: Sexological Psychology] (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), was published in French in late April 1935; it was his only book that was never published in a German-language edition. In the book's preface, he described his hopes for his new life in France:


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: In search of sanctuary, I have found my way to that country, the nobility of whose traditions, and whose ever-present charm, have already been as balm to my soul. I shall be glad and grateful if I can spend some few years of peace and repose in France and Paris, and still more grateful to be enabled to repay the hospitality accorded to me, by making available those abundant stores of knowledge acquired throughout my career.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: On his 67th birthday, 14 May 1935, Hirschfeld died of a heart attack in his apartment at the Gloria Mansions I building at 63 Promenade des Anglais in Nice. His body was cremated, and the ashes interred in a simple tomb in the Caucade Cemetery in Nice. The upright headstone in gray granite is inset with a bronze bas-relief portrait of Hirschfeld in profile by German sculptor and decorative artist Arnold Zadikow (1884–1943), who like Hirschfeld was a native of the town of Kolberg. The slab covering the tomb is engraved with Hirschfeld's Latin motto, ""Per Scientiam ad Justitiam"" ("through science to justice"). (The Caucade Cemetery is likewise the location of the grave of surgeon and sexual-rejuvenation proponent Serge Voronoff, whose work Hirschfeld had discussed in his own publications.)


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: On 14 May 2010, to mark the 75th anniversary of Hirschfeld's death, a French national organization, the Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle (MDH), in partnership with the new LGBT Community Center of Nice (Centre LGBT Côte d'Azur), organized a formal delegation to the cemetery. Speakers recalled Hirschfeld's life and work and laid a large bouquet of pink flowers on his tomb; the ribbon on the bouquet was inscribed ""Au pionnier de nos causes. Le MDH et le Centre LGBT"" ("To the pioneer of our causes. The MDH and the LGBT Center").


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: According to "Shtetl", Hirschfeld's "radical ideas changed the way Germans thought about sexuality." American Henry Gerber, attached to the Allied Army of Occupation following World War I, became impressed by Hirschfeld and absorbed many of the doctor's ideas. Upon his return to the United States, Gerber was inspired to form the short-lived Chicago-based Society for Human Rights in 1924, the first known gay rights organization in the nation. In turn, a partner of one of the former members of the Society communicated the existence of the society to Los Angeles resident Harry Hay in 1929; Hay would go on to help establish the Mattachine Society in 1950, the first national homosexual rights organization to operate for many years in the United States.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: In 1979, the National LGBT Federation established the Hirschfeld Centre, Ireland's second gay and lesbian community centre. Although badly damaged by a 1987 fire, the centre continued to house the "Gay Community News" magazine until 1997.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: In 1982, a group of German researchers and activists founded the Magnus Hirschfeld Society (Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft e.V.) in West Berlin, in anticipation of the approaching 50th anniversary of the destruction of Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science. Ten years later, the society established a Berlin-based center for research on the history of sexology. Since the late 20th century, researchers associated with the Magnus Hirschfeld Society have succeeded in tracking down previously dispersed and lost records and artifacts of Hirschfeld's life and work. They have brought together many of these materials at the society's archives in Berlin. At an exhibition at the Schwules Museum in Berlin from 7 December 2011 to 31 March 2012, the society publicly displayed a selection of these collections for the first time.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: The German Society for Social-Scientific Sexuality Research established the Magnus Hirschfeld Medal in 1990. The Society awards the Medal in two categories, contributions to sexual research and contributions to sexual reform.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: The Hirschfeld Eddy Foundation, established in Germany in 2007, is named for Hirschfeld and lesbian activist FannyAnn Eddy.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: In August 2011, after 30 years of advocacy by the Magnus Hirschfeld Society and other associations and individuals, the Federal Cabinet of Germany granted 10 million euros to establish the Magnus Hirschfeld National Foundation (Bundesstiftung Magnus Hirschfeld), a foundation to support research and education about the life and work of Magnus Hirschfeld, the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, German LGBT culture and community, and ways to counteract prejudice against LGBT people; the Federal Ministry of Justice (Germany) was expected to contribute an additional 5 million euros, bringing the initial endowment of the foundation to a total of 15 million euros.


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Magnus Hirschfeld has been portrayed in a number of works of popular culture both during his lifetime and subsequently. Following is a sampling of genres and titles:


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Hirschfeld was a frequent target of caricatures in the popular press during his lifetime. Historian James Steakley reproduces several examples in his German-language book "Die Freunde des Kaisers. Die Eulenburg-Affäre im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Karikaturen" (Hamburg: MännerschwarmSkript, 2004). Additional examples appear in the French-language book "Derrière "lui" (L'Homosexualité en Allemagne)" (Paris: E. Bernard, [1908]) by .


title: Magnus Hirschfeld

text: Hirschfeld's works are listed in the following bibliography, which is extensive but not comprehensive:


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona College ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Claremont, California. It was established in 1887 by a group of Congregationalists who wanted to recreate a "college of the New England type" in Southern California. In 1925, it became the founding member of the Claremont Colleges consortium of adjacent, affiliated institutions.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona is a four-year undergraduate institution that approximately students. It offers 48 majors in liberal arts disciplines and roughly 650 courses, as well as access to more than 2,000 additional courses at the other Claremont Colleges. Its campus is in a residential community east of downtown Los Angeles, near the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona has the lowest acceptance rate of any U.S. liberal arts college and is considered the most prestigious liberal arts college in the American West and one of the most prestigious in the country. It has a $ endowment , making it the seventh-wealthiest college or university in the U.S. on a per student basis. Nearly all students live on campus, and the student body is noted for its racial, geographic, and socioeconomic diversity. The college's athletics teams, the Sagehens, compete jointly with Pitzer College in the SCIAC, a Division III conference.


title: Pomona College

text: Prominent alumni of Pomona include Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony award winners; U.S. Senators, ambassadors, and other federal officials; Pulitzer Prize recipients; billionaire executives; a Nobel Prize laureate; National Academies members; and Olympic athletes. The college is a top producer of Fulbright scholars and recipients of other fellowships.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona College was established as a coeducational and nonsectarian Christian institution on October 14, 1887, amidst a real estate boom and anticipated population influx precipitated by the arrival of a transcontinental railroad to Southern California. Its founders, a regional group of Congregationalists, sought to create a "college of the New England type", emulating the institutions where many of them had been educated. Classes first began at Ayer Cottage, a rental house in Pomona, California, on September 12, 1888, with a permanent campus planned at Piedmont Mesa four miles north of the city. That year, as the real estate bubble burst, making the Piedmont campus financially untenable, the college was offered the site of an unfinished hotel (later renamed Sumner Hall) in the nearby, recently founded town of Claremont. It moved there but kept its name. Trustee Charles B. Sumner led the college during its first years, helping hire its first official president, Cyrus G. Baldwin, in 1890. The first graduating class, in 1894, had 11 members.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona suffered through a severe financial crisis during its early years, but raised enough money to add several buildings to its campus. Although the first Asian and black students enrolled in 1897 and 1900, respectively, the student body (like most others of the era) remained almost all white throughout this period. In 1905, during president George A. Gates' tenure, the college acquired a parcel of land to its east known as the Wash. In 1911, as high schools became more common in the region, the college eliminated its preparatory department, which had taught pre-college level courses. The following year, it committed to a liberal arts model, soon after turning its previously separate schools of art and music into departments within the college. In 1914, the Phi Beta Kappa honor society established a chapter at the college. Daily attendance at chapel was mandated until 1921, and student culture emphasized athletics and academic class rivalries. During World War I, male students were divided into three military companies and a Red Cross unit to assist in the war effort.


title: Pomona College

text: Confronted with growing demand in the 1920s, Pomona's fourth president, James A. Blaisdell, considered whether to grow the college into a large university that could acquire additional resources or remain a small institution capable of providing a more intimate educational experience. Seeking both, he pursued an alternative path inspired by the collegiate university model he observed at Oxford, envisioning a group of independent colleges sharing centralized resources such as a library. On October 14, 1925, Pomona's 38th anniversary, the college founded the Claremont Colleges consortium. Construction of the Clark dormitories on North Campus (then the men's campus) began in 1929, a reflection of president Charles Edmunds' prioritization of the college's residential life. Edmunds, who had previously served as president of Lingnan University in Guangzhou, China, inspired a growing interest in Asian culture at the college and established its Asian studies program.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona's enrollment declined during the Great Depression as students became unable to afford tuition, and its budget was slashed by a quarter. The college reoriented itself toward wartime activities again during World War II, hosting an Air Force military meteorology program and Army Specialized Training Program courses in engineering and foreign languages.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona's longest-serving president, E. Wilson Lyon, guided the college through a transformational and turbulent period from 1941 to 1969. The college's enrollment rose above 1,000 following the war, leading to the construction of several residence halls and science facilities. Its endowment grew steadily, due in part to the introduction in 1942 of a deferred giving fundraising scheme pioneered by Allen Hawley called the Pomona Plan, where participants receive a lifetime annuity in exchange for donating to the college upon their death. The plan's model has since been adopted by many other colleges.


title: Pomona College

text: Lyon made several progressive decisions relating to civil rights, including supporting Japanese-American students during internment and establishing an exchange program in 1952 with Fisk University, a historically black university in Tennessee. He and dean of women Jean Walton ended the gender segregation of Pomona's residential life, first with the opening of Frary Dining Hall (then part of the men's campus) to women beginning in 1957 and later with the elimination of parietal rules in the late 1960s and the introduction of co-educational housing in 1968. The student body, influenced by the countercultural revolution, became less socially conservative and more politically engaged in this era. Protesters opposed to the Vietnam War occupied Sumner Hall to obstruct Air Force recruiters in 1968 and forced the cancellation of classes at the end of the spring 1970 semester. The college's ethnic diversity also began to increase, and activists successfully pushed the consortium to establish black and Latino studies programs in 1969. A bomb exploded at the Carnegie Building that February, permanently injuring a secretary; no culprit was ever identified.


title: Pomona College

text: During the tenure of president David Alexander from 1969 to 1991, Pomona gained increased prominence on the national stage. The endowment increased ten-fold, enabling the construction and renovation of a number of buildings. Several identity-based groups, such as the Pomona College Women's Union (founded in 1984), were established. In the mid-1980s, out-of-state students began to outnumber in-state students.


title: Pomona College

text: In 1991, the college converted the dormitory basements used by fraternities into lounges, arguing that this created a more equitable distribution of campus space. The move lowered the profile of Greek life on campus.


title: Pomona College

text: In the 2000s, under president David W. Oxtoby, Pomona began placing more emphasis on reducing its environmental impact, committing in 2003 to obtaining LEED certifications for new buildings and launching various sustainability initiatives. The college also entered partnerships with several college access groups (including the Posse Foundation in 2004 and QuestBridge in 2005) and committed to meeting the full demonstrated financial need of students through grants rather than loans in 2008. These efforts, combined with Pomona's previously instituted need-blind admission policy, resulted in increased enrollment of low-income and racial minority students.


title: Pomona College

text: In 2008, it was discovered that Pomona's alma mater may have been originally written to be sung as the ensemble finale to a student-produced blackface minstrel show performed on campus in 1909 or 1910. The college stopped singing it at convocation and commencement, alienating some alumni.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona requested proof of legal residency from employees amid a unionization drive by dining hall workers in 2011. Seventeen workers who were unable to provide documentation were fired, drawing national media attention and sparking criticism from activists; the dining hall staff voted to unionize in 2013. A rebranding initiative that year sought to emphasize students' passion and drive, angering students who thought it would lead to a more stressful culture. Several protests in the 2010s criticized the college's handling of sexual assault, leading to various reforms.


title: Pomona College

text: In 2017, G. Gabrielle Starr became Pomona's tenth president; she is the first woman and first African American to hold the office. From March 2020 through the spring 2021 semester, the college switched to online instruction in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona's campus is in Claremont, California, an affluent suburban residential community east of downtown Los Angeles. It is directly northwest of the Claremont Village (the city's downtown commercial district) and directly south of the other contiguous Claremont Colleges. The area has a Mediterranean climate and consists of a gentle slope from the alluvial fan of San Antonio Creek in the San Gabriel Mountains to the north.


title: Pomona College

text: In its early years, Pomona quickly expanded from its initial home in Sumner Hall, constructing several buildings to accommodate its growing enrollment and ambitions. After 1908, development of the campus was guided by master plans from architect Myron Hunt, who envisioned a central quadrangle flanked by buildings connected via visual axes. In 1923, landscape architect Ralph Cornell expanded on Hunt's plans, envisioning a "college in a garden" defined by native Southern California vegetation but incorporating global influences in the tradition of the acclimatization movement. President James Blaisdell's decision to purchase undeveloped land around Pomona while it was still available later gave the college room to grow and found the consortium. Many of the earlier buildings were constructed in the Mission Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival styles, with stucco walls and red terracotta tile roofs. Other and later construction incorporated elements of neoclassical, Victorian, Italian Romanesque, modern, and postmodern styles. As a result, the present campus features a blend of architectural styles. Most buildings are three or fewer stories in height, and are designed to facilitate both indoor and outdoor use.


title: Pomona College

text: The campus consists of 88 facilities , including 70 addressed buildings. It is bounded by First Street on the south, Mills and Amherst Avenues on the east, Eighth Street on the north, and Harvard Avenue on the west. It is informally divided into North Campus and South Campus by Sixth Street, with most academic buildings in the western half and a naturalistic area known as the Wash in the east. It has been featured in numerous films and television shows, often standing in for other schools.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona has undertaken initiatives to make its campus more sustainable, including requiring that all new construction be built to LEED Gold standards, replacing turf with drought-tolerant landscaping, and committing to achieving carbon neutrality without the aid of purchased carbon credits by 2030. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education gave the college a gold rating in its 2018 Sustainable Campus Index.


title: Pomona College

text: South Campus consists of mostly first-year and second-year housing and academic buildings for the social sciences, arts, and humanities.


title: Pomona College

text: A row of four residence halls is south of Bonita Avenue, with Frank Dining Hall at the eastern end. Sumner Hall, the home of admissions and several other administrative departments, is to the north of the dormitories. Oldenborg Center, a foreign-language housing option that includes a foreign-language dining hall, is across from Sumner.


title: Pomona College

text: South Campus has several arts buildings and performance venues. Bridges Auditorium ("Big Bridges") is used for concerts and speakers and has a capacity of 2,500. Bridges Hall of Music ("Little Bridges") is a concert hall with seating for 550. On the western edge of campus is the Benton Museum of Art, which has a collection of approximately including Italian Renaissance panel paintings, indigenous American art and artifacts, and American and European prints, drawings, and photographs. The Seaver Theatre Complex has a 335-seat thrust stage theater and 125-seat black box theater, among other facilities. The Studio Art Hall garnered national recognition for its steel-frame design when it was completed in 2014.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona's main social science and humanities buildings are located west of College Avenue. They include the Carnegie Building, a neoclassical structure built in 1908 as a Carnegie library. Several historic Victorian houses line the southern portion of the avenue, including the Queen Anne–style Renwick House, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016.


title: Pomona College

text: Marston Quadrangle, a lawn framed by California sycamore and coastal redwood trees, serves as a central artery for the campus, anchored by Carnegie on the west and Bridges Auditorium on the east. To its north is Alexander Hall, the college's central administration building, and the Smith Campus Center (SCC), home to many student services and communal spaces. East of the SCC is the Center for Athletics, Recreation and Wellness (Pomona's primary indoor athletics and recreation facility) and Smiley Hall dormitory, built in 1908.


title: Pomona College

text: At the intersection of Sixth Street and College Avenue are the college gates, built in 1914, which mark the historical northern edge of the campus. They bear two quotes from <includeonly>Pomona's fourth president, James A. Blaisdell</includeonly>. On the north is "let only the eager, thoughtful and reverent enter here", and on the south is "They only are loyal to this college who departing bear their added riches in trust for mankind". Per campus tradition, enrolling students walk south through the gates during orientation and seniors walk north through them shortly before graduation.<section end="gates"/>


title: Pomona College

text: The less-developed eastern portion of the campus is known as the Wash (formally Blanchard Park), and contains a large grove of coast live oak trees, as well as many of the college's athletics facilities, an outdoor amphitheater, an astronomical observatory, and the Pomona College Organic Farm, an experiment in sustainable agriculture.


title: Pomona College

text: North Campus was designed by architect Sumner Spaulding, and its initial phase was completed in 1930. It consists primarily of residential buildings for third- and fourth-year students and academic buildings for the natural sciences.


title: Pomona College

text: The academic buildings are located to the west of North College Way. This area includes "Dividing the Light" (2007), a skyspace by Light and Space artist and alumnus James Turrell.


title: Pomona College

text: The residence halls include the Clark halls (I, III, and V) and several more recent constructions. The North Campus dining hall, Frary Dining Hall, features a vaulted ceiling and is the location of the murals "Prometheus" (1930) by José Clemente Orozco, the first Mexican fresco in the U.S., and "Genesis" (1960) by Rico Lebrun.


title: Pomona College

text: The college owns the Trails Ends Ranch (a wilderness area in the Webb Canyon north of campus), the Mildred Pitt Ranch in southeastern Monterey County, and the Halona Lodge retreat center in Idyllwild, California. The astronomy department built and operates a telescope at the Table Mountain Observatory in Big Pines, California.


title: Pomona College

text: Along the north side of campus are several joint buildings maintained by The Claremont Colleges Services. The consortium also owns the Robert J. Bernard Field Station north of Foothill Boulevard.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona is governed as a private, nonprofit organization by a board of trustees responsible for overseeing the long-term interests of the college. The board consists of up to 42 members, most of whom are elected by existing members to four-year terms with a term limit of 12 years. It is responsible for hiring the college's president ( since ), approving budgets, setting overarching policies, and various other tasks. The president, in turn, oversees the college's general operation, assisted by administrative staff and a faculty cabinet. The college has total employees as of the semester. Pomona operates under a shared governance model, in which faculty and students sit on many policymaking committees and have a degree of control over other major decisions.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona is the founding member of the Claremont Colleges (colloquially "7Cs", for "seven colleges"), a consortium of five undergraduate liberal arts colleges ("5Cs")—Pomona, Scripps, Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, and Pitzer—and two graduate schools—Claremont Graduate University and Keck Graduate Institute. All are located in Claremont. Although each member has individual autonomy and a distinct identity, there is substantial collaboration through The Claremont Colleges Services (TCCS), a coordinating entity that manages the central library, campus safety services, health services, and other resources. Overall, the 7Cs have been praised by higher education experts for their close cooperation, although there have been occasional tensions. Pomona is the largest undergraduate and wealthiest member.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona is a member of several other consortia of selective colleges, including the 568 Group, the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges, the Oberlin Group, and the Annapolis Group. The college is accredited by the WASC Senior College and University Commission, which reaffirmed its status in 2021 with particular praise for its diversity initiatives.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona has an endowment of $ , giving it the seventh-highest endowment per student of any college or university in the U.S. The college's total assets (including its campus) are valued at $. Its operating budget for the 1 academic year $, of which roughly half funded by endowment earnings. That year, 46 percent of the budget was allocated to instruction, 2 percent to research, 1 percent to public service, 13 percent to academic support, 16 percent to student services, and 22 percent to institutional support. In 2021, Fitch Ratings gave the college a AAA bond credit rating, its highest rating, reflecting an "extremely strong financial profile".


title: Pomona College

text: For the 1 academic year, Pomona charged a tuition fee of , with a total estimated on-campus cost of attendance in of . In 20212022, 57 percent of students received a financial aid package, with an average award of $50,261, including 37 percent of international students, who received an average award of $49,106. The college meets the full demonstrated need of all admitted students, including international students, through grants rather than loans. It does not offer merit awards or athletic scholarships.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona offers instruction in the liberal arts disciplines and awards the Bachelor of Arts degree. The college operates on a semester system, with a normal course load of four full-credit classes per semester. 32 credits and a C average GPA are needed to graduate, along with the requirements of a major, a first-year critical inquiry seminar, at least one course in each of six "breadth of study" areas, proficiency in a foreign language, two physical education courses, a writing-intensive course, a speaking-intensive course, and an "analyzing difference" course (typically examining a type of structural inequality).


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona offers 48 majors, most of which also have a corresponding minor. For the 2021 graduation cohort, 21 percent of students majored in the arts and humanities, 40 percent in the natural sciences, 25 percent in the social sciences, and 15 percent in interdisciplinary fields. 14 percent of students completed a double major, 25 percent completed a minor, and 2 percent completed multiple minors. The college does not permit majoring in pre-professional disciplines such as medicine or law but offers academic advising for those areas and 3-2 engineering programs with Caltech, Dartmouth, and Washington University.


title: Pomona College

text: Individually, Pomona offers approximately 650 courses per semester. Additionally, students may take a significant portion of their courses at the other Claremont Colleges, enabling access to approximately 2,700 courses total. The academic calendars and registration procedures across the colleges are synchronized and consolidated, and there are no additional fees for cross-enrollment. Students may also create independent study courses evaluated by faculty mentors.


title: Pomona College

text: All classes at Pomona are taught by professors (as opposed to teaching assistants). The average class size is 15; for the fall 2021 semester, 93 percent of traditional courses had under 30 students, and only two courses had 50 or more students. The college employs faculty members as of the semester, approximately three-quarters of whom are full-time, resulting in an ratio of students to full-time equivalent professors. Among full-time faculty, 37 percent are members of racial minority groups, 45 percent are women, and 97 percent have a doctorate or other terminal degree in their field. Students and professors often form close relationships, and the college provides faculty with free meals to encourage them to eat with students. Semesters end with a week-long final examination period preceded by two reading days. The college operates several resource centers to help students develop academic skills in quantitative tasks, writing, and foreign languages.


title: Pomona College

text: More than half of Pomona students conduct research with faculty. The college sponsors an annual Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP), in which more than 200 students are paid a stipend of up to $5,600 to conduct research with professors or pursue independent research projects with professorial mentorship. The Pomona College Humanities Studio, established in 2018, supports research in the humanities. Pomona is home to the Pacific Basin Institute, a research institute that studies issues pertaining to the Pacific Rim.


title: Pomona College

text: Before the pandemic, approximately half of Pomona students studied abroad. , the college offered 62 pre-approved programs in 36 countries. Study-away programs were available for Washington, D.C., Silicon Valley, and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, and semester exchanges were offered at Colby, Spelman, and Swarthmore colleges.


title: Pomona College

text: The Pomona College Career Development Office (CDO) provides students and alumni with career advising, networking, and other pre-professional opportunities. It runs the Pomona College Internship Program (PCIP), which provides stipends for completing unpaid or underpaid internships during the semester or summer; more than 250 students participate annually. The office connects students with alumni for networking and mentoring via the Sagehen Connect platform. During the 20152016 academic year, 175 employers hosted on-site informational events at the Claremont Colleges and 265 unique organizations were represented in 9 career fairs.


title: Pomona College

text: For the 2015 through 2018 entering classes, 97 percent of students returned for their second year, giving Pomona one of the highest retention rates of any college or university in the U.S. For the 2015 entering class, 86 percent of students graduated within four years (the highest rate of any U.S. liberal arts college) and 93 percent graduated within six years.


title: Pomona College

text: Within 10 years, 81 percent of Pomona graduates attend graduate or professional school, according to a 2017 alumni survey. The college ranked 10th among all U.S. colleges and universities for doctorates awarded to alumni per capita, according to data collected by the National Science Foundation for 2008 to 2017. The top destinations between 2009 and 2018 (in order) were the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University; the University of Southern California; and Stanford University. A 2021 analysis of the schools that send the most students per capita to the highest-ranked U.S. medical, business, and law schools placed Pomona 14th for medical schools, 22nd for business schools, and 9th for law schools.


title: Pomona College

text: The top industries for graduates are technology; education; consulting and professional services; finance; government, law, and politics; arts, entertainment, and media; healthcare and social services; nonprofits; and research. Pomona alumni earn a median early career salary of $73,700 and a median mid-career salary of $146,400, according to 2021 survey data from compensation analytics company PayScale.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona ranks among the top producers of recipients of various competitive postgraduate fellowships, including the Churchill Scholarship, Fulbright Program, Goldwater Scholarship, Marshall Scholarship, National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship, and Rhodes Scholarship.


title: Pomona College

text:
Pomona is considered the most prestigious liberal arts college in the Western United States and one of the most prestigious in the country.

 However, among the broader public, it has less name recognition than many larger schools.


title: Pomona College

text: The 2022 "U.S. News & World Report" Best Colleges Ranking places Pomona third in the national liberal arts colleges category out of 223 colleges. Pomona has been ranked in the top 10 liberal arts colleges every year by "U.S. News" since it began ranking them in 1984, and is one of five schools with such a history, alongside Amherst, Swarthmore, Wellesley, and Williams.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona has rated similarly in other college rankings. In 2015, the "Forbes" ranking placed it first among all colleges and universities in the U.S., drawing media attention. Pomona is the third most desirable college or university in the U.S., according to a 2020 analysis of admitted students' revealed preferences among their college choices conducted by the digital credential service Parchment.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona offers three routes for students to apply: the Common Application, the QuestBridge application, and the Coalition Application. Applicants who want an earlier, binding decision can apply via early decision I or II; others apply through regular decision. Additionally, the college enrolls two 10-student Posse Foundation cohorts, from Chicago and Miami, in each class.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona considers various factors in its admissions process, placing greatest importance on course rigor, class rank, GPA, application essays, recommendations, extracurricular activities, talent, and character. Interviews, test scores, first generation status, geographic residence, race and ethnicity, volunteer work, and work experience are considered. Alumni relationships, religious affiliation, and level of interest are not considered. Admission is need-blind for students who are U.S. citizens, permanent residents, DACA recipients, undocumented, or graduates of a U.S. high school, and need-aware for international students. The college is part of many coalitions and initiatives targeted at recruiting underrepresented demographics.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona has the lowest acceptance rate of any national liberal arts college in the U.S. . The college admitted of applicants for the entering class; in , of admitted applicants chose to enroll. The number of transfer applicants admitted has varied by year; in 2021, Pomona admitted 39 of 465 applicants (8.3 percent).


title: Pomona College

text: , Pomona's student body of degree-seeking undergraduate students and a token number of non–degree seeking students. Compared to its closest liberal arts peers, Pomona has been characterized as laid back, academically oriented, mildly quirky, and politically liberal.


title: Pomona College

text: The student body is roughly evenly split between men and women, and 91 percent of students are under 22 years old. Approximately 62 percent of domestic students are non-white and 12 percent of students are international, making Pomona one of the most racially and ethnically diverse colleges in the U.S. The geographic origins of the student body are also diverse, with all 50 U.S. states, the major U.S. territories, and more than 60 foreign countries represented. Twenty-seven percent of students are from California, with sizable concentrations from the other western states. The median family income of students was $166,500 , with 52 percent of students coming from the top 10 percent highest-earning families and 22 percent from the bottom 60 percent. The college has been increasing its enrollment of low-income students since the early 2000s, and was ranked second among all private institutions and eighth among all institutions in "The New York Times" 2017 College Access Index, a measure of economic diversity. Various religious and spiritual beliefs are represented among students, with many leaning secular.


title: Pomona College

text: Among students in the 2021 entering class who submitted test scores, the middle 50 percent scored 730770 on the SAT evidence-based reading and writing section, 740800 on the SAT math section, and 3335 on the ACT. Among students with an official high school class rank, 30 percent were valedictorians, 93 percent ranked in the top tenth, and all ranked in the top quarter.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona is a residential campus, and nearly all students live on campus for all four years in one of the college's sixteen residence halls. All first-year students live on South Campus, and most third- and fourth-year students live on North Campus. Housing is offered in various configurations, including singles, one-room or two-room doubles, and "friendship suites" consisting of a cluster of rooms, often around a central common area. All incoming students are placed into a sponsor group, with ten to twenty peers and two or three upper-class "sponsors" tasked with easing the transition to college life but not enforcing rules (a duty given to resident advisors). Sponsor groups often share activities such as "fountaining", a tradition in which students are thrown into a campus fountain on their birthday. The program dates back to 1927 for women and was expanded in 1950 to include men.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona's social scene is intertwined with that of the other , with many activities and events shared between the colleges. The college's alcohol policies are aimed at encouraging responsible consumption and include a strict ban of hard liquor on South Campus. Dedicated substance-free housing is also offered. Overall, drinking culture is present but does not dominate over other elements of campus life, nor does athletics culture. Violations of the student code are typically handled by the student-run Judicial Council, known as "J-Board".


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona's dining services are run in house. All on-campus students are required to have a meal plan, which can be used at any of the Claremont Colleges' seven buffet-style dining halls. The menus emphasize sustainable and healthy options, and the food quality is generally praised. Every night Sunday through Wednesday, Frary Dining Hall opens for a late-night snack. Meal plans also include "Flex Dollars" usable at the various campus eateries, including the Coop Fountain, Coop Store, and sit-down Café 47 in the .


title: Pomona College

text: Some extracurricular organizations at Pomona are specific to the college, whereas others are open to students at all of the Claremont Colleges. In total, there are nearly 300 clubs and organizations across the .


title: Pomona College

text: The Associated Students of Pomona College (ASPC) is Pomona's official student government. Composed of elected representatives and appointed committee members, ASPC distributes funding for clubs and organizations, represents the student body in discussions with the administration, runs student programming (such as the Yule Ball dance and Ski-Beach Day) through the Pomona Events Committee (PEC), and provides various student services such as an airport rideshare program.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona has numerous clubs or support offices which provide resources and mentoring programs for students with particular identities, including female, non-white, Asian, South Asian, Latino, black, indigenous, multi-ethnic or multi-racial, international, queer, religious, and undocumented or recipient students. The college's first-generation and low-income community, FLI Scholars, has more than 200 members. The Campus Advocates and EmPOWER Center support survivors of sexual violence and work to promote consent culture.


title: Pomona College

text: The Pomona Student Union (PSU) facilitates the discussion of political and social issues on campus by hosting discussions, panels, and debates with prominent speakers holding diverse viewpoints. Other speech and debate organizations include a mock trial team, model UN team, and debate union. Pomona's secret society, Mufti, is known for gluing small sheets of paper around campus with cryptic puns offering social commentary on campus happenings.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona's music department manages several ensembles, including an orchestra, band, choir, glee club, jazz ensemble, and Balinese gamelan ensemble. All students can receive free private music lessons.


title: Pomona College

text: The Draper Center for Community Partnerships, established in 2009, coordinates Pomona's various community engagement programs. These include mentoring for local youth communities, English tutoring for Pomona staff, and volunteering trips over spring break. It also operates the Pomona Academy for Youth Success (PAYS), a three-year pre-college summer program for local low-income and first-generation students of color.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona has two remaining local Greek letter organizations, Sigma Tau and Kappa Delta, both of which are co-educational. Neither have special housing, and Greek life is not considered a major part of the social scene on campus the way it is at many other U.S. colleges.


title: Pomona College

text: As part of Pomona's 10-day orientation, incoming students spend four days off campus completing an "Orientation Adventure" or "OA" trip. The OA program began in 1995, and is one of the oldest outdoor orientation programs in the U.S.


title: Pomona College

text: Every spring, the college hosts "Ski-Beach Day", in which students visit a ski resort in the morning and then head to the beach after lunch. The tradition dates back to an annual mountain picnic established in 1891.


title: Pomona College

text: Since the 1970s, Pomona has used a cinder block flood barrier along the northern edge of its campus, Walker Wall, as a free speech wall. Over the years, provocative postings on the wall have spawned numerous controversies.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona's campus is located immediately north of Claremont Station, where the Metrolink San Bernardino Line train provides regular service to Los Angeles Union Station (the city's main transit hub) and the Foothill Transit bus system connects to cities in the San Gabriel Valley and Pomona Valley.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona's "Green Bikes" program maintains a fleet of more than 300 bicycles that are rented free to students each semester. The college has several Zipcar vehicles on campus that may be rented and owns vehicles that can be checked out for club and extracurricular purposes. and off-campus events are usually served with the college's "Sagecoach" passenger bus.


title: Pomona College

text: <includeonly>Pitzer's</includeonly> varsity athletics teams compete jointly with <includeonly>Pomona College (another consortium member)</includeonly> as the Pomona-Pitzer Sagehens. The 11 women's and 10 men's teams participate in NCAA Division III in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC). Pomona-Pitzer's mascot is Cecil the Sagehen, a greater sage-grouse, and its colors are blue and orange. Its main rival is the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Stags and Athenas (CMS), the other sports combination of the Claremont Colleges.


title: Pomona College

text: Club and intramural sports are also offered in various areas, such as dodgeball, flag football, and surfing. The physical education department offers a variety of activity classes each semester, such as karate, playground games, geocaching, and social dance.


title: Pomona College

text: Pomona's first intercollegiate sports teams were formed in 1895. They competed under several names in the school's early years; the name "Sagehen" first appeared in 1913 and became the sole moniker in 1917. Pomona was one of the three founding members of the SCIAC in 1914, and its football team played in the inaugural game at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1923. In 1946, Pomona joined with Claremont Men's College (which would later be renamed Claremont McKenna College) to compete as Pomona-Claremont. The teams separated in 1956, and Pomona's athletics program operated independently until it joined with Pitzer College in 1970.


title: 4′33″

text: 4′33″ (pronounced "four minutes, thirty-three seconds" or just "four thirty-three")<ref name="Solomon 1998/2002"></ref> is a three-movement composition by American experimental composer John Cage. It was composed in 1952, for any instrument or combination of instruments, and the score instructs performers not to play their instruments during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements. The piece consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, although it is commonly perceived as "four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence". The title of the piece refers to the total length in minutes and seconds of a given performance, "4′33″" being the total length of the first public performance.


title: 4′33″

text: Conceived around 1947–48, while the composer was working on "Sonatas and Interludes", "4′33″" became for Cage the epitome of his idea that any auditory experience may constitute music. It was also a reflection of the influence of Zen Buddhism, which Cage had studied since the late 1940s. In a 1982 interview, and on numerous other occasions, Cage stated that "4′33″" was, in his opinion, his most important work. "The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians" describes "4′33″" as Cage's "most famous and controversial creation".


title: 4′33″

text: Silence played a major role in several of Cage's works composed before "4′33″". The "Duet for Two Flutes" (1934), composed when Cage was 22, opens with silence, and silence was an important structural element in some of the "Sonatas and Interludes" (1946–48), "Music of Changes" (1951) and "Two Pastorales" (1951). The "Concerto for prepared piano and orchestra" (1951) closes with an extended silence, and "Waiting" (1952), a piano piece composed just a few months before "4′33″", consists of long silences framing a single, short ostinato pattern. Furthermore, in his songs "The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs" (1942) and "A Flower" (1950) Cage directs the pianist to play a closed instrument, which may be understood as a metaphor of silence.


title: 4′33″

text: The first time Cage mentioned the idea of a piece composed entirely of silence was during a 1947 (or 1948) lecture at Vassar College, "A Composer's Confessions". Cage told the audience that he had "several new desires", one of which was


title: 4′33″

text: At the time, however, Cage felt that such a piece would be "incomprehensible in the Western context", and was reluctant to write it down: "I didn't wish it to appear, even to me, as something easy to do or as a joke. I wanted to mean it utterly and be able to live with it." Painter Alfred Leslie recalls Cage presenting a "one-minute-of-silence talk" in front of a window during the late 1940s, while visiting Studio 35 at New York University.