This week’s campus mail brought the yearly call for submissions to scholarly competitions. Leafing through, I stopped at the one that has baffled me for each of my four years here: the Eda May Haskell Library Prize, which awards one graduating senior for the possession of a library which demonstrates "discriminating judgment, personal taste, and imagination." While the flyer states that "numbers, rarity, handsome format or monetary value will be of secondary consideration," this stipulation, along with the instructions to indicate paperback books with a "p," ensures potential applicants that this is not a need-blind competition.

Many seniors have little to no chance of winning this prize. I speak of seniors who either take books out of the library, sell or donate their books after they read them, or live too far from Claremont for grand book collections to be possible. These conditions do not make these disadvantaged seniors any less intelligent or well-read than those with book collections. The Library Prize seems anachronistic, a vestige of a time when intelligence was thought measurable by material possessions. But why, now, are we giving a monetary reward to a student who, more than likely, won’t need it?

It seems that the parameters for this contest could be easily changed. The fact that they have not, and that the contest is not directed to find the "libraries" which students are keeping inside their heads, seems like a deliberate attempt to retain outmoded, aristocratic values. The reason for this, it seems obvious, is the patronage: once upon a time, Eda May Haskell gave money for a library prize.

Pomona adheres too closely to the rules that donors set for their donations. One of the administration’s arguments for development of the Bernard Field Station is that Ellen Scripps, donating the land in the 1920s, wanted it to be for a future college. Times have changed since then: there already are four other colleges, and California is no longer a vast, unused land mass. Our donors probably would be embarrassed to know that the administration’s strict adherence to their trusts are making them seem outmoded and regressive.

Sincerely,

Nora Lawrence

Editor-in-Chief