Every time I see one of those "Harvard: the Pomona College of the East" t-shirts, I must say, I am saddened. Sure, I know that it’s a joke, but the humor seems to lie in the role-reversal of the schools, playing off of the assumption that Pomona is something like the Harvard of the West. It is this presumption that bothers me. Look, Pomona is a good school, arguably one of the best, but it’s not Harvard. To tell the truth, I don’t know that much about Harvard, but I know there’s a reason why it’s the most renowned institution of higher learning in the country. In comparison, Pomona wallows in relative obscurity outside of the tightly knit circle of academia. Again, it’s not that Pomona is a bad school, but it has several factors impeding its rise to academic super-stardom.

For one thing, our fair school is tiny. Our undergraduate population is less than one-quarter of Harvard’s, not to mention their nearly 10,000 graduate students. Also, our founding date of 1887, which adorns all kinds of Coop Store paraphernalia, looks pretty silly when compared to Harvard’s birthdate back in 1636. Because Harvard has been running at full steam with a large capacity for quite some time, they have over a quarter-million living alumni. Now, I’m not throwing these statistics around to make anybody sad, but I wish that people wouldn’t compare the two schools. They’re not even the same type of institution.

The real problem isn’t the t-shirt, though. The more general issue, the thing that truly bothers me, is Pomona’s identity crisis. Due to our lack of renown (how many times have you explained that Pomona is a four-year school?), people in the college community tend to seek some sort of solid ground on which to attach. Perhaps the early settlers of Claremont thought that naming the streets of the town after well-known eastern institutions would lend credibility to our academic community. The reality, however, is that having streets named Harvard, Amherst, and Yale makes us look like pathetic riders of Ivy League coattails. Over the three or four hundred years that some eastern schools have been around, they seem to have developed certain traditions. Some are cruel, some are strange, some are just traditional.

At Pomona, we have the number 47. The meaning of this number I have never fully understood, even though I have read some school-issued explanation of its significance. Maybe it’s just me, but the whole 47 thing seems a bit forced. Sure, there are quite a few occurrences of this number in our lives, but I wonder if this wouldn’t be the case for any other number. I mean, I lived in room 216 freshman year, and then that was one of the numbers in my suite junior year, and they said God’s name had 216 letters in the movie "Pi," but I’m not throwing that on any mugs. I understand that it’s fun to have traditions, but it’s sad when we have to latch on to something so arbitrary just for the sake of having a tradition.

Perhaps some of you have misinterpreted my statements as being anti-Pomona, so I will make my point clear. I have truly enjoyed my time at Pomona, and I do not regret my choice to enroll here. I never had any desire to go Ivy; I always felt that the liberal arts environment would best suit my needs. In fact, what I love most about Pomona are the things that set it apart from other schools. I love the small classes, the laid-back atmosphere, and the weather (let’s be honest: it makes a difference). Had I gone for a big-name school and been accepted, I probably would have been unhappy. I dealt with enough big-school bureaucracy in high school to last a lifetime.

Still, I feel that Pomona has not completely found its niche. Our student body still tends to be somewhat regional, the college is not terribly well renowned, and school spirit is not one of our strengths. What we do have is a talented and qualified (if not diverse) student body, a beautiful campus, and an excellent faculty. With all of these assets, we should not be so concerned with our status in comparison with other schools, whether it be in terms of fame or the wildly arbitrary US News rankings. Until we stop the constant self-monitoring and "keeping up with the Joneses" mentality, we will never step out of the shadow of the schools that so many of us self-consciously compare to Pomona.