PASADENA—Ditch Day, that delightful annual day of college pranks at Caltech, is today. On one day each spring, kept secret until the last minute, Caltech seniors ditch their classes and vanish from campus. Any senior discovered on campus after 8 a.m. is liable to be captured by vigilant underclass students and summarily duct-taped to the nearest tree.
Meanwhile, the rooms of absent seniors are vulnerable to all sorts of mischievous goings-on, so seniors have spent considerable time prior to Ditch Day devising ingenious and elaborate locks and obstacles for their rooms. Underclass students then try to get through these "stacks"—named for the stacks of books and furniture that were used in decades past to barricade the doors—and into the seniors' rooms.
The stacks today can be far more elaborate than just a physical barricade, and often take the underclass students far away from the room itself on scavenger hunts, quests, red-herring searches, and the like. Many of these activities have photographic potential for journalists, and for this reason Caltech invites the media each year to come to campus and cover the Ditch Day happenings.
In addition to the Ditch Day stacks, a group of students who call themselves "Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow" will install an art piece titled "The Tower of Pizza" at Millikan Library. The art work, a stack of pizza boxes along one side of the 9-story building, symbolizes the vast quantity of deliverable foodstuffs consumed at an institution of higher learning such as Caltech.
Media wishing to cover Ditch Day should arrive in the morning. The Caltech Media Relations staff at 315 S. Hill Ave. will be available to conduct film crews to interesting stacks.
Contact: Jill Perry Robert Tindol (626) 395-3226 (626) 395-3631
