Student life traditions
Every Halloween, Dabney House conducts the infamous "Millikan pumpkin-drop experiment" from the top of Millikan Library, the highest point on campus. According to tradition, a claim was once made that the shattering of a pumpkin frozen in liquid nitrogen and dropped from a sufficient height would produce a triboluminescent spark. This yearly event involves a crowd of observers, who try to spot the elusive spark. The title of the event is an oblique reference to the famous Millikan oil-drop experiment which measured e, the elemental unit of electrical charge.
On Ditch Day, the seniors ditch school, leaving behind elaborately designed tasks and traps at the doors of their rooms to prevent underclassmen from entering. Over the years this has evolved to the point where many seniors spend months designing mechanical, electrical, and software obstacles to confound the underclassmen. Each group of seniors designs a "stack" to be solved by a handful of underclassmen. The faculty have been drawn into the event as well, and cancel all classes on Ditch Day so the underclassmen can participate in what has become a highlight of the academic year.
Another long-standing tradition is the playing of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" at 7:00 each morning during finals week with the largest, loudest speakers available. The playing of that piece is not allowed at any other time (except if one happens to be listening to the entire 14 hours and 5 minutes of The Ring Cycle), and any offender is dragged into the showers to be drenched in cold water fully dressed.
Caltech students have been known for their many pranks (also known as "RFs").
The two most famous in recent history are the changing of the Hollywood Sign to read "Caltech", by judiciously covering up certain parts of the letters, and the changing of the scoreboard to read Caltech 38, MIT 9 during the 1984 Rose Bowl Game. But the most famous of all occurred during the 1961 Rose Bowl Game, where Caltech students altered the flip-cards that were raised by the stadium attendees to display "Caltech", and several other "unintended" messages. This event is now referred to as the Great Rose Bowl Hoax.
During the Presidency of Bill Clinton students released a banner stating "Impeach Nixon" while Clinton was on the campus. Graeme Wood stated, "mockery and mischief, not politics, were the point."
Circa 2006, pranking had been officially encouraged by Tom Mannion, Caltech's Assistant VP for Student Affairs and Campus Life. "The grand old days of pranking have gone away at Caltech, and that's what we are trying to bring back", reported The Boston Globe.
In December 2011, Caltech students went to New York and pulled a prank in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. The prank involved making The Cube sculpture look like the Aperture Science Weighted Companion Cube from the video game Portal.
Caltech pranks have been documented in three Legends of Caltech books, the most recent of which was edited by alumni Autumn Looijen '99 and Mason Porter '98 and published in May 2007.
In 2005, a group of Caltech students pulled a string of pranks during MIT's Campus Preview Weekend for admitted students. These include covering up the word Massachusetts in the "Massachusetts Institute of Technology" engraving on the main building façade with a banner so that it read "That Other Institute of Technology". A group of MIT hackers responded by altering the banner so that the inscription read "The Only Institute of Technology". Caltech students also passed out T-shirts to MIT's incoming freshman class that had MIT written on the front and "... because not everyone can go to Caltech" along with an image of a palm tree on the back.
MIT retaliated in April 2006, when students posing as the Howe & Ser (Howitzer) Moving Company stole the 130-year-old, 1.7-ton Fleming House cannon and moved it over 3,000 miles to their campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts for their 2006 Campus Preview Weekend, repeating a similar prank performed by nearby Harvey Mudd College in 1986. Thirty members of Fleming House traveled to MIT and reclaimed their cannon on April 10, 2006.
On April 13, 2007 (Friday the 13th), a group of students from The California Tech, Caltech's campus newspaper, arrived and distributed fake copies of The Tech, MIT's campus newspaper, while prospective students were visiting for their Campus Preview Weekend. Articles included "MIT Invents the Interweb", "Architects Deem Campus 'Unfortunate'", and "Infinite Corridor Not Actually Infinite".
In December 2009, some Caltech students declared that MIT had been sold and had become the Caltech East campus. A "sold" banner was hung on front of the MIT dome building and a "Welcome to Caltech East: School of the Humanities" banner over the Massachusetts Avenue Entrance. Newspapers and T-shirts were distributed, and door labels and fliers in the infinite corridor were put up in accordance with the "curriculum change".
In September 2010, MIT students attempted to put a TARDIS, the time machine from the BBC's Doctor Who, onto a roof. Caught in mid-act, the prank was aborted. In January 2011, Caltech students in conjunction with MIT students helped put the TARDIS on top of Baxter. Caltech students then moved the TARDIS to UC Berkeley and Stanford.
In April 2014, during MIT's Campus Preview Weekend, a group of Caltech students handed out mugs emblazoned with the MIT logo on the front and the words "The Institute of Technology" on the back. When heated, the mugs turn orange, display a palm tree, and read "Caltech The Hotter Institute of Technology". Identical mugs continue to be sold at the Caltech campus store.
Life in the Caltech community is governed by the honor code, which simply states: "No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community." This is enforced by a Board of Control, which consists of undergraduate students, and by a similar body at the graduate level, called the Graduate Honor Council.
The honor code aims at promoting an atmosphere of respect and trust that allows Caltech students to enjoy privileges that make for a more relaxed atmosphere. For example, the honor code allows professors to make the majority of exams as take-home, allowing students to take them on their own schedule and in their preferred environment.
Through the late 1990s, the only exception to the honor code, implemented earlier in the decade in response to changes in federal regulations, concerned the sexual harassment policy. Today, there are myriad exceptions to the honor code in the form of new Institute policies such as the fire policy and alcohol policy. Although both policies are presented in the Honor System Handbook given to new members of the Caltech community, some undergraduates regard them as a slight against the honor code and the implicit trust and respect it represents within the community. In recent years, the Student Affairs Office has also taken up pursuing investigations independently of the Board of Control and Conduct Review Committee, an implicit violation of both the honor code and written disciplinary policy that has contributed to further erosion of trust between some parts of the undergraduate community and the administration.
