Rena Fraden, an English professor at Pomona...

Rena Fraden, an English professor at Pomona College in Claremont, and Alan Barr, a modern languages and literature professor at the college, have each been awarded $3,000 stipends from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Fraden received the award for her research on plays, reviews, notebooks and oral histories of the Negro Units division of the National Theater Project in the 1930s. Barr was chosen for his examination of rare materials documenting the evolution of classical Chinese tales and a study of the works of 17th-Century fiction writer Pu Songling.

Five computer science students at Caltech in Pasadena were named the top student programmers in the country at the 1986 International Scholastic Programming Contest of the Assn. for Computing Machinery. The students competed against college students from throughout the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Switzerland. The students, Steve Burns of Oceanside; Dave Gillespie of Mercer Island, Wash.; Rajiv Gupta of Hyderabad, India; Tim Kay of Greenwood Village, Colo.; and Steve Rabin of New York, received the honor after successfully solving eight programming problems in six hours.