Class Struggle : Caltech Students Put Imagination to the Test in Ditch Day Pranks

In a courtyard on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, sparks flew as a student wielding an electric saw sheared the metal roof off a brown Capri car.

On a brick-lined walkway, others dipped a combination lock into a bucket of liquid nitrogen, then smashed it gleefully to smithereens.

Near the cafeteria, underclassmen with miniature fire hydrants hanging from their necks erected a 10-foot plastic temple to the “Great Dog God Fred.”

On Wednesday, Ditch Day once again descended on Caltech, transforming the usually well-behaved physics and engineering majors into small bands of raving nerds bent on destruction.

From 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. they roamed the grounds, taking sledgehammers to concrete, mimicking heavy metal musicians and lobbing water balloons at journalists who dared venture inside the “reporter-free zone.”

Their antics were part of a well-orchestrated effort to get into the locked dormitories of absent seniors.

In the annual May tradition, seniors devise diabolical methods to foil the underclassmen--called frosh or wimps. They set up a long list of humiliating chores to perform, puzzles to solve and clues to find to crack the combinations and unlock the dorms to get to food and drink within.

The puzzles, called stacks because seniors once stacked furniture against their dorm rooms to keep underclassmen out--have evolved into sophisticated and often silly tests of brain and brawn.

There are brute force stacks, which must be shattered with power drills and the like, or finesse stacks, which involve feats of math and physics. Many solutions involve going off campus; the car-shearing frosh, for example, had instructions to turn the Capri into a convertible, then drive to UC Santa Barbara for a beach party with the stack’s creator.

Administrators say Ditch Day allows stressed-out students to let off steam at the end of the academic year. Students agree to pay for any damage, which can run into thousands of dollars.

This year’s stacks drew on recent history (finding safety rods in time to keep a nuclear reactor from blowing up) pop culture (the movie “Total Recall”) and social problems (the war on drugs).

“Caltech professors are up in arms over the clandestine drug-dealing going on right inside their labs,” began a stack called “Crack House,” in which participants had to nab ruthless drug-smuggling criminals.

The ersatz DEA agents raided an abandoned house in Pasadena, where they found a plastic bag filled with white powder. Inside was another clue, which led them to a sandbox in a public park where they found a prescription bottle filled with . . . vitamins. And so on, until they found the final clue to break down the “crack house” door.

One of the more intriguing stacks involved lowering a student through a hole in the senior’s dorm room into a huge tub of water filled with darting goldfish.

“I’m not scared,” said Don North, 18, a mechanical engineering student. “I just hope they remembered not to use electrical currents.”

Memorable stacks from years past included the unsolvable three-page physics problem left taped to a door, and the computer left with no instructions. After trying all day, the frosh discovered too late that the door would open automatically if left untouched for 10 minutes.

Bob Finn, a Caltech spokesman, said the most odious stack he recalls was one called “Cornucopia.”

“There was this five-foot-long tunnel filled with disgusting food items and people had to eat their way through them. You had to tunnel through with your mouth. It was disgusting.”

But to 24-year-old Gorm Nykreim, a graduate student in physics and astronomy who offered help to stymied undergraduates, 1991 left a lot to be desired.

“Ditch Day is very lame this year,” said Nyreim, who carried a toolbox and wore overalls, a hard-hat, two different-colored tennis shoes and a button that said “Dangerously Overeducated.”

“They’re all oriented toward task-solving rather than problem-solving. I was looking for a challenging engineering stack and I can’t find one.”