``There is something glorious about a college prank. A really good prank brings not just laughter, but a visceral satisfaction and a kind of awe that does not fade with time nor diminish with retelling.''

- Neil Steinberg

Campus pranks have a special place in modern lore, and students - flush with youth, intellectually understimulated and face-to-face with inflexible and inane authority - are frequently fertile fields of foolishness.

Not all of the stories you hear of campus hijinks are more than legends, but enough of the creative and wittier ones can be verified that a bit of sports-like rivalry pops up (say, between CalTech and MIT) over the extent and cleverness of their hacks.

In one legendary hack, a number of students from CalTech hacked the instruction cards for Washington State's half-time flip-card display at the 1961 Rose Bowl. On national television, on the most-watched college football game of the year, the stands suddenly filled with the name of a college that was playing an entirely different game.

Neil Steinberg, whose book If At All Possible, Involve a Cow is a prime source for historical and cross-campus information on American college pranks, writes:

There is something glorious about a college prank. A really good prank brings not just laughter, but a visceral satisfaction and a kind of awe that does not fade with time nor diminish with retelling. In the narrow world of university life, so routine, so programmed and often - like life in the real world - too dull to tolerate, a prank shakes things up, breaks the tedium, and gives hope for a life filled with hidden, delightful possibility.

The Pail & Shovel Party of Madison University, Wisconsin took over the otherwise irrelevant student government in the 1970s and fulfilled their absurdist campaign promises to bring the Statue of Liberty to Madison.

The P&S are gone, alas, but Ten-Fat-Tigers remain.

A student at Springbank High School in Calgary, Alberta, slid some hardcore porn into the middle of a video that accompanies the mandatory morning replay of Canada's national anthem.

The Yippies played an interesting prank on a meeting of college newspaper editors. At one point during a deadlocked discussion of whether the editors should come out against the United States government policy in Vietnam, according to Yippie Jerry Rubin:

Suddenly the lights went out and across the wall flashed scenes of World War II fighting, burning Vietnamese villages, crying Vietnamese women and napalmed children, image after image. The room echoed with hysterical screams, ``Stop it! Stop it!'' A voice boomed over a bullhorn: ``Attention. This is Sergeant Haggerty of the Washington Police. These films were smuggled illegally into the country from North Vietnam. We have confiscated them and arrested the people who are responsible. Now clear this room!...'' The editors fell over themselves rushing for the door.

Prankster Hugh Troy played a joke on a Cornell University professor who used to leave his galoshes out by the classroom door. During the lecture, he quietly painted them to look like feet, then covered them with soot to restore their black color. When the professor walked outside, the soot washed away so that he appeared to be walking barefoot.

Troy also used a trash can made from a rhinoceros leg, suspended from ropes, to make a track in the snow down from the campus to the lake. A zoölogy professor identified the tracks, and afterwards many people refused to drink tap water that originated in the lake, thinking that a rhino had crashed through the ice and drowned therein.

Check out our Art Forgeries section for information on another Hugh Troy prank.

Hackers at Louisiana Tech University programmed the campus clock tower to play ``Dueling Banjos'' on the hour.

Remember when all the spoons vanished from the dining hall at Johns Hopkins University?

Students at the University of Waterloo altered a water tower in amusing fashion back in 1958 and they're still talking about it today.

Nonexistent people are sometimes enrolled in class for the amusement of those in the know. Joseph David Oznot, Adelbert l'Homme-dieu X. ``Bert'' Hormone, Joe Gish, Ephriam di Kahble, Cuthbert Gleep, Warren G. Wonka, Helmar Sciete and Cyndi LePage are among the non-students who have attended.

Which reminds me of Hugo N. Frye, the founder of the New York state Republican Party. Or not.

The 60s and 70s are thought of as the heyday of creative campus protest, but when you remember that in the 1930s, students at Princeton U. brought us the biting and very successful parody-organization Veterans of Future Wars, you see that this sort of tomfoolery has been around for a while...

Legendary newspaperman William Randolph Hearst, as a student at Harvard University, sent as gifts to every member of the Harvard faculty a chamberpot with the recipient's picture affixed inside.

Public school classrooms are anæsthetizing holding cells that can only improve by being disrupted. Students short on ideas of their own might consider the ones in the School Stopper's Textbook - available on-line here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here .

A correspondent writes: ``At my old high school we managed to get a 20 foot for-sale sign and drape it over the front, we got newspaper coverage in the classifieds: 'large house for sale, 103 bedrooms, lake front access, 10 bathrooms and a full sized gym' (or something like that). Fun prank, no damage (except for the sign we had to steal), we had the sign up on Saturday night, was there all day Sunday and Monday, the students loved it.''

Students at Norton High School in California, upset at mandatory urine tests the school had insisted on as their part in the drug war hysteria, held a bake sale every day to raise funds for their protest - selling poppy-seed-infested desserts which happened to have the property of inducing false-positives in the drug tests of those who ate them. Soon, half the school was testing positive for opiates and the urine tests were worthless.