Campus Pranks |
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"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 these tales are more than legends, but enough of the creative and wittier ones are that a bit of sports-like rivalry can pop up (say, between CalTech and MIT, or Princeton and Yale) over the extent and cleverness of their hacks. Neil Steinberg, whose book If At All Possible, Involve a Cow is the 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. Hackers at Louisiana Tech University programmed the campus clock tower to play "Dueling Banjos" on the hour. Students at the University of Waterloo altered a water tower in amusing fashion back in 1958 and they're still talking about it. In 1999, incoming UCLA students were informed that they'd been transferred from their expected dorm rooms to the basement of Hedrick Hall. (The perpetrator of this prank found himself expelled, alas, so the joke's on him.) Nonexistant 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, Helmar Sciete and Cyndi LePage are among the non-students who have attended. The 60's and 70's are thought of as the heyday of creative campus protest, but when you remember that in the 1930's, 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... Not that these things are restricted to the halls of higher education. There's little of value left to do in the public school classrooms but to disrupt them. 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, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here 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. Another commentator 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 bathhrooms 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."
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