If at All Possible, Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks, Neil Stenberg
Saw this one in a North Atlanta bookshop (new, used, collectible) and picked it up because I was a college student for about eight years, all told, and then a college professor for about thirty years, all told, and it looked funny.
Steinberg sets out to present a history of American college pranks, locations ranging from Podunk campuses to the iviest of leagues (but with a strong emphasis on Caltech). Oh, those rascally students! What hijinks they pull, my word. While a student at Yale, James Fenimore Cooper impishly set fire to a friend’s room by forcing gunpowder though his keyhole and then igniting it! He presumably stopped giggling when he was expelled. Then, too, in the late 19th Century, Cornell upperclassmen decided to trick the lowly freshmen by sabotaging their Freshman Banquet. They did so by piping chlorine gas into the dining room, except they accidentally bored a hole in the kitchen next door and instead of sickening all the freshmen, they merely fatally poisoned the cook. A similar sort-of jape at another school showered a roomful of students in ammonia. Nobody died, though several were blinded, so that wasn’t quite as humorous.
Not all the pranks were so horrendous, many were amusing, and some were just meh. The Harvard Lampoon faced frequent thefts of its iconic emblem, a bronze ibis that crowned its headquarters. On one occasion the birdnappers shipped it to the USSR (not really, that was part of the prank). Caltech has, or anyway, had, Ditch Day, when all seniors would ditch classes and head for the beach—and underclassmen would break into their dorm rooms and, oh fill them with four feet of water or two tons of sand, until the seniors counterattacked by creating incredibly intricate stacks (puzzles and booby traps) that the younger students would have to negotiate even to gain entrance to the rooms. In the old, old days, a student would steal the college president’s horse and shave it. In more modern times, they’d steal a professor’s BMW and hoist to the roof of a campus building and then persuade the campus cops to write a ticket for illegal parting.
Sadly, I found most of the stories on the “meh” side, but they did remind me of a prank a friend of mine and I once played on a favorite professor. He taught one class without much enthusiasm, a sophomore-level American poetry survey. My friend and I were then graduate assistants, and we realized that the professor had developed a habit of giving a weekly short-response quiz every Friday. He’d write out three or four topics and have the students write no more than one page responding to any one they chose. He was very forgetful, and every Friday he’d come hurrying into the faculty lounge, scrawl out three or four sentences, and photocopy them. He’d get to class five or ten minutes late, but generally the students were done with their papers in thirty minutes instead of the regulation fifty-five minutes of class.
So my friend and I helped him by preparing in advance a weekly quiz one Friday: 1. Robert Frost said writing free verse was like playing tennis with the net down. In a match between Frost and Walt Whitman, who would win and why? 2. In Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” he says “My little horse must think it queer / To stop without a farmhouse near.” How queer did the horse think it was? Would he go out on a trip with the speaker again? On a dark night? 3. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and Carl Sandburg’s “Fog” have nothing in common. Briefly compare them.
We expected to get a laugh from the students. Nope. Every dang one of them wrote a page on one or the other of those idiotic topics. When the professor came in with his stack of topics, he saw they were all writing away, so he sat at his desk and collected the papers. After we confessed, he said he enjoyed it but asked us never to do it again
Some of the student responses, though, got an “A.”
