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Legends related to sadistic practices used by professors and folklore about pranks that students use to teach the professors a lesson have tremendous staying power. Perhaps the traditions of academe keep the stories flowing from generation to generation. Some of the most persistent legends concern practices that everyone swears are true, but no one can locate the rules in university documents. For example, generations of students have accepted the unwritten rule that students whose roommates die during the semester receive all A’s. The legend is so pervasive that it was used as the basis for two movies, Dead Man on Campus and Dead Man’s Curve, as well as an episode of CSI: New York in which a student murders his roommate to receive all A’s. Unlike other legends with versions going back centuries, this story springs up only in the mid-1970s.
Another pervasive “rule” students swear can be found in the student handbook is the amount of time students are required to wait if a professor is late to class. Many versions state that students must wait five minutes for an assistant professor, ten minutes for an associate professor, and the entire class period for a full professor. However, although some universities have official policies about how long students should wait before assuming a class is cancelled, no institution has rules related to the rank of the professor.
The absent professor myth takes another form in the story of the professor who left his lecture on a tape recorder while he missed class and returned to the classroom to find empty desks with tape recorders listening to the professor’s recorder. Other legends related to students getting the upper hand with professors include the student who responds to the one-word philosophy exam “why?” with “why not?” and earns an A. Another story concerns the student caught cheating who asks if the professor knows who he is. Receiving a reply in the negative, the student inserts his blue book exam in the middle of the stack so that the professor will not know which exam is his. There is another tale in which students seem to gain the upper hand: the “trained professor” experiment, in which many students swear that they have participated. The legends vary, of course, but most involve class members using negative and positive feedback to make sure a professor does what students want. For example, when a professor heads toward a certain part of the room or holds a certain pose, students will give active, positive feedback by nodding their heads in agreement and rapidly taking notes. When the professor moves, the students discontinue eye contact, become restless, and stop the note taking. Students insist that they have trained professors to stand only in one corner of the room or stand on a trashcan or even a desk to deliver the lecture. Although anecdotal evidence exists, no actual documented cases are recorded.
Often, however, the professor gains the upper hand in legends related to homework and exams. One such story concerns the professor who realizes that one exam is missing and cuts off an inch from the bottom of the exams. The overly long exam will be the stolen one. Another persistent story concerns the files of papers that fraternities keep for various classes so that members won’t have to write one of their own. After the professor recognizes the paper as one that received a C in the previous semester, he gives the paper a B and another version an A, writing on the A exam, “I like this paper more every time I read it.” Sometimes the professor will have written the paper himself, assigning it an A and making the comment that he always thought the paper deserved more than the C he received on it. Still other cases concern papers that included a drawing or table of some sort, so when the professor sees the paper without the accompanying illustration, she comments, “Why didn’t you include the picture?” In another grading case, an astute professor didn’t believe the two students who said they missed the exam because they had a flat tire. When they received the makeup exam, the one essay question on the test asked, “Which tire was flat?”
Campus buildings inspire their own legends based on age-old stories passed along to generations of students. For example, many colleges are said to have “sinking” libraries because the architect who designed the building forgot to account for the weight of the books. Sometimes the story is modified to suggest that things are okay as long as a portion of the books are checked out at any given time. Other common stories include famous predictions that a murder will be committed at a school beginning with a common letter, such as “U.” Others note that all students are required to take a swimming class or eat ice cream for every meal because an unspecified donor included that requirement when he or she donated the building to the university.
Ghosts of Gettysburg College
Most colleges and universities have ghost stories, so it is hardly surprising that an institution that was in the midst of the largest battle of the American Civil War would be a particularly vibrant locus of specter sightings, legends of hauntings, and latter-day ghost hunters. The most famous spooky story regarding Gettysburg College concerns the fact that the school’s main building, Pennsylvania Hall, was used as a hospital for the wounded and dying during July 1–3, 1863. Local lore—passed down from one generation of students to the next, but also repeated on ghost tours, in books and magazines, and even on programs on the paranormal—holds that, on certain nights, administrators and staff using the elevator in Penn Hall will find themselves inexplicably on a ride to the basement; when the doors open, a spectral scene of carnage and death unfolds before them. In the most famous telling of this particular tale, a ghostly orderly locks despairing eyes with those on the elevator just before the doors close again and they return to the first floor and the land of the living.
C. Fee
Many legends take the form of cautionary tales about campus dangers. One of the most common concerns is about the roommate who enters her dark room at night without turning on the light because her roommate appears to be entertaining her boyfriend in the bed on the other side of the room. When the thoughtful roommate awakens in the morning, she finds her roommate murdered and the message, “Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?” scrawled across the mirror. Other stories feature a student whose gay roommate sexually assaults him during the night or a student who dies after attempting to pleasure herself with a broom. These cautionary tales have no basis in fact and seem designed to appeal to the prurient tastes many college-aged students adopt.
Linda Urschel
See also Myths; Urban Legends/Urban Belief Tales
Further Reading
Bronner, Simon J. 2012. Campus Traditions: Folklore from the Old-time College to the Modern Mega-university. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Liss, Joseph N. 2004. “Myth Information.” University of Chicago Magazine 96 (6).
Tucker, Elizabeth. 2005. Campus Legends: A Handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Williams, Andria. 2014. “College Urban Legends.” The CollegeBound Network. http://www.collegebound.net/content/article/college-urban-legendslies-students-love-to-tell/19214/. Accessed August 20, 2015.