Urban Legends - Academe, Legends of

College and university campuses, despite being centers of research,
learning, and sophistication, are also fertile grounds for the growth of
legends and other folklore. As Barre Toelken points out, students “can
be seen as members of a distinct folk group, the members of which are
separately literate but communally alliterate.” That is, while campus folk
are undeniably literate, much of their shared lore of campus life and traditions
is transmitted not in print but by means of customary example and
word of mouth, more recently aided by electronic communication. What
is true of students in this regard is equally so of faculty and staff. Toelken
provided this example of a typical campus story in the first publication of
his essay in 1968:

Just last year, one hears from reliable friends, an easily embarrassed biology teacher who was frightened of discussing sex in mixed company got rid of all the women in class by writing an obscene word on the board before taking roll, or by asking an intentionally ambiguous questions: “Can you tell me, Miss, what part of the body expands to three times its normal size when properly stimulated?” After the young woman leaves, the professor asks the class innocently, “What’s so bad about the pupil of the eye?”

A surprising amount of supernatural legendry still circulates on college and university campuses, including stories of haunted dormitories and labs, ghostly warnings from past residents, and tales telling of the restless spirits of native peoples who first inhabited the lands where colleges were
later built. The more modern urban legends of academe typically concern either eccentric faculty members (“The Acrobatic Professor,” “The Trained Professor,” etc.) or crises among students (“The Roommate’s Death,” “The Gay Roommate,” etc.). Legends about examinations and term papers abound on campuses, including stories of “Resubmitted Term Papers,” of a one-word exam question (“Why?”), of clever solutions to “The Barometer Problem,” of a “Tricky Answer” to a question for
which the student is unprepared, and especially of students’ imaginative ways of beating the system using “The Second Blue Book.” Two of the most popular examination legends describe a student’s witty one-upping of an officious professor; these are “The Bird-Foot Exam” and “Do You
Know Who I Am?”

Some campus legends influence behavior since they are accepted as official regulations, even though their circulation is merely traditional, never official. These legends include the supposed “rule” that a student will receive straight-A grades if his or her roommate commits suicide, the conventional notion that students must wait in the classroom a specific number of minutes for a late professor (depending on his or her academic rank), and the widely held belief that sitting in the front row,
maintaining eye contact with the professor, and smiling will guarantee a high grade.

The campus itself is the subject of legends in the stories about libraries supposedly sinking into the ground because the architect forgot to calculate the weight of books into the design, or the stories about supposed mix-ups that caused buildings to be erected on the wrong campus or facing in the wrong direction. Another theme is that campus planners had conspired to make new buildings “riot-proof” following the student demonstrations of the 1960s. This was supposedly accomplished by limiting large open spaces where students could gather and designing stairways and halls to be difficult for large numbers of students to move around in. Another part of the scheme was to install secret tunnels which police could use to infiltrate any buildings occupied by demonstrators.

One of the rare urban legends to have been traced to its apparent source is the academic story of “The Unsolvable Math Problem.” Legendary themes that have gone the other way—from being mere stories to becoming actual incidents—include the academic legends concerning student pranks (such as leaving an arm behind in a toll booth or stealing garden ornaments and sending them on “vacation”).

Besides stories dealing directly with campus life, the larger themes of urban legends circulate freely among academics, especially now that computers with Internet access have become common on campus. In e-mail and on computer bulletin boards, websites, and in listserv exchanges, the latest stories are enthusiastically transmitted and discussed by students and professors alike. A surprising number of these “separately literate” folk seem to give some credence to wild tales that have no more support other than someone somewhere has set the story racing along the Information Superhighway.

See also “The Announced Quiz”; “The Barrel of Bricks”; “The Fatal Initiation”; “A Lesson in Compassion;” “A Lesson in Perception”; Medical Student Pranks; Pranks; “Roaming Gnomes”; Scotland; Slovenia; “The Stanford Origin Legend”; “The Stolen Exam”; “Writing High”