Most famous or interesting fictional alumni from your school?

Cafe Society
1

What’s the most famous and/or interesting alumni from your school?

I went to Dartmouth, which has been represented in fiction fairly well as an elite but not exceptionally exclusive eastern liberal arts school with a long heritage. As a result, it’s a pretty good shorthand used by authors to inform readers/viewers about a character.

Michael Corleone attended Dartmouth, but dropped out to join the Marines after Pearl Harbor and never graduated.

My personal favorite alum is Trapper John McIntyre who played football at Dartmouth and was even a member of the Dartmouth Outing Club according to the books.

Honorable mention to Steven Colbert’s character on the Colbert Report. Colbert didn’t actually go to Dartmouth.

2

Indiana Jones went to the University of Chicago and later taught there. Curiously, Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble in the Fugitive also went to UChicago medical school.

3

The University of Pennsylvania is proud to list Elon Musk and me as alumni.

4

And which of you is fictional? Gotta be Musk… maybe Zuckerberg, too.

…

Gatsby was born James Gatz on a North Dakota farm, and though he attended St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he dropped out after two weeks, loathing the humiliating janitorial work by means of which he paid his tuition.

5

I attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison; our alumni association addressed this very question in a web post about a decade ago.

Answer: apparently, no hugely noteworthy characters; the ones that stand out on the list are Donna Moss on The West Wing, Laurie Forman on That 70s Show (though she did not graduate), and Chris on Parks and Recreation. Also, President Andrew Shepherd in The American President was from Wisconsin, and taught at the UW, but was a Stanford grad.

6

Cool, every school should do that.

Did any of the other That 70’s Show kids (other than Laurie) go to UW-Madison? I thought there was a plot that had them preparing for college…

7

Best I could find was that some sort of advanced AI featured in The Postman (the book, not the movie) was conceived at Oregon State University. Not sure if that counts. I thought I read somewhere that the character Teddy Cleaver got an honorary degree from OSU but apparently this didn’t occur. Not sure why I thought that.

8

I think that both Eric and Donna had planned to go there, but did not actually do so.

9

Can anyone beat Tristram Shandy, Mr Darcy, Swift’s Gulliver, Holmes (probably) and Moriarty (certainly), Data in Star Trek… and a dedicated Wikipedia page listing several hundred others?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Cambridge_in_popular_culture

Strangely the Wiki page omits James Bond.

10

Dunstan Ramsay, the protagonist of Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business, had an MA in History from my alma matter, the University of Toronto.

11

The only fictional alumnus from my school (that I know of) is an unnamed scientist in an episode of Futurama.

12

Wikipedia also maintains lists of fictional alumni and staff of various schools in its Fictional university and college personnel category. The Harvard subcategory looks to have several dozen entries, though of course that’s nowhere near what you found for Cambridge.

14

President Josiah Bartlet

Also, L’il Sebastian holds an honorary degree from Notre Dame.

15

He got an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth, and taught there as a tenured professor.

16

I went to Emerson College in Boston. Weirdly, the last two Stephen King stories I read both had characters who were supposed to be attending Emerson in the future, but neither were at the time of the stories. Nancy Drew’s boyfriend Ned Nickerson attended Emerson. I’m not sure he’s as famous as his girlfriend, but he still might be the correct answer.

17

Nothing for my alma mater, but Olivia Benson from Law and Order: SVU went to the college where I work.

18

I went to Kent State University. I can’t think of any fictional alumni but I’m wondering if any of the characters from “The Drew Carey Show” (such as Drew) went to KSU being that Carey went there. Also, cartoonist Tom Batiuk went there so I’m pretty sure some characters from his strip Funky Winkerbean went there.

Can I fictitiously claim that one or both of Calvin’s parents (of Calvin & Hobbes) went there? Maybe that’s where they met.

19

I got both my undergrad and MD degrees from Johns Hopkins. A few fictional folks (courtesy of wiki) who attended the school of medicine include:

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22

I’m a Yalie, so there’s sort of an embarrassment of riches. I’m going to go with my personal favorites.

Composer Charles Ives (1898)
Actor Vincent Price (1934)
Activist and member of the Chicago Seven David Dellinger (1936)
Cartoonist Garry Trudeau (1970)