Your favorite college story; real or fictional.

In My Humble Opinion
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Nuff said. Share your favorite college stor(y/ies); about professors or students or tests or dorms or football stadiums or whatever. Whether they’re urban legends; dorm stories; stories you heard from teachers and other students; or stories you experienced personally.

My favorite (no idea if it really happened or not; heard it from a Criminal Justice teacher):

Four San Diego college students drive up to LA for the weekend. There’s a big test on Monday; but they decide to stay up in LA for an extra day; come back Tuesday; and take the test then. They all agree that they’ll go back to the prof and tell him they were in LA for the weekend and tried to get back in time for the test but had a flat tire. Well; they do it; they come back on Tuesday; go into the teacher’s office; tell him their story and ask him if they can make up the test. He seems to buy it and tells them to come in later that day to take a makeup test.

They come in at the specificed time and place; Prof puts them in four opposite corners of the classroom and hands them their tests. Each one opens up to the first page; sees a ridiculously easy problem for 5 points; and rocks that problem; thinking “This is gonna be so easy!” Then each student; seperated by the dimensions of the classroom; turns to Page 2 to find this question worth 95 points:

Which tire?

2

This story has a rich history with some validity.

3

I’m sure it happened to the four guys from San Diego just as much as it happened to the four girls from the private high school where I came from.

Anyway, here are some of my favorites that may or may not have happened:

There was this guy who would stand by a different lecture hall each day. As class let out he asked each passing girl if she wanted to go to bed with him. Naturally, he got his face slapped. A lot. When asked why he set himself up for that kind of punishment day after day, he said, “It only takes one to say ‘yes.’”

As part of a fraternity initiation, a guy had to expose himself in public. He chose to flash a certain girl in the university library. With his frat brothers watching, he approached her and unzipped his jeans. The girl looked up briefly from her book and said “Looks like a penis – only smaller.”

At the annual Harvard/Yale (Alabama/Auburn, Texas/Oklahoma, Ohio State/Michigan, Cal/Stamford, USC/UCLA) game two alumni from the rival schools found themselves side by side in the men’s room. As they finished their business and zipped up, one of them stopped at the sink to wash his hands while the other headed for the exit. The ____ fan said over his shoulder, “At ____ they taught that a gentleman washes his hands.” “Maybe so,” the other replied, “but at _____ they taught us a gentleman doesn’t piss on his hands.”

4

Well…everybody’s probably already heard this, but in a similar vein to kunilou’s last example…

A lost freshman at Fancy Ivy League University goes up to an senior and says, “Excuse me, where’s the library at?” The senior turns her nose up to him and says, “At Fancy Ivy League University, we don’t end our sentences in a preposition!” “Okay then,” retorns the frosh, “where’s the library at, BITCH?”

Haw haw.

One of my favorite Onion headlines was something along the lines of: “Guy Reminisces About that Day at College When Everyone Hung Out on the Roof.”

It’s funny 'cause it’s true.

5

This isn’t a story, but a saying that my husband told me one of his professors used to say at the beginning of each class (June Welch, U. Dallas), it cracks me up!

As for college stories, there’s always the time when I pushed a friend into the sprinklers on campus and the next thing I knew I was standing in the middle of campus without my shirt on.

Or the time that I threw sand at a guy in the middle of class because my classmates kept pelting me with mints, and I couldn’t stand it anymore and the only thing (other than mints) that I had was a little bit of sand left over from our class field trip (to the beach) … so I threw it at him.

Or the time I filled my advisors office with chocolate/Christmas decorations/Thanksgiving decorations (complete with a scare crow).

Or the time I drew directions in the street so that my professor wouldn’t forget where his parking space was, complete with arrows and a smiley face welcoming him into his parking space.

Or that within the first hour on campus I had already broken my dorm window…

But, these are my stories, so maybe you had to be there…

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Another “my story”:

I was taking a course in 19th and 20th century visual art and at the end of term we had a “Decadence Party”. For some reason, in the laundry room of my dorm there was an old sedan chair that must have been used in theatricals.

At the party, all the guests were being announced as they entered, so I got four friends to carry in the sedan chair with me in it, and on alighting I did the Groucho Marx Captain Spaulding routine.

I’m a geek, yep.

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John Lechner has gained some notoriety for being a Wisconsin-Whitewater undergraduate since 1994, but he’s a mere piker compared to George P. Burdell, who matriculated at Georgia Tech in 1927 and continues to show up on class rolls to this day. While Lechner has accumulated 250 credit hours, Burdell not only celebrated the 1969 arrival of computerized registration at Tech by signing up for every class the school offered, but shouldered similar loads in 1975 and '80!

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Okay, here’s one of my own stories then:

I was in a music class that had I think a total of 4 people. On a rotating basis, each of us was supposed to come to class with a different composition to present. So, on my day to present, about 20 minutes before class begins I run down to the music library where I know my friends from class will be. “Hey!” I say breathlessly, “help me out – I gotta present today, and I haven’t even begun to look at my piece!” My friends just look up at me awkwardly, which is unusual, because we’re usually a pretty fun bunch (for music geeks, at any rate). “Come on, guys!” I say, my voice rising, “help me out or Professor _______ will kill me!” It’s then that I look up to see Professor __________ standing across the room, score in hand, staring at me blankly. I literally just turned around without a word and left the room. Needless to say the class was rather uncomfortable after that display. (And although that particular presentation obviously flopped, I did pass the class with either an A- or B+, can’t remember which.)

In the end it ultimately just provided a good story. My classmates ribbed me about it till the end of the year. Even now it makes me laugh, the look on that prof’s face…

9

I took Indian Philosophy my sophomore year. That was the year Govinda’s opened around the corner from my campus. It was the ISKCON temple that offered vegetarian all you can eat lunch for 99 cents, back in 1978. As a penurious college student, I made the most of it. Mostly composed of carbs, laden with ghee fat, a tummy full of Hare Krsna food acts as a powerful sedative. The Hare Krsnas themselves believed that their tamarind tea was soporific.

So I had Indian Philosophy class right after lunchtime. The professor was an old Jesuit who sat in a chair the whole time and droned in a low monotone. The class invariably put me to sleep.

Then the prof would call on me and ask a question about the day’s lesson on Madhyamika, Carvaka, the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, or whatever. I developed the ability to instantly snap awake and also give the correct answer to the question every time. The only way I can explain this astounding mental feat is that these things are a lot easier when your mental powers are young and full of energy.

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Totally true story:

I went to a school where we regularly had chapel and sang hymns. We also, less interestingly, had a cafeteria. In my freshman year, I made a habit of keeping the butter knife from dinner, taking it up to my room and throwing it into a box. By the end of the year, I had ~100 butter knives.

By the end of my senior year, I had well over 500.

Didja ever notice that hymnbooks have those bindings that when you open the book up, there’s a space in-between the spine and the cover where you could stick something the size of a butter knife? They do. But when you close the hymnbooks, the knife is in there nice and snug and you’d never know.

Well, of course you see where this is headed: sneak into the chapel the night before, insert 500 knives into 500 hymnals, “please stand and open your hymnbooks…” Hilarity ensues.

The auditorium, BTW, has concrete floors, and excellent acoustics.

11

Ok, these are my dad’s, they are sadly true.

Background is that the junior dean (faculty member in charge of enforcing discpline among the stuents) was a much loved history professor, but he was so timid that the students got away with murder.

Anyway, everyday he would cycle around a quad in college. One day a student poked a shotgun out of his window and “shot” another student, the guy then reloaded the gun, pointed it at the rapidly cycling dean and shouted "You’re next ". Of course, the cartridge was blank and the “shot” student was covered in ketchup.

The point being that nothing happened to either of them because the dean feared for his life. realising that they must have actually terrified him, the boys apologised, and he used to recant the tale over and over to show what a good sport he was.

The time the medical students got a lot of offal, dressed it in clothes and threw it under the wheels of a bus, causing the driver to believe he had run someone over.

The guys who experimented with the hallucinogenic properties of nutmeg and jumped out of a third floor window.
These are mine, and sadly also true.

The men’s boat club used to force novices to drink a bottle of cooking sherry and run naked around campus. As a female cox I had to drink the sherry, but got to skip the running, which was just as well, all things considered, as that was the year that they caused so much damage that the naked run was banned forever.

There was my friend who set off the fire alarm every Saturday night for 6 months because he tried to make bacon while off his face on alcohol and various chemicals. Eventually people from the building volunteered to make the bacon, and there was a rota of people to provide 4am sandwiches for him. The reasoning being that this way only one person had to stay awake, as the alarm wouldn’t go off.

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I’ve just remembered another one of my dad’s.
There used to be an old retired judge (about maybe 80) who would hand out in the coffee bar and library.

He was completely ga-ga and everyone was very fond of him. One day, someone looked up the courts records for his last case and found out why he had “retired”.

Apparently, he was trying someone for cycling at night without lights, and when the guy was found guilty, the judge sentenced him to death!

After that, the poor old guy got more free cups of coffee than ever before.

13

This was my friend Matt’s strategy. (Well, he’d ask them out, not to bed – not right away, at least.) It was very successful, as it turns out.

The best one I’ve got (which I think I may have posted about before) was told to me as a true story about a mutual friend, Dave. Supposedly, one day Dave’s roommate (let’s call him Bob) skipped his afternoon class and returned to the dorm early. When he enetered, he found Dave standing naked on his (Bob’s) bed, masturbating. But instead of hiding in the closet or trying to come up with some half-assed excuse like you would expect, Dave’s only reaction to Bob’s arrival was to say “Oh, hey. Your mom called.”

In the same general category, there’s another story from our first night at school, and this one I know is true. Apparently there was this couple from high school that had been together for a long time, and so when he decided to go to Cornell, she decided to follow him there. They also signed up to live in the same dorm. Unfortunately, he dumped her over the summer, not wanting to be encumbered. So he gets to school during Orientation. Cornell, like I assume most other places, has a big party for all the new students the night they move in. The guy and his new roommate head down to the party and go around meeting folks; they eventually get separated. So after a while, the guy decides to go home. He opens the door to his dorm room and is confronted with – you guessed it – his roommate and his ex-girlfriend en flagrante. They stayed together for years while the the guy had no success throughout freshman year.

One other one (this probably no one thinks is cool but me). Spectre reminded me – at Cornell, there’s a very old chair that is the official Preisdent’s chair – no one has ever sat in it except the President of Cornell, who uses it only for certain ceremonial occasions. The rest of the time, the chair is kept roped off and hidden. Except I had a class in the room where it’s hidden, and I managed to work my way around the ropes. So nobody’s ever sat in that chair except the President of Cornell, and me.

–Cliffy

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My undergrad school is (was?) nationally known for our Halloween parties. People would travel from all over the country to attend. There were rooms set aside in the dorms for… recreational partaking of illegal substances. During my freshman year, and upperclassman I was acquainted with dressed up as a mushroom and bopped from drug room to drug room, never saying a word… just sitting down next to the drugged-out folks and grinning like a maniac.

Perhaps you had to be there…

15

My freshman year at UT…the best memories of that year were launching water balloons off the roof and causing UFO sightings with homemade hot air balloons.

We could jimmy the lock on the door up to the roof, and we had a giant slingshot. It took 3 people to fire it, and we had marks painted on the roof that would allow us to target various frat/sorority houses in the vicinity. We would also make hot air ballons out of kitesticks, the plastic bags from the drycleaners and candles. We managed to get one all the way from (for those familiar with Austin, TX) 27th and Nueces all the way down to the state capitol.

Ah, the good old days…

16

A true story from when I was at the University of Vermont:

One of the fraternities decided they would have the biggest Christmas tree ever. So, one cold night in December, they got drunk, hopped in a couple trucks, drove over to the local convent (yes, convent. Where nuns live) and cut down an approximately 25’ tree from the front yard to (somehow) put in their house. After cutting it down, they used their trucks to drag it the 1/4 mile back to the house. Amazingly enough, the theft wasn’t discovered until the following morning. One of the nuns went outside and noticed the tree was gone. She also noticed the thieves had left a trail through the snow of pine needles and branches leading out to the street, down the street, into the driveway of the fraternity, and then into the backyard. The tree never even made it into the house. Police were called, folks got arrested, I’m pretty sure the fraternity lost its charter, and the convent got a new tree.

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Got another from UC San Diego.

Link

Revelle College* has an annual Watermelon Pageant, which originated when Dr. Robert Swanson, teaching introductory physics, asked on an exam (a) what the impact velocity of a watermelon thrown from the 7th floor of Urey Hall would be, and (b) how far the fragments would scatter. Prior to the Pageant a Watermelon Queen is selected, which in my time (1975-1980) could be of either gender but was still always called a Queen.

The cool thing is, Dr. Swanson is still there, and will be observing this year’s drop as he has done every year since 1965. I didn’t even know that when I was there.

*Revelle is one of several undergraduate colleges within UCSD

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FWIW, in USAF boot camp I heard this one as “…the Marine said, ‘In the Corps they teach us to wash our hands’. The Airman replied, ‘In the Air Force, they teach us not to piss on our hands.’”

Reminds me of a high school friend who (unconsciously, of course) learned to say “What? I’m awake!” during his sleep in Math class.

That’s hilarious! Was it U. Wisconsin? When I went to U. Arizona I read/heard about the UW Halloween parties. (That Halloween, BTW, I narrowly escaped being arrested for my second and third times that semester.)

Oh yeah, and there was the neo-Nazi attack on the Jewish fraternity too, and the evangelist who toured Arizona colleges and collected quite the mocking daily audience at the UA. That was Spring 2005; he had more success at ASU and I even saw him at San Diego State, so thinking back now I have no idea how widely he toured.

That’s awesome, and makes me want to go to UCSD even more!

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I like the probably-apocryphal story about the group of guys at my university who dressed up as workmen, borrowed a ute (truck), went to the central police station and casually removed the large “Police” sign…

There’s also the story about the bunch of drunken guys from my residential college that decided to go on a nude run through another college. Twp problems with this idea - they happened to run into a convention of priests, so the punishment was perhaps more severe than it might have been, and they weren’t completely naked. Why’s that last bit a problem? Well, the one item of clothing they left on were their football jumpers, clearly identifying themselves as members of _____ College, and with big identifying numbers on the back.

Stupid.

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All 100% true:

  1. In a Physiology class at Penn State (circa 1984) with 200+ students, our militant ex-Army Nurse professor yells “pencils down” at the end of the final exam. One guy keeps working as students funnel down the lecture hall and drop their blue-books on the podium. The prof becomes furious at said student, commanding him to stop, and bring her his paper. He looks up and says “lighten up lady, I’m almost done.” Many of us remain in the room to witness what is sure to be either an excellent coup or a bloodbath. She begins walking up the aisle, yelling all the way, at the same time he gets up and moves across the row and down the other aisle. He reaches the podium as she reaches his seat, and he puts his blue-book in the pile, and mixes up the pile. he then says to her “Lady, you have no idea who I am” and then runs up the aisle and out of the room. Tremendous balls on that one!

  2. I lived in a house with a bunch of guys in my senior year (large house, but we were not a frat) and after a snow storm, we went outside and built a gigantic snow phallus on our front lawn. Why? I don’t recall, but it seemed funny at the time. This thing was erect at 15-20 feet, with giant testicles on each side. We hosed it down to freeze it, had a good laugh, and went inside. An hour or so later, the police knock on the door and tell us, half embarassed, that we have to take it town, as neighbors have complained. Well, it is now dark, freezing cold, and this monstrous snow penis is completely frozen solid. We have 5-6 guys trying to knock it down, hit it with baseball bats, etc. We managed it to tip over, but sitting on the testicles, it only made it funnier, as it looked like it was ready for insertion. The police asked us to try to cover it up with snow and left, so we sprinkled some snow to give it some hair. It must have been out there on the lawn for a month or so before it began to melt.

  3. My gf in college was rather risque and liked to have sex outdoors. After a semester overseas, with commensurate topless beaches, she returned in the summer with no tan lines. We treked out to the “forestry research center” to sun among lines and lines of evergreen trees so she could tan in private. Mix sun, music, hormones, ganja, tanning oil, and youthful exuberance, and you get an excellent schtup-fest. In mid-boffage, I feel something rather foreign in my nether-regions, and also hear a slight jingling sound, followed by a “throat clearing” sound. Turns out some dude walking his dog without a leash happend upon us, and the dog found pay-dirt when going in for “the sniff.” This story always causes someone to spit out a mouthful of liquid when told at the proper moment!