All posts in College

When you rip hundreds of young people from their childhood homes and thrust them into the endless torture machine of college life, it’s a certainty that they will find a host of ways to let off steam. Some students party a little too hard; others pour themselves into their studies, eschewing all social activities and habitual bathing.
 
Then, there are those who conspire against their academic oppressors, devising evil schemes to create campus chaos and disorder. Those brave young men and women are college pranksters. Some pranks are simple and amusing, others are complicated and cerebral. But they’re a part of college history, and some of them deserve to be honored for their sheer hilarity and genius. Here, in no particular order, are some of the best.
 

1. Carleton College’s giant R2D2

Students at Minnesota’s Carleton College draped the campus conservatory in spray painted sheets to make what could be the world’s largest Star Wars character replica.
 

2. University of Wisconsin-Madison’s field of flamingos

On September 4, 1979, University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Bascom Hill was decorated by the campus’s Pail and Shovel Party. More than a thousand pink flamingo lawn ornaments graced Bascom Hill, greeting students as they made their way to campus that morning. It was a silly ploy to gain seats in the school’s student government. And it worked: they won 29 seats.
 

3. Harvard’s Theft of the Sacred Cod

There’s still some debate over which is more ridiculous: the existence of a Sacred Cod or its theft. The consecrated fish presided over the Massachusetts House of Representatives chamber until it was stolen by members of the Harvard Lampoon in 1933. After two days of panic, the cod was returned to its rightful place.
 

4. Great Rose Bowl Hoax of 1961

This one’s a doozy: it takes serious guts to hijack a college football game viewed by millions, but fourteen students from the California Institute of Technology managed to pull it off. With a daring operation that involved altering a crowd sign that was supposed to spell “Washington,” but instead spelled “CalTech.”
 

5. Doctor Who’s TARDIS visits MIT

Nerds pull the best pranks, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) produces some of the world’s best nerds and pranks, so you’ll see them more than once on this list. A full-size replica of the Doctor’s phone box spaceship was perched on top of Building 7 on the MIT campus. You can find this and other pranks on the university’s page dedicated to such exercises in humor.
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