Campus Comedy

Essay Time

    I was up at the university nearby a few days ago and the students seemed down and dour. It was quiet even in the library.  I would imagine things are rather gloomy because essays are due and exams are forthcoming. It is highly likely that the professors (or more likely, adjuncts or graduate assistants) who have to read the results are depressed as well, but none were spotted. On this frivolous first day of the month I thought I would attempt to cheer them up by reminding them of the potential humour at hand.

     Early in this century an enterprising professor mined the student papers and exam booklets for funny bits and found enough to publish this book:

Non Campus Mentis: World History According to College Students, by Anders Henriksson. This is the 2001 edition.

    A few years later he published another version and from these works some samples are provided:

Ignorance is Blitz: Mangled Moments of History From Actual College Students, by Anders Henriksson. This is the 2008 paperback edition.

“John F. Kennedy worked closely with the Russians to solve the Canadian Missile Crisis.”

“Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill and Truman were known as “The Big Three.”

“Athena the Hun rampaged the Balkans as Far as France.”

"Prehistoricle people spent all day banging rocks together so they could find food. This was the Stoned Age."

"Civilization woozed out of the Nile about 300,000 years ago. The Nile was a river that had some water in it. Every year it would flood and irritate the land."

"Magellan circumcised the globe."

"John Calvin Klein translated the Bible into American so that the people of Geneva could read it."

"Cat berets were a favorite form of German entertainment at this time."

"History grundled onward. International relations moved to the broodle stage."

    Perhaps proving that the Whig interpretation of history is the correct one, evidence of continuing progress is found  in Professor Henriksson’s latest work:

This work “is a parody of a course-by-course study guide right down to its spiral notebook complete with doodles. Featuring bloopers, blunders, and desperate attempts to bluff the right answer, it is a hilarious report on the state of American higher education.”  Some of those bloopers:

"The Eight Amendment bans cool and unusual punishment."

"Most liberals are circular humanists."

"The propositional phrase is often an attempt to answer the questions 'where' and when'?"

    I assume that among my millions of followers many are Canadians and I would warn them that it would be wrong for them to assume that books such as these provide additional evidence that standards are a little lower in the establishments offering higher education south of our border. (As an aside, better evidence will be available tonight in the interviews that will be held after the “Final Four”). I offer this warning because some of the student ‘gems’ offered by Professor Henriksson were written by Canadian students!

    Professor Henriksson taught at both McMaster University and the University of Alberta (he has a Ph.D in history from the University of Toronto). Way back in the last century he produced an essay presenting such student wisdom and much of it was likely based on Canadian examples. The article was originally published in the Wilson Quarterly in the spring of 1983. Luckily for you, it was one of their most popular essays and it was re-published in their collection “Four Decades of Classic Essays” and you can read it here (WQ, Vol.38, No.1, Winter, 2014).

   In an interview he was asked:  "You're making these up, right? College students aren't this stupid”. His answer: “ I'm not making them up. I don't think you could. Anyone who's taught at any level, whether it's college or third grade, will have a whole raft of funny things like this that students write. ... I got into the habit of sitting with a legal pad next to the stack of essays I grade, and I write down the funny things I run across. And I've built a network of other like-minded souls across the English-speaking academic world who very kindly contribute to me their own harvest of glee.”

   With some glee I am able to report that Professor Henriksson is still teaching history at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Perhaps he will offer us more samples. (As another aside, I will note that they will have to be really good given the humorous examples of mangled prose and jumbled thoughts being offered daily by a competitor - the POTUS who is located just a few miles down the Potomac).