Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends

by Jan Harold Harold Brunvand

  “Switched Campus Buildings”

  I heard this story when I was a student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. It involves the University Chapel there, a small, squat, grey stone building which contrasts with the general red brick Georgian/classical design of virtually every other building on the central grounds.

  The story goes that the architect of the chapel was also the architect of the chapel at Cornell University in New York. Somehow, his designs for these chapels were switched, so that Cornell received a red brick Georgian chapel while Virginia received its current chapel. I have never been able to ask anyone who has been to Cornell whether they have such a chapel or not.

  Dear Professor Folklore: I graduated from Calif. State Polytechnic University, Pomona, in 1978. I heard a story that the architect who designed the red-brick dorm building had earlier designed prisons.

  I quoted a variation of the chapel story with a switch between Virginia and Notre Dame in The Baby Train; the above version was sent to me in 1989 by Daniel M. Covino of Rye Brook, New York. Numerous stories circulate on other campuses alleging that building plans were switched between institutions, usually those with radically different architectural styles or those in distant parts of the country that have completely opposite climates. The prisonlike nature of so many college living units prompts stories such as the second example above, which I quote from a postcard sent in 1995 by Richard T. Wylie of Torrance, California. Another common campus-architecture legend follows.

  “Sinking Libraries”

  When I was an undergraduate at Northwestern University from 1977 to 1981, there was a story circulating on campus that the University Library was gradually sinking. The building had been constructed on a section of campus known as the “lakefill,” which, as its name implies, was at one time under the waters of Lake Michigan.

  As I remember it, the architects had neglected to include the weight of the books when making their necessary calculations. As a result, the library was sinking by a quarter of an inch each year. For all I know this may actually be true.

  When I was a freshman in the early ’80s at the University of Pittsburgh I heard about the Sliding Engineering Building. It seems that the engineers, when designing the foundations for this large building, had neglected to take into account some instability of the soil upon which it was built. This, coupled with the building’s location at the top of a sloping street, resulted in a tendency for it to slide down the hill.

  The only way to prevent it from sliding was to keep the building light enough, and the only way to accomplish this was to limit the amount of laboratory equipment in the basement labs. So it was only the judicious restraint of the experimenting professors that kept the building from sliding down to rest against the residence halls at the bottom of the slope, and then from sliding on through an elementary school immediately below them.

  Northwestern University seems to have the most famous “sinking library” in the United States, judging from all the letters and articles I have received about it. Jenny Cline of Maynard, Massachusetts, sent me the above example in 1990. Another notorious sinking library is at Syracuse University. Essentially the same legend—sometimes without a mention of unstable subsoil—is told on many American college and university campuses, possibly encouraged by the students’ noting that the shelves of the library are never completely full; some books are always checked out. The sliding-building story from Pittsburgh came to me from John F. Myers of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1993. Off campus there are similar legends about new buildings either leaning off-vertical or steadily sinking into the ground; the most common sinking buildings seem to be new shopping malls.

  “The Acrobatic Professor”

  Your campus stories prompted my husband to recall some about a chemistry professor at Mississippi State named Seeley, a terror to all the agriculture students.

  Once students asked when they would have an exam. He replied, “The day you see me come into the classroom through the transom.”

  The next day he brought a ladder with him, set it next to the door, climbed in through the transom and gave them an exam.

  When he retired, a cartoon of his head sticking through a transom was supposedly published in the campus newspaper.

  I was surprised to learn while reading The Mexican Pet that a story I had taken as truth was probably an urban legend. As a freshman at Texas A&M University in 1968, I was told by older students that my introductory calculus professor had once answered the usual first-week question about pop quizzes by saying that the class could expect one when he entered the room via the back window.

  He was a slight man with physical impairments that made it difficult for him to walk, so there was some nervous laughter at this announcement, especially since the class met in a second-floor classroom. There was no balcony off the room, but only a small ledge outside the rather large windows.

  One day near the middle of the semester, the story went, the class was about to dismiss itself after waiting the then-standard fifteen minutes for the professor to arrive, when a window at the back of the room opened, and in crawled the professor. He stood up and distributed a stack of pop quizzes to the astonished class.

  Marie H. Lewis of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, sent me her husband’s recollection of the Professor Seeley story in 1991. This was probably the same Mississippi State University professor who was alluded to without name or field in the October 1961 edition of Reader’s Digest. I have heard similar stories about a German professor at the University of North Carolina, a mathematician at Union College in Schenectady, New York, a history professor at Tennessee Technological University, and—best known of all the acrobatic professors—about Professor Guy Y. (“Guy Wire”) Williams, who taught at the University of Oklahoma from 1906 until his death in 1968. Campus folklore claimed that Williams had once been a circus acrobat, but an official history of the University only mentions that he was “a skilled gymnast and acrobat,” without specifically describing the transom feat. Three published photos of Williams show him mixing chemicals, twirling a lariat, and “startling his class with an impromptu handstand on the corner of his desk.” But there is no mention of climbing through a transom, nor are pop quizzes described. Transoms would be characteristic of only the very oldest classroom buildings; the variation of the story from Texas A&M with the professor simply entering through a window was sent to me in 1990 by John T. Yantis of Texas.

  “The Telltale Report”

  It was in 1886 that “discretionary supervision” of attendance at scholastic exercises, as the Dean discreetly termed it, was adopted [at Harvard]…. “Discretionary supervision” meant in practice that upperclassmen could cut classes at will; and term-time trips to New York, Montreal, and Bermuda became all too common. The Faculty remained in blissful ignorance of this new definition of liberty until it was called to their attention by a careless student and his irate father. The lad had left Cambridge for the more genial climate of Havana, writing a series of post-dated letters, which his chum was supposed to mail to his parents at proper intervals. Unfortunately, his “goody” [housekeeper] placed the lot in the mail; the alarmed father came to Cambridge, and no officer of the University had the remotest idea where the son might be. Shortly after, the Overseers offered the Faculty the choice between holding a daily morning roll-call and checking attendance in classes. They chose the latter.

  From Samuel Eliot Morison’s 1936 book Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636–1936, pp. 368–69. While the imposition and discontinuation of “discretionary supervision” at Harvard can be historically verified, the anecdote about the anonymous “lad’s” postdated letters giving him away because of slipups by his “chum” and his “goody” sounds apocryphal. This story did not survive on the liberated campuses of the twentieth century, but a similar account of telltale reports written in advance and mailed by a landlady as a group, or in the wrong sequence, became a standard theme in twentieth-century folklore of Mormon missionaries who are required to
file weekly activity reports and to stay on the job during their church-assigned two-year missions. Every Mormon missionary has heard the cautionary tale about the missionaries who strayed—to a World Series game, the Olympics, Disneyland, skiing, etc.—and were caught when those telltale reports arrived in the mail.

  “The Daughter’s Letter from College”

  When I was a university president, trying to deal with campus protests against the war in Vietnam, building a law school and a medical school and three community colleges, handling several budget crises a year, serving as a defendant in twenty lawsuits at a time, and even having to worry about three assassination threats, it was a condition of survival to take the longer and the wider view. On one particularly noisy day a kind and perceptive friend handed me a letter sent by an American college girl to her parents.

  Dear Mom and Dad: I’m sorry to be so long in writing again, but all my writing paper was lost the night the dormitory was burned down by the demonstrators. I’m out of the hospital now, and the doctor says my eyesight should be back to normal sooner or later.

  The wonderful boy, Bill, who rescued me from the fire kindly offered to share his little apartment with me until the dorm is rebuilt. He comes from a good family, so you won’t be too surprised when I tell you we are going to get married. In fact, you always wanted a grandchild, so you will be glad to know that you will be grandparents next month.

  Please disregard the above practice in English composition. There was no fire, I haven’t been in the hospital, I’m not pregnant, and I don’t even have a boyfriend. But I did get a “D” in French and an “F” in chemistry, and I wanted to be sure you received this news in proper perspective.

  Love,

  Mary

  From the foreword to Harlan Cleveland’s 1985 book The Knowledge Executive: Leadership in an Information Society. While not precisely a legend, this anonymous letter in several variations has circulated on many college and university campuses since at least the mid-1960s. Cleveland’s version is somewhat sanitized and much shorter and less detailed than most texts. It omits the class-based or racist elements usually found in the letter. For example, the daughter may describe her new fiancé as of “a different race and religion than ours,” or even as the son of “an important gunbearer in the village in Africa from which he comes.” Other texts mention that the daughter has been diagnosed with syphilis as well as being pregnant, or that the fiancé cannot marry her until his “minor infection” allows him to pass the state’s blood test. The photocopied sheets upon which the letters are distributed are often titled “Perspective—writer unknown.”

  “The Barometer Problem”

  I heard this story while attending San Jose State University in 1975. One of the questions on a physics final exam asked the students to measure the height of a building using a barometer. Not having studied the chapter on pressure changes with altitude, one student thought for a moment and then wrote: “Take the barometer to the top of the building to be measured. Throw it off. Using a stopwatch, time its descent and from that data compute the height of the building.”

  The professor was not impressed, and graded the student’s response as incorrect. The student protested to the teacher and was reluctantly given another chance to answer the question.

  The second time he wrote, “Take the barometer to the basement of the building to be measured. Find the building superintendent or manager, and tell him you will give him the barometer if he tells you the correct height of the building.”

  It wasn’t said whether the professor was impressed with this second response.

  Sent to me in 1989 by Steve Butler of San Clemente, California. If the professor had failed to be impressed by the student’s second effort, he might have liked one of the other “wrong answers” sometimes mentioned in this story. These alternate solutions involve lowering the barometer from the roof on a rope and measuring the rope, suspending the barometer on a string as a pendulum and calculating the height based on the pendulum’s swing, measuring the shadows of the barometer and the building from the same base and calculating the height, or measuring the side of the building in units of “one barometer” as the student climbs the steps from bottom to top. College students tend to circulate this story in order to illustrate the arbitrary nature of testing, while faculty members may tell the story to demonstrate the possibilities of creative thinking.

  “Term Paper Trickery”

  In 1984 when I was a senior at Regis Jesuit High School in Denver my English teacher was a faculty member from the associated Regis College. On the first day he felt compelled to warn us about plagiarism, and he told us the following story, which we all believed to be true, as I assumed the teacher himself did.

  He said there was a teacher who had an introductory college English class similar to the one we were in. This teacher gave the class a term paper assignment, and when the papers were graded and being returned to the class he asked to see one of the students after class. This particular student had bought a term paper through the mail, and then had submitted it as his own.

  After class the teacher told the student flat out that he had plagiarized the paper. The student instinctively denied it, but the teacher insisted, and eventually the student admitted the truth and asked how the teacher had known that he had copied it.

  The teacher replied, “Because it is a chapter out of my own master’s thesis.”

  A grading story that was told as true at my high school in Oakland, California, in 1957–58. There was a legend about one of our biology teachers, that he never read the middle of a paper, only the beginning and the end. Supposedly, one student a few years ahead of my class had put the theory to the test by turning in a biology paper with a brilliant beginning, a fantastic ending, and the Gettysburg Address in the middle. It was graded F, with the comment, “Ha, ha; I do too read the middle part.”

  Stories of resubmitted term papers—inevitably recognized by the instructors—are common on college and high school campuses, even more so in these days of Internet sources of research papers. The first example above was sent to me by Matthew S. Christensen of Durham, North Carolina, in 1990. Variations on the theme include stories in which the paper receives a high grade, despite the teacher’s awareness that it was not original, since, as he comments, “I like this paper better every time I read it,” or “I got only a B-minus when I wrote this twenty years ago, but I thought it deserved an A.” The second term paper story above was sent to me by Melanie Nickel of San Diego, California, in 1991. The student’s attempted trickery represents what I call the “Gotcha!” ploy: the writer inserts a garbled sentence, a repeated paragraph, a meaningless footnote, or an upside-down page just to check whether his or her paper is actually read in full by the teacher. When I was editor of an academic journal some years ago I received a few manuscripts with one page upside down; my practice was to reverse a different page before mailing back a rejected manuscript.

  “The Bird Foot Exam”

  It seems that this college student needed a small two-hour course to fill out his schedule. The only one that fit was in Wildlife Zoology. He had some reservations, as he heard the course was tough and the teacher a bit different. But it seemed like the only choice, so he signed up.

  After one week and one chapter the professor had a test for the class. He passed it out, and it was a sheet of paper divided into squares and in each square was a carefully drawn picture of some bird legs. Not bodies, not feet—just different bird’s legs. The test simply asked them to identify the birds from the pictures of their legs.

  Well, he was absolutely floored. He didn’t have a clue. The student sat and stared at the test and got madder and madder. Finally, reaching the boiling point, he stomped up to the front of the classroom and threw the test on the teacher’s desk and exclaimed, “This is the worst test I have ever seen, and this is the dumbest course I have ever taken.”

  The teacher picked up the paper, saw that the student hadn’t even put his name o
n the paper, and said, “By the way, young man, what’s your name?” At this the student bent over, pulled up his pants, revealed his legs and said, “You identify me.”

  Usually in this story the test does reveal the birds’ feet, sometimes using stuffed birds lined up under little bags rather than drawings. This example is from Parables, etc.: A Monthly Resource Letter for Pastors/Teacher/Speakers, vol. 4, no. 11, January 1985. An alternate punch line is “You tell me prof!” The “What’s your name” theme also appears in the next story, yet another student commentary on the supposed arbitrary nature of college testing and grading.