Which College Urban Legends Are True?

Posted on Jun 1, 2009 by Whistlebury Properties

Have you ever played the icebreaker game “Two truths and a lie”? Basically, each person tells the group three things about herself, and the group has to decide which two items are true, and which one is the lie.

I found the first three legends and the information behind them at the College Bound Network. The rest of the information I gathered from Snopes.com

The Legends

1. Dissect an Aunt
Imagine rolling up your sleeves for gross anatomy lab, only to discover that you are, in fact, seeing dead people – and one of the cadavers is someone you’ve seen before. It happened to a medical student who discovered that one of the cadavers presented to her class was her great aunt. Of course, a different cadaver was immediately substituted by the state anatomical board.

2. Doing Laps to Get a Degree
At Columbia University, a stellar student who completed his degree requirements in three years, finished at the top of his class, and later earned a Ph.D. from Columbia and taught at Columbia was denied his bachelor’s degree because he failed to pass the mandatory school swim test. After informing Columbia that he had since learned how to swim and asking the school to waive his disqualification, he was finally granted his bachelor’s degree – 60 years later.

3. Beware the Brothel
Have you ever wondered why your school doesn’t have a sorority house? It might be because of local brothel laws, which prohibit more than a specified number of unrelated females from living together. In these municipalities, sorority houses are illegal … so members of the sisterhood stay in the dorms.

4. Unfortunate Acronym
Before Furman University became an accredited university, they were called Furman College Christian Knights. When they became accredited and turned into a university, their name became Furman University Christian Knights, resulting in an unfortunate acronym for cheerleaders to chant during football games.

5. Unsolvable Math Problem
A young college student was working hard in an upper-level math course, for fear that he would be unable to pass. On the night before the final, he studied so long that he overslept the morning of the test.

When he ran into the classroom several minustes late, he found three equations written on the blackboard. The first two went rather easily, but the third seemed impossible. He worked frantically on it until – just time mintues short of the deadline – he found a method that worked, and he finished the problems just as time was called.

The student turned in his test paper and left. That evening he received a phone call from his professor. “Do you realize what you did on the test today?” he shouted at the student.

“Oh, no,” thought the student. I must not have gotten the problems right after all.

“You were only supposed to do the first two problems,” the professor explained. “That last one was an example of an equation that mathematicians since Einstein have been trying to solve without success. I discussed it with the class before starting the test. And you just solved it!”

Truth or Lie?

1. Dissect an Aunt: It’s true, and it happened in 1982 at the University of Alabama School of Medicine. Other urban legends about discovering the cadaver of a long-lost parent or a celebrity, however, are false, including the tale of the corpse of English novelist Laurence Sterne, who died in 1768. But the fact that it could happen and it has happened is creepy enough!

2. Doing Laps: This one’s for real, too. In 1923, Dr. Mortimer J. Adler was denied his bachelor’s degree from Columbia because he couldn’t pass the mandatory swim test. Actually, Columbia and a handful of other schools still require students to pass a swim test before graduation. Untrue urban legends about university swim tests do abound, however, citing that the tests came at the behest of a wealthy benefactor whose own child drowned.

3. Beware the Brothel: Despite constant retelling at colleges across the country, there are no “brothel laws” that tie a building’s classification as a bordello to the number and gender of its occupants. Some municipalities do have zoning laws that prohibit more than a specified number of nonfamily members from living together, but buildings in violation of those codes would only be labeled a brothel on the basis of what goes on inside the house. Plus, sororities and fraternities are exempt from those housing restrictions.

4. Unfortunate Acronym: While Furman did begin as a Men’s academy and Theological Institute, (therefore Christian), the team’s mascot was a paladin (depicted as a mounted knight). It isn’t a stretch to think that Furman’s mascot might have once been known as a Christian Knight. However, he legend is debunked when according to Furman’s Web site, all the school’s sports teams did not adopt the name “Paladins” until 1961, and before that different sports teams used different names (none of them “Christian Knights”).

5. Unsolvable Math Problem: This is true! One day In 1939, George Bernard Dantzig, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, arrived late for a graduate-level statistics class and found two problems written on the board. Not knowing they were examples of unsolved statistics problems, he mistook them for part of a homework assignment, jotted them down, and solved them. (The equations Dantzig tackled are more accurately described not as unsolvable problems, but as unproved statistical theorems for which he worked out proofs.) Six weeks later, Dantzig’s statistic professor notified him that he had prepared one of his two “homework” proofs for publication, and Dantzig was given co-author credit on another paper several years later when another mathematician independently worked out the same solution to the second problem.

Tagged: college urban legends, college myths

Blog
Contact Us
Home