April Fools?
Have you ever been tricked on April Fools’ Day? Apparently, some of the best known April first pranks have taken place in higher education settings.
In 1983, a Boston University professor of history, John Boskin, when interviewed about the origin of April Fools’ Day, fabricated a story that was published by the Associated Press and later withdrawn. He claimed that some court jesters in the days of Constantine had told the emperor they could run the empire better than he did and that, amused, Constantine allowed a jester called Kugel to become king for a day, April 1. When the young AP reporter got the “story” published, Boskin used the incident to teach his students about false reports in the media: how the media can take a joke, innuendo, or story, consider it as authentic, and spread it. Luckily, the credulous reporter’s career was not ruined; he is now an associate professor in the College of Communication (“How a BU Prof April-Fooled the Country”).
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been associated with other well-known April first pranks. Among these was the 1998 hacking of the institutional web site by students who announced the “unprecedented acquisition of a non-profit educational institution by a Fortune 500 company”. They claimed that a huge Disney scholarship fund would reimburse past and future students for the following twenty years; the Engineering School would switch to “Imagineering”; the Sloan School would be renamed the Scrooge McDuck School of Management; there would be a Donald Duck Department of Linguistics, and Disney characters would appear in lectures to keep students alert, facilitating the learning process ("Walt Disney Corporation to Acquire MIT for $ 6.9 Billion").
The University of Cambridge has also had its fair share of April Fools’ Day stories. A posting on a student forum in 2011 announced that, due to government spending cuts, the Vice Chancellor had announced Cambridge would soon become a science only university ("Cambridge to Cease Arts Teaching by the End of the Decade"). While some naive readers were shocked, others realised that could only have been a joke.
Let us all be on the alert this April first, and every day of every year; few are as fortunate as the Boston former AP reporter though many are equally, if not more, gullible.
Posted by May Mikati on 27 March 2012, 12:13 AM
Have you ever been tricked on April Fools’ Day? Apparently, some of the best known April first pranks have taken place in higher education settings.
In 1983, a Boston University professor of history, John Boskin, when interviewed about the origin of April Fools’ Day, fabricated a story that was published by the Associated Press and later withdrawn. He claimed that some court jesters in the days of Constantine had told the emperor they could run the empire better than he did and that, amused, Constantine allowed a jester called Kugel to become king for a day, April 1. When the young AP reporter got the “story” published, Boskin used the incident to teach his students about false reports in the media: how the media can take a joke, innuendo, or story, consider it as authentic, and spread it. Luckily, the credulous reporter’s career was not ruined; he is now an associate professor in the College of Communication (“How a BU Prof April-Fooled the Country”).
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been associated with other well-known April first pranks. Among these was the 1998 hacking of the institutional web site by students who announced the “unprecedented acquisition of a non-profit educational institution by a Fortune 500 company”. They claimed that a huge Disney scholarship fund would reimburse past and future students for the following twenty years; the Engineering School would switch to “Imagineering”; the Sloan School would be renamed the Scrooge McDuck School of Management; there would be a Donald Duck Department of Linguistics, and Disney characters would appear in lectures to keep students alert, facilitating the learning process ("Walt Disney Corporation to Acquire MIT for $ 6.9 Billion").
The University of Cambridge has also had its fair share of April Fools’ Day stories. A posting on a student forum in 2011 announced that, due to government spending cuts, the Vice Chancellor had announced Cambridge would soon become a science only university ("Cambridge to Cease Arts Teaching by the End of the Decade"). While some naive readers were shocked, others realised that could only have been a joke.
Let us all be on the alert this April first, and every day of every year; few are as fortunate as the Boston former AP reporter though many are equally, if not more, gullible.
Posted by May Mikati on 27 March 2012, 12:13 AM
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