11 of the Greatest Class Pranks in History

Ravi Kochhar

Any group of subversive students can cover campus trees with toilet paper or make a series of prank calls. These 11 school pranks went above and beyond, and that's what makes them the stuff of mischief legend.

1. Lady Liberty Takes a Soaking

In the spring of 1978, two students at the University of Wisconsin ran for student government as candidates of the facetious Pail and Shovel Party. To their astonishment, they got elected. Like all good leaders, the pair vowed to make good on their campaign promise, which was to move the Statue of Liberty from New York City to Lake Mendota near campus. No one took them seriously until…one day in February, rising up out of the frozen lake was Lady Liberty herself. Her gigantic green head and glowing torch floated above the icy surface. The two pranksters told everyone that they’d had the statue flown in by helicopter, but the cable holding it had broken and Lady Liberty crashed through the ice. The real story: They had the statue built out of wire, papier maché, and plywood and then hauled it onto the lake.

2. Card Trick

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As far as we know, you can’t actually major in pranks at college. But if you attend the California Institute of Technology, you can come close. The school is famous for its brilliantly engineered pranks, and the Rose Bowl Hoax of 1961 is perhaps the crème de la crème.

As usual, the Caltech football team did not stand a chance of actually playing in the storied Rose Bowl game in 1961. But a group of students decided to get Caltech in on the action anyway. They learned that the Washington Huskies cheerleaders were planning a halftime stunt where their fans would hold up colored cards in prearranged patterns to spell out a series of pro-Husky messages. A Caltech student managed to liberate the master plan for the stunt while the Huskies were visiting Disneyland the day before the big game. CalTech pranksters then replaced the plan with their own, revised version.

The next day at halftime, the Washington fans started performing the card stunts. The first 11 stunts were just as the Huskies had planned. Then things went awry: The 12th stunt was supposed to be the team’s dog mascot. Instead, the cards formed the unmistakable silhouette of a beaver, the Caltech mascot. Stunt 13 spelled out HUSKIES, only backwards. In the final stunt, gigantic letters filled the stands—and TV screens across America—with, you guessed it: CALTECH.

3. A Tough Parking Spot

Erik Nygren

Like Caltech, MIT is famous for its audacious, tech-savvy pranksters. Over the years, students have placed many objects on top of the campus’s 15-story Great Dome, including a fake cow, a piano, a small house, and a giant nipple. In 1994, they managed to park a campus police car, complete with a dummy officer in the driver’s seat, on the curved roof. To do it, they took the car apart, hauled the pieces up the side of the building using a system of rollers, then reassembled the vehicle and even got the lights on the roof to flash. Then they placed a ticket on the windshield, since after all, the car was in a no-parking zone.

4. Politicians Are Animals

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Most college pranks have relatively trivial consequences, but in 1959, a group of students in Sao Paolo, Brazil, managed to swing an election when they got a five-year-old rhinoceros named Cacareco elected to city council. The four-legged candidate won by a landslide, garnering 100,000 votes—one of the highest totals for a local candidate in Brazil’s history to that point. The students had ballots printed up with Cacareco’s name on them and then got thousands of voters to send them in. “Better to elect a rhino than an ass,” commented one voter.

After Cacareco won, the head of the zoo where she lived demanded that the rhino receive a councilman’s salary, but the election was nullified before any paychecks were cut. Today Cacareco’s memory lives on in the expression “Voto Cacareco,” which is used in some parts of Brazil to mean “protest vote.”

5. Flaming Undies

As the Olympic Torch neared the end of its 1,695 mile-journey to Melbourne, Australia in the summer of 1956, it had already faced several challenges, including torrential rains and temperatures so high that the runners carrying it nearly collapsed. But nothing beat what happened when the Olympic flame arrived in the city of Sydney. A champion runner named Harry Dillon was scheduled to carry the torch into the city and present it to Mayor Pat Hills. Some 30,000 people lined the streets, waiting for Dillon’s arrival. At last, a runner came sprinting into the city. The crowd cheered as he made his way to the podium and handed the torch over to the mayor. The mayor quickly launched into his speech without giving the torch a second glance until someone whispered in his ear, “That’s not the torch.” The mayor looked down and realized that he was holding a fake torch, constructed from a wooden chair leg painted silver and a can stuffed with a pair of kerosene-soaked underwear.

By then, the man who had delivered the fraudulent torch had disappeared. He was Barry Larkin, a student at the University of Sydney, who along with eight other students felt that people were overly reverent about the torch and that the tradition was ripe for ridicule. The mayor took the prank in good humor, and minutes later the official torchbearer arrived. Larkin received a standing ovation when he returned to his college along with a “Good job, son!” from the headmaster.

6. Gotcha, Captcha!

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When your college’s mascot is a concrete brick with arms and legs named Wally the Wart, it is imperative that you win the Victoria’s Secret “Pink Collegiate Collection” contest so Wally’s image can grace some fashionable lingerie. Or at least that’s what students at Harvey Mudd College thought when they heard about the contest in 2009. The contest website was set up so that people could cast only one vote a day, which put colleges with large student bodies at an advantage. But the site’s flawed security put colleges with a high quotient of tech wizards who like to pull pranks at an even greater advantage. A group of Mudders went to work and wrote a computer program that bypassed the CAPTCHA and automatically cast a vote every 2 or 3 seconds. Suddenly HMC, with fewer than 800 students, was at the top of the list, with over a million votes. That wasn’t enough for the HMC pranksters. They rigged the voting so that the schools in second through fifth places spelled out the acronym WIBSTR, which stands for “West Is Best, Screw the Rest,” the motto of a famously wild dorm at HMC. Not surprisingly, HMC was disqualified from the contest, and Wally is still waiting for his underwear op.

7. All America Hoaxers

When Steve Noll was a junior at the College of William and Mary in 1972, he and his friends loved college basketball, but they hated the fact that the top honor for players involved being named to All America teams by national sports journalists. The students were just as unhappy that their own school’s top player, guard Mike Arizin, would never make one of those teams. Noll and three friends decided to correct the situation themselves. They formed the Association of Collegiate Basketball Writers (even though none of them had ever penned a word about sports) and they invented the Leo G. Hershberger Award, which they named for a cigar-smoking New York City sportswriter who never existed. The four spent hours poring over player stats to select their team of honorees, which included, of course, Mike Arizin. They designed an official-looking certificate, and stationery bearing the slogan “Serving the Sport.” When every detail was perfect, they told the Associated Press about the award, and soon the news was in every major paper in the country. Then the pranksters shut their mouths. For forty years. They didn’t reveal the award was a hoax until 2013, on the eve of the Final Four tournament. Most of the winners said they were surprised but amused to learn that the award was a fake—and Mike Arzin decided he was “sort of flattered.”

8. Tetris on Steroids

Some pranks make you laugh out loud while others make you grin in quiet awe. The gigantic, playable Tetris game that lit up one side of the 21-story Green building on the MIT campus one April night in 2012 is one of the latter. MIT pranksters had dreamed about achieving this “Holy Grail” of hacks since at least 1993. It took a large team of students more than four years of work to finally pull it off. They installed custom color-changing LED lights in 153 of the building’s windows and connected them wirelessly to a podium where players controlled the game. This game was not for the timid: Upon losing, all the blocks would fall to the bottom of the building and all of Boston could watch the player's failure from across the Charles River.

9. A Pregnant Pause

Aquinas College economics professor Stephan Barrows did not like his students answering their cell phones during class, so he had a rule: If your phone rings, you must answer it on speakerphone. He should have had another rule: No prank calls. On April 1, 2014, students arranged to have a friend call a female student named Taylor Nefcy during class. As required, Nefcy put the call on speakerphone.

“Hi, this is Kevin from the Pregnancy Resource Center,” the voice on the other end said, as Nefcy’s friends switched on their hidden recorders. “Per your request, I am calling to inform you that the test results have come back positive. Congratulations!”

Professor Barrows, who had been smiling until then, suddenly became anxious and suggested that Nefcy might want to “shut that down.” But Nefcy let the call continue and Kevin explained that with the father “no longer in the picture,” the center would provide Nefcy with counseling and maternity services at no charge.

At this point, Barrows attempted to interrupt, and Nefcy politely told the caller, “Thank you, I’ll call back later.” Barrows then launched into a sober apology, but before he could get very far, Nefcy brushed him off: “That’s okay, I’ve been expecting this call,” she said, adding sweetly, “I already know what I’m going to name the baby. The first name will be April, and the middle name will be Fools.” Barrows lost it, along with the rest of the class, and the video promptly went viral.

10. Veterans of Future Wars

In 1936, Congress passed a controversial bill allowing veterans of World War I to receive their war bonuses 10 years early due to the economic hardships of the Great Depression. With another war brewing in Europe, two Princeton University students formed an impromptu group called Veterans of Future Wars. They demanded that draft-eligible men receive $1,000 payments in advance. They reasoned that they would likely be called into the military soon, and they might as well get the money when they could still enjoy it. The idea hit a nerve, and soon there were 500 chapters on campuses across the country. They adopted the group’s satirical salute: an arm outstretched, palm up, towards Washington. Eleanor Roosevelt admired the hoax, calling it a “grand pricking of a lot of bubbles.” But many real veterans did not see the humor. “They’re too yellow to go to war,” scoffed VFW Commander James E. Van Zandt. He misjudged the pranksters, however. The two founders and nearly all members of the Princeton chapter ended up serving in World War II.

11. A Traffic-Stopping Prank

In 2006, students at Austin High School in Austin, Minnesota engineered a prank that capitalized on the unusual architecture of their school. A busy street separates two buildings on the school’s campus. Students can use the crosswalk or an underground tunnel to get from one building to the other. At an appointed time on the day of the prank, 94 students began filing across the street, using the crosswalk. Then they circled back through the underground tunnel and crossed the street again—and again, and again—creating an endless stream of pedestrians. Traffic was tied up for nearly 10 minutes as cars lined up waiting for the students (including one dressed as a cow and another as a chicken) to finish crossing.