Book Proves an Empty Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Prof. Anders Henriksson wants you to know that college kids today aren’t necessarily stupider or less informed than they were 30 years ago, and he offers an improbable book full of proof.

The volume is “Non Campus Mentis”: non sequiturs, faux facts and boneheaded statements gleaned from three decades of student tests and papers at universities and colleges across North America. It has inched its way onto the New York Times miscellaneous bestseller list. And it certainly is miscellaneous.

Henriksson insists he’s not kidding. One student really did write that “the airplane was invented and first flown by the Marx brothers” and another that “Hitler’s instrumentality of terror was the Gespacho,” he says.

“But it’s been a pretty steady stream over the years,” says Henriksson, who chairs the history department at Shepherd College in Shepherdstown, W.Va. “It’s not necessarily getting worse.”

Nature, as we know, abhors a vacuum. The real test, Henriksson says, is how creatively students fill the cerebral vacuum they discover when it’s test time and they haven’t studied, have skipped class, have been imperfectly briefed by other students or just don’t have a clue.

Was Noah’s wife really Joan of Ark? Was Middle Eastern history really written by Florence of Arabia? Did the Soviets truly erect the Berlin Mall?

“What we have here is the creme de la creme” of student vacantness, he says, “from quite a number of sources and years. It would be dangerous to draw conclusions from this about the preparation of the average student.”

Dangerous, maybe. But unthinkable?

Consider the broader cultural underpinnings of the earnest pupil who wrote: “Plato invented reality. He was teacher to Harris Tottle, author of ‘The Republicans.’ Lust was a must for the Epicureans. Others were the Vegetarians and the Synthetics, who said, ‘If you can’t play with it, why bother?’”

Henriksson won’t tell you where the writer of that paragraph--or any of them, for that matter--went to school. In addition to compiling his treasury of student howlers, he says, he has been the grateful recipient of thousands of others from colleagues at other schools, most of whom have conditioned their contributions on protection of the source.

But he promises he hasn’t made them up.

“I don’t think anyone could make this up,” he says. “You’d have to be Mel Brooks or Woody Allen, and I’m not that clever.”

He will say, however, that he has taught since 1985 at Shepherd, source of “quite a few” entries in the book, and was collecting them before that while teaching at the University of Toronto. He also says the book includes submissions from student writing at every sort of public and private college and university, including Oxford, City College of New York and the U.S. Military Academy.

Maybe it was a West Pointer who wrote that “Germany’s William II had a chimp on his shoulder and therefore had to ride his horse with only one hand.”

Henriksson previously published two compilations of student weirdness in the Wilson Quarterly, each of which prompted outpourings gathered by other professors across the continent. One teacher at Texas Lutheran University, he says, generously proffered a collection from the emptiest minds at that school dating to the 1930s.

The bloopers demonstrate equal-opportunity zaniness, he suggests. “As near as I can tell, they don’t break down at all by gender or race or region or class.”

They can, however, be categorized in other ways. There are loony thoughts based on the misunderstanding of words, particularly foreign words:

“The Germans took the by-pass around France’s Marginal Line. This was known as the ‘Blintz Krieg.’”

“Corruption grew especially ripe in Zaire, where Mobutu was known to indulge in more than an occasional little armadillo.”

There are efforts to bull their way through by trying to sound important:

“The plurious of wealth was therefore uneven. The rural populous was reduced to tenement farming.”

There are those who show absolutely no sense of time and/or place:

“The Boston Tea Party was held at Pearl Harbor.”

“Americans ... wanted no involvement in the French and Indian War because they did not want to fight in India.”

“Moses was told by Jesus Christ to lead the people out of Egypt into the Sahaira Desert. The Book of Exodus describes this trip ... including the Ten Commandments, various special effects and the building of the Suez Canal.”

There are those hopeful answers whose authors are clearly winging it:

“Zorroastrologism was founded by Zorro. This was a duelist religion.”

“During the Dark Ages it was mostly dark.”

And there are those sentences whose writers have somehow made it all the way through high school and into college and still don’t have a clue:

“Christianity was just another mystery cult until Jesus was born. The mother of Jesus was Mary, who was different from other women because of her immaculate contraption.”

Yet what most endears these fragments of tortured prose to Henriksson is a bizarre species of higher truth that some contain.

Who would really quarrel today with the student who wrote, “The fall of empires has been a good thing, because it gives more people a chance to exploit their own people without outside interference”?

Or the one who wrote, “Roman girls who did not marry could become Vestigal Virgins, a group of women who were dedicated to burning the internal flame”?

“I remember the very moment I started collecting this stuff,” Henriksson says. “I really ought to blame it on my wife. I was a teaching assistant in Toronto grading about 500 papers on Machiavelli. She heard me laughing from the other room and asked what was so funny, and when I told her she said, “You have to save that.’”

A student had written: “Machiavelli, who was often unemployed, wrote ‘The Prince’ to get a job with Richard Nixon.”