University Anecdotes

So, guys, do you have some anecdotes from your time at a university you want to share? I have three of them that I consider exceptionally funny:

1) During the summer break, my father asked me which courses I have the next semester. I was naming the courses, and, when I said "object-oriented programming", my father interrupted me and said "How? Object-oriented programming? A really weird name. And, is there then some subject-oriented programming?" I said that, as far as I know, there isn't. Then my father said: "I guess that's something that we historians can't understand. No, that, on Croatian language, that's not a good name.". After a few weeks, we met with some old friend of his. And my father told me: "So, tell him, what's the name of the course you have this semester.". So, I repeated: "object-oriented programming". And then my father asked him: "So, what does that name mean? Can you guess? Well, can you think of a name that's more stupid?". And the friend of my father said: "Well, I guess it's called object-oriented because programming is usually done by mathematicians and people from natural sciences. If programming were done by historians or poets, then it would be called subject-oriented programming.".

2) I also shared this anecdote on the TextKit forum:

Hodie in universitate (ego studeo scientiam computorum) docebamur de theoria unionum. Professor nobis explicabat, cur numerus cardinalis unionis unionum non semper sit summa cardinalum numerorum unionum: "Si hoc veritas esset, canis debet octo crura habere. Canis enim habet duo crura antica, duo crura posteriora, duo crura laeva, et duo crura dextera.".
Ego scio nulla verba Graeca, ergo ego non possim hoc lingua Graeca dicere. Non certus sum etiam, num ego hoc lingua Latina bene dixi.

So, on our statistics lectures, professor told us: "See, the cardinal number of the union of sets doesn't have to be equal to the sum of the cardinal numbers of these sets. Because, if that were the case, a dog would need to have eight legs. Dog namely has two front legs, two beg legs, two left legs and two right legs.".

3) When explaining the Biot-Savart law, our electrical engineering professor told us: "See, when you turn a glass full of water, the water won't spill out of it until some air enters that glass. Similarly, the current won't start flowing from the battery all until some magnetic field enters the battery.".

My best anecdote about university is that they are able to keep themselves in business.

the university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class. - Foucault

I did have a professor that would routinely tell the class blatantly false information in the hopes of miseducating those in the class he didn't like.

My best anecdote about university is that they are able to keep themselves in business.

Quote

the university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class. - Foucault

I did have a professor that would routinely tell the class blatantly false information in the hopes of miseducating those in the class he didn't like.

Well, I mostly agree with you on that. Universities are primarily there as to be signalling that people are smart. Diploma is primarily a signal that you are smart enough to finish the university, not that you have the knowledge and skills needed to do the job. OK, maybe it plays a certain role in educating you for a job in that, if you know a lot of about mostly irrelevant stuff, you may be less likely to find yourself in a stupid situation in which you don't know something and don't know that you need to know that. But it's primary role is signalling. And more people go to universities, less those diplomas are actually worth. Or, better say, universities make people dependent on universities to get a job, even though most of those jobs don't actually require university degrees.