One of the many misconceptions surrounding folklore today is that it is found primarily in rural areas, among peasants and rustics who are backwards and illiterate. Admittedly, this was the typical belief in the 19th and early 20th centuries among folklorists (such as the Brothers Grimm), who feared that folklore would vanish with the spread of literacy and urbanization, and that it therefore needed to be collected and recorded from rural people before it all disappeared. Granted, there is an abundance of folklore in rural areas, but there is also an abundance of folklore in urban and suburban areas, even among students and professors who may consider themselves highly educated and sophisticated people. I call this academic folklore, or folklore of the academy.

          First, a brief definition: folklore consists of cultural behavior, beliefs, and knowledge that is passed on, from person to person or within members of a group, without continual corrective reference to a fixed source (e.g., a book, musical score, or videotape). This definition places less emphasis on the materials or texts themselves, and more emphasis on the process of communication and the context in which the materials are transmitted. Particularly important to folklorists are the various groups among which these beliefs, behavior, and knowledge may be shared. These include groups that may be based on kinship, geographical region, race or ethnicity, religion, age, gender, and occupation. In the latter group may be included not only farmers, farriers, and firefighters, but also college students and faculty members.

          Because folklore does not make continual corrective reference to a fixed source, it almost always exists in different versions, known as variants. As a result, folklore is not the same everywhere; if it is the same, there probably is a fixed source involved. The definition may also suggest that folklore is informal (generally transmitted without any formal instruction), non-institutional (without any institutional backing or direction), and unofficial (often subverting or mocking official policies and personnel). Moreover, unlike the two other main categories of cultural expression—elite culture and popular culture—folklore is unmediated. Rather than being spread through publishing companies, television broadcasting stations, or music labels (all of which act as filters or guardians of public morality), folklore comes to us directly from the people. Consequently, folklore can often be crude and vulgar.

          Speaking of crude and vulgar, and to provide a concrete example of academic folklore and how it functions, I will reveal (with some embarrassment) my first realization that there was such a thing as academic folklore. Williams College, which I attended in the late 1960s, was a small liberal arts school in northwestern Massachusetts—at that time 1,200 men, though now it is co-educational with nearly 2,000 students. Housed in all dormitories for first-year students were a small number of upperclassmen who were there to instruct the freshmen in the ways of college life. They advised us on courses to take or avoid, extracurricular activities and organizations, and many other matters of navigation that freshmen needed to know. But my advisors also loved to tell stories about Clay Hunt, one of the English professors at the college who had a reputation as a free-swinging and somewhat bawdy bachelor. They told these stories as if true, which is what makes them legends rather than folktales; they believed them to be true, and I believed them to be true.

          One legend of Clay Hunt that I vividly remember concerns the time he was about to lecture on John Milton. He strolled into the classroom, noticed a young woman (presumably visiting for the weekend, since no women were enrolled at Williams College then), and politely asked if she would mind crossing her legs. After she had done so, he announced, “Now that the gates of hell are closed, we may safely begin our consideration of Paradise Lost.”  Although I did not hear Clay Hunt utter these words myself, I never doubted that he had—until some years later, when I read exactly the same story in a folklore textbook. It was only then that I understood this was actually a migratory legend, a story told as if true, which travels from college campus to campus, attaching itself to one particular faculty member, usually with a reputation for bawdiness.

          It was also then that I realized that something else I had learned about Professor Hunt—even more crude and vulgar—was equally legendary. I had heard from my advisors that Clay Hunt invariably began each semester by telling his students (all of them male), “My name is Clay Hunt. This is an easy name to remember, because it’s Clay as in lay, and Hunt as in [ahem, expletive deleted].”  As I recall, I took three different courses from Clay Hunt during my four years at Williams College, and although I never heard him utter this astonishing introduction myself, the legend was so powerful that I never doubted the authenticity of the story. It was always told to me, not by someone who had been personally present at the event, but who had heard about it from a friend who was there (a source known to folklorists as a FOAF, or friend of a friend). Even today, in the Williams College alumni magazine, former students may occasionally reminisce, in a mischievous tone, about the way Clay Hunt used to introduce his classes. Being a scrupulous folklorist, I’ll contact them to ask, “Did you really hear Clay Hunt say those words?”  And generally, they’ll reply after a pause, “Well, no, not exactly. But I heard it from someone who was a reliable source.”

          Although bold and audacious, the Clay Hunt stories are rather typical of academic folklore, much of which consists of legends told by students about distinctive professors, or about some intriguing aspect of campus life.

          For example, why doesn’t George Washington University have a football team? The legend holds that because the son of Charles E. Smith was once injured while playing football, one of the conditions for endowing the Smith Center was that football be dropped from GWU’s athletic program. In fact, GWU’s football team stopped playing in 1966; the Smith Center opened in 1975.

          Another example: why are there no sorority houses at GWU? Legend has it that D.C. law prohibits having more than six unrelated women living in the same house because it would then be considered a brothel. In fact, no such law exists.

          A recent story in the GW Hatchet noted that students here have long believed that Thurston Hall was ranked as the second most sexually active dormitory in the United States, according to a study conducted by Cornell University. In fact, no such ranking exists.

          Other GWU legends might include the belief that Margaret Truman (daughter of the president, and Class of 1946 at GWU) once worked behind the counter at Quigley’s Drugstore, or the belief that the shoes hanging from a tree outside the Delta Tau Delta fraternity house on G Street were coded messages for sexual activity, or the belief that if your professor is late to class you are required to wait at least fifteen minutes before leaving—but only five minutes if waiting for your T.A.

          Whatever form academic folklore may take, or wherever it may be found—either at GWU or around the world—it may serve several functions:

          1) The first function is simply amusement, which we find in the telling and enjoyment of these customs and legends. College professors and students obviously are entitled to a little amusement and enjoyment in their lives. But we don’t need Sigmund Freud to tell us that beneath a great deal of humor lies deeper meaning.

          2) The second function is education, by which I mean the education that occurs outside of the classroom, as new students must be educated in the ways of the academy, which for them is often large, mysterious, and quite imposing. Students use folklore as their guide and unofficial cultural orientation to the new academic world, as a way in which they can learn about their fellow students, their professors, the customs, and the rituals that are an inherent part of their home away from home for the next four years.

          3) The third function is validation and reinforcement of beliefs and conduct. Students know that they often must resort to trickery to survive in the competitive academic world, and professors know that students will try almost anything to get ahead. The folklore of the academy validates and reinforces these beliefs to those who observe and perform them. If professors believe that students will do anything to get a better grade, and if students believe that professors are peculiar creatures whom they must constantly try to outwit, then the folklore of the academy validates and reinforces those beliefs. At the same time, the folklore also helps to maintain conformity among the members of the group through validation and reinforcement of those distinctive patterns of behavior that have been established over the years, and are thus maintained by tradition.

          4) The fourth function of folklore is that it can provide socially sanctioned and approved outlets for expression of aggressions, tensions, cultural taboos, and fantasies, (e.g., the stories about Clay Hunt). For students in the U.S., college occurs at the moment when many are making the difficult passage from adolescence to adulthood, anxiously awaiting their entry into a real world of competition where success and failure can have genuine consequences. Accordingly, during their college years, they may be very much in need of outlets for their tensions and anxieties.

          5) The preceding four functions add up to folklore’s primary function of maintaining the stability, solidarity, cohesiveness, and continuity of the group within the larger mass culture. All groups—whether occupational, religious, regional, racial, ethnic, age, gender, or kinship—are interested in preserving their own group identity; and the maintenance of folk traditions is one very effective way to do so. The folklore of students and professors grows out of a shared cluster of hopes, frustrations, fears, and joys that are experienced in common by a substantial number of the group’s membership. The legends and traditions of the literate academy, which are passed from person to person and within the group, represent a communicative process that is just as authentically folk as anything found in the rural communities around the world.

James I. Deutsch is an adjunct professor in the American Studies Department, teaching courses on American film. He is very much interested in collecting other examples of academic folklore at GWU, and can be reached at deutsch@gwu.edu.