[Phys-L] Re: Warning: Don't ask for Library loans on Political Topics

[John Clement <clement@HAL-PC.ORG>]

I would think it depends on the context of the hoax.  If it is cheating or
intellectual dishonesty, it certainly needs to be treated as such.  If it is
put into a paper as a concrete detail then it certainly merits an academic
penalty.  If it is in a creative writing course, it can be celebrated.  In
this case it looks like "the dog ate my homework" excuse, and it was
apparently given verbally.  Libel and hoaxes designed to incite violence
would also be punishable.  None of the articles indicated whether the hoax
had any effect on the course grade, so we are not in a good position to
judge the situation.  If it was just a story concocted to see if the
professor was gullible, it certainly succeeded, and the embarrassment is
merited.  Actually, the student will now have their work scrutinized more
carefully, so in effect there is already a penalty.  If the university is
embarrassed, perhaps they should hire less gullible faculty in the future.
Actually the idea of having the red book on a watch list is not that
farfetched.  The RC church had Galileo on their banned list for centuries.
The larger the organization, the slower it reacts.

There have been many harmless and celebrated hoaxes and pranks.  One of my
favorites is the hippopotamus escape near Cornell.  The prankster carefully
planted stories in the local press of various nearby communities, and
finally simulated hippo prints near the campus lake terminating in a hole in
the ice.  The girls in the dorms complained that water tasted of hippo, so
despite the administrations assurances that it was a hoax, they ended up
draining the lake.  Another is the BBC April 1 documentary about harvesting
spaghetti from trees in a small town in Italy.  They got a number of letters
from people who wanted to obtain seedlings of these trees.  The video is
available in low resolution on the web.  Spoofs can even be more compelling.
There was a German spoof of an American quiz show which awarded a million
marks for evading killers for 3 days.  The killers were even allowed to get
a last shot at the contestants as they passed behind a bulletproof screen
with holes, on the way to collect their checks.  Gullible people wrote in
asking to be contestants.  My wife saw this show in Germany.

Incidentally I regularly get E-mail from intelligent people about things
like the dangers of microwaving in plastic containers, not reading certain
messages, bad files implanted on my hard drive...  Despite the fact that I
investigate these and then expose them as hoaxes, the same people persist in
sending these things.  They never go to the web sites that expose these hoax
messages.  So, many are easily fooled.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> 3) The idea of punishing students for hoaxes is deeply abhorrent.
>
>    3a) The fact that quite a few seemingly-reasonable people found the
>   story initially plausible indicates that he did a decent job of creative
>   writing ... perhaps not up to Jonathan Swift standards, but certainly
>   well within long-established traditions.
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