part0081

While I’m on the topic of campus folklore, here’s a beauty of a story sent to me first by Brenna E. Lorenz of Geneseo, New York. Her father, a professor of physics at the University of the South, originally implied when telling her the story that it was true. (Years later, when she checked again, he said that it had merely been reported as true by the person who told it to him.)

While a student at Syracuse University from 1961 to 1966, Lorenz’s father says, a fellow graduate student took a psychology course that included a unit on behaviorism. The friend claimed that his class had decided to put their new knowledge to work by training the professor to lecture while standing on an overturned wastebasket. The students would begin to fidget, yawn, shuffle papers, and the like whenever the prof paced away from a wastebasket in the corner of the classroom. Whenever he moved near the basket during his lectures, they would nod, take copious notes and generally look interested. Continuing this reinforcement of the desired behavior, they gradually got the professor to lecture while standing next to the basket. Then they turned the basket over before class began and rewarded the prof with attentiveness whenever he put one foot, and then both feet, on top of it. Eventually, Lorenz’s friend said, the class succeeded in modifying the professor’s behavior to the point where each day he would enter the classroom, pick up the basket, carry it to the same spot at the front of the room, turn it over, climb on top of it—and then begin his lecture.

What a wonderful story! But is it true? Probably not, I suspected from the start—but, then, it’s my job to distrust such charming anecdotes.

Brenna Lorenz herself trusted the story for years until a friend, a graduate student in mathematics at the State University of New York, Buffalo, told her a variation—that he had heard of a math professor trained by his students to write on only one section of the blackboard.

Readers of my column supplied further variations on “The Trained Professor.” Timothy Hunt, executive director of the Festival at Sandpoint (Idaho), had heard the story from Lester J. Hunt (no relation), associate professor of psychology at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. A student in Professor Hunt’s summer 1968 “Analysis of Behavior” course at NAU set up a conditioning experiment using the rest of the class to try to induce their professor always to lecture from the same side of the classroom. As Professor Hunt recalled the incident to me in a letter written some twenty years later, “The result was that I came to spend 70–90% of the class period on the ‘correct’ side of the room.” However, he also pointed out several flaws in the experiment, and he admitted, “I was aware that I was being trained as early as the first day, but I did not know what behavior I was performing to get the class attention.” It sounds to me as if Hunt’s class was simply trying out what a reader from San Diego described in a letter as “an ancient legend about the principle of positive reinforcement that has been told for at least twenty years.” Right on!

The California letter, by the way, identified the desired behavior as “lecturing with one hand stuck into his coat à la Napoleon Bonaparte, and speaking in terse clipped sentences.”

Professor Edward L. Kimball of the Brigham Young University Law School believes that he read about the class conditioning the teacher in an article in Psychology Today some ten or fifteen years ago. As Kimball remembers the incident—and as he has repeated it to his own classes—the professor, though naturally right-handed, was trained to shift over and gesture with his left hand. I have not found anything like that in Psych Today , and Professor Hunt writes, “I know of no popular literature on the topic of controlling a teacher’s behavior through the use of attention.”