Let's be real: a lot of scandalous things can go down on a college campus without the real story ever getting told. That's why I asked the college students and alumni of the BuzzFeed Community to tell me their most shocking college scandals and share they did! Here are the 28 most shocking ones below:
1. "A professor shot himself in the foot during class. He kept a small handgun on him in class and was messing around with stuff in his pocket when it went off. Instead of calling in the city police and reporting it, which is required by law, campus police covered it up. It was reported instead by students in the class."
—Anonymous
2. "Nelly was supposed to perform a concert on campus as part of some festivity, but he had to cancel the show because he got arrested. We were all pretty bummed."
3. "This actually happened to my boyfriend. So before we got together, he was still exploring his sexuality and decided on being bisexual. He joined Grindr and met a guy on there who went to the same university as us and lived in one of the less crowded dorm buildings. He was on his way to see him when his car backfired. Later that day, a safety announcement was sent to all students that a man was arrested for sexually assaulting and murdering a gay man he met on Grindr."
4. "I worked at a private college that was affiliated with the Methodist church. Our campus chaplain was arrested after propositioning an undercover female police officer. He was immediately suspended by the college, then he 'retired.' A lot of people tried to defend him but he apparently knew what to ask for, he knew what the going rate for it was, and he asked the woman if she was a cop. So not his first time, clearly."
5. "In 2001, a few streets down from my student apartment, David Attias (son of director, Dan Attias) killed four people with his vehicle in what became known as the “Isla Vista killings” at UCSB. Several eyewitnesses said they heard him shout 'I am the Angel of Death' and other satanic phrases moments after the collision."
6. "In the cafeteria, they were serving soup one day when a girl dropped a USED tampon into it! Fortunately, she wasn’t exactly slick, and the servers caught on before anyone got more soup, but still, sometimes I wonder what happened to that girl after college ended."
7. "My university declared bankruptcy and entered a creditor protection program to avoid having to close, which required them to make some cuts to save money. The scandalous part was that they fired faculty members in group Zoom calls. No private meetings or conversations, people were being fired in front of all their colleagues on Zoom. You logged in for a meeting with the rest of your department about the cuts happening at the university, and suddenly you were one of the cuts too!"
8. "The university chancellor [died by] suicide my junior year by jumping out of a building in San Francisco. She'd had a ton of controversy with some of her demands before she moved into the chancellor’s mansion and some other stuff must have been going on in her personal life."
—Anonymous
9. "During my sophomore year, the dorm that I was living in experienced a week where we kept getting woken up during the night to the fire alarm. Each time there was an actual small fire, but luckily one of the resident assistants managed to put the fire out. A few days later after the fourth or fifth time it happened, it turned out that the RA that put out the fire was the one who set them in the first place, in an effort to look heroic for putting them out and getting people to safety. He ended up confessing to investigators and admitting that he set multiple fires in the dorm. He was expelled and arrested."
10. "The year before I started, there was a big blow-up between the faculty, the students, and the university president. He made a number of questionable decisions after coming into office, primarily trying to get his pet project of a medical school off the ground by taking funding from other departments and trying to convince the school to buy him a new house because the traditional president's home wasn't 'good enough' for his wife. She wanted a brand new $700,000 house built just for them. Over the course of the dispute, he disbanded the faculty senate, which caused the student senate to protest in support of the faculty. In response, he threatened to also disband the student senate unless they stopped being so outspoken."
—Anonymous
11. "So my senior year of college, some friends of mine hosted a house party that I decided to skip. The next day, I woke up to my roommates telling me all about the craziest thing they'd ever seen. This house (where the party was) had a big pool, and college kids being college kids, decided to jump off the roof into the pool. Everyone was drunk and/or on drugs, so obviously not a great plan as is. This one girl decided she wanted to be on the roof, but apparently wasn't so sure about jumping off into the pool. As the story goes, she wasn't ready to jump and someone pushed her. She would've needed a running start to clear the concrete and she didn't have a running start, obviously."
"She ended up surviving, but she slammed onto the side of the pool, shattering most of her lower body, getting a concussion, being knocked out, almost drowning, and fracturing her spine. The girl and her parents sued the owners of the house and my friends who were renting."
—Anonymous
12. "So, I was a freshman at college and it was one of my first lectures, so I was really nervous because I wanted to impress my teacher as he was one of my idols. I walked into the hall where I was supposed to be attending class quite early and the door was open. I knocked and I didn't hear anything so I opened the door a bit more and I saw the teacher with one of my classmates basically doing it on the desk. Their backs were facing the door so they didn't see me, but my jaw dropped. I stood there for five seconds in shock before bolting out of there and switching classes. Thank god I never saw either of them again and I heard from friends that the student dropped out a few months later."
13. "My 30-year-old male graphics teacher was arrested because he was accused of grooming a female student when she was 14-15. She had since graduated and no one knew who it was until he was bragging about it in a group chat with some freshman boys. He was escorted off school grounds by the police mid-class and went to stand in court."
—Anonymous
14. "The head of campus security ordered a crate of semi-automatic rifles for campus security officers. The head of the school found out that they had not only been ordered, but also the order was incredibly shady. He reported the purchase to the police and the guns were confiscated."
15. "About two years before I went to my alma mater, there had been a large theft of computers from the graphic design department. When I went there, all of the computers were chained and locked to the workstations, and all of the windows were welded shut. It turns out that while this room was on the second story of the building, there was a hill that it had been built into that made like it was at ground level. One night some people got in, took all the computers out through the window."
16. "The president of our school’s son killed someone during hazing and it was covered up."
17. "A student gave birth and threw her baby away in the dumpster behind her dorm."
18. "I just walked into the laundry room today and saw a poster that said: 'Please remember our IT department can see what you search! 32% of residents have accessed bestiality content so far in the semester. In response to this, we will be restricting any searches containing 'Judy Hopps' and 'Animal Crossing.' Thank you for understanding.' We’re barely five weeks into the semester."
19. "My biology professor got caught having sex with one of her students in the backseat of her car in the parking lot right outside of her office. All she got was a slap on the wrist, and I heard she did it with several other male students over the years — just never on campus again."
20. "A sorority girl with millionaire parents was having these parties in her dorm room where she was encouraging people to get high off of Benadryl. The reason this was brought to light is because a girl was having violent hallucinations in the middle of class. I was able to gather from what she was saying that her hallucination involved her being fried on a skillet by a mermaid, but I didn't get a lot of details. She was taken to the hospital, where she revealed what happened after she sobered up. The girl behind it all faced absolutely zero consequences."
—Anonymous
21. "A girl suddenly stopped going to classes. Just stopped showing up. She left the campus. It was really strange. No one knew where she went. Then she showed up to an end-of-year party uninvited and pooped in the punch bowl. She then immediately left. I never learned what was going on with her."
22. "This was big news at my very small mountain college, but a professor joined the theater department, moving his wife and kids away from L.A. to this incredibly tiny mountain town. He made it no secret to anyone that he hated teaching and felt that it was a huge step down in his career, and would often cancel classes to record audition tapes. Then after only two years teaching there, he left with one of his students, abandoning his wife and kids in the town he forced them to move to. He was older than the student's dad! They had a pretty quick engagement, but they're already divorced. It was a huge scandal."
—Anonymous
23. "I was on the women’s rowing team in college. My friend started having sex with our female assistant coach. The coach would sneak into her dorm after her roommates (also on the team) were asleep. This ended after my friend graduated. We ended up finding out the coach had done this to two other girls at two other schools."
—Anonymous
24. "My small-town college has a really hard time hiring professors to teach a lot of the classes. The solution they thought of was to change the term 'professor' to 'success coach' so now no one needs any sort of degree or anything to teach my college classes and they can hire anyone off the street. I had one 'success coach' show us nothing but Marvel movies in one class because "everyone has the potential to be a superhero." Another spent half the class every day asking us random questions for attendance. I somehow got my degree, but feel like I got a lot dumber by going to this school."
25. "All I remember is hearing that the cumulative grade point average of the entire basketball team was 0.02. Oddly, the coach didn't get fired over that."
26. "In 2022, after barely surviving a faculty vote of no confidence, campus administration finally had evidence to sack the president everyone hated. He was set to quietly resign with a huge pension, but they found loads of emails he had sent to a subordinate he was in a relationship with, through his university account. But the real scandal was that as that news broke, the emails were also made public. This man was writing sonnets and fantasizing about getting stuck at the Paris airport with this woman."
"Even before the details of the relationship broke, he was an awful person. He had an MD and a PHD in epidemiology, yet he pushed hard to bring students back to campus during the pandemic because his rich friends owned apartment complexes in the city and wouldn't be able to lease units if everyone went virtual."
27. "One of my friends went to Stanford. One day, he saw one of his friends from the high school track team hanging around, but he didn't actually go to Stanford. Turns out, he had been an imposter student for quite a while and he was caught sneaking a TV out of a dorm. He made so many friends with Stanford students that he would be invited to parties and snuck into the dorms. It was revealed in a Stanford Review article that he didn't want to have a boring life, so he made money investing in cryptocurrency and decided to meet people at Stanford. It made national news and everything!"
—Anonymous
28. "Shortly after I graduated, a scandal erupted where the student newspaper uncovered that the head of Student Affairs was covering up multiple sexual assaults. That is terrible on its own, but it turns out he was also a long-term fraternity advisor and it was members of this fraternity that were sexually assaulting these girls. The head of Student Affairs managed to keep the girls from going to the police to keep things 'in house' without actually doing anything about it. The newspaper found out and published an article. The university administration went ballistic and made the newspaper staff empty all of the campus news stands. Last I heard, the head of Student Affairs stepped down. But the university was more reactive to the newspaper investigation than the sexual assaults and coverup."
—Anonymous
Responses have been edited for length/clarity.