Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Long Running Joke Lives On.

Earlier today Compound Cal reminded us of RYS's tweaking of RateMyProfessors, the creation of a 2006 RMP page for "Martin Bell," a supposed Classics proffie at Arkansas Northeastern College.

RYS pulled an April Fool's Day prank about Bell being "outed" by the Chronicle in April 2007, but not only is Bell's rating page still up, he's got 25 ratings, some as recent as last summer!

Bell is quite the Renaissance fellow, teaching courses in Latin, Psychology, History, Psychology, Physics, Economics, and Education.

8 comments:

  1. AnonymousSeptember 13, 2011 at 3:54 PM

    At least the Chronicle got in on the joke. Great last line:

    A Scoop That Wasn’t
    April 2, 2007
    By Brock Read

    An announcement Sunday posted on Rate Your Students that Chronicle reporter Rachel Zino would expose the popular blog’s creator and moderator as Martin Bell, a classics professor at Arkansas Northeastern College, and force him to take down the site provoked a roar of outrage from fans.

    “I can’t believe the Chronicle would do this to you,” one fan wrote. “It makes me so angry I could spit.” Many readers begged Rate Your Students not to shut down. The blog provides a forum for students and faculty members to “work out the tricky dynamics of the modern classroom.”

    Rate Your Students’ moderators (three in all and all still anonymous) received more than 700 upset e-mail messages before apologizing to readers for the unexpectedly successful April Fools Day post and confessing that Martin Bell is a “completely fictional character.”

    In other news, Rachel Zino has been fired.

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  2. AnonymousSeptember 13, 2011 at 4:46 PM

    There's no place like Blytheville in September.

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  3. StrelnikovSeptember 13, 2011 at 5:37 PM

    He was the greatest Etruscan Underwater Basket-weaving instructor I ever had, along with teaching Portugese philosophy...such men are rare, and should be treasured by the institutions they work in.

    If Yaro is our Christ, then Martin Bell is our Socrates-Aristotle-Empedocles-Ortega y Gasset.

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  4. The Contemplative CynicSeptember 13, 2011 at 8:16 PM

    I loved him so much I gave him a hotness rating of five peppers!

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  5. Hellish HarpySeptember 13, 2011 at 8:24 PM

    The Captain Tuttle of Academia.

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  6. Contingent CassandraSeptember 13, 2011 at 11:26 PM

    Hmm. . .I wonder whether we could get him simultaneously hired to enough different adjunct positions in different departments at different schools to crash the system when he didn't show up? We'd probably have to clone him first, and set up RYS accounts for the clones. But that doesn't look like it would be hard.

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  7. The Contemplative CynicSeptember 14, 2011 at 1:31 AM

    I have an idea: let's create IDs on RYS based on our CM monikers. Anyone up for rating Yaro with red hotness peppers?

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  8. EskarinaSeptember 14, 2011 at 3:00 AM

    Oh, yes. What school?

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