In fiction, college institutions of higher learning are of often strange places even by the standards of World of Weirdness: the faculty are all Mad Scientists or Sadist Teachers, the buildings are often substandard, haunted and/or highly explosive, and as for the students...
Roughly the equivalent of the Elaborate University High in anime; high school settings of this sort are less common in webcomics, but not unknown, and conversely, university settings are relatively rare in anime. This may be a reflection of the different roles these institutions play in U.S. and Japanese cultures, though it may also reflect the target demographics.
Not particularly related to Strawman U, though the name may make one think such a thing.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- U.A. High from My Hero Academia. The academy that Class 1-A attends is, of course, designed to transform them into professionals, but the staff is very odd. Their main tutor is a depressed, angry, but experienced Lazy Bum who has lived a terrible life, his assistant is an energetic, hammy musician who is very openly sociable but has a darker side to him, and the mentor for the protagonist is the Big Good with a Career-Ending Injury that turned his body completely emaciated which he has to keep secret from everyone.
Comic Books
- Scott Pilgrim: Though it is only alluded to once, and we never hear about anything that happened there, Ramona Flowers attended the University of Carolina in the Sky, which must have been... interesting.
- Wonder Woman (1942): In The Golden Age of Comic Books, Holliday College was a woman's college which went through deans quickly, often had Wonder Woman on campus, had a large sorority with bizarre and very public rituals like having pledges dress as an infant for an entire day or wear other fetishistic gear, had professors which would take students on expeditions to the other side of the world at the drop of a hat, and most of its students were actively involved in tracking down and fighting Axis spies during WWII.
Films — Live-Action
- South Harmon Institute of Technology of Accepted. The students are the teachers, and can thus major in anything they want, including Mental Detonation.
- Pacific Tech from Real Genius.
Ick: Now if we can just keep it from exploding!
Literature
- Unseen University in Discworld, a Wizarding School where maps look like exploded chrysanthemums and are accurate for a few hours, and you're lucky if you leave the library the same shape you entered. And that's before we get to the staff...
Unseen University was used to eccentricity among the faculty. After all, humans derive their notions of what it means to be a normal human being by constant reference to the humans around them, and when those humans are other wizards the spiral can only wiggle downwards. The Librarian was an orang-utan, and no-one thought that was at all odd. The Reader in Esoteric Studies spent so much time reading in what the Bursar referred to as "the smallest room" that he was generally referred to as the Reader in The Lavatory, even on official documents. The Bursar himself in any normal society would have been considered more unglued than a used stamp in a downpour. The Dean had spent seventeen years writing a treatise on The Use of the Syllable "ENK" in Levitation Spells of the Early Confused Period. The Archchancellor, who regularly used the long gallery above the Great Hall for archery practice and had accidentally shot the Bursar twice, thought the whole faculty was as crazy as loons, whatever a loon was. "Not enough fresh air," he'd say. "Too much sittin' around indoors. Rots the brain." More often he'd say, "Duck!"
Live-Action TV
- Community: Greendale, where everyone is accepted! They offer an insane variety of exotic courses, hold annual paintball tournaments, and the Dean loves wearing inappropriate costumes. They once almost gave a dog a degree (she only had it withheld due to library fines), have come within inches of selling the school to Subway on multiple occasions, and made an anus their school flag even after they realized what it was because that's what the students voted for. Oh, and if the Dean scolds anyone, school bylaws state that he owes them three wishes.
Tabletop Games
- GURPS Illuminati University takes place in a university that nearly defies description. The Dean of the history department is a Captain Ersatz of the Fourth Doctor, the Botany department is housed in a giant tree, the sample characters include a witch-girl, a cave-man, and a football-playing werewolf, and the favorite sport on campus is moopsball
.
Video Games
- Trail of Anguish offers Elkland, where the professors set paint bombs for one another.
- The Zork franchise gives us GUE Tech, a prank-happy engineering school that teaches magic.
Webcomics
- In a case of What Could Have Been, Bob and George was originally going to be in a setting like this, until the author realized he couldn't draw nearly well enough to make the comic, and settled into writing the Mega Man (Classic) Sprite Comic that ran for seven years.
- Bricktown was originally going to be set at one, based on RIT.
- College Roomies from Hell!!!: For certain values of "wacky".
- The Succubus and Incubus Academy in Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures.
- Enjuhneer is set at one of these.
- E.V.I.L. (2016): The titular Elite Villain's Institute of Learning combines this with Academy of Evil.
- Halls, a short-lived webcomic by Craig Munro, focuses more on the main character and his roommates (all of whom are weird, but not in any particularly "wacky" way) than bizarre goings-on at the school. The only mention of a teacher is after the main character makes an inspiring speech about what he's about to learn at "Generic U". Last panel: A hand, holding a paintbrush, explaining that it is a paintbrush. Like Mac Hall below, probably semi-autobiographical. There comes a point in an art student's life when some of the more basic classes, like color theory, start to feel like an insult to your intelligence.
- Happy but Dead is nominally set in a college dorm, but you'd never know it.
- Mac Hall is notable in that it's at least semi-autobiographical (the name is short for Boyd and McConville's old dormitory, MacDonald Hall), so it's entirely possible the college they went to was actually somewhat like this.
- Nixvir: The Academy of World Kalkaas is this trope, being the premiere university on World Kalkaas, and is mentioned and shown in the lore. Unlike most examples of this trope in webcomics, it's an idealised version of a British university town, crossed with a Minoan palace. It's also huge, big enough to act as its own city, and houses thousands of dormitories with thousands of students. It also happens to be the university Ragnar of the Snowmen attended when he was younger. It's also a ridiculously exaggerated caricature of the author's alma mater of King's College London's Strand Campus; the library at the Academy is a double reference to the Maughan Library and author W. Somerset Maugham.
- For quite possibly the most extreme example, Nowhere U has students who literally have no idea where the school is, are taught by important figures from classical literature, and tend to randomly receive mysterious powers.
- Smithson boasts a campus superhero, a glee club which is also a cult and a guerilla chair-decorating movement, amongst other weirdness.
- Umlaut House had this as its original premise, but dropped away from it almost immediately.
- Walkyverse: Roomies!, at first. Dumbing of Age is more straightforward, and occasionally wacky elements are sometimes played for drama.
Web Originals
- Chatoyant College: The college is like other American colleges only that it teaches magic and not everybody there is human.
- A now-defunct web series named College University had the double-named school portrayed as pretty much what every drunken frat boy believes college to be like: lots of drinking, weird and eccentric teachers, and out-and-out craziness all around. Even the Only Sane Man was pretty blind to the facets of the actual "learning" part, as one episode saw him pass out from too much studying for an open-book test.
- Dropout gives us Quendleton State University.
- SCP Foundation: Deer College in the Three Portlands (a pocket dimension including Portland, Oregon, Portland, Maine, and Portland, England) deals in both natural and occult studies.