Upon entering The Feather’s online newspaper on April 1, guests found the headline “failure” flashing across the nearly blank screen. The Feather staff’s explanation: April Fools!

Across the nation people celebrate April Fools Day by pulling pranks. In keeping with this tradition, campus journalism students participated in a form of retaliation against authority.

As a prank planned for Journalism advisor Greg Stobbe, senior editors Eric Witters and Randy Hill “erased” all the staff’s articles from the online edition and ran a new article explaining the pandemonium.

“I decided that it would be incredibly hilarious if Stobbe logged on to our website from San Diego and discovered a blank page,” Hill said. “It was quite simple to erase everything on the front page, and it brought great pleasure to me as well as to the staff.”

Credit for the prank’s origin fell to Stobbe’s first period journalism class.

“Our staff thought the prank was uproarious since we knew Stobbe would have a heart attack over it,” Witters said. “Although, it turns out that Stobbe never saw it, which is disappointing.”

Much to the dismay of The Feather staff, Stobbe, who was at a journalism conference in San Diego, did not arrive at the conference until eight o’clock that night and was unable to see the prank.

“I was glad that I found out about the prank after the fact,” Stobbe said. “Because I was in San Diego at the journalism workshop, I could not log onto the website. It’s a good thing though because if I had seen it, I probably would have had a stroke!”

Rumors of the prank spread around the campus causing many to burst out laughing.

“I thought the journalism prank was very creative and it was the perfect joke to play on Mr. Stobbe,” Jennifer Schmidt, ’06, said. “He is in love with the newspaper and is obsessive over it, which made the prank really funny.”

Journalism students were not the only participants in April Fools activities.

“At the beginning of my fourth period class I told my students that this year I had too much work and that I had decided to leave their period because I was too stressed out,” Beatriz Foth, Spanish teacher, said. “I told them that, beginning that day, they were going to have a new Spanish teacher. Then I took all of my stuff and left the room.

“I went into Mrs. [Annette] Sarkissian’s room and she came into my room and started speaking completely in Spanish, telling the students to take out a paper for a quiz on Costa Rica. The students panicked! After a few minutes, I went back into class and explained the prank.”

Pranks initiated by both students and teachers brought festivity to the campus on April Fool’s Day, supporting the belief that, “Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious” [Brendan Gill].