Mennonite mischief: CMU’s April fools campus capers
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A dorm bathtub filled with Jell-O. A doctored graduation composite with a non-existent student’s name and portrait. The transformation of a school hallway into a public park with sod, trees and benches.
These are among the legendary pranks that have taken place at Canadian Mennonite University since its early inception.
For students and academics alike, April 1 marks the winding down of the winter term and an opportunity to keep up a longtime tradition of pulling practical jokes on the Shaftesbury campus.

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A nonexistent student known as Virgil Blatz, whose name was doctored onto a class composite at Canadian Mennonite University, has been a running joke for 40 years.
“Academics often have the reputation of being boring, of being stuffy, of nose-in-the-books, writing a paper,” said Charlie Peronto, who has spent the last decade overseeing student residence and extracurricular programming at the Christian university.
For Peronto, CMU’s approach to higher education, which promotes a culture of participation and community-building and aims to be responsive to student ideas, challenges that narrative.
Brainstorming, executing and witnessing group stunts are a staple on the tight-knit campus that is frequented by roughly 700 students in southwest Winnipeg.
These organic activities — such as the 2015 mass printing of photos of actor Nicolas Cage and subsequent hiding of the wallet-sized portraits that continue to resurface in building crevices and dusty library books a decade later — allow students to blow off steam, Peronto said.
“Academics often have the reputation of being boring, of being stuffy, of nose-in-the-books, writing a paper.”– Charlie Peronto, who oversees student residence and extracurricular programming at Canadian Mennonite University
Senior administration has accepted that reality and, perhaps surprisingly, encouraged it.
CMU released a video promoting a fake equestrian studies program on April Fool’s Day in 2016.
The following year, in a prank that poked fun at sustainability being a buzzword, school leaders announced plans to create a cross-campus zip-line “to reduce all of our actual footprints.”
Administrators have also elicited laughter over phoney policy rollouts, including a 2019 directive to wear academic robes at all times and a 2021 request to remove outdoor shoes inside campus buildings.
The prank culture on campus predates the post-secondary institute’s official launch in 1999, said Sandy Koop Harder, an alum of Canadian Mennonite Bible College, which amalgamated with Concord College and Menno Simons College to form CMU shortly after she graduated.

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A group of student pranksters printed out hundreds of wallet-sized photos of actor Nicolas Cage in 2015 and scattered them across the Canadian Mennonite University campus on Shaftesbury Boulevard.
Koop Harder, now the vice-president external at CMU, recalled reminiscing about her and her classmates’ escapades on the Shaftesbury Boulevard grounds at their 30-year reunion in September.
One of her vivid memories? A group of peers creating a partition out of drywall and setting up a desk and flowers beside it to make a residence hallway look as though it’d disappeared overnight.
Among other hoaxes part of CMU history: the time a group of students took apart a car and reassembled it inside a building. Another was when students lined a conversation pit with plastic and turned it into an active fish tank; and the random storage of all classroom desks and chairs that were shoved into a room and boarded up with hockey sticks.
While many pranks are one-offs, the mysterious creation of a fictitious student named Virgil Blatz and his legacy have been fodder for 40 years.
The imaginary member of the Class of 1986 — his name and a photo of a different man was edited onto a class composite — has sparked many offshoot jokes, from students signing Blatz up for choir to submitting essays on his behalf.
“The institution has a sense of humour.”– Koop Harder, vice-president external at CMU
People have made donations in his name and most recently, announced his daughter, Beatrice Blatz Pankratz’s, enrolment.
“The institution has a sense of humour,” Koop Harder said, noting she is aware of only one prank that went seriously wrong decades ago when a dorm bathroom’s windows were opened to allow Jell-O to set inside a bathtub and pipes froze as a result.
On the eve of April Fool’s Day, art major Sophia Lobe said she’d heard whispers about students planning the latest round of spring surprises. Beatrice’s birthday is believed to be April 1, she added.
maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca

Maggie Macintosh
Education reporter
Maggie Macintosh reports on education for the Free Press. Originally from Hamilton, Ont., she first reported for the Free Press in 2017. Read more about Maggie.
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History
Updated on Tuesday, April 1, 2025 9:29 AM CDT: Clarifies specific hoax Hardwer remembers, separate from other hoaxes; changes wording to bathtub
Updated on Tuesday, April 1, 2025 10:22 AM CDT: Corrects spelling of Jell-O