At exactly 2:07 a.m. on Sat., Jan. 11, a procession of hooded figures entered Boliou 104, immediately drawing the attention of the students crowded in the classroom. The audience arrived following the instructions specified in a coded message written on slips of paper that had been placed throughout campus in the preceding week, advertising the first in a series of challenges set to decide the next recipients of the infamous bust of Schiller. Standing behind two true-to-size wax candle replicas of Schiller, the architect of the event, a student disguised and operating under the pseudonym “Mr. E,” shouted out “All hail Schiller,” effectively silencing the room.
The organizer, who asked to remain anonymous for the purpose of protecting Schiller, explained that he intends this project to embody the eccentric, passionate culture that initially drew him to Carleton. Now a senior, he plans to hold an elaborate competition where any student has a chance to participate in the tradition. Clues, riddles and challenges will be released every week until sunrise on Thursday, Mar. 13, when the location of the bust will be revealed to the two teams with the highest score.
A projected video displayed a bingo card with tasks in each space and directed the gathered students to complete as many tasks as possible before 2:07 a.m. the next day. After some chanting, more processing and distributing several buckets of Fruity Pebble bars, the hooded entourage left, and teams of students scrambled to begin their first tasks.
The tradition of students trying to steal a bust of German playwright Friedrich Schiller began in 1956. Since then, groups of students have been devising elaborate ways to display the statue while other students compete to obtain it.
“I’ve been thinking about doing something like this since freshman year. I’ve kind of been a little bit underwhelmed by the Schiller appearances,” the organizer of the challenges said. “Carleton loves to promote the Schiller tradition like, ‘Oh, here’s this quirky thing that students do,’ but it sometimes feels like it’s just being traded between sports teams. And it’s just so violent, and the violence of it isn’t even fun for everyone.”
Historically, the bust of Schiller has often been won by force, sometimes involving massive brawls, damaging the bust in the process. The student currently in possession of the statue is organizing the competition himself, and he obtained the bust from a sports team, although he would not share any further details.
“I find this type of thing more fun than [athletic challenges],” Charles Millard ’27, a student who participated in some tasks on Saturday, said. “And I think a lot of other people on campus are going to enjoy this more… The old way, you had to hear from someone what was going on, and if you didn’t know the people in specific groups, you just weren’t involved.”
In contrast to the historical aggression of the tradition, the organizer said the winners this term will be rewarded — not just for solving hard puzzles — but for commitment, kindness and creativity. He described this methodology as a system of “whimsical justice,” warning that the actual structure of the challenges is not meant to be necessarily fair.
“There’s going to be a lot of stuff that is coded and is intentional. There’s also a lot of stuff that is just chaos… It is your responsibility to make sense of what’s chaos and what’s code and see that there is no logic to it,” the organizer said. “That is unfair, but the point of this is not to have a fair competition, the point is to give everyone a chance to have fun. The fairness will be awarded based on who is actually buying in and having a good time, and is able to solve some of these harder clues. So there’s both fairness and not fairness to the way that this will be done.”
The challenge organizer specifically mentioned that he plans to reward teams who use the challenges as an opportunity to connect with other students.
“The hope is to give people a chance to break out of some of their traditional friend groups, to meet new people… It’s no longer just someone who is walking by who’s a freshman that you don’t know, it’s someone that you smile or wave at and say ‘hi’ to,” he said.
This intention is reflected in the experience of the current first-place team, “Rimes with Purple.” Devin Gulliver ’28, a member of the team, described collaborating with another team, the “Schiller Schnoops,” to complete a task by staging a public protest against peanut oil. Many of the challenges mandated the involvement of students outside of the competing teams.
“It’s brought me and a bunch of my friends closer together. It also brought me and just other random people pretty close together, especially since one of the squares was ‘befriend a first-year you haven’t met yet and then record their whole life story.’ Also, we ended up befriending other teams,” they said.
Beyond the system of “whimsical justice,” he has needed to set more hard-line rules as the challenges have progressed. At one point, the @search4schiller Instagram account had to release an Instagram story altering the parameters of the bingo square that required teams to “Create a Schiller-themed art piece and hand it to the Mayor of Northfield.”
“DO NOT CALL THE MAYOR!!!! If your team sends a picture in by noon on Monday showing the mayor your artwork, you will still get points,” the story read.
The challenge organizer has also had to clarify that the bust is not hidden in a dorm and that attempting to search dorm rooms is “jerk-like behavior” that will disqualify any involved teams.
More teams are invited to join the competition by DMing the @search4schiller Instagram account. According to the challenge organizer, teams joining now would still be in contention to win the competition. Students can also participate by sending in suggestions for clues and challenges to be included in the hunt.
“What I’m hoping to do is make it as involved and inviting as possible and to get people thinking about what crazy thing they would do for Schiller for spring term because I’m graduating, and I want to see something good. I want to see something even better than this,” he said.