Who was the famous revolutionary who once worked for a New York newspaper?

That question, and many others, were hotly debated at “Are You Smarter Than A Saint Michael’s Student,” a good-natured contest in a TV game-show format that the Honors Program sponsored in the McCarthy Arts Center on April 15.
Five professors and a staff member were the featured competitors, but as with the TV show “Are you Smarter than a Fifth Grader,” which inspired this event, key characters on-stage included a “class” of six student volunteers from the audience.

If one or more of those six students got an answer right after the faculty/staff contestant was unable to supply a correct answer (even after utilizing several legal but limited opportunities for help), then that contestant “flunked out” and was required by the rules to publicly declare from center-stage, “I am NOT smarter than a Saint Michael’s student!”

Co-hosts and computer science majors Ashleigh McCrory ’09 and Rob Sullivan ’10 kept the fun quotient high and the action moving with silly but purposeful banter. Their professor Greta Pangborn oversaw the computer-projected display of questions that had been gathered from non-competing faculty earlier in the week. The more questions a contestant answered, the more “prizes,” like apples, stickers, coupons for coffee and doughnuts, they could accumulate.

Contestants were allowed to select one member from the student “class” for two questions at a time to sit alongside them and help with answers, as on the TV show. An added twist was that contestants also had a chance to consult a fellow faculty competitor of their choice, but only once.

Players naturally gravitated to quiz categories most nearly matching their specialties or those of their helpers. Mostly the topics were traditional academics — science, mathematics, artistic expression, religious studies, foreign language, social studies, but also included a college trivia category, featuring such questions as “how

much money is taken off of your Knight Card when you do a load of laundry? (answer: $2.50).

Stacey Peet of the athletics office staff (the lone non-professor), Richard Kujawa (geography), Brett Findley (chemistry), Patrick Standen (philosophy), John Trono, (computer science) and finally Dean of the College Jeffrey Trumbower (religious studies) faced off against the students, and the game’s unofficial winner appeared to be Kujawa, the only contestant who made it through all his questions, mostly on his own power, though he also took advantage of helpers when he wasn’t sure.

When their times came, some of the flunk-outs offered ego-soothing, qualified variations on the harshly humble declaration officially demanded of them by the rules – for instance, “I’m not smarter than THAT Saint Michael’s student TODAY, or “…on THAT subject.”  Dean of the College Jeff Trumbower had a good run through the categories as the final contestant, staying alive until the very last question at the end of the game when he incorrectly guessed Frederich Engels was the revolutionary who had worked for a New York newspaper (the answer was actually Karl Marx).