On Tuesday afternoon, reports of Bill Nye sightings popped up all over Yik Yak. They ranged from believable to not-quite-right.
“Is Bill Nye really on campus?”
“Is Bill Nye actually at USC and for what?”
“Bill Nye is in Jones.”
“Bill Nye is in Caroliniana signing calculators.”
“Bill Nye just took my girl.”
“Bill Nye just broke up a fight at Marble Slab.”
“Bill Nye fighting against a snake and a Zeta in Marble Slab.”
“Where the f--k is Bill Nye?”
“HAS ANYONE ACTUALLY SEEN BILL NYE.”
But when students arrived at the Caroliniana Library, they were disappointed. According to two staff members at the circulation desk, they’d seen more students than normal for a Wednesday.
“A bunch of students came in,” said Graham Duncan, staff member at Caroliniana. “They all started looking around, and finally one of them worked up the nerve to ask if [Bill Nye] was here. We had to tell them, no,” he said, clearly amused. “Bill Nye is not here.”
“I had no idea,” said Mike Berry, Curator of Published Materials, who came into the library after everything had died down. “I hate that I missed it.”
Brian Cuthrell, Manuscripts cataloger, confirmed that the Yik Yak posts and tweets were not a marketing ploy to bring students into the library, nor was it a promotion for Nye’s new book. He hopes students will come back again, but next time to study at the university’s manuscripts library.
“This isn’t really the library he would come to,” Duncan said with a laugh. “We’re history, not science.”
It was hard to believe that Nye would be found — signing calculators, no less — on campus given that he was just on the CBS morning news Tuesday. The chance of him popping up on campus Tuesday was unlikely, but students dared to dream of meeting their childhood science hero.
But Nye's booking agent Glenn Schwartz gave the final word.
“No he was not [on campus],” Schwartz said in an email.