“The end is near; Johnny Lechner is thinking about graduating this year”

Anybody can become a celebrity these days. That glorified status can be reached by doing just about anything. You can gain fame from an alleged act or you could even become a legend just for being idle. Today’s exhibit seems reasonably apt in this age of ‘lifelong learning’ where the concept of never-ending education is promoted to us by lifestyle shows and dare I say it, governments. This is a man who is making a name for himself and getting noticed because he’s in his twelfth year of higher education.

Forgive my manners, please meet Johnny.

University of Wisconsin student Johnny Lechner has been gaining notoriety for many years around his campus. The woeful prediction in the title above is an actual; if perhaps rather tongue in cheek message, which was once displayed on the board outside the college church. These days the reach of Johnny’s personality status takes his story somewhat further afield.
Johnny has attracted attention from several major newspapers across the globe and has recently made appearances on US TV shows Late Night with David Letterman, Good Morning America and Inside Edition. Sponsorships deals have also come his way with merriment merchants National Lampoon footing the bill on his final year's tuition fees and graduation party as well as receiving regular deliveries of ‘Monster’ energy drink in return for his endorsement. Not a bad life you might think and you’d be right. Johnny certainly seems to think so; he has found it rather difficult to pull himself away from this life. Of course it hasn’t always been promotional freebies and television appearances but the student life has served Johnny well. As the quote on his home page states: “There is a time and a place for everything, and that's college”. Now though, he is bringing it to a close.

As this edition of The National Student hits the stands Johnny will be enjoying his 4068th day of studentity with only a potential 172 days left. It should be accepted however that he has come close to this before. Last year he had actually filed the paperwork to leave university and move on but he found in the end that he couldn't go through with it. You might even assume that he has been throwing all this time away on party-going and debauchery, OK, perhaps there has been some of that, but he has shown himself to be a strong student. 120 grade points are required to graduate from Wisconsin, Johnny has clocked up 242. Recent rule changes have brought increased tuition fees for students exceeding 165 credits. This ‘Slacker Tax’ has quickly been appointed the title of the ‘Johnny Lechner Rule’. While some at his university may regard him as a bit of an embarrassment - particularly now his long term incumbency at their educational establishment has been so widely publicised - many think otherwise.
“We’re a community of scholars, and he just loves to learn,” comments Martha Saunders, chancellor of Whitewater where Johnny studies.
The difficulty in the public relations side of this story is the sponsorship and media angle. The products and companies that yearn for Lechner's endorsement are attracted to the exciting persona of the life and soul of the fraternity and Johnny isn’t necessarily averse to fulfilling that role. National Lampoon themselves created ‘Van Wilder’ the story of a party-going fictional seventh year college senior. The real life student they appreciate so well is not the slacker he is made out to be, and to his credit, he seems to make a point of bringing this to people’s attention. He has compiled a 4.0 grade-point average whatever that means and in one semester got straight As. Generally the guy hasn’t fallen below a B grade throughout the main part of his educational career, one semester; he made the ‘Dean’s List’ as an outstanding student.
He has taken an admirable route through the subjects on offer on his campus taking in such titbits as communications, theatre studies, liberal studies, women’s studies and health. As each path ended Johnny would simply change his options and choose a new subject to major in. Although he may admit having enrolled on a few courses having forgotten he’d taken them previously.
He received financial funding from his parents for the first two years but since then has supported himself through a combination of part-time work, ‘acoustic storytelling’ and student loans. Johnny recounts hardly noticing the semesters fly by during his fifth, sixth and seventh college years saying he had found a ‘comfort zone.’ During his eighth year, he began to realize he had a great story, and began thinking about writing a book.
“There’s a big difference between saying I went to [university] for nine years, and saying I went for a decade,” explains Johnny. “It’s more amazing.”
The passing of time is an important factor in his experience. When Johnny first enrolled at university in 1994, the internet was still entering the public consciousness and his current girlfriend was just starting fourth grade. His bedroom walls are now plastered with photos of his classmates from throughout his studious years. Many of his old peers are now married with children, and well into their professional careers. He is the subject of ‘will-he-won’t-he graduate’ speculation in the local student newspaper and commands quite a following among students, according to his friend John Koskinen. Recently, there were reports of an impostor posing as Lechner to get dates, he says. “Johnny’s just mythical.”

Johnny has also thrown himself into a wide range of extracurricular causes and activities around university including founding the Whitewater chapter of Men against Sexual Assault and Violence, winning the 2003 ‘Big Man on Campus’ pageant, and last year standing for the position of student union president. He volunteers with numerous organizations, including Habitat for Humanity, the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Prairie Restoration Project and Camp Getaway for inner-city Chicago children with AIDS. If pushed for an explanation as to why he has spent such a long time as a student when many would have been done and gone in three to four years he is reticent.
“It’s the lifestyle,” he says, “It’s being laid back, going with the flow. If I had a better answer, I'd tell you.” He finds it easier to answer the question of why he intends to bring it to an end. For a start there aren’t really any courses at Whitewater that he has not taken and secondly he will conceed that his stint at education has now passed into the realms of silliness. One reporter recently confronted him with a question asking when his college career would cross the line from amusing to pathetic; his answer?
“Probably three years ago.”

I should also point out the sad news, that Johnny, close to our hearts as he already is, unfortunately is not a record breaker. There is apparently another student somewhere in the great US of A that is in their seventeenth year. Their identity it would appear is a mystery, maybe they don’t have as much reason to be proud of it as our Johnny does.
If this is Johnny's final year, he doesn’t have too much work ahead of him, particularly considering he already has twice the required credits to graduate. His senior thesis is in the preparation stages, but it will be anything but a quiet year for the eternal student. Britain’s own Lion Television (Castaway 2000) were following him with a camera through September, another reality programme is in the making and beyond that a sitcom based on his life following graduation is also on the cards. He has his own agents in the form of the William Morris Talent Agency with his handlers touting book proposals around publishers and entertaining interview offers from Howard Stern amongst others. Fortunately for Johnny, this new found earner could be just what he needs to overcome his accumulated college debt. He appears to be quite aware of this; even encouraging people to call him not by his name but by his URL.

We shall stay in touch with JohnnyLechner.com during his ‘final’ year and will of course keep you posted on his shall-I-shan’t-I mental struggle. So spare a thought for JohnnyLechner.com whenever you fear the real world creeping up on you or simply feel that time is slipping away; just take a brief moment to appreciate your leisurely life of learning.
Images courtesy of Erol Reyal and Johnny Lechner