In an interview with author Kevin Brownlow, Buster Keaton said that he directed almost all of this film and that credited co-director James W. Horne did virtually none of it. Keaton said that his business manager talked him into using Horne, but that Horne proved "absolutely worthless to me . . . I don't know why we had him."
Various sources associated with the production recalled in later interviews that there was also a filmed scene of Buster Keaton's character trying to play football, but that this scene was later removed to avoid too close a comparison with Harold Lloyd's The Freshman (1925). While no film has surfaced to confirm this, production stills show Buster wearing a football uniform, and playing football with some kids in a vacant lot. Moreover, two small parts of the released film lend credence to it: 1) When Keaton is unpacking in his dorm, one of the how-to-play-sports books he unpacks is about football, and 2) in the scene of Keaton running across the campus to rescue his girl, he dodges through a crowd of people like a running back trying to avoid tacklers in the open field.
The boat for which Buster Keaton is coxswain is called Damfino, the same name as the eponymous boat in his short movie The Boat (1921).
For a scene near the film's conclusion where Ronald pole-vaults through a window, Buster Keaton had to use a stunt double (Lee Barnes) for the first time in his career. "I could not do the scene because I am no pole-vaulter and I didn't want to spend months in training to do the stunt myself." This, in fact, is probably one of the few stunts in his career that Keaton did not perform himself, having been raised since a toddler as part of his parents' acrobatic Vaudeville act.
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