The world laid out through six seasons of Community centered on Greendale Community College. The entire college and its students wasn't the focus, though, just the Spanish Study Group. However, when they were on campus, things got strange. This has led a lot of fans to wonder what Greendale was like before Jeff Winger and friends arrived. Was it already weird before they got there? Or, did they make it weird?

Each member of the Spanish Study Group had their own reasons for being at Greendale. Jeff was there because he wanted his law career back. Abed was there because his father wanted him to get an education that would help their business. Annie and Troy were there in attempts to recover from their respective high school careers. Britta rarely seemed to be fully aware of why she did anything. And Pierce had been there for a decade or so at that point.

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Coach Bogner congratulates Jeff Winger

The absurdity of Greendale became apparent quite quickly. There were a lot of school dances and a lot of diorama assignments, far more than students would expect to find at a place of higher education. But this ridiculousness ran much deeper than that, and became more and more preposterous as the series went on. However, since the series focused almost entirely on the Study Group, it did leave fans wondering what the school was like when they weren't around.

Not much was discussed about Greendale pre-Study Group. Pierce had been on campus for a long time, for several years before Jeff and the rest of the gang showed up. In more than one episode, Dean Pelton referenced the fact that Pierce was the school's longest-tenured student. But even Pierce never really talked about his time on campus before the Study Group that much, probably because it didn't go well.

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Community Bottle Episode.

It's hard to deny that in Season 1, Greendale seemed like a much more serious school. Michelle Slater was a stats professor who was only around in the beginning, her final appearance on the series being the last episode of the first season. She was highly intelligent and a serious teacher, who disappeared after her run-in with Jeff Winger and, to an extent, Britta Perry. That being said, both Ben Chang and Ian Duncan were also teaching at Greendale at that time and neither of them could ever be taken seriously as professors. Chang was, after all, a Spanish teacher who didn't speak Spanish.

Season 5, Episode 13 was one of the few times the series took a real look into the past of the school. The episode revealed that Greendale was founded by a reclusive and wealthy tech genius, who went into hiding to have a long-term sexual relationship with a computer. At that point, it became crystal clear that the foundations of Greendale were firmly constructed out of pure, unadulterated absurdity. The Study Group may have focused that absurdity, if not enhanced it, but the place was strange long before they ever showed up on campus. In all fairness to the members of the Study Group, no institution run by Dean Craig Pelton could ever be completely free of shenanigans.

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