“Even cops think, ‘Oh they are just tattooed long haired guys who like to ride motorcycles.’ And the reality of it is they are long-haired tattooed guys who ride motorcycles and sell a hell of a lot of methamphetamine and murder people and steal motorcycles and extort people and beat people up in bars for no reasons.”
May 22nd, 2015 at 5:38PM
You know I’ve ready many articles in newspapers and on the web, listened to several radio pieces and a few TV reports on the recent events in Waco. In all of this coverage, the only place that thought it was a good idea to link the shootout at the restaurant that happened to be in Waco to Baylor University was this blog. I didn’t comment the first three times but I guess four is my limit.
It kinda makes me think that you’ve never been to Baylor. I have been. It makes Texas A&M look pretty out there (although if you’ve never been to TAMU you won’t get that either).
I wonder if the daily violence one can read about in Washington DC are appropriately linked to institutions such GWU or Georgetown?
Finally, I wonder if you noticed that the link in the above post is not for a story not about Baylor or even Waco. It’s about Myrtle Beach. In South Carolina. So I guess it is only few steps from Baylor University. That is, if you consider 2 million steps “a few”.
Or maybe your still linking location of the shootout to Baylor. In that case, about 8000 steps.
May 22nd, 2015 at 6:35PM
Hi Pete: The fact that I’m the only blog saying something is neither here nor there. A lot of Americans, I guess, think it’s okay that we welcome to our towns and restaurants and beaches gun-toting cults – there’s huge money in it, and America is about personal freedom, driving fast and loud, and gun rights. I don’t agree that this is okay. This maybe makes me an outlier.
Like Nikki Haley (with whom I seldom agree), I think we need to shut some of this activity down, whether it’s killing people in South Carolina – not far from Coastal Carolina University – or in Texas (I mean to refer to both places in the post you say is conflating or confusing them – I probably should have made this clearer).
As for the university angle: This blog is concerned with the welfare of universities, and that includes campus safety, as well as the larger issue of the local culture in which a university is located. Yes, there’s urban crime near NYU and GWU and Boston University – sometimes a significant amount. That crime is “appropriately linked” (to use your phrase) to nearby schools when campus and city police are unable to control it. An example would be Virginia State University – not an urban university, but afflicted with terrible urban-style crime.
Yet it is one thing to want the cultural amenities of a great city like NY or DC or Boston and be willing to be very careful (I was a grad student at the University of Chicago) because you’re in a city and cities have crime rates. It is another thing to be subject to anarchic gun violence on an unprecedented scale when you go out to dinner for parents’ weekend.
The criminal bikers have been killing one another in medium to large shootouts all over the country for years. Why would one choose to spend a meditative four years a few miles from one of their favorite restaurants? (Of course one doesn’t know about bikers and breastaurants when one applies to their neighboring schools. I think disclosure of this would be fair.) What sort of municipality – Panama City Beach, Myrtle Beach, Waco – allows biker violence (or, as with Panama City Beach, non-biker gun and sexual violence) to happen on a large scale? Does it make students feel better, as people seeking a university experience, that these municipalities will now be trying to solve the problem by turning themselves, on a regular basis, into police states?
You’re wrong about mentions of Baylor, by the way. A number of news outlets reported that right next to or near the breastaurant were extended families celebrating their kids’ graduation from Baylor.
PS: Keep an eye out.
May 22nd, 2015 at 9:03PM
The only thing evident from these posts and replies is UD’s fascinating ignorance of the world beyond her narrow ‘thesda circle.
May 22nd, 2015 at 9:16PM
Don’t just call me ignorant, Anon; enlighten me.
May 23rd, 2015 at 8:47PM
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/college/news/a38092/george-washington-university-loses-8-students-in-a-single-year/
May 23rd, 2015 at 8:47PM
http://www.indiawest.com/news/global_indian/george-washington-university-student-found-guilty-of-killing-best-friend/article_ec2b4802-ccdb-11e4-b1c0-b701b09fd594.html
May 23rd, 2015 at 8:49PM
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/04/01/george-washington-university-students-request-more-cameras-after-swastika-incident/
May 23rd, 2015 at 8:50PM
http://college.usatoday.com/2015/01/08/violent-crimes-rise-after-george-washington-u-police-chief-departs/
May 23rd, 2015 at 8:52PM
http://collegeinsurrection.com/2015/04/george-washington-university-fires-46-from-staff-without-warning/
May 23rd, 2015 at 8:54PM
http://www.indiawest.com/news/global_indian/former-department-chair-sues-george-washington-university-for-m/article_9bcdb624-b165-11e4-8a7f-c365ca7943c1.html
May 23rd, 2015 at 8:55PM
http://www.gwhatchet.com/2015/01/20/seven-greek-organizations-slapped-with-sanctions-in-two-months/
May 23rd, 2015 at 8:55PM
Might want to deal with the log in GW’s eye before taking on Baylor and Waco.
May 23rd, 2015 at 9:33PM
And I suppose we should also consider the fact that GW has been caught twice in the last 3 years lying about its admissions:
http://www.gwhatchet.com/2013/10/21/gw-misrepresented-admissions-and-financial-aid-policy-for-years/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/2012/11/14/53954596-2e8d-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html
May 23rd, 2015 at 11:56PM
Anon: This blog has covered most of the negative or troubling stories about GW you link to. I’ve long said on this blog that the smartest thing GW ever did was not have a football team, because it thereby lost an enormous source of negative stories. But there are of course other sources of negative stories for GW, and I have tried over the years to be thorough in blogging about them.
Nothing I’ve written about Baylor suggests it’s at fault in any way for what’s going on around it in Waco. It doesn’t have – to use your word – a log in its eye. I have been arguing that Baylor is simply extremely unfortunate to be located where it is, in the heart – it appears – of outlaw motorcycle gang territory. Baylor is doubly unfortunate, because post-restaurant-massacre these violent cults are extremely angry against the police (as well as, of course, against their established enemy cults), and we can as a result probably expect more large-scale violence not far from Baylor’s campus.
I suppose in the broadest sense what I’m attacking in the Waco situation are certain predictable outcomes of a gun-mad culture, especially in the wild, wild West. I see Baylor as a victim of that, not a wrongdoer.
May 24th, 2015 at 7:39AM
Anon must be very new to this blog. If not I wonder what he/she thought was being accomplished by the posts.
May 24th, 2015 at 12:21PM
Anon, yeah, so what? Urban unis come with violence, part of the equation. I attended University of San Francisco, I could walk from Lone Mountain to Hunter’s Point, quite easily. If you don’t know HP, Utube it. Tenderloin was even closer, that’s where SFPD, and the city fathers, herded some of the most dangerous West Coast vagrants and corralled them for the night.
USF is CA’s third oldest uni, all that degradation grew up around the school, but had nothing to do with USF. The overarching point, which you seemed to have missed, is, why is there increasing hyper-violence, premised on drugs, guns and macho posturing, despite more USAAmericans having college degrees than ever before? Shouldn’t that fact indicate a lessening of the carnage, not a an increase of it? Why do unis, such as USF, or GWU, have to deal with that kind of criminality, at all? Could it be that we have venues that serve up high caliber violence as part of the menu? Is it that we’ve become so inured to violence that it becomes part of some marketing scheme? The whole point of education is to ask and reflect on that kind of incongruity. Why would you be surprised that it’s done on a site entitled University Diaries?