George Washington University students celebrating in front of the White House late last night.

More pictures.

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LOL.

Heard loud and clear over chants of “U.S.A.” and “Obama” was an unnamed George Washington University undergraduate screaming to her friends: “I legitimately have a paper due tomorrow!”

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Last night was a nail-biter.

Yeah, we’ve got that.

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A Win for Professors.

If you can understand the Five Stages of Grief, thank a professor.

And a professor shall lead them.

Professor Bashing as Clever Strategy on the Eve of a National Election.

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The Three Horsemen of the Republican Apocalypse:

Empiricism

Humaneness

Proper Speech

You’ve really got to pay attention. And you’ve got to tell someone. If students at Folsom Lake College hadn’t noticed David Ming Lee acting oddly, he might have used the small part of his weapons cache that he decided to bring to school that day.

A Folsom Lake College student remains in custody – his bail set at $1 million – after his arrest Thursday for bringing a loaded handgun onto campus, college officials said.

Police dropped in on his apartment.

A subsequent search of Lee’s residence turned up an assault rifle and large capacity magazines.

… August” was a 22-year-old student with Prozac, alcohol, and morphine in her system. The local coroner was astonished by the morphine: “It’s hard to get ahold of.”

Chico State has long been at the cutting edge of drug and alcohol deaths and injuries at American universities. I’m not sure why certain schools get this way. I’d guess that after awhile a place gets a reputation and starts attracting freshmen who’ve already been addicts for years. (See the first Chico student interviewed in this pretty good Chico State film.)

Three deaths in three months; and a hard-to-get drug showing up in the latest death. It’s ominous.

The local newspaper grapples with the amazingly violent University of Massachusetts student body.

The dean helps the reporter understand this profoundly complex problem: Why do so many of the young men the school has admitted destroy neighborhoods and physically attack the police? It’s in their nature. Look to the developmental spectrum. It’s all part of the price of doing business for the university. Boys will be boys, and we admit them knowing they can’t help where they are on the spectrum.

… at play.

I wonder what in their admissions essays must have made Berkeley decide to admit them.

I hope, in my legal career, to have an opportunity to torture, behead, and play with the dead bodies of birds.

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UD thanks David.

… to a group of students I don’t know (I was substituting for a colleague), a woman came up to the podium to talk to me.

I don’t know why I want to share this with you, but… A couple of winters ago, I was sitting with a friend in her house during a terrible snowstorm. The house had big windows everywhere, and the snow was falling really beautifully in all the windows and we took out Catcher and spent the whole day taking turns reading it aloud to each other. Start to finish, one sitting, with the snow falling… This is why I’ll never forget one page of that book…

I told the student that was a beautiful story and I thanked her for it (and I wondered – as I often do – why students tend to share things like this with me privately, after class, even though I’d love it, and it’d be great for discussion, if they’d tell everyone…), and she rushed off before I had a chance to tell her my story along those lines.

One summer UD was alone for a couple of weeks at the little Soltan house in upstate New York, and, over the course of a few sunny quiet days, she sat on the deck in a butterfly chair and read Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The solitude, the slowness with which she read, the powerful natural setting — it made it so that, like her student today, UD took in that novel for good.

… shot to death by a campus policeman.

He had taken LSD at a concert that evening and had gone on a rampage, attacking three other people before he got to the police station.

Video taken by a surveillance camera showed Collar nude and covered in sweat as he pursued the retreating officer more than 50 feet outside the building, Cochran said. Collar got within 5 feet of Austin and the officer fired once, striking the student in the chest, Cochran said…. [The Mobile County Sheriff] said he had “serious concerns” about the killing of an unarmed student when he first heard what had happened, but he better understood the officer’s decision to open fire after watching the videotape of the shooting.

“It’s very powerful,” [he] said …

Investigators are trying to determine who provided Collar with LSD and could charge that person with murder…

Typical pro-laptop bs. Centuries ago, still images of Picassos and volcanoes were flashed on one screen in front of students via projectors – a cheap, perfectly adequate way of providing visual material. Waters doesn’t note in his comment that laptops are about one long endless private self-service image-stream. His comment doesn’t note that instead of occasionally drawing students’ attention to one image at the front of the room, the PowerPoint prof quite often spends the entire class session hunched over images and blocks of words, ignoring the class, which is of course in return ignoring her.

But anyway. Faculty gatherings like this one at Elon College are all about the lovely PowerPoint/laptop classroom synergy coming out of the closet.

As always, it’s honest students instructing cynical professors:

“There is no reason to use them in a discussion class,” [an Elon student] said. “That’s where they become more of a distraction, because students that use them during discussions are most likely on Facebook or Pinterest.”

And as for the massive, no-discussion lectures laptops are so terrific for — this form of education is becoming obsolete, since it makes absolutely no sense to do a class of this sort in real time. Just gather all the clickers and laptops and PowerPoints and films and cellphones that you’re dragging into the classroom and, you know, take your toys and go home. Only an idiot – or someone drawing a salary – would continue with this scenario.

… of the Alabama university student who got naked and went to the campus police station, where he banged on windows and threatened the policeman who came outside to investigate, ended as badly as it’s possible to end. The policeman, after repeated threats from the student, shot and killed him (there’s a security tape of the incident).

It’s too soon to say anything with confidence about this event, beyond the fact that it’s heartbreaking. The student was a freshman, a wrestler, and, according to his friends, had no record of this sort of behavior. Theories abound – a psychotic break, drugs… Many observers wonder why the policeman was unable to find a non-lethal way to calm things.

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David, a reader, reminds UD that a couple of years ago the Georgia Tech police (actually, now that I look at the link, it’s not clear they were campus police) were able to do enough roughing up and pepper spraying of a crazed student to take him down:

[S]everal officers had their handguns trained on Shrotri and were ordering him to drop the sword, according to another report also obtained by the AJC.

“You will have to kill me,” Shrotri responded.

A scuffle ensued after one of the officers squirted pepper spray at Shrotri. Officer Robert J. Turner, 29, of Griffin, had his right hand cut as he tackled Shrotri.

The voice of the people. Philosophy of education, American-style. If the University of Georgia students and alumni like to shit all over the campus during football games, “it’s a college campus for crying out loud.” That’s what college campuses are for.

The University of Tennessee would dearly love to pull the tubing out of the alcohol enema story, but, like Franzia wine over-topping your sphincter, it just keeps circulating. The frat what done it has been suspended (temporarily; anal-opening-awareness workshops are doubtless in the works), but, despite national news coverage that won’t quit, UT’s president seems disinclined to say anything public about the brothers giving each other enemas.

Durkheim’s observation plays out in a moving way in the university (or high school) setting, where students and former students may choose places on campus associated with their greatest successes or most significant experiences.

A sixty year old guy who’d been named “the University of Montana’s outstanding athlete in 1975″ killed himself on that campus. Nora Miller, a Wesleyan track star, killed herself on the track.

A football player who’d been at the University of South Carolina went not there but “to his old high school and parked near the field where he had starred as a wide receiver in football and a sprinter in track and field.”

Building prisons does seem to lower crime rates – at least if you put criminals in them. Similarly, despite this NYU student’s insistence that suicide barriers at places like NYU and Cornell are pointless, there’s evidence that they can dissuade some people from jumping.

One must have a heart of stone to read this account without laughing.

This time last year, the incredibly violent University of Massachusetts, Amherst – a university which seems to have a gang-legacy admissions category – was the scene of extensive back-to-school bloodshed.

It’s exactly the same thing this year, with party/riots so massive and attacks on police so vicious that the poor little town of Amherst, once host to gentle Emily Dickinson, now host to hordes of scary drunks, has begun considering its options.

It wants, to start with, to know just how seriously the university is disciplining its large numbers of remarkably vile students. UD isn’t sure what Amherst intends to do once it gets this information, but considering the long history of U Mass student riots (read that history here), the town has been astoundingly forbearing.

UD has proposed shutting the school down and making it an online institution. The negative here is obvious – Amherst currently enjoys a captive audience of thousands of thirsty alcoholics, and that’s got to be great for its bottom line. But gradually the whole Zoo Mass phenom is costing Amherst – and all Massachusetts taxpayers – more than it’s bringing in.