… all there is?
**************************
UD‘s already written about the promiscuously self-accrediting law schools of America
here
here
and here.
Every school gets accredited, every fool gets accepted somewhere. New law schools are opening all the time.
Now you’ve got these impoverished unemployed indebted people. Some of them are blogging with a certain degree of anger.
Like this guy, who graduated from Seton Hall, a low-ranked law school. He went to all that trouble and expense and is that all there is?
As they enter the worst job market in decades, many young would-be lawyers are turning on their alma maters, blaming their quandary on high tuitions, lax accreditation standards and misleading job placement figures.
Students claim the schools lie or give incomplete information about their graduates.
On its website, the school currently reports an employment rate of 94 percent for the 2009 class, but does not break that down into full-time, part-time or temporary work. The school also claims a starting salary of $145,000 in private practice, though it does not specify how many grads reported salaries in this area.
******************************
Don’t tell this guy about this.
You know how happy birthday presents make you! Toys!! Toys!!!
Now listen carefully to Mr. Weiler, boys and girls. Your university got a birthday present. From its best friend, Mr. Knight. A wonderful shiny present.
This present looks so pretty! See the present? Pretty presents are pretty!
… “Its a really nice building,” University sports marketing senior Taber Webb said, “but I don’t understand why the best building on campus is reserved for less than one percent of the student population. My tuition is spiking every year because supposedly Oregon doesn’t have enough money, but then you see things like Jaqua and its quartz stone fireplace on the first floor, and you begin to wonder what the deal is.”
… University spokesperson Phil Weiler emphasized that the Jaqua Center was a gift from Knight and the University had no control over how the donated money was spent.
“The building was a gift,” Weiler told the Oregonian. “When someone buys you a birthday present, you don’t ask them how much they spent for it.” …
Someone bought you a present, Taber! A pretty present!
From Cambridge News:
An ancient piece of rock art – unlike anything previously found in Eastern England – has been unearthed in a Cambridgeshire village.
The hand-sized artefact is thought to be 4,500 years old, and it was found by a woman taking part in a weekend geological course run by Cambridge University at Over.
It is a slab of weathered sandstone, with two pairs of concentric circles etched into the surface – a motif which, according to archaeologists, is typical of “grooved ware” art from the later Neolithic era, in 2,500 BC…
Sure, it’s a little unnerving to live in University of Central Florida student housing, but what if everyone moved out and demanded a refund because another chem major was discovered using explosive chemicals in his room to make meth?
Rather than panic and begin making demands, ask yourself: How good is the UCF chem department? What’s the student’s GPA in his major? He hasn’t detonated the building yet, and he seems to have a very solid, established business going.
… but it’s rare, and therefore newsworthy, when it happens during the summer.
[A] University of Idaho senior died of respiratory arrest, apparently due to alcohol poisoning after a night of drinking to celebrate his 21st birthday.
Emergency personnel responded to a report of an unconscious man at Sigma Nu fraternity at 2:42 a.m. Tuesday. They located Benjamin Harris of Burley on the third floor and began CPR. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Gritman Medical Center.
Assistant Police Chief David Duke says Harris may have had as many as 15 shots in two-and-a-half hours as he celebrated his birthday Monday night…
UD looked up why it is that you can stop breathing when you drink too much. Alcohol depresses everything, including the central nervous system. Drink enough, and you’ll simply be too weak to breathe. Eventually you’ll go into heart failure.
Two male Edinburgh University students have been found dead in a Scottish hotel, in a laptop suicide pact.
UD doesn’t understand how you set up a laptop to inject drugs for you.
[They] used a laptop to deliver lethal overdoses – and may have broadcast their final moments using a webcam.
Police are probing the possibility that the harrowing footage of their deaths may have been aired over the internet.
Last night, a source said: “It looks like this was meticulously planned.
“The room was tidy and they seemed to have set up a laptop so they didn’t have to inject the drugs directly – they appear to have had a reasonable level of medical knowledge and skill.
“It also looked as if they had set up a camera to film what was happening…”
UD is rushing about from graduation ceremonies to senior English majors parties to other sorts of parties.
The weather is beautiful; her students are beautiful. She will return to blogging when she has finished embracing them and praising them to their parents.
Yet the mother of a Reed College student who died of a drug overdose (background on Reed’s drug problem here) makes a telling complaint:
In [Barbara] Tepper’s … letter [to the Reed campus], she … urged Reed College to provide more counseling to students struggling with stress, to expel and not just suspend students who use or distribute illegal drugs and faulted college counselors for prescribing sleeping pills to her son who had trouble sleeping.
“I was very upset because that’s sending a very clear message if you don’t feel good, chemicals will solve your problem,” Tepper said in an interview Thursday. She said that when she learned her son was given sleeping pills by a campus psychiatrist, she was furious.
“I told Sam, ‘You’re 20 years old. I don’t want you taking sleeping pills. Go out and run around the block. Make yourself physically tired, and you’ll fall asleep.”
The larger point here, about America as a profoundly pill-dependent culture, and about the way easy recourse to pills can predispose people toward overuse and abuse as well as weaken their ability to solve their problems non-chemically, is a terribly important one.
“None of this went reported. We were able to confirm there were no restraining orders, no reports. But just sort of the campus buzz — just the buzz, the campus grapevine — if you’re coaching a team and a player is assaulting a sleeping teammate, wouldn’t you prod around? There were just too many episodes that were almost foreshadowing this.”
A CBS reporter pulls together the latest reports of George Huguely’s violence – toward Yeardley Love and toward others – leading up to her murder.
Having covered, on this blog, quite a lot of on-campus and off-campus violence, I’d like to speculate a little here, about this case.
Let’s start with the coach. It’s contemptible that, knowing Huguely was dangerously violent, the coach said nothing to anyone about it. But it is unsurprising. Why?
1.) Coaches go to incredible trouble, and get paid large sums of money, to recruit and retain aggressive young men. These men are rewarded for their aggression on the field, and rarely punished for that same aggression off the field. Sports heroes like Huguely have been rewarded all their lives for being rude and crude. Their coaches are part of the reward system.
2.) From the coach’s point of view, Huguely is part of a crowd. There are several pretty wild drunks on the team, and it’s going to be hard to single any of them out as not merely wild but pathological.
3.) Coaches tend to have intensely paternal relationships with their boys. They think like fathers, and fathers don’t report their sons, or call the police on them.
4.) The coach is unlikely to come from same the privileged background as his players. If he did, he’d be a lawyer, not a coach. He will perhaps, when considering action against a player, be intimidated by the money and power the player’s parents have.
5.) He will also be intimidated by thoughts of fans and alumni who expect victories and who adore Huguely as a big part of the team’s victory delivery system. A coach’s job is always very shaky — recall that Duke unloaded its lacrosse coach long before the innocence of his players was finally established.
*********************************
What about Yeardley Love herself? She was obviously being bombarded by threatening emails and by escalating physical violence from Huguely. She must have known about his jealousy-fueled attack on a male friend of hers on the team. Why did she do nothing, beyond locking her bedroom door?
1.) She might have done something. She might have talked about it. She might even have lodged a complaint — something short of a restraining order, let’s say, but maybe something. We don’t know yet.
2.) She might have thought along the same lines as the chair of Amy Bishop’s department: Yes, this is a scary person, but the school year is almost over. If I can just get to the end of the semester, she’ll have to go away, because she didn’t get tenure. Love might have thought We’re a few weeks away from graduation. If I can just wait that out, he’ll go his way and I’ll go mine.
3.) The crowd thing again. She saw him as one of the guys, part of a very close-knit team. Maybe he was crazier than most of the other guys, but they embraced him, loved him, didn’t throw him off the team. He could be seriously shitfaced, but so could they. He could also probably be charmingly apologetic about his obnoxiousness the next morning.
4.) Finally there’s pity and fear.
She wanted to help him. She understood he was a terrible drunkard about to enter an unforgiving world of work, and she wanted to help him. She pitied him, not just because he was an alcoholic, but because he loved and needed her so much. He roused her compassion.
Just as much, though, he roused her fear. He was a powerful man, and a very mean drunk. His love was sick and obsessive, and now that she’d rejected him, it was all wounded ego and vicious rage. Perhaps like his coach she deluded herself that Huguely was under it all still a little boy given to tantrums, rather than a man capable of murder.
… the Tom Buchanan passages.
The latest on Yeardley Love’s killer (UD thanks David for the link):
University of Virginia lacrosse player George Huguely attacked a sleeping teammate last year, leaving his face bruised in an altercation that took place after a night of partying, according to four sources with knowledge of the incident.
… [One] former player, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of respect for the grieving families, said Huguely attacked the other player after hearing that his teammate had kissed women’s lacrosse player Yeardley Love, who was dating Huguely at the time…
************************************************************
From The Great Gatsby:
… Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven — a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy — even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach — but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.
Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it — I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
… He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body — he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage — a cruel body.
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.
… Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy’s name.
“Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouted Mrs. Wilson. “I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai——”
Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.
From yesterday’s Daily News:
… A friend of Huguely’s who played lacrosse with him in summer leagues told the Daily News that Huguely “partied really hard and when he was drunk or f—– up, he could be violent. He would get out of control.”
Huguely was described by the summer league teammate as “obsessive,” constantly texting and calling Love, to the point that people close to her worried about the relationship.
[N]o protective order had been filed in the local magistrate’s office.
A former Virginia student who was friends with both Love and Huguely described a disturbing incident in which Huguely recently reportedly attacked Love, then had no recollection of it the next day, which precipitated their final breakup. “He was really messed up and punched a window of a car on the way over to her apartment that night,” the friend said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of consideration for Love’s family. The friend said Huguely had been seen breaking bottles at another party before Love’s death and had told people he was going to her apartment to get Love back…
Five female students, including one who’d recently completed a self-defense class, jumped to the aid of a fellow student, grabbing her knife-wielding attacker and holding him until police officers arrived at Husson University, officials said Wednesday.
Jesse Hladik put her new skills to work when she lunged for the hand holding a knife, while fellow students grabbed the man’s other limbs and wrestled him to the ground. Hladik, 21, of Buckfield, said she knew the pressure points to make him drop the knife, thanks to the class.
… Officers responding to the report of a domestic fight at 7:40 a.m. arrived to find 45-year-old Horst Wolk of Bangor subdued on the pavement. A campus officer cuffed him, and city police hauled him away.
John Michaud, professor of legal studies, heard the commotion and saw a pile of people on the pavement, while more women stood by, ready to jump in, if necessary.
… Wolk has been charged with attempted murder, elevated aggravated assault, aggravated assault and violating a protection order, said Bangor Police Sgt. Paul Edwards.
… The incident unfolded in a parking lot next to Husson’s O’Donnell Commons. Wolk, who isn’t a student, rammed the victim’s vehicle after she pulled into a parking space at 7:40 a.m., then jumped out of his vehicle with a knife in his hand, said Julie Green, Husson spokeswoman…
Horst looks pretty beat up in his mug shot.