This blog has featured some less than ideal places to attend college or university, places that seem to UD not optimal if you’d like a little peace and quiet and not too much gun-play to go with your studies. Trigger-mad Waco, Texas, for instance, with its breastaurant-biker riots/mass killings, rape- friendly university (Baylor) and good ol’ boy judges (most of them Baylor grads) does not seem to UD to shout pursue a higher education here. Unless you already know you want to study American cults up close and personal (the Branch Davidians raped their children here) you might want to look elsewhere.
Similarly, Huntington, West Virginia, home of appalling Marshall University, might not be the best place for you to study. Folks there saw in 2020 by shooting everybody up at a bar that calls itself Kulture Hookah and has a very strange, uh, provenance.
Back in July the city approved the place because its owner was a fine lass struggling to raise drug-free kids and she was fervently opposed to alcohol and any form of acting up in the joint. This would be a quiet, strictly private refuge full of oldies. Profits from the place, she told the unanimously-impressed Board of Zoning Appeals, would go toward the eradication of the town’s well-known drug problem.
One sharp-eyed commenter on the story about this in a local paper asked
Is the owner the same person convicted of operating a heroin distribution house in Huntington in 2016?
but the Huntington zoners got all choked up at her sob story and didn’t see any need to check newspaper articles or court records about how the hookah bar owner
pleaded guilty in 2016 to maintaining a residence for the purpose of distributing heroin.
[She] was sentenced to 15 months in prison.
They musta been mighty surprised to find out, day after the mass shooting, that
The bar advertised their New Year’s Eve party via social media and left an aftermath of drinks, party favors, and blood on the floor.
I mean. How can UD say this politely? Some places are just too stupid for you to go to school there.
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Update. When asked if [the bar owner] would have been given a business permit given her criminal history, [Huntington’s mayor] said it’s important to have all the information when making those decisions.
Yeah, it’s important but we’re too dumb to have it… I mean, we’re too high to have it… And yeah, I hear you: The state with the nation’s highest overdose death rate should maybe keep a bit of an eye on heroin distributors and maybe not give them permits to open bars, but … uh… (nods off)…
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Second Update: Getting better and better.
The flier for Wednesday morning’s party included a picture of a woman holding an assault weapon.
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Third Update: Just before she was given her certificate of occupancy for the retail shop, court papers reveal [Kulture Hookah’s owner] was cited for shoplifting at Walmart.
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Dunno. At this point there are two distinct possibilities: Huntington West Virginia is actually this stupid; or everyone in the government is getting huge sums of money to coordinate running the city with the best interests of the well-established Huntington/Detroit drug cartel in mind.
January 2nd, 2020 at 5:08PM
I’m trying to come up with a list of academically excellent research universities with properly proportioned sports in safe neighborhoods in non-crazy communities with minimally-felonious faculty and students and can’t think of any. Cambridge and Oxford may qualify but they’re not in the US.
The list is easier if research is taken out – a lot of schools in NCAA’s Division 3 would fit the remaining criteria.
January 2nd, 2020 at 5:57PM
Whoops. UC San Diego may qualify. Top flight research, respectable Division 2 sports (no football), La Jolla is very nice, and the faculty/students don’t appear on the police blotter.
January 3rd, 2020 at 6:33AM
Ravi: Yes – UCSD is an example — but a more perfect one than I have in mind. That is, I don’t ask that readers avoid great universities with so-so sports in not great neighborhoods, for instance. So University of Chicago, Hopkins, Columbia, Yale… these are certainly not in safe neighborhoods, but few serious students turn them down.
January 3rd, 2020 at 12:48PM
Cal Tech should be on that list. Last years of his life, dad lived a few blocks from the campus. The most serious crime was double parking…
January 3rd, 2020 at 1:33PM
I thought UD was going for full morality so I left out Caltech due to a highly publicized incident involving a faculty member in the past couple of years. But, yes, Pasadena/San Marino are very U, no one can say that Caltech is sports-happy, and the brainpower density there is impressive.
January 4th, 2020 at 1:05PM
My only contact with Marshall University is via a math professor who has done some interesting work with an innovative way to teach differential equations. Met a couple of her students, too, who seemed pretty sharp.
So, anecdotal data only, but an existence proof that *some* worthwhile things are going on there…
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/57194.html