… the University of Virginia lacrosse player who killed his ex-girlfriend already had a pretty long police record.

… A 2008 Palm Beach County, Fla., Sheriff’s Office report describes an incident in which an angry George Huguely V had to be rescued from the Atlantic Ocean after he jumped from a 40-foot yacht during a heated confrontation with his father.

Huguely, 22, had two previous booze-related arrests, one in Palm Beach County and one that involved a violent attack on a female police officer outside a Washington & Lee University fraternity in Lexington, Va…

Even an urban campus like mine
has leafy paths and flowering trees.
It’s not like Kenyon College, of
course, with its remarkable
Middle Path.

But in all seasons here, as at
Kenyon, there’s a sense of a
separate world, a beautiful world.

Yet the beauty of these college
worlds isn’t really about nature.
Take the two students with back-
packs out of this picture, the
students walking together along
those trees and into a mist, and
it’s any autumnal woods.

These particular worlds are beautiful
because youth is beautiful, and
thought is beautiful, and friendship
is beautiful, and potential is beautiful.

And those things – youth, thought,
friendship, potential – exist with
greater intensity in this setting than,
I think, anywhere else.

Students take the middle path and
then move into the mist at its end.

Professors watch them move off
into their futures; year after year
professors watch students step
off into their futures, and there’s
no knowing. But what professors
keep of their students – some of
their students – is a permanent
image of their perfection as they
walk along the middle path.

They walk at ease, in love, in lust,
curious, amused, charitable, fervent.
The college takes their intensity and
cools it a bit; it asks them to consider
how human beings have shaped their
energy into ideas and structures and
states. The discipline of a curriculum
cools and shapes their intensity.

Somewhat. Essentially they remain
high-spirited and unreachable and
enviably vivacious.

***********************

To follow the strange and beautiful
world of the university is to feel the
same shock and sorrow others do
when youthful intensity turns into
violence against the self or against
other people, when fervency becomes
the sort of inner turmoil that destroys.

It doesn’t just destroy a life. It
destroys a life at a kind of pinnacle
of inquiry into life. This
sky-high exuberance makes anything
possible. When it is shot down, or
when, inexplicably, it shoots itself
down, the fall is terrible.

Jack Ford, CBS News:

… “You’re not surprised,” Ford observed, “that his attorney is saying, given these facts, ‘It was an accident.’ You can have a situation where somebody dies, because of somebody else’s conduct, and it might not be criminal. Classic illustration, on the job site and two guys are working and one has a piece of lumber in his hand and he turns around and hits the other accidentally, knocks him off the roof, he hits his head and dies. Might be some civil responsibility, it’s not a criminal case.

“But here, quite candidly, it’s going to be a tougher sell, because you have a whole series of intentional conduct: intentionally kicking in the door to her bedroom. Grabbing her. This isn’t a situation where he said, ‘I went to talk to her and I just sort of grabbed her to turn her around and she tripped on something, fell and hit her head.’ What he says, according to police is, he’s shaking her and repeatedly her head is banging against the wall. That gives you intentional conduct. He might not have intended to kill her, but enough intentional conduct that I think accident, pure accident, would be a tough sell here.”

Ford added that, “In most jurisdictions, they say if you intended to harm somebody seriously and they die, even though you didn’t intend to kill them, you could be guilty of murder.” …

In 2005, the year of its founding, UD took their Trump Success Test (all links have expired) and did very poorly, especially on Money Motivation. Still, when she read this article by Alex Beam, she felt nostalgic for her brief time as a student there… And now you’re telling me the whole thing was some sort of real estate scam?

… know that UD spends part of the summer at her little house in the wilds of Upstate New York. As the academic year ends and August seems less distant, she begins to follow the news in the Leatherstocking Region — which is what her part of the state calls itself.

But maybe not for much longer.

The name has mystery, history and romance but tourism leaders say the name Central Leatherstocking Region doesn’t attract tourists.

After long discussions and a virtually unanimous vote at a recent meeting tourism leaders in that area agreed to now call the region ‘Central New York’.

The Central Leatherstocking was named for James Fenimore Cooper’s literary works ‘Leatherstocking Tales’. Cooper’s father founded Cooperstown and 4 of the 5 ‘Leatherstocking Tales’ were based out of the New York area.

“Of course Natty Bumppo was a prototype of the American frontiersman, wore leather britches. He was referred to as leatherstocking. He was Cooper’s hero in all five leatherstocking tales” says Paul D’Ambrosio who serves as chief curator for the Fenimore Art Museum.

Stephen Elliott who is the president of N.Y.S. Historical Association says the name Central Leatherstocking Region didn’t attract tourists to their area. “When people plan trips the practicality is that they know where it is so they know if they want to go there. While we may have lost that great romance connotation the fact of the matter is people know where [Central New York] is.” says Elliott.

A UD reader long ago pointed UD in the direction of Mark Twain’s essay about Cooper, which says everything I’ve thought about Cooper ever since Harold Kaplan, at Northwestern University many years ago, assigned Deerslayer in one of her American literature classes.

There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now… Now I feel sure, deep down in my heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our language, and that the English of “Deerslayer” is the very worst that even Cooper ever wrote.

I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that “Deerslayer” is not a work of art in any sense; it does seem to me that it is destitute of every detail that goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems to me that “Deerslayer” is just simply a literary delirium tremens.

A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are — oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.

Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.

(UD‘s house is in Summit, New York. She’s therefore introduced a new category with this post: SNAPSHOTS FROM SUMMIT.)

… Southern Connecticut State University’s journalism department, and indeed, when interviewed recently by the police, Jerry Dunklee said he was “under the impression that whatever he did in the privacy of his own home was his business.”

But there’s freedom, and there’s the law. The indecency law.

A Southern Connecticut State University journalism professor has been arrested for public indecency after neighbors say he was masturbating in his window.

Jerry Dunklee has also been charged with breach of peace.

Police in New Haven were called to Front Street last week. Dunklee’s neighbor told police that she had been dealing with his “odd behavior” for four years. The neighbor says whenever she walks her dog, Dunklee would run to his window, undress and begin masturbating.

Another neighbor told police that he would often see Dunklee dancing around his house naked.

When the neighbor was walking with officers around her yard, police noticed Dunklee standing naked in the window and when he saw the police, he quickly sat down.

“We are confident that Ms. Love’s death was not intended, but an accident with a tragic outcome,” Huguely’s attorney, Fran Lawrence, said Tuesday. “It is our hope that no conclusions will be drawn or judgments made about George or his case.”

A short article about the rough sex defense here.

*************************************

Update:

Search warrants reportedly say two witnesses found Love in her bedroom face down in a pool of blood on her pillow, according to the local NBC affiliate. Police officers reported that Love had a large bruise on the right side of her face, which appeared to have been caused by blunt force trauma.

***********************************

More:

Police say a Virginia lacrosse player suspected of killing a member of the women’s team shook her and hit her head repeatedly against the wall.

An affidavit filed with a search warrant says police found 22-year-old Yeardley Love face down in her bedroom with a pool of blood on her pillow.

Police also say the suspect, 22-year-old George Huguely, told them he had an altercation with Love and had kicked in her door…

***************************************

Update: Via Kate, a reader and a wonderful ex-student of mine, more sickening details at The Hook, a local paper. (Read the comments, too. They provide updates on details of the crime scene.)

Scratch the rough sex defense.

A Stanford student describes an early morning eco-walk around that university’s vast holdings. A well-written account of hidden Stanford.

… This ambitious annual event, now in its fourth year, takes a select group of undergraduates, biologists, professors and others on a 21-mile walk around the perimeter of Stanford land… By exploring the outer reaches of campus, Walk the Farm aims to use Stanford as a microcosm of the American West to display the changes climate change has wrought on the environment.

… The first thing I learned from the Walk – Stanford supports a heck of a lot of cows. More cows than any university should know what to do with…

… la clé to the future.

A vast multiversity’s being built just outside Paris, in Saclay.

In farm fields south of Paris, billions of euros are being ploughed into a new modern university campus designed to rival Harvard, MIT and Cambridge as one of the world’s best.

The Paris-Saclay super-campus is France’s answer to years of decline in higher education, with the result that the nation’s best university only ranks 40th in the world.

… “Our goal is to rank among the top 10 universities in the world,” said Herve Le Riche, who heads the 4.4-billion-euro project (5.9 billion dollars) in Saclay, a plateau of grain fields dotted with clusters of modern buildings.

Already home to some top-notch colleges such as the Polytechnique engineering school, the new campus will start opening its doors in 2015 as a grouping of 23 universities, colleges and research institutes.

New laboratories, amphitheatres, student housing along with shops and transport will be built with a view to making France a destination for some of the best and brightest who now head to US and British universities.

… Sarkozy got the academic world talking when he announced that one billion euros of his 35-billion-euro national loan program would go to Paris-Saclay.

That’s on top of 850 million euros earmarked for the project under his government’s university reform program….

Let’s take a look at the first woman fined for doing so.

[Amel Marmouri, a Tunisian immigrant resident in Novara, an Italian town,] was in a post office when police officers stopped her and issued her with [a 500 euro fine for wearing a burqa].

“As far as I know this is a first in Italy,” said police officer Mauro Franzinelli.

Her husband, Ben Salah Braim, 36, said the family would struggle to pay the penalty.

He said his wife would continue to wear the full-length item of clothing because he did not want her to be seen by other men, but in future she would be forced to stay at home most of the time…

And what does Amel have to say?

Amel?

Amel?

*********************************

As for the struggle to pay the penalty: Wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia, which feel strongly about fully veiling their women, should establish a Save the Burqa fund for this purpose.

Frontline‘s special on for-profit colleges appears May 4.

Here’s a review.

————————————————–

You can watch it here. Thanks, Bill.

This is a big, fast-moving story. Here’s a link. Updates on their way.

———————-

An interview Love gave last year at UVA.

Question: Who has most influenced your lacrosse career and how?

Love: My high school coach has definitely influenced my lacrosse career. She was an awesome coach that always pushed me to work harder. She not only prepared me to play at the college level, but she taught me important life lessons. She always put a strong focus on good sportsmanship and working together as a team.

Question: What made you decide to come to Virginia to play lacrosse?

Love: I had wanted to play lacrosse at Virginia since I was little, so coming here was like a dream come true.

—————————-

Nora, a reader, sends this link to Inside Lacrosse, which has links to a number of news sources.

—————————-

From the New York Times:

… “This is just an incredible story that has taken a life of its own because it’s so tragic,” [Charlottesville Police Chief Tim] Longo said. “Everyone who has children can relate to the families of what these young people are going through. These young people were literally on the threshold of their futures. That dramatically has changed.”

The top-ranked Virginia’s men’s lacrosse team is expected to be the top seed heading into this month’s N.C.A.A. tournament. The women’s team is in the top five and considered to be a strong contender to advance to the national semifinals.

The Virginia lacrosse community has endured its share of recent tragedy: the former Virginia men’s captain Will Barrow died of an apparent suicide in 2008 and the longtime assistant media relations director Michael Colley, who was the lacrosse team’s main contact, died of a heart attack in July.

Now the community is in shock again.

“Charlottesville is just a wonderful place,” Longo said. “Kids from all over the country come here, the best and brightest, and these are two of them, two successful athletes.

“It’s just an unbelievable situation. These are not the kinds of things we see in this community.” …

——————————————–

Via Crimson05er, another reader, these local Charlottesville links.

——————————————–

From the police news conference.

——————————————–

One initial comment from UD. The story is very new — one wants not to say much. But here’s one piece of speculation in response to the remarkable speed with which Huguely was arrested.

Love was a strong and pretty fearless woman, from what I can gather. My guess is that she fought hard, and as a result Huguely may have sustained injuries consistent with someone trying to ward him off. I also think it likely that he confessed.

———————————————-

A recent case that seems similar:

… Kevin R. Schaeffer, also a Gettysburg College student, choked [Emily Rachel] Silverstein, 19, a sophomore from Roosevelt, N.J., early Thursday morning and then stabbed her in the neck with a steak knife. He sat with her for 15 minutes before putting her in a bathtub, according to a police affidavit.

Mr. Schaeffer, 21, of Oley, Berks County, confessed to the crime, according to the affidavit. He told police he had been drinking that evening but was not intoxicated. He said he had recently stopped taking Zoloft, an anti-depressant, the affidavit said.

Police arrested Mr. Schaeffer that morning and charged him with homicide, aggravated assault, possessing instruments of crime and tampering with evidence.

… Preliminary autopsy results showed that Ms. Silverstein died from a combination of strangling and stabbing between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m.

It was not clear why Ms. Silverstein was at his house. The two had recently ended a sporadic romantic relationship.

“They’d been on and off, and they had broken up again recently. He never hit her that we know of. But she broke up with him because, I don’t know, he had some issues,” Ms. Silverstein’s father, Robert Silverstein, said yesterday…

A much more detailed account. (Note: The earlier link wasn’t working. I found a better one.)

**************************************

It’s a weirdly local story for me. Huguely comes from an old Bethesda family; he went to school at Landon, the place where I rehearsed Handel’s Messiah last year.

… at his university office. He’s in critical condition. He was active in Iran’s Green Revolution.

Sing it, sister.

It’s a common experience – a dimly lit classroom, the low hum of the projector, and the soft glow of yet another bulleted list on the screen.

Eyes grow heavy. The professor stands motionless, ensconced behind a podium and laptop. Attention fades.

Across our great University, PowerPoint has become a crutch for teaching rather than a tool for learning. With more and more technology migrating into classrooms and students seeking an easy lecture crib sheet, these presentations have come to lead lectures rather than augment them.

Students recognize that the best professors make subjects come alive with interesting lectures, open discussion, and critical questioning. No teacher has ever derived effectiveness solely from sleek slides with cheesy fade effects. At its heart, much of education needs little more than a teacher, some chairs, and perhaps a book.

The New York Times recently covered a conference earlier this month in North Carolina where military leaders spoke openly of the hazard posed by dependence on the ubiquitous PowerPoints. Brigadier General H.R. McMaster warned that “it’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding, the illusion of control. Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

And therein lays the crux of the problem. When lectures are molded to fit the constraints of PowerPoint, learning is compromised and subjects become pasteurized, homogenized, and intellectually boring. Abandoning this crutch will enhance learning and create more opportunities to practice extemporaneous public speaking with probing questions and answers. These skills challenge students to become better listeners and thinkers — qualities that are of critical importance in today’s increasingly complex world.

Extemporaneous public speaking with probing questions and answers. Sounds like teaching!

From Bloomberg Businessweek:

… The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the largest U.S. union for public employees and health-care workers, [has] advised its members to withhold their votes to re-elect Blankfein and President Gary Cohn, 49, to the board.

Two other Goldman Sachs board members have also been in the spotlight. Rajat Gupta, the former McKinsey & Co. senior partner who isn’t running for re-election, is suspected by U.S. investigators of tipping off Galleon Group LLC founder Raj Rajaratnam ahead of Buffett’s investment in the company, a person with direct knowledge of the inquiry said last month…

Stephen Friedman, a former senior partner of Goldman Sachs who has served on the board since 2005, resigned as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last year to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest because Goldman Sachs is regulated by the Fed. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said it plans hearings about why Friedman was allowed to buy Goldman Sachs stock even when he was playing a role in regulating it…

Blankfein’s flippant remark to a British journalist last year that he was doing “God’s work” may backfire at this year’s meeting as three of the seven shareholder proposals came from religious organizations such as the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic, a Catholic missionary order based in Maryknoll, New York. Goldman Sachs’s board has opposed all of the proposals…

Our interest here at University Diaries is in the two Goldman Sachs directors with university positions: Ruth Simmons of Brown, and Bill George of Harvard. But it never hurts to get the bigger picture.