… has been found dead. His roommate “found him about 7:40 a.m. on the floor of their room in Roy Wilkins Hall.” It’s not yet known how he died.

… may have died – in New York City last week – of an accidental overdose.

You become a paranoid police state.

Chicago State University – graduation rate barely above ten percent – has just issued an email to its faculty:

In an email sent March 22 to faculty and staff, Sabrina Land, the university’s director of marketing and communications, wrote that all communications must be “strategically deployed” in a way that “safeguards the reputation, work product and ultimately, the students, of CSU.”

The policy applies to media interviews, opinion pieces, newsletters, social media and other types of communications, stating that they must be approved by the university’s division of public relations. “All disclosures to the media will be communicated by an authorized CSU media relations officer or designate,” the policy says.

Failure to follow the rules “will be treated as serious and will result in disciplinary action, possible termination and could give rise to civil and/or criminal liability on the part of the employee.”

Shades of North Korea.

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Update: Chicago State decides it doesn’t want to be North Korea.

Seyla Benhabib, author of a resolution, just passed by the Yale faculty, that notes the unimpressive “respect for civil and political rights” in contemporary Singapore, and urges a new Singapore/Yale university venture to uphold civil liberties on its campus, reflects on her victory.

Yale’s president objected to the “sense of moral superiority” in the resolution.

Funny how you find moral relativism not among faculty, but among administrators, eh?

Ah, but he’s costing them so much more than that.

Lawyers anticipating the severance deal already have stars in their eyes.

In 2007, three Grizzlies football players and a former player broke into a home to steal money and drugs. All three were suspended from the team and convicted.

In 2008, three freshman football players were charged in a beating that broke a fellow student’s jaw. Two pleaded guilty and the third pleaded no contest.

In 2009, standout cornerback Jimmy Wilson was charged in his home state of California for a fatal shooting that occurred two years earlier. He was acquitted of those charges, but later got embroiled with the law again in 2010 after his bite of a co-ed’s leg required her to go to the hospital.

… Another Griz defensive back, Trumaine Johnson, and another student were charged with beating another student unconscious in 2010. Johnson was also arrested in 2011, in conjunction with an incident with police at a party, along with teammate Gerald Kemp.

… Some … run-of-the-mill incidents involve speeding tickets, where during the course of the investigation it came out that Johnson also had unpaid speeding tickets to go with everything else.

Others involved a drunk driving incident involving Nate Montana, son of NFL legend Joe Montana – which was reduced after he pleaded guilty to reckless driving.

Former star transfer offensive lineman J.D. Quinn, too, had a second drunk driving charge mysteriously dropped – after he had already been convicted once before.

A pattern had been set: rather than handle the matters with suspensions or meaningful discipline, it appeared as if folks at Montana were trying to spin their … athletes’ way out of trouble.

… In 2011, extremely serious allegations came to light involving a party involving football players, a female victim, and the sedative Rohypnol, which is sometimes called the “date-rape” drug.

[S]oon thereafter, another woman came forward with an eerily similar story of blacking out and being raped by football players in 2010, proving that the one report was no fluke.

The bravest woman in Afghanistan speaks.

Yet more sleaze from for-profit schools.

The for-profit Minerva Project has a lot of reputational work to do if it’s going to be regarded as legit, much less Ivy League.

Greg Mortenson, already in trouble for having apparently made up parts of his best-selling books about establishing schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, must now repay his charity a million dollars — money he is said to have used for personal expenses.

A Detroit News columnist talks a lot of sense on the subject of student athletes.

LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant and Kevin Love, have a combined two years of college experience.

… America’s top college students are nihilized into the power elite will recall Walter Kirn’s classic Lost in the Meritocracy, where he chronicled his transformation from an earnest person who loved literature to “the system’s pure product, clever and adaptable, not so much educated as wised-up.” At Princeton, he learned to hone

more-marketable skills: for flattering those in authority without appearing to, for ranking artistic reputations according to the latest academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the background of my listener, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” work of “literature,” for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if the consensus changed.

Now there’s this year’s account of the ‘“intoxicating nihilism” that dominates campus social life’ at another corporate feeder.

At the sports factories, it’s one-and-done. In the higher precincts, it’s four-and-whore.

[L]ast night was a validation of the Calipari Way: recruit a fresh stable of top talent each year, luring them with promises of immediate preparation for the N.B.A. and limited academic commitments, then let them go and find new guys to replace them. “What I’m hoping is that there’s six first-rounders on this team,” Calipari said after the game. “That’s why I’ve got to go recruiting on Friday.” What little shred of truth existed in the N.C.A.A.’s beloved moniker “student-athlete”—a phrase Calipari actively, and rightly, ignores—was whittled further away.

… [I]t becomes easy to imagine a series of factories set up, if they don’t exist already, in Lawrence, Chapel Hill, Lansing, Storrs, and the handful of other places with the clout to promise enough national-television exposure for a kid to wait out the N.B.A.’s minimum-age requirement in style. All this has made being a fan of “traditional” college basketball feel a bit like preferring rotary phones to cell phones—there’s no going back, so, best to get on with it.

Rotary phones doesn’t quite say it. It’s more like preferring petty larceny to grand larceny.

“I was just reading something last night from the state of California that … seven or eight of the California system of universities don’t even teach an American history course [Rick Santorum said at a campaign stop]. It’s not even available to be taught.”

MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow on her Monday broadcast called the Santorum statement “100 percent untrue” and “hysterically wrong.”

She then read from the University of California, Davis, course calendar naming several courses from the Davis catalog and the classes’ instructors.

Courses include “History of the United States,” “The Gilded Age and Progressive Era” and “War, Prosperity and Depression, 1917-1945.”

Davis officials said they were pleased with the unexpected exposure.

“We were thrilled that a national TV audience was able to see the breadth of our course offerings in a very important subject,” UC Davis spokesman Barry Shiller said Tuesday.

All campuses teach multiple American history courses.

… has been found dead in a midtown Manhattan hotel under odd circumstances — maybe suicide, maybe an assignation gone wrong… or maybe natural causes:

Detectives were treating Richard Descoings’ death as suspicious after finding his cellphone on a third-floor landing as if “it had been flung out the window,” a police source said.

Descoings, director of the prestigious Institute of Political Studies in Paris, was found dead about 1 p.m. in his seventh-floor room at the Michelangelo Hotel.

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Update: The clues (if they’re reliable; it’s still early in the story) point to suicide. Friends have apparently told police Descoings was depressed; empty liquor bottles and anti-depressant pills were found in the room. No marks of trauma were on the body. Someone had hurled his laptop and cell phone out of the room, onto an exterior landing.

One possible sequence of events: Suicidal, but not wishing to kill himself at home, in France, he determined to wait until he was in a hotel room (it’s not uncommon for suicidal people to choose hotels – hotels are anonymous, and you spare the people who live with you the trauma of discovering your body). He drank a lot of liquor (alcohol for that matter may have been a factor in his depression), maybe took a bunch of pills… In a kind of rage, or in despair, he threw, as it were, his life away – the laptop, the phone – and then lay down.

This would explain his condition when hotel security came to check on him on the morning he was supposed to appear at a conference. Colleagues, concerned that he hadn’t shown up, contacted the hotel. Hotel personnel said they heard him snoring.

Some time later, they checked again, and found him dead.

Pure speculation, of course – but, again, if the clues are correct, it’s a possibility.

There are also reports that he had visitors to his room that night. So something very different might have happened.

Professors at the University of Ottawa want the right to ban laptops from their classrooms; the school will soon vote on a proposal along these lines.