In the aftermath of an organized shout-down of a campus speech by the Israeli ambassador, UC Irvine’s Erwin Chemerinsky clarifies the way free speech works:
The government, including public universities, always can impose time, place and manner restrictions on speech. A person who comes into my classroom and shouts so that I cannot teach surely can be punished without offending the 1st Amendment. Likewise, those who yelled to keep the ambassador from being heard were not engaged in constitutionally protected behavior.
Freedom of speech, on campuses and elsewhere, is rendered meaningless if speakers can be shouted down by those who disagree. The law is well established that the government can act to prevent a heckler’s veto — to prevent the reaction of the audience from silencing the speaker. There is simply no 1st Amendment right to go into an auditorium and prevent a speaker from being heard, no matter who the speaker is or how strongly one disagrees with his or her message.
From ABC News:
The woman who was at the center of the phony Duke lacrosse rape case was arrested today and charged with attempted murder.
The Durham Police Department told ABC News that Crystal Gale Mangum got into an argument with her boyfriend, Milton Walker, shortly after midnight on Thursday…
This year’s winner of the
Princeton snowman competition
reminds UD that she’s
been meaning to review the
subject of squirrels on campus.
Tame, rampant, clever, and
occasionally threatening squirrels
are a big feature of a lot of
campuses. Students get
particularly excited about them
if they’re black or if they’re white.
Gray does little for them.
Mary Baldwin College
has a squirrel on its seal.
Kent State has a Black Squirrel Festival.
Sarah Lawrence’s many black squirrels
are the college’s unofficial mascot:
When St. Norbert College’s
albino squirrel died, it was
buried with full honors.
University of Texas students
believe that if you see an albino
squirrel on your way to a test,
you’ll get an A.
Universities tired of squirrels
chewing through their electrical
systems sometimes secretly
try to kill them. Or not secretly.
But you have to be careful.
… has been on top of the Why the Hell is Ruth Simmons on the Goldman Sachs Board? story; but there’s also a very strong-minded Brown student who’s been after her. And of course UD‘s had her own wee say on the matter.
Now that Simmons has quit the board, Volokh Conspiracy wraps things up.
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UD thanks Brad for the link.
From the University of Oklahoma newspaper:
… When Kieran Mullen, OU physics professor, noticed that students’ laptop usage was a distraction during his lectures, he planned a scene to get students to pay attention. During a general physics for engineering majors class Monday, Mullen placed a student’s decoy, non-functioning laptop into a plastic container and poured liquid nitrogen on it.
“He said: ‘this is just liquid nitrogen, so it alone won’t hurt the computer. But this will’,” said Lindsey Brinkworth, University College freshman. “Then he threw it to the ground and told him to have IT fix it.”
Most students usually find Mullen to be considerate of students and attentive to their needs, said Jonathan Scranton, University College freshman.
“He is one of those quirky kind of professors but to actually break someone’s laptop seems a little harsh,” Scranton said.
… “I was a little concerned at first, but I thought later that it was a little too convenient that he would have liquid nitrogen and a Styrofoam box in a back room like that,” said Brinkworth. “Either way, he got his point across.” …
The UAH professor who defied Bishop and shut down her massacre speaks.
… [Debra Moriarity] worried that any attempt to tighten security could have negative consequences. “There is evil in the world; it is unfortunate that good people are hurt by that. But a university is a place of free thought and freedom to explore ideas and to search out new knowledge and you don’t want to put anything in place that dampens that.”
Moriarity returned to her office on Wednesday and said she plans to resume teaching next week. She predicted that, with the help of anti-anxiety medication, she would be able to sleep Wednesday night.
“I’ve been talking to family and friends and just getting their support helps you deal with it,” she said. “I think right now most of us want to get back there and get things going, make plans for who is going to cover classes.”…
From a blogger at Huffington Post:
Here’s the Cliff Notes version: Player pummels student into coma, flees country. Player knocks over woman while shoplifting condoms from Wal-Mart. Team season assist leader arrested for selling cocaine. Academically unqualified basketball prospects given special waivers. Players caught using stolen debit card. Subtle (and unfounded) hints of racism leveled at admissions officers trying to protect the school’s integrity. Text messages which point towards improper petty cash distributions to players. Smear campaigns leveled at a professor and New York Times reporter who had the audacity to rain on the parade. Head coach placed on indefinite leave. Athletic director forced out. University president announces retirement. University reputation in shambles.
2002, assault.
In March, 2002, [Amy] Bishop walked into an International House of Pancakes in Peabody with her family, asked for a booster seat for one of her children, and learned the last seat had gone to another mother.
Bishop, according to a police report, strode over to the other woman, demanded the seat and launched into a profanity-laced rant.
When the woman would not give the seat up, Bishop punched her in the head, all the while yelling “I am Dr. Amy Bishop.”
Bishop received probation and prosecutors recommended that she be sent to anger management classes…
Boston Globe
… I’ve added a new category to the blog: AMY BISHOP.
If you want to read all of my posts about the case without interruption by other posts, click on Amy Bishop under CATEGORIES.
See it down there?
↓
To the right.
→
The Boston Globe quotes the official statement on what they found. Here’s the heart of it:
The analysis of the newly received documents, as well as the previously released March 30, 1987 State Police report indicate that probable cause existed at that time to place Amy Bishop under arrest charged with:
Assault with a Dangerous Weapon, Chap. 265 Sec. 15B
Carrying a Dangerous Weapon, Chap. 269 Sec. 10, 12D
Unlawful possession of ammunition, Chap. 269 Ch. 10 (h)
Polio said he allowed officers to release Bishop on the day of the shooting because the lead investigator, Captain Theodore Buker, told him she was too emotional to interview.
This part of this business has been bothering me. If this were a 21-year-old man, would the police send him home for over a week to get over his emotionality?
What, for that matter, did Buker mean by too emotional? If a suspect in a murder is emotional — I’m sure they often are — you bring in a psychiatrist to talk to them for awhile I guess… I don’t know. I’m not a policewoman. But you don’t send them home so they can work on their story. You keep them at the station and you talk to them when they calm down.
If they don’t calm down, you tell them they can stay in a cell until they calm down so that you can talk to them.
“If you eliminated everyone from an interview that was emotionally upset after a shooting death, you’d have no one to talk to,’’ [Norfolk DA William R.] Keating said.
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You don’t say to the 21-year-old man Oh! I see your mom’s here. Why don’t you go home with her? Do you? But you say it to the 21-year-old woman?
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Also find myself thinking about Bishop’s parents. What’s up with them? They’ve known, I guess, for decades, that their daughter is mentally ill. They’ve known she killed their son, possibly intentionally. They must have suspected she was involved in the bomb plot. There were probably other things.
What was their thinking in (perhaps) covering up the murder of her brother? That rather than lose both their children — one to murder, the other to prison — they would try to hold on to one of them, try to treat her illness… ?
But think of living with the murderer of your son!
UD thanks her old friend Jonathan Freedman for this amazing bit of sleuthing from Daily Kos, which reviews Bishop’s publication record and concludes:
The tenure system in the U.S. is already under attack. Perhaps there are ways it could be improved. But this Alabama case has about as much to do with problems with the tenure system as the O.J. Simpson case has to do with problems with waiters.
From ABC News:
Colleagues are touting a University of Alabama biochemistry professor with heroically saving lives during last week’s campus shooting rampage.
… [Debra] Moriarity, 55, is a professor whose lab was next door to Bishop’s lab. She was also believed to be Bishop’s closest friend in the department.
… The shooting erupted about an hour into the meeting at a moment when Moriarity was looking at some papers. When she looked up, the chairman of the department Gopi K. Podila had been shot in the head and Bishop was firing a second round at the person sitting next to Podila, Adriel D. Johnson Sr., Moriarity said.
Bishop was going down the line, shooting each person in the head, although the sixth person was shot in the chest, she told the magazine.
Moriarity said she immediately dove under the table and scrambled over to Bishop. “I was thinking ‘Oh, my God, this has to stop,” she said.
The professor said she pulled and then pushed on Bishop’s leg, yelling, “I have helped you before, I can help you again!”
Bishop pulled her leg away from Moriarity’s grip and kept shooting, she said. Moriarity crawled past Bishop and into the hallway when she said Bishop turned towards her friend, the gun gripped with both hands and a look of fury on her face.
“Intense eyes, a set jaw,” Moriarity told the Chronicle. As Moriarity, still on her hands and knees, looked up at her one-time friend helplessly, Bishop pulled the trigger. Click. She fired again. Click.
As Bishop stopped to reload, Moriarity said she scrambled back inside the room and with the help of survivors, quickly barricaded the door with a table so Bishop couldn’t reenter the room and resume shooting…
From an email one of the professors in the University of Alabama Huntsville biology faculty conference room sent to a friend:
“[Amy Bishop] started with the one closest to her and went down the row shooting her targets in the head,” Ng wrote. “Six people sitting in the rows perpendicular were all shot fatally or seriously wounded. The remaining 5 including myself were on the other side of the table (and) immediately dropped to the floor.
“During a reload, the shooter was rushed, and we pushed her out the hall way and closed the door. Thereafter we barricaded the door and called 911.”