Entries for November 21, 2006

Terrence Duren is the officer who used a Taser gun to shoot UCLA student Mostafa Tabatabainejad for failing to present an ID while in a campus library, campus police announced Monday. Duren, who was named officer of the year in 2001, also was accused of brutality in 2003, when he shot a man he believed was intruding in a university hall. The man, Willie Davis Frazier, turned out to be homeless, but--like the UCLA student--claimed he never resisted Duren's request that he leave the lounge.

At the time, the Daily Bruin reported that the two men's accounts of the incident varied widely, "mainly because Frazier said he never struck Duren or held any of Duren's weapons during the incident--issues that make up the three charges against him." As of March 2005, the case had not been decided, but Frazier was being held in the psychiatric unit of an L.A. jail because he could not pay his $500,000 bail, according to the Daily Bruin. Here's a YouTube video of the Taser incident.

"The process of attempting to educate the ineducable or those who don't want to be educated is at best futile and at worst silly," the University of Oklahoma Daily declared in an unsigned staff editorial last week. They got some heat for the story--but, in at least one case, seem to have relieved some bottled tension, too. In response to an athletics director's comment that "There is no way a student would trade places" with a student athlete, one student wrote:

"No way I'd trade places with an OU athlete, you say? My typical day begins at 7 a.m. with classes throughout the day. When I get out of class, I go to work, often working until midnight during the weekday or as late as 2 a.m. After work it's back to my apartment to study, often ending my day at 3 a.m. Repeat this every day.

"At some point throughout my day, I must find time to get a workout in at the Huff. Throw in that I do my National Guard duty one weekend a month and you see that I, like many other students on OU's campus, do just as much or more than the athletes at OU, just to make ends meet.

"Before saying that we wouldn't want to switch places with an athlete, know where many of us come from and many of us must do a lot just to continue our education, which doesn't come free-of-charge."

After a court case judged unrestricted police patrols in Washington State University dorms illegal (because dorm hallways are like the hallways of a home), the school's board of regents has voted to change its own code to get around the ruling, the Daily Evergreen reports. The initial ruling was based on the school's definition of a guest inside a residence hall. Now, that definition has been changed so that police and emergency vehicles no longer count as guests.

A University of Utah professor emeritus lost 40 years worth of research last week when his laptop was stolen, the Daily Utah Chronicle reports. After working 12 hour days five days a week, James Mayfield had finished about 80 percent of a book on Egyptian villages, which he expected to publish this year. Mayfield still has most of his raw notes, says the Chronicle, but transcribing them again could take another three to four months.

• Administrators who worried about Tulane University's first post-Katrina freshman class are no longer worried--not even close, the Hullabaloo reports.
• Ivy League schools are about to get bigger, both in physical space and number of students, says the Daily Pennsylvanian.
• Will the University of Wisconsin's Bucky the Badger win the Capital One Bowl mascot contest? Not if you don't keep voting for him!, the Daily Cardinal pleads.