Safety

As application season starts to peak and applicants everywhere get a bit crazed with anxiety, it's good this time of year to try to keep things in perspective. (Same goes for me, too.) I was moved by this account of Mark Daily, a recent UCLA honors graduate who lost his life in Iraq. It's a great blessing to sit in our cozy and safe environments while we work on applications and fret about the "walk in someone's shoes" essay for Chicago GSB or the grading curve on the September LSAT. It's good once in a while to take a step back, breathe, and realize that the sky won't fall if you don't get into School X.

The Boston press is coming down pretty hard on Star Simpson, the MIT sophomore and "artist" who yesterday strolled through Logan airport with a fake bomb and was nearly taken out by security forces. MIT's getting a bit of a black eye as well. [Edited to add: It's not clear that she constructed the device to be a fake bomb, or to look like a bomb; she claims the circuit board with a bunch of wires sticking out from under her sweatshirt was a piece of art she had created to stand out at a career fair -- if true, also a boneheaded move, but not one that rises to the same level as walking into an airport with a device that makes people think you're a suicide bomber. More here.]

I have to wonder what she was smiling about while she was being arraigned? According to the Boston Herald, "[d]uring her arraignment in East Boston, Simpson smiled as her lawyer entered a not guilty plea to possession of a hoax device, a felony with a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $5,000 fine."

Many locals are also making the "brilliant but not bright" observation (with an emphasis on the "not bright" part). From the same article, verbatim:

• “It makes me angry that police, instead of responding to legitimate emergencies, have to be diverted to deal with morons,” City Councilor John Tobin said. “In this day and age, you can’t play around.”
• “Thankfully, because she followed our directions, she is in a jail cell right now instead of the morgue,” State Police Maj. Scott Pare said.
• The Logan scare was the second MIT-related incident that has created chaos this month. On Sept. 6, a cleanup crew working the banks of the Charles River was burned when it retrieved metallic sodium. Although the exact source of the substance remains under investigation, the annual “sodium drop” is a tradition for MIT students.
• Yesterday, MIT released a statement calling Simpson’s actions “reckless."

People are particularly sensitive about Logan airport, where all four of the 9/11 planes originated: “Enough with the guerrilla art. It’s irresponsible. . . . What did she actually think was going to happen?” asked Juliette Kayyem, undersecretary of Homeland Security.To Alyson Low, whose 28-year-old sister Sara was a flight attendant on one of the planes hijacked six years ago, yesterday’s drama was “painful” to watch. “She had better be given a jail cell surrounded by the photographs of all the people who left that airport and never came back,” Low said. “With freedom comes responsibility. And she showed none.”Well put.

A friend of the Ivey Files sends me this news story and asks whether MIT should drop in the rankings for admitting someone that stupid. I'll let you be the judge. Guess some people didn't learn from Adult Swim's little bomb scare here in Boston back in February. If my grandmother were around to read this story, she'd no doubt whip out one of her favorite sayings: "She's brilliant, but not very bright."

This will make for one doozie of a disclosure addendum if Ms. MIT (evocatively named Star Simpson) ever applies to grad school.

Brian Leiter reports the inevitable: Anthony Ciolli and other AutoAdmit posters have been sued. He links to the complaint as well.

More here, here, here, and here.

What a weird story. The LA Times reports that an 18-year-old impostor named Azia Kim successfully passed as a student at Stanford for eight months:

The Stanford Daily, quoting one of Kim's former roommates, said the deception started in September, the day before Stanford's orientation for new students.

Two sophomores agreed to let Kim stay in their room after she told them she did not like the roommate she had been assigned.

During the fall and winter terms, Kim allegedly slept in the other women's room or the lounge of the 210-resident dorm. Last month, she moved into another dorm after being referred to another student who needed a roommate.

Residence hall associates became suspicious after comparing conflicting statements Kim allegedly gave and contacting the student housing office. Kim was confronted Monday and escorted from campus, according to the Stanford Daily.

Amy Zhou, Kim's roommate in the second dorm, said Kim apparently got into the room through the window because she never had a key.

Kim told other students she was a sophomore majoring in human biology and bought textbooks and studied with friends.

"Personally, I don't feel safe now that Stanford allowed this to happen and that they're not doing anything to ensure the safety of their students," Zhou said. "I think something's definitely wrong with the system if this could happen."

No word yet on whether she took classes, ate at the cafeteria, etc. (Not that it matters, but I wonder if she was a dinged applicant who decided she was going to attend Stanford anyway?)

It's disturbing that she got away with this for eight months. That several students let this stranger move in with them, no questions asked, serves as a caution. Having to climb through the window to get in and out of the room because she never had a key? I hate to tell people that they are too trusting, but there is such a thing.  (See here for my posting about an experiment in which college students easily let themselves be lured into a stranger's van and tied up with duct tape.)

And while the (real) Stanford student quoted above is right that there are obviously some problems with the current "system" if this was able to happen, students also need to take responsibility for their own safety, and for each other's safety. All the security in the world isn't going to help if you let an impostor climb through your window for eight months. It can be embarrassing to confront someone you suspect of being a fraud, or to yell for help when you suspect someone may be trying to harm you. What if you're wrong? What if they're actually harmless, nice people? It's an embarrassment we need to get over.

So far there's a happy ending in the sense that no one got hurt, but it's a nice reminder that there are a lot of strange ducks out there, both on campus and off, and we need to be careful.

In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, many of us have been scratching our heads about how things could escalate so horribly without more people noticing or doing something about the sociopath in their midst.

Peggy Noonan asks in today's OpinionJournal, "Where are the grown-ups?":

There seems to me a sort of broad national diminution of common sense in our country that we don't notice in the day-to-day but that become obvious after a story like this. Common sense says a person like Cho Seung-hui, who was obviously dangerous and unstable, should have been separated from the college population. Common sense says someone should have stepped in like an adult, like a person in authority, and taken him away. It is only common sense that if a person like Cho leaves a self-aggrandizing, self-celebrating, self-pitying video diary of himself to be played by the mass media, the mass media should not play it and not publicize it, not make it famous. Common sense says that won't help.

And all those big cops, scores of them, hundreds, with the latest, heaviest, most sophisticated gear, all the weapons and helmets and safety vests and belts. It looked like the brute force of the state coming up against uncontrollable human will.

But it also looked muscle bound. And the schools themselves more and more look muscle bound, weighed down with laws and legal assumptions and strange prohibitions.

The school officials I saw, especially the head of the campus psychological services, seemed to me endearing losers. But endearing is too strong. I mean "not obviously and vividly offensive." The school officials who gave all the highly competent, almost smooth and practiced news conferences seemed to me like white, bearded people who were educated in softness. Cho was "troubled"; he clearly had "issues"; it would have been good if someone had "reached out"; it's too bad America doesn't have better "support services." They don't use direct, clear words, because if they're blunt, they're implicated.

The literally white-bearded academic who was head of the campus counseling center was on Paula Zahn Wednesday night suggesting the utter incompetence of officials to stop a man who had stalked two women, set a fire in his room, written morbid and violent plays and poems, been expelled from one class, and been declared by a judge to be "mentally ill" was due to the lack of a government "safety net." In a news conference, he decried inadequate "funding for mental health services in the United States." Way to take responsibility. Way to show the kids how to dodge.

Way to teach administrators how to dodge. This blog entry at Rate Your Students shows how hamstrung professors are within their universities when faced with a sociopath in class. Here's an excerpt:

In Spring of 2004, our fiction writing professor had this student in her class. She is a five foot woman in her 50s. He is a body builder who can bench approximately 350 pounds, a known steroid abuser who had written an essay for his composition class about the benefits of steroids, contending that the media had falsely propagated claims that steroids are harmful. The student terrified her. He was disruptive and hostile in class, using obscenities in every sentence. He turned in a story in which a man inserts a gun into his girlfriend's vagina, which excites her sexually. My colleague was so intimidated that she had security guards posted after class at one point. She kicked him out of the class, only to be told by the department head that she had to re-instate him. I was sitting in the next room when he met with the department head, and I heard him say, of my colleague, "She's proof that they'll give anyone a Ph.D. She's an idiot."

The next semester, the student enrolled in my poetry writing class. His first poem contained the lines "She's begging for a condom that never existed / but it isn't rape, is it?" His second poem contained a racial slur. He used the class Blackboard page to engage in obscenity-laced flame wars with classmates. Several classmates complained that they felt intimidated by him.

At the end of the semester, he wanted to include a poem called "Fat Stripper" in the class book, and perform it at the class's public reading. He printed it across a photo of a 300 pound African-American woman in a g-string, pole-dancing. The poem compared the woman to "the last piece of rotisserie chicken that nobody wants." He read the poem at the class reading, after I asked him not to, and our creative nonfiction writing professor could be heard saying how distasteful he thought the poem was. The next day, outside the building where we work, the student yelled at the creative nonfiction professor, whom he had never met, "Hey [professor's name]! You piece of s---. You got a f------ problem with me?" The creative nonfiction professor called the police, and the student was escorted off campus.

I failed the student because he hadn't done any of the assigned reading for the class and because he had been tardy fifteen times. My reward for this was (a) relentless badgering from his parents, demanding that I change the grade; and (b) I had to have the student in class again two years later. In fact, in addition to re-taking the class with me, he enrolled in another of my class, the required capstone class for all creative writing majors. At this point, he had it in for me. He had posted vicious things about me all over the internet. He posted the following response to another student's creative work, in a non class-affiliated online forum: "Hey! You suck! ________ is perhaps the worst short story I have ever read, and your fanfiction is no better. Please quit school. You will never succeed as a writer, and your major in English is truly ironic (meaning you are an imbecile). Or, better yet, just die. Yes, die please. I think that would suit us all."

I was afraid for my own life. I met with the university attorney, the dean of students, the department head, the dean of my college, and the assistant dean of my college. They said there was nothing that I could do, besides flunking him again, in the absence of direct threats, e.g. "I'm going to do X to you." The dean of students actually told me, "You may be in danger of physical harm here," but didn't offer any help. The bottom line is that they were more afraid of lawsuits from the student's deranged parents than of what might happen to their faculty and their other students.

When I was an admissions officer, I dealt with some folks who were clearly disturbed. I remember one guy in particular -- a student at another division of the university who was applying to the law school. When I became sufficiently spooked by his behavior and told him I was calling security, I received a very huffy phone call the next day from the university's Office of Civil Rights. (I can't even find that department on the university website anymore, but it definitely existed at the time.)  That administrator spouted a bunch of PC nonsense at me, and I told her flat out that if I continued to feel threatened in any way, I would call security, and the police, as many times as I needed to, and that if she wanted to read me the riot act each time, that would be a small price to pay.

And those are just the internal roadblocks. There are various federal privacy laws that prohibit university professors and administrators from acting preemptively, and I have no doubt all those regulations will be getting a closer look now. From the Washington Post:

A school official said that under federal privacy laws, he could not discuss what was in Cho's student records, even though he is dead. I respect the need for privacy, but under the circumstances, that seems ludicrous.

See Overlawyered.com for a great discussion of those privacy laws.

More details here on the recent torture of a Columbia grad student.

This is a good time to re-recommend The Gift of Fear. From amazon.com:Each hour, 75 women are raped in the United States, and every few seconds, a woman is beaten. Each day, 400 Americans suffer shooting injuries, and another 1,100 face criminals armed with guns. Author Gavin de Becker says victims of violent behavior usually feel a sense of fear before any threat or violence takes place. They may distrust the fear, or it may impel them to some action that saves their lives. A leading expert on predicting violent behavior, de Becker believes we can all learn to recognize these signals of the "universal code of violence," and use them as tools to help us survive. The book teaches how to identify the warning signals of a potential attacker and recommends strategies for dealing with the problem before it becomes life threatening. The case studies are gripping and suspenseful, and include tactics for dealing with similar situations.

People don't just "snap" and become violent, says de Becker, whose clients include federal government agencies, celebrities, police departments, and shelters for battered women. "There is a process as observable, and often as predictable, as water coming to a boil." Learning to predict violence is the cornerstone to preventing it. De Becker is a master of the psychology of violence, and his advice may save your life.

More sad news.Tied up and left to die in a burning apartment, a Columbia student used the blaze set by her sadistic rapist to free herself, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said yesterday.

"It appears she was able to escape as a result of the fire," Kelly said. "She was tied, and the flame was used by her to break the bond."

The 23-year-old woman, identified by sources as a student at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, endured 19 hours of rape and torture at the hands of a sick creep in her Hamilton Heights apartment Friday night.

In what Kelly called a "particularly vicious" assault, the fiend tied his victim to a bed, cut her, raped her, burned her with scalding water and chemicals - and then set the woman's futon on fire to cover up the crime, police said.

He was so brutal he slit her eyelids, Kelly said.

The student used the flames to free herself and fled her fifth-floor apartment with her hands still bound to each other to get help from a neighbor, officials said.

The woman remains hospitalized in serious but stable condition.Full story here.

Lots of people have been sending me an article on the front page of yesterday's Washington Post called "Harsh Words Die Hard on the Web: Law Students Feel Lasting Effects of Anonymous Attacks." The relevant bits:

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, has published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in her field. So when the Yale law student interviewed with 16 firms for a job this summer, she was concerned that she had only four call-backs. She was stunned when she had zero offers.

Though it is difficult to prove a direct link, the woman thinks she is a victim of a new form of reputation-maligning: online postings with offensive content and personal attacks that can be stored forever and are easily accessible through a Google search.

The discussion board in question is AutoAdmit.com, also known as xoxohth.com. A lot of what's there is indeed painful to read -- the immaturity, the viciousness, the stupidity, the patent falsehoods. It's frightening that these people are future members of the bar, and it's such a contrast to the MBA discussion boards, where the conversations are moderated (the "Rules of the Board") and remain much more civilized, professional, and on-topic. (On a related note: isn't it sad when discussion boards about Grey's Anatomy and American Idol are more civilized and thoughtfully moderated than AutoAdmit?)

I've had my own run-ins with law school discussion boards. I've seen people quote entirely fictitious conversations that they claimed to have had with me. And you can imagine my surprise when an admissions officer at a top law school (and friend) sent me a link to a thread discussing my appearance in X-rated terms. So I get where this law student is coming from, although the situation appears to be much more serious for her, because these numb-nuts are actually threatening her physical safety.

I've written before about the folly of posting things online that will come back to bite you when you're looking for a job, but what if other people are posting things that prospective employers will find? My first thought is that employers would be stupid to rely on what other people are saying or posting about someone, unless there's some reason to think their opinions are credible and they have the balls to identify themselves. As a society, we're still figuring out what the right recourse is. There are services like ReputationDefender. One can post rebuttals on discussion boards (I haven't been -- they just feed the beast) or take the matter up with the webmasters (that works with Wikipedia, but not with AutoAdmit). One could bring a defamation suit, although that can be a difficult way to go.

Do I think that the creepy and offensive discussions about this particular law student are actually hurting her on her job search? The article suggests that's the case, and she clearly thinks so. And maybe that's true. But don't assume that just because she got into Yale Law School that she's also great in law firm interviews. I once coached a Yale law student who came to me because he had a great record there but was striking out in his interviews and was having trouble lining up a summer associate job. That's the whole point of face-to-face interviews: to see if the person who looks so great on paper makes the same great impression in real life. Sometimes not.

I feel for this student, especially if there is in fact a causal link between what's being said about her online and her trouble securing callback interviews. We'll probably never know what the real reason is, but the story does demonstrate how vulnerable people are to online attacks over which they have no control and raises interesting questions about the moral responsibilities inherent in running discussion boards. It's easy to hide behind free speech, but just because something is legal doesn't make it right.

Lecherous congressmen are only one species of scary predator. Then there's this expose by Ken Wooden, who wanted to test how easily otherwise smart college students -- Ivy Leaguers and criminal justice majors among them -- could be lured into a total stranger's van. Answer: Very easily. One guy even let himself be tied up with duct tape inside the van. See the exposé on the CBS Early Show here. And then go out and read Gavin de Becker's "The Gift of Fear."