Friday: stay

Can Student Newspapers Make Campuses Safer?

Recently a colleague of Rebel Girl's was intercepted on her way to class by an administrator who had some important news: a student in the class she was about to teach had been charged with harassing other students at a nearby campus.The remarks made to the other students were racial in nature and the student was seen as a threat, removed from campus and was facing disciplinary action. The professor was advised to be aware and to call campus security if needed.

We are often told that we as faculty and staff cannot be be made aware of a student's previous or ongoing conduct issues - so why was this administrator able to inform this professor of a possible threat in her classroom?

Because, the professor was told, the conduct was public - published in Fullerton College's student newspaper, The Hornet.

Here's The Hornet's coverage of the initial incident:
FC student shares firsthand experience about recent harassment on campus that’s currently going viral

And its aftermath:

FC student to undergo a student conduct process after verbally harassing other students

Rebel Girl, intrepid sleuth, also discovered that the student in question was not only enrolled at IVC this semester - but also during the previous summer session when, according to a student, he was removed from class by police for disruptive aggressive behavior toward other students. Rebel Girl tried to verify the summer incident through the IVC Crime Blotter but found no evidence. It could be that such removals from classroom are not tracked (and perhaps don't have to be) on the Crime Blotter. 

There's more to say here, of course, there always is, but it's Friday and there's other work to do, there always is, and loyal Dissent readers know how to connect the dots by now and what the picture shows. It's a familiar picture.

Fullerton College has been served by The Hornet since 1922.

Of course a student newspaper does more than report news items related to campus security; such publications also promote athletic programs and their achievements, theatrical productions, concerts, academic programs and campus events such as Banned Books Week (IVC recently hosted a similar event).

Renewed interest in campus safety might also include a robust discussion about how a revived journalism program and student newspaper (online and/or print) might serve the cause of security - and the needs of our larger campus community.

Please notice how The Hornet keeps the Fullerton College campus community informed and safer - and hey, just this once, keeps us at IVC safer too.

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "all of the clocks strike NO"

my dream about time 

BY LUCILLE CLIFTON

a woman unlike myself is running

down the long hall of a lifeless house

with too many windows which open on

a world she has no language for,

running and running until she reaches

at last the one and only door

which she pulls open to find each wall

is faced with clocks and as she watches

all of the clocks strike

                                             NO

*

To hear Clifton read this poem, click here. 

Saddleback student's killer sentenced to death

Robbin Brandley, Saddleback student

When Rebel Girl first came to Orange County as a grad student in the late 80s, the brutal murder of Robbin Brandley was still in the news as the killer had not yet been caught. Brandley was a 23- year-old Saddleback college student, a journalism major who also worked at the campus radio station KSBR. On January 18, 1986 she was a volunteer usher at an evening jazz piano concert. She was found stabbed 41 times at 10:30 PM in Saddleback College Lot 12.

As it turns out, her murder was the first of five that would be committed between 1986 and 1995 by a serial killer, then a marine at Camp Pendleton.

From last week's October 5, 2018 issue of the LA Times:

Serial killer convicted in murders of five Southern California women is sentenced to death

A former Marine convicted of brutally slaying five women in Southern California and three in Illinois over the course of a decade was sentenced to death Friday.

An Orange County Superior Court jury convicted Andrew Urdiales, 54, in May of five counts of special-circumstances murder, which prompted a second phase of the trial to determine whether he should serve life behind bars or face the death penalty.

Jurors ultimately recommended in June that he receive capital punishment for killing Robbin Brandley, Julie McGhee, Maryann Wells, Tammie Erwin and Denise Maney between 1986 and 1995. Judge Gregg Prickett affirmed that recommendation on Friday.

The original LA Times article:
Student, 23, Slain in Campus Parking Lot : Woman Found Fatally Stabbed After Leaving Saddleback Concert

Check out Nick Schou's excellent coverage of the case some years back in the OC Weekly (which also appeared in The Best American Crime Reporting 2018) : Just a Random Female

The grisly murder would remain unsolved for 11 years. Witnesses offered inconsistent accounts of events in the hours preceding the crime; Brandley's parents became convinced that someone she knew was responsible for the killing. Then, in April 1997, a man confessed to the murder—and several others. The cop writing down his confession would note that the killer had simply wandered around Mission Viejo until he ended up at a dark parking lot, where he saw a woman walking to her car.

The victim, in the words of the confessed murderer, “could have been anybody.” She “was just a random female.”

Robbin's murder inspired 1990 legislation:
1986 Murder in Dark Lot Spurs Campus Lighting Bill

excerpt:

...Reilley said Saddleback College has been at particularly high risk because of its location amid hills where shrubbery can conceal an attacker.

The year before Brandley's death, another Saddleback student was attacked on campus. In April, 1985, a 25-year-old student was abducted from a different parking lot by two men who beat her over the head, stripped her, then dumped her naked, but alive, about six hours later on a freeway off-ramp. Since Brandley's death, at least three other women have reported being sexually assaulted there....

The Brandley family maintains this blog about Robbin:
Who Murdered Robbin Brandley

Recently Rebel Girl has thought about Robbin, and not just because the jury conviction of her killer in May of this year brought her name back into the headlines. She came across Robbin's name in a document she received a few weeks ago which closes with a long paragraph that is a litany of 15 former students who variously were convicted of violent behavior and/or were victims of assaults or died under suspicious circumstances. It was a disturbing list, especially if you have a long memory, but perhaps much less so if you don't.

The most high profile one of these was Robbin Brandley.

Rebel Girl imagines that not enough people working in the district now would recall her name or remember the case. After all, it happened a long time ago, 32 years now, about the time the person who wrote the document started attending the college. 

Robbin Brandley

*

Can you hear the laughter?

In A-200 today.

Leahy: Well, then, let’s go back to the incident. What is the strongest memory you have, the strongest memory of the incident, something that you cannot forget? Take whatever time you need.

Ford: Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the laugh — the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.

Leahy: You’ve never forgotten that laughter. You’ve never forgotten them laughing at you.

Ford: They were laughing with each other.

Leahy: And you were the object of the laughter?

Ford: I was, you know, underneath one of them while the two laughed, two friend — two friends having a really good time with one another.

*

Another Trumpian rat bastard (behold the hypocrisy!)

DEVIN NUNES’S FAMILY FARM IS HIDING A POLITICALLY EXPLOSIVE SECRET
BY RYAN LIZZA (Esquire)

     Devin Nunes has a secret. Nunes is the California Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who has become famous in the Trump era for using his position as a battering ram to discredit the Russia investigation and protect Donald Trump at all costs, even if it means shredding his own reputation and the independence of the historically nonpartisan committee in the process.
. . .
     Nunes grew up in a family of dairy farmers in Tulare, California, and as long as he has been in politics, his family dairy has been central to his identity and a feature of every major political profile written about him. A March story in National Review is emblematic. It describes how Nunes’s family emigrated from the Azores in Portugal to California’s Central Valley, “a fertile, sunny Eden,” and how the family “worked and saved enough money to buy a 640-acre farm outside Tulare.” The soil of the Central Valley is depicted as almost sacred in these articles. National Review quotes a 1912 Portuguese immigrant farmer who wrote that when he grabs a clump of dirt, “I feel as if I had just shaken hands with all my ancestors.” As recently as July 27, the lead of a Wall Street Journal editorial-page piece about Nunes, which featured a Tulare dateline, emphasized the dairy: “It’s 105 degrees as I stand with Rep. Devin Nunes on his family’s dairy farm.” Last year, Nunes noted in an interview with the Daily Beast—headline: “The Dairy Farmer Overseeing U. S. Spies and the Russia Hack Investigation”—“I’m pretty simple. I like agriculture.” The Daily Beast noted, “The cows are not far from his mind. He keeps in regular contact with his brother and father about their dairy farm.”

     So here’s the secret: The Nunes family dairy of political lore—the one where his brother and parents work—isn’t in California. It’s in Iowa. Devin; his brother, Anthony III; and his parents, Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, sold their California farmland in 2006. Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, who has also been the treasurer of every one of Devin’s campaigns since 2001, used their cash from the sale to buy a dairy eighteen hundred miles away in Sibley, a small town in northwest Iowa where they—as well as Anthony III, Devin’s only sibling, and his wife, Lori—have lived since 2007. Devin’s uncle Gerald still owns a dairy back in Tulare, which is presumably where The Wall Street Journal’s reporter talked to Devin, and Devin is an investor in a Napa Valley winery, Alpha Omega, but his immediate family’s farm—as well as his family—is long gone.
. . .
     Other dairy farmers in the area [Sibley, Iowa] helped me understand why the Nunes family might be so secretive about the farm: Midwestern dairies tend to run on undocumented labor.
. . .
     In the heart of [Trump supporter] Steve King’s district, a place that is more pro-Trump than almost any other patch of America, the economy is powered by workers that King and Trump have threatened to arrest and deport….

Let's not malign the good name of the Twilight Zone