suckage obtains

     Yes, at yesterday's IVC Academic Senate, one senator reported witnessing someone (I believe) drawing a Swastika on a bathroom door or some such. There was much discussion about that and about other somewhat related security issues on campus.
     All seemed to agree that Prez Glenn Roquemore is an idiot.
     The general impression left by the meeting is that no one is in charge of the college, many people are angry or disgruntled, and, well, suckage generally obtains.

Anonymous said...
What Roy said.
     --8:51 PM, October 19, 2018

Anonymous said...
Not only is there no way to communicate to the college at large and especially the students in any effective way (I had a counselor come into my class the other day and he acknowledged to the students that he knows they don't read the avalanche of emails they receive: "I know," he said, "I see it when you're in my office and we open up your MySite and your email - nothing has been read." - they all laughed) but they don't even know WHO the president is. He has the office but he lack the authority. Why would they listen to him even if he cared enough to say anything to anyone ever? Swastikas!
     --9:02 PM, October 19, 2018

Anonymous said...
They don't respond not only because there is no practical way for them to respond but also because they don't care. They will use the excuse that they don't want to bring attention to such behavior and attitudes but truly, the failure to speak out emboldens those to do such things and the failure to speak out hurts further the people these actions target. It tells them they don't matter.
     --7:20 PM, October 20, 2018

Anonymous said...
Glenn is an idiot but somehow stays in his job. Discouraging! Imagine what the college would be like with someone good in that seat.
     --6:44 PM, October 22, 2018

Trust teachers. We know.

Gabby Giffords and husband Mark Kelly at UCI's Langston Library, Saturday October 13

Former congresswoman Gabby Giffords came to town last weekend which inspired Rebel Girl to revisit the Tucson shooting of 2011.

Seven years ago, in the wake of the shooting that targeted Giffords, took six lives and wounded more than a dozen, Timothy Noah asked a question many have been asking lately, "What does a kid have to do these days to get kicked out of community college?" The shooter was Pima Community College student Jared Lee Loughner whose educational experience was reviewed in Noah's Slate article "Class Clown: Why was it so hard to kick Loughner out of Pima Community College?"

excerpt:

Loughner wasn’t just inexplicably difficult to remove from Pima; he was even more inexplicably difficult to remove from Ben McGahee’s algebra class at Pima. McGahee told the Washington Post that he had to complain repeatedly to Pima administrators about Loughner’s disruptions before they let him kick Loughner out of the class. On the first day, McGahee said, Loughner yelled “How can you deny math instead of accepting it?” That same day a student in the class complained about Loughner in an e-mail to a friend: “I’m not certain yet if he was on drugs (as one person surmised) or disturbed. He scares me a bit. The teacher tried to throw him out and he refused to go.” Nine days later this student wrote in an e-mail: “Until he does something bad, you can’t do anything about him. Needless to say, I sit by the door.” Four days later the student wrote that Loughner “scares the living crap out of me.” It was three or four weeks before McGahee was permitted to remove Loughner from class. McGahee told the Post that when he first complained, “They just said, ‘Well, he hasn’t taken any action to hurt anyone. He hasn’t provoked anybody. He hasn’t brought any weapons to class.’ ” Meanwhile, McGahee said that whenever he turned “to write on the board, I would always turn back quickly—to see if he had a gun.”

It's complicated, for sure, balancing rights and responsibilities but it can't be that complicated. It can't be.

Perhaps we need a new movement: Trust teachers. We know.

*

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.

*