<p>
</p>
<p>Pain? Hmmm. As in “Pain and Suffering”? Perhaps as the result of a tort? I assume the legal counsels for Nifong, the City of Durham, the Durham PD, Duke University and certain individual Duke faculty members have already made the connection. Well, maybe not the Duke faculty members. They seem to be impervious to rational thinking.</p>
<p>epistrophy:
Having the case thrown out my the special prosecutor, though, is much more of a declaration of innocence - although I suppose it is too much to ask that there would be a statement to that effect …</p>
<p>1soccer-</p>
<p>those numbers are the total apps received by the school gathered from newspaper articles published on the web or p.r. announcements.</p>
<p>they are definitely NOT the ED/EA numbers.</p>
<p>it promises to be a very interesting year.</p>
<p>you need to relax about defending Duke. They’re fine and played the game well, even if they ran the deadline out to make sure there wasn’t a decline. Look at the spin Yale put out about their decline of 9.7%.</p>
<p>musictoad:
The question was whether or not the lax scandal impacted the number of applicants that applied this year. I am not sure how that is defending anything. I made that statement that the verdict is still out. It still is. ;)</p>
<p>How did Washington and Lee fare this year? :)</p>
<p>Yale Daily News:</p>
<p>"The total number of applications for the Class of 2011 decreased 9.7 percent from last year, Dean of Admissions Jeff Brenzel announced Thursday.</p>
<p>Yale received 19,060 applications this year, compared to the record-high 21,101 for the Class of 2010. Of this year’s pool, 15,464 were submitted through regular decision and 3,596 were received through single-choice early action. The other Ivy League schools that have released their numbers all reported increases in their applicant pools.</p>
<p>……</p>
<p>President Richard Levin said the reason for the decline might be Yale’s low acceptance rate last year.</p>
<p>“It’s possibly because of the fact that our selectivity rate kept getting lower and lower,” he said. “People are not applying because the odds are small.”</p>
<p>Brenzel said he expects Yale will admit about 1,150 students in April through the regular process, in addition to the 709 applicants already accepted through early action in December. While the early acceptance rate this fall was 19.7 percent, the overall acceptance rate will likely end up at about 9.8 percent, he said.</p>
<p>Last year, Yale admitted 1,878 total students for an Ivy League record-low acceptance rate of 8.9 percent.</p>
<p>The other four Ivy League schools for which statistics are available all saw increases in their applicant pools.</p>
<p>Columbia University received 21,303 applications for their Class of 2011, an 7.3 percent increase over last year. Brown University reported a rise of 3.8 percent, totaling 18,951. Cornell’s pool increased by 7.5 percent to 30,191, and University of Pennsylvania Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson said Penn received approximately 22,500 applications, marking a 10 percent increase."</p>
<p>This is a pretty impressive drop, in the face of increasing apps at other Ivies. I can see how applications might saturate as acceptance rates decrease. (If we assume Yale rejects half of the EA applicants, that leaves 1,000 deferred students in addition to the 15,000 RD applicants. If 1150 are accepted from this pool it would be 7% accept rate. Unhooked students need not apply). </p>
<p>One might predict that this can be distinguished from a decrease in popularity for other reasons by examination of the applicant pool. If it is the former then the decrease would be in the bottom end of the applicant pool (“why bother”); if it is the latter then it might be across the board (or even skewed to the top end). Also, in the former case yield should be unaffected, which is not true for the latter. </p>
<p>I suspect we’ll never actually see those numbers.</p>
<p>What’s changed since last year? Yale’s number one grad has been demonized, successfully, by the Democrat libel machine.</p>
<p>You mean John Kerry?</p>
<p>Just when I thought things might be getting less weird and most people were coming to understand that this case was actually about prosecutorial abuse, the John Edwards campaign has hired as its blogger-in-chief Amanda Marcotte who has had some impolitic things to say on the subject. What she wrote was not written six or eight months ago while there was still a lot of confusion and doubt about what had happened, but just two weeks ago, January 21, and after she was hired by the campaign. To be clear, she was not writing on the Edwards’ blog but on her own blog. The players will always be guilty, no matter what, in her mind. I wonder how long she will be employed by the Edwards campaign? </p>
<p>Caution-strong language</p>
<p>Summary here:</p>
<p>Verification that she tried to expunge the entries (but forgot about Google cache)</p>
<p>The Google cache, if there is any doubt:</p>
<p>The comments by those that follow her blog are interesting. Are these the type of people Edwards is hoping to draw to his campaign?</p>
<p>One of those comments alluded to above:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Wow.</p>
<p>" … they inherited the wealth and sense of privelege inherent in being the descendants of slave-rapers- they attended a university built upon slavery-derived wealth- they are the hubristic children of an evil nation with a blighted past."</p>
<p>as my wife noted, - this applies to a jewish kid from Long Island exactly how?</p>
<p>Worse yet is that Marcotte is mild compared to most of those commenting on her blog. If these posters are examples of what the current soft humanities departments (women’s studies, etc) are producing as graduates, it is truly disheartening. Believers, not thinkers, who reject anything not fitting with their world view and utterly unable to engage in rational discourse.</p>
<p>Actually, at least one of the posters - Harkonnendog - was a right wing ■■■■■ posting deliberately over-the-top stuff. For the most part they just came off as poorly informed ideologues, with the depth of analysis common to the type. You’ll find opinions equally as dopey right here on CC - firing from both directions without bothering to aim first. But you’re right about Marcotte - she’s a genuine liability to the Edwards campaign - and I have been an Edwards supporter - until now.</p>
<p>I’m a student who chose to attend Duke on a full scholarship over Harvard and Yale. My experience here has been absolutely amazing, and I feel almost personally hurt by the accusations leveled against some of the professors and the student body in general. I’m taking a political philosophy class with one of the members of the “Group of 88”, and as a person holding moderate and sometimes conservative political opinions, I initially felt apprehensive about having a professor who has developed the reputation of being a “militant liberal” by signing the Group of 88 document. However, as the semester as been progressing, I have been extremely impressed by the professor’s objectivity, accessibility, and open mind. He fosters class discussion at all times, and takes care not to interject his personal opinions into controversial material. Instead, he argues from the point of view of the authors we are reading about, who are from all sides of the political spectrum. Friends of mine have been reporting similar experiences from these so called militant liberal professors at Duke. Granted, there are certainly a few loony professors here and there, but at such a large and diverse institution like Duke, the quality of education is not impacted by these outliers.</p>
<p>I’ve said before there really no such thing as “The Group of 88.” There’s a broad spectrum of folks who signed onto both the listening statement and the open letter, and while I certainly disagree with aspects of both, I’m glad for ashes passing along classroom experiences from them.</p>
<p>Here is a different version of Nifong’s original DA appointment! Apparently Governor Easley only agreed to the interim appointment because Nifong promised not to run for office.</p>
<p>"Gov. Mike Easley said last month that picking Mike Nifong to be Durham’s district attorney was the worst appointment of his career, and he said Nifong broke his promise not to run for the office.
Easley told law students in New York that Nifong’s decision to seek office in last fall’s election almost prompted him to consider yanking Nifong from office.</p>
<p>“I almost un-appointed him when he decided to run,” Easley said. “I rate that as probably the poorest appointment that I’ve,” the governor trailed off before adding “I’ve made some good ones.”"</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.newsobserver.com/114/story/539319.html[/url]”>http://www.newsobserver.com/114/story/539319.html</a></p>
<p>“Duke Lacrosse Grand Jurors Speak Out”</p>
<p><a href=“Exclusive: Duke Lacrosse Grand Jurors Speak Out - ABC News”>http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2852337&page=1</a></p>
<p>^ Grand Jurors Speak out? </p>
<p>According to the link posted, they didn’t say anything! Talk about a bunch of “PC” BS! :eek:</p>
<p>where do they find these idiots to serve on a gj?</p>
<p>the one is concerned about the false accuser’s reputation???</p>
<p>give me a break.</p>
<p>who cares how they feel? what intellectual basis did they have to render an indictment?</p>
<p>God help our nation.</p>
<p>Well…I’m guessing maybe it’s because once people make a decision, they’re going to be pretty married to their original decision and actions - I mean, can you really imagine them saying “we made a terrible mistake” - plus, they live in Durham, where Nifong is still DA…if it were me? I wouldn’t say a WORD, unless my child(ren) and I relocated and lived very far away from anywhere this DA could have influence.</p>
<p>“what intellectual basis did they have to render an indictment?”</p>
<p>Well, you don’t need much.</p>
<p>Remember that grand jurors only hear from the prosecution. They didn’t know the circumstances of the visual identification. I’d vote to indict if all I heard was that the AV had identified the three men who she said raped her. There’s a truism in law school that “A grand jury will indict a ham sandwich if a prosecutor tells them to,” and that’s because of the system, not the jurors.</p>