More Scholarships for Murderers to Attend Law School: It’s the “Progressive” Thing to Do

A thieving murderer who killed a professor is receiving a scholarship to attend a Louisiana law school, courtesy of college administrators and the NAACP:

When he was 20 years old, [Bruce] Reilly beat and stabbed to death a 58-year old English professor at Community College of Rhode island, capping off his crime by stealing the professor’s car, wallet, and credit cards. . . . Reilly is an admitted student in Tulane’s law school . . . The Louisiana Bar, like all other states, requires proof of good moral character and fitness to be admitted to the bar, a requirement that almost always excludes felons – particularly those who have been convicted of a violent crime as heinous as Reilly’s. . .It is next to impossible for him to become a licensed attorney even if he graduates, as Tulane University officials must surely know. . .As at least one student complained to The Times-Picayune, Reilly is taking up “another’s space in the law school even though he may never be able to practice as a lawyer because of his conviction.” But it gets worse.

Reilly is attending Tulane on an NAACP scholarship and a Dean’s Merit Scholarship. . . .Now, we know that the NAACP (and apparently the dean of Tulane) thinks it is appropriate to give a scholarship to a convicted killer

Earlier, a left-leaning British government paid the college costs of the “Crossbow Cannibal,” enabling him to take more lives after he had previously been incarcerated for attempted murder and many violent crimes. “While pursuing a PhD in “homicide studies” at the British taxpayers’ expense, a man with a long history of criminal violence became a serial killer, noted Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal. After Stephen Griffiths’ release from prison — and a mental hospital, in which he was diagnosed as an incurable psychopath — he was accepted by the University of Bradford; the government paid his fees and living expenses. Griffiths “killed and ate three women, two cooked and one raw, according to his own account.” He’s now serving a life sentence, giving him time to complete his doctorate on 19th-century murder practices, notes education expert Joanne Jacobs.

Every criminal, it seems, must have the chance to go to college at taxpayer expense, the more morally-depraved the better — at least according to the Progressive mind, which seems to view criminals as victims of society. (Tulane, by contrast, is a private — if heavily-government-subsidized — university. It receives not only federal funds, but also Louisiana state funds, which its law clinic then uses to sue Louisiana businesses that subsidize it through their tax dollars. Legal commentator Walter Olson has an interesting book, Schools for Misrule, that discusses the phenomenon of state-funded law clinics suing states to demand huge government spending increases — resulting in state taxpayers subsidizing lawsuits against themselves.)

Subsidies for academic underperformers are also in fashion. Maryland’s governor, Martin O’Malley, recently lavished money on a bottom-tier left-wing college whose students could not receive a high-school diploma at a school with rigorous standards.

As noted earlier, states spend billions of dollars operating bottom-tier colleges that manage to graduate few of their students — like Chicago State University, “which has just a 12.8 percent six-year graduation rate,” and UT El Paso, which graduated only “1 out of 25 students in a timely manner.” As more and more mediocre students go to college, students learn less and less. “Our colleges and universities are full to the brim with students who do not really belong there, who are unprepared for college and uninterested in breaking a mental sweat.” “Nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges don’t make academics a priority,” according to a widely-publicized January report from experts like New York University Professor Richard Arum. “36% showed little” gain after four years, and students “spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago, the research shows.”