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BU tries to hide Markoff connection from prospective students
By adamg on Thu, 04/23/2009 - 4:29pm
The Daily Free Press reports workers at the school admissions department removed copies of the paper with stories about their most infamous medical-school student from a reception area for prospective students and their parents:
An admissions office employee, who wished to remain anonymous out of concern for her job, told a Daily Free Press reporter Wednesday that the papers had been hidden because of their content, which could reflect negatively on the school.
Oh, and if you're looking for the Philip Markoff is Innocent Until Proven Guilty Facebook group, it's here. The Globe wrote about it, but naturally couldn't be bothered to link to it (if you check it out, call up the member list and see if you can figure out who's trying to be funny).
Innocent, etc.
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Comments
The Freep would cover this
The Freep would cover this because it was their mediocre paper that was removed.
Colin Riley spoke in my class on Tuesday and he actually said the exact opposite -- that he's encouraging admissions and students to be open and honest about it if asked. It could happen to any school.
Maybe take a look at the
Maybe take a look at the mediocre paper before criticizing it?
"BU spokesman Colin Riley said he knew nothing about the newspapers being hidden.
“There’s no reason that I know of that they wouldn’t be there today or yesterday,” he said. “I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t be. Maybe they’re all gone because people picked them up.”
...
[Riley] urges [the admissions staff] not to be defensive,” McEachern stated in the email. “He encourages us to embrace [questions about Markoff], and gave me some talking points.”
Freedom of the Press, freedom of the press!!!!
Didn't some MIT cops get fired for doing the same thing with their campus newspaper?
Who would see that Markoff
Who would see that Markoff goes to BU Med and infer that the school is not safe to attend or produces (alleged) murderers? And if those people do exist, does BU really want them in the first place?
Good point actually. Unless
Good point actually. Unless BU has a history of creating sociopaths (some may argue that they do I guess lol) then there is no need for concern.
On the other hand the significant others, and parental units of those would be doctors may not be so immune from seeing the bad news and having it affect their views on the campus. Was it possible that he was pushed too hard at the school? Did he show signs and nobody looked into it? Even if it is not their fault the bad vibes permeate through by osmosis. Im sure no perspective med student would reject a school based off of the case, but who is to say it wont set up shop in the back of their head and be a deciding factor when they go to decide what school to go to?
Well
Pre-meds tend to be aggressive (if not downright ruthless) when it comes to their career path, :) but I suspect that this is mostly about generating positive feelings for prospectives.
You want them thinking about your program and going there, not about the latest tabloid thriller.
the freep lies
i work in the admissions office as a volunteer and the freep is completely wrong
1) it is not even a university publication, so we have no reason to put it out in the 1st place, it is independent from the university
2) our policy is to never put the freep out anyways, its always only available upon request to the employees and students.
3) he wasn't pre-med. he was a med student who isn't even on the charles river campus.
pre-med
My point regarding pre-meds is that the office might be entertaining this type of prospective, who is infamously fixated on his/her career, including the prestige of everything that will show up on his/her applications over the next decade. So, they could conceivably care about "BU med" being tinged with scandal. It wasn't a big point.
Good do-bee
If you keep this up, they might even give you a paying position!
1) Non sequitur. Just because it's independent from the university doesn't mean the university doesn't have a reason to put it out for consumption. It is the primary written news publication about BU. It's not like they cover the daily ins-and-outs at Harvard in their pages or that BU students first submit their editorials to The Tech at MIT.
2) Someone should let the rest of your staff and school know. They're always sitting out in the open for people to read while waiting in your office. Well, always..except those two days that week when Markoff was on the front page. The BU Spokesman even said that he'd expect them to be out there and knew of no policy about making them "available by request" (unless you think he's lying too).