:EDUCATED IN THE WEST

If Bob King, my old high school art teacher, actually played and coached football, Sportscenter might look a little something like this:

A very fictitious hypothetical for your consideration:

Brenda is an attorney in a major American city who has been nominated by her medium-sized law firm for a very prestigious legal representation award given by a local bar association. The award comes with a generous prize of about $40,000 and winning it would very much boost Brenda’s future career advancement in her firm and beyond. In assembling her nomination dossier, Brenda solicits and receives a glowing letter of recommendation from Bob, one of her former clients. Brenda helped Bob win a wrongful termination case two years earlier and, by all accounts, did a superb and professional job as his attorney. Bob’s letter is one of ten client letters submitted in support of Brenda’s application.

In fact, Bob is just one of a string of satisfied clients as Brenda has a stellar, unblemished record as a trial attorney and as a legal counselor. Given that, it is of no surprise when the bar association’s awards committee selects Brenda for the prize. She is subsequently showered with admiration and accolades from her colleagues.

Not long after the prize is awarded, the bar association’s newsletter publishes a lengthy write-up about Brenda and her legal career. The writer of the piece quotes extensively from interviews with Brenda’s colleagues and from the praise heaped on her by the writers of her letters of recommendation.

Paula is an attorney who also works with Brenda at the same medium-sized law firm. They are colleagues and friends. She is happy for Brenda and the recognition that Brenda receives from winning the award. One morning, Paula stumbles upon the story about Brenda and her award while reading the bar association’s newsletter. After reading half way through the piece, Paula is shocked to discover that Bob had written a letter of recommendation for Brenda.

Paula has first hand knowledge that while Bob and Brenda initially had an attorney-client relationship, once it was over, their relationship had changed from professional to very personal in nature. In fact, Paula knows for certain that when Brenda solicited the letter from Bob and when Bob wrote his letter, Bob and Brenda had an ongoing sexual relationship. In addition, Paula has hearsay knowledge that Brenda has pushed (and perhaps crossed) the bounds of professionalism by having sexual relationships with clients very soon after the end of their attorney-client relationships.

None of this was ever disclosed to the awards committee. More importantly, no one on the committee knew that Bob and Brenda were lovers. Paula believes that if the underlying conflict of interest had been revealed to the committee, they would have chosen another attorney for the prize despite Brenda’s strong record in court.

1) Do we have a problem here?
2) Was it wrong for Brenda to ask Bob for the letter? Was it wrong for him to agree to write it?
3) In hindsight, did either Brenda or Bob have a duty to disclose their relationship to the committee? Did they both have that duty?
4) What should Paula do, if anything?

[Details of the following story have been changed to protect me and the guilty.]

Does anyone remember the scene from the movie Stripes when the characters played by Bill Murray and Harold Ramis go to the Army recruiting office? In processing them, the recruiter asks a series of questions one of which is something like, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” Ramis and Murray look at each other slyly and say deliberately, “Nope, never convicted.” The implication is, of course, that they’ve been charged with felonies on multiple occasions, but that the prosecutors couldn’t prove their case.

Well, when I was visiting my parents not too long ago, I heard a story from my dad that made me think of this particular scene.

As it turns out, my father has an older male friend who was charged with murder for hire back about twenty years ago. (No, not in this country.) He was charged with conspiracy to commit murder and with murder. The prosecutor alleged that he had conspired with another well-connected individual to off a particular civil servant who was taking bribes. Well, this civil servant guy did happen to die in a hail of gunfire directed at his car as it sat in traffic on a bridge.

The police arrested five people in connection with the murder. However, none of these individuals was the actual trigger man. According to the police theory, my dad’s friend and his partner in crime had insulated themselves from the gunman with at least one layer of individuals. These five who were arrested were the ones who, allegedly, knew of the plot against the civil servant. The gunman who did the actual killing, according to the theory, never knew who had hired him. I think the police might have watched Godfather II one too many times.

My dad’s friend was brought in for questioning not long after the first five were arrested. While in police custody, he was apparently threatened with physical harm unless he confessed. The police took him in a van to a very remote place and, while en route, threatened to do very bad things to him once they arrived at their destination. Calling their bluff, my dad’s friend made a move for the van door. He was trying to jump out and kill himself so that the police would be caught with a corpse on their hands. The police knew what he was trying to do and did everything they could to pull him back into the van. Let’s just say that my dad’s friend wasn’t trying to kill himself, but that he has a belly full of guts to beat the police at their own bluffing game. He made it back safely to the station house without confessing anything and was sent off to jail. Not long after, he was charged and posted bail. I know. How does a murder for hire suspect get bail? All I can say is that it wasn’t in the States.

Anyway, back in jail, the five who were arrested were plotting their escape. Lo and behold, they were able to break out of jail not long after they were arrested. What a coincidence that all five made it out! Well, things wouldn’t go well for our five escapees once they had set themselves loose.

Within weeks after their escape, all five had been shot dead mysteriously, one by one. Yeah, Michael Corleone style, bitches. No one knows who did it and no one knows if the murders were related to the case. Well, at least I don’t know who did it or if the five deaths were connected. The bottom line is that those five guys were sleepin’ with the fishes and could tell no tales.

And, of course, without these five key witnesses, the case against my dad’s friend and his alleged partner in the scheme crumbled. All charges were quickly dropped.

I’ve met this particular friend on multiple occasions and I can say that he’s not a bad guy. He is, like me, a lover of Asian cuisines. He shares with me all sorts of secrets about cooking and preparing good food. He is generous to a fault once dropping a c-note on me for driving him around Las Vegas for a couple of hours. He’s also gotten me into the VIP grandstand at the horse track on several occasions and made sure that I was stuffed with food and quenched with drinks while I was there. Oh, and he got me in to observe a session of Parliament when usually no one without official business is allowed inside. When you consider all of that, you almost forget that he brandished a gun at his son’s school teacher a few years back. Hey, no one’s perfect, right?

What, you ask, does this friend do? Well, he’s actually a lobbyist, or so says my dad. The guy sure does very little lobbying for being a lobbyist, though. What’s that they say about “no visible means of support.”

Anyway, before you start thinking that my dad is a bad guy who hangs around with thugs, just know that this friend is kind of special and unlike the others. And, after all, he’s innocent until proven guilty, right?

Neela’s final episode in the ER was last night. I enjoyed it, especially the ending. I hate Dr. Brenner, the David Lyons character who’s the last in-hospital love interest for Neela. Ugh. And if I didn’t know any better, I’d say that the British actress who plays Neela on TV has had her Midlands accent blunted by six years living in Los Angeles. Take a listen below and then compare. What say you?

There once was a prolific author who wrote and published often about Europe. His books on European politics gained him a small fortune and a good measure of fame. Alas, it also inflated his already blimpy professorial ego to gargantuan proportions. In time, though, he capitalized further on his writings and landed an adjunct professor position at WCU. He fancied himself a big fish in a small pond as indicated by his pompous little facebook rants about his fame and shortcomings of the school. But stoked with a fancy new title and with classrooms full of genuflecting supplicants, his voracious ego grew uncontrollably.

Several years later, our prof found himself firmly ensconced at WCU. Though still an adjunct, he was continually sought out by many outside of the university as an expert on Western Europe. In one newspaper article, he was even misidentified as being associated with my own department, much to my chagrin. And when out of the limelight, he, of course, still had a coterie of fawning students.

After years of gorging on attention, the prof liked to think of himself as a campus demigod. This was perhaps true, especially through the eyes of one shy Korean woman who had recently immigrated to the United States. This young woman had sat through the prof’s classes and was impressed by his knowledge and command of a vast number of topics. She was intrigued by his sartorial senses and was admiring of the fashion glasses that made him so prominent. To most others, though, the spectacles made him look ridiculous–like a cross between Malcolm MacDowell and Liberace.

The young woman did well in her class with the adjunct, so well that she was able to overcome the intimidation factor and actually approach the prof for a coveted letter of recommendation.

As each letter request was one more stroke of his porcine ego, the prof was quick to oblige. He was gracious in granting the young woman what she wanted, really. But before he could commence with the writing of what would surely be a glowing letter, he needed to know more about his young student. Fair enough.

Of course, a bit of time spent chatting in his office or at the campus coffee house would likely have been sufficient, but not for prof. He was a bon vivant. He had flair and style. So, instead of a walk down to a shady spot underneath the branches of the school’s famed Magnolia trees, our adjunct decided that he’d ask the young woman to meet him over a fancy shellfish dinner one evening that week. But wait. Where can one get a shellfish dinner on campus? Well, one can’t. One would have to go to seaside restaurant along Malibu Beach, and that is exactly where this couple went.

The night proceeded splendidly. Our adjunct plied the young woman with wine and the two talked the night away.

When the young woman returned home, she couldn’t help but think that there was something strange in the way the prof spoke that night. Although she was fluent enough in English, there was so much he said that she didn’t understand. She was overwhelmed with so many cryptic idioms and phrases that night. Drowsy from all the wine, she thought nothing more about it and promptly went to bed with the satisfaction that she had laid the groundwork for a stellar letter of recommendation.

The next morning, she found herself back on campus for a meeting with her counselor. During their session, she spoke of her admiration for the adjunct and described the memorable night she had had with him dining along the beach. She made some offhand comments and innocently repeated some of the many curiously opaque English phrases that the prof had sprinkled generously throughout their conversation.

Upon hearing this, the counselor was mortified. She went straight to our adjunct’s department to inform the powers that be, and by week’s end our adjunct’s glorious and soaring academic career landed with a sickening thud. His teaching days were over.

We still don’t know much about what was said that night as the young woman was too embarrassed to tell her story once the true meanings of the prof’s phrases were revealed to her. However, one tiny detail did manage to filter down to this writer.

As it turns out, the phrases used by the prof as he looked out on the waters of the Pacific were actually sly double entendres. And they were the good kind (or bad, depending on your perspective). What did he say? Again, we don’t know the full picture, but we do have one phrase that might clue us in on the nature of that night’s discourse.

It seems that during at least part of the hours-long conversation over dinner, our prof was engaged in a fit of what one might call bukkake daydreaming. You see, our esteemed prof had repeatedly told the young Korean woman how lovely it would be if she would allow him to give her “a facial.”

Was our professor a purveyor of beauty creams? Was he a concerned metrosexual looking after the skin care needs of his students? Did the counselor overreact to innocuous advice for younger skin? We will probably never know.

Not long after the prof was relieved of his duties, the young woman, along with all of her classmates from the previous semester, received stern e-mails from their department telling them that the adjunct was no longer available for consultation or for recommendations and that they should not seek him out in any way.

So, let this be a lesson to the professors and TA’s out there who might be moonlighting as amateur beauticians. Watch your language, because it could cost you your job!

(Oh, and don’t take your students out to romantic shellfish dinners in Malibu.)

A hypo for you:

Let’s say there’s a university. Let’s say that this university has graduate students. Let’s say that this university offers its students money for study. Let’s say there was a graduate fellowship given by this school. Let’s say that the stated goal of this grad fellowship was to help students who might otherwise find it difficult or impossible to pursue graduate studies.

Fat Tojo shows up at the school. He already holds a master’s degree AND a law degree. He applies for the fellowship and wins a full ride for his first three years in the Ph.D. program. Other applicants who had never been to grad school are SOL.

Fair or unfair? Given the stated goal of the fellowship, does it make sense that Fat Tojo with his graduate degrees is eligible for consideration? Why or why not?