From: "Rich Gauszka" 

So to report the grant of preferences to a lowest rank tier 4 school smacks
of religious bigotry? If you read the article in it's entirety it did
mention that Regent has improved it's standards since 1999 ( Gooding's
class ) where 60 % failed the bar exam ( 71% now pass ) .

I agree that not all those that graduate from a 'prestigious' university
are the best and the brightest - George W Bush comes to mind

"Gary Britt"  wrote in
message news:464b7251$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> There are so many anti-religious, anti-Christian bigoted statements and
> attempted slurs in this article that it is not possible to any part of it
> seriously, unless one's own bigotry predisposes them to agree with the
> slurs and bigotry contained in the article.
>
> 1.  First it starts out by attempting to say by implication that prayer in
> a religious private law school means something bad about the students in
> that school.  Time to stop reading really right there.
>
> 2.  It states Monica Goodling worked at DOJ when that is false.  She
> worked at the WHITEHOUSE and was liaison from the whitehouse to DOJ.
>
> 3.  It states as though it were fact that if you don't have prosecutorial
> experience you can't have anything to do with evaluating statistics that
> measure performance criteria and aren't qualified to evaluate whether a
> person is following policy directives set by the head of the executive
> branch.  Then it goes on to imply that graduates from a different school
> that doesn't pray but have absolutely no more prosecutorial experience are
> qualified to do these things.
>
> 4.  It states by implication that a person from Harvard is more qualified
> for government work than a person from another University, and argues we
> should let the Harvard/Yale sycophants hire only other socio-economic
> bigots and religion hating atheists from the same in bred left wing
> academies from which they were spawned.
>
> 5.  Similar articles have appeared recently complaining that somebody who
> was a member of the conservative federalist society was hired and he
> didn't come from Harvard but came from the University of Kentucky.  Oh my
> god!  The horrors.  I hope he didn't once hang up on somebody without
> saying good bye like John Bolton.  Then there was another recent complaint
> about somebody who was hired from a school other than Harvard or Yale who
> actually kept a bust of James Madison (author of many of the federalist
> papers) in his office instead of the mandatory Karl Marx bust.  Ok I made
> up the Karl Marx part, but they really complained the guy wasn't qualified
> because he thought highly of James Madison (Madison is of course a
> favorite of the federalist society lawyers and that alone is a
> disqualification to DOJ service to the likes of the bigots like the author
> of this useless crap you linked to and quoted from.
>
> 6. God forbid the DOJ should have people in it that wouldn't give a
> cover-up sweetheart deal to Sandy Berger and then not even enforce the
> terms of that sweetheart deal by not requiring him to take a lie detector
> test that he agreed to take to detail what he stole, what he destroyed,
> and what information was in the materials he stole and destroyed that have
> been permanently kept from the 9/11 commission and the American people.
> Yes it was those kinds of career civil servants in the DOJ that should
> determine who is hired at DOJ.
>
> The DOJ and much of the shadow government known as the federal bureaucracy
> needs are sharp kick in the ass out the door.  I think everyone under
> Gonzales and above Janitor at DOJ should be fired immediately.  The place
> wreaks from decades of inbreeding and incest of type this moron you cite
> argues should be the norm in perpetuity.
>
> Gary
>
> Rich Gauszka wrote:
>> From Oral Roberts University?
>>
>> http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/04/08/scandal_puts
_spotlight_on_christian_law_school/
>>
>> VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. -- The title of the course was Constitutional Law,
>> but the subject was sin. Before any casebooks were opened, a student led
>> his classmates in a 10-minute devotional talk, completed with
"amens,"
>> about the need to preserve their Christian values.
>>
>> "Sin is so appealing because it's easy and because it's
fun," the law
>> student warned.
>> Regent University School of Law, founded by televangelist Pat Robertson
>> to provide "Christian leadership to change the world,"
has worked hard in
>> its two-decade history to upgrade its reputation, fighting past years
>> when a majority of its graduates couldn't pass the bar exam and leading
>> up to recent victories over Ivy League teams in national law student
>> competitions.
>>
>> But even in its darker days, Regent has had no better friend than the
>> Bush administration. Graduates of the law school have been among the most
>> influential of the more than 150 Regent University alumni hired to
>> federal government positions since President Bush took office in 2001,
>> according to a university website.
>>
>> One of those graduates is Monica Goodling , the former top aide to
>> Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who is at the center of the storm over
>> the firing of US attorneys. Goodling, who resigned on Friday, has become
>> the face of Regent overnight -- and drawn a harsh spotlight to the
>> administration's hiring of officials educated at smaller, conservative
>> schools with sometimes marginal academic reputations.
>>
>> Documents show that Goodling, who has asserted her Fifth Amendment right
>> against self-incrimination to avoid testifying before Congress, was one
>> of a handful of officials overseeing the firings. She helped install
>> Timothy Griffin , the Karl Rove aide and her former boss at the
>> Republican National Committee, as a replacement US attorney in Arkansas.
>>
>> Because Goodling graduated from Regent in 1999 and has scant
>> prosecutorial experience, her qualifications to evaluate the performance
>> of US attorneys have come under fire. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse,
>> Democrat of Rhode Island, asked at a hearing: "Should we be concerned
>> with the experience level of the people who are making these highly
>> significant decisions?"
>>
>> And across the political blogosphere, critics have held up Goodling, who
>> declined to be interviewed, as a prime example of the Bush administration
>> subordinating ability to politics in hiring decisions.
>>
>> "It used to be that high-level DOJ jobs were generally reserved for the
>> best of the legal profession," wrote a contributor to The New Republic
>> website . ". . . That a recent graduate of one of the very worst (and
>> sketchiest) law schools with virtually no relevant experience could
>> ascend to this position is a sure sign that there is something seriously
>> wrong at the DOJ."
>>
>> The Regent law school was founded in 1986, when Oral Roberts University
>> shut down its ailing law school and sent its library to Robertson's
>> Bible-based college in Virginia. It was initially called "CBN
University
>> School of Law" after the televangelist's Christian
Broadcasting Network,
>> whose studios share the campus and which provided much of the funding for
>> the law school. (The Coors Foundation is also a donor to the university.)
>> The American Bar Association accredited Regent 's law school in 1996.
>>
>> Not long ago, it was rare for Regent graduates to join the federal
>> government. But in 2001, the Bush administration picked the dean of
>> Regent's government school, Kay Coles James , to be the director of the
>> Office of Personnel Management -- essentially the head of human resources
>> for the executive branch. The doors of opportunity for government jobs
>> were thrown open to Regent alumni.
>>
>> "We've had great placement," said Jay Sekulow , who
heads a non profit
>> law firm based at Regent that files lawsuits aimed at lowering barriers
>> between church and state. "We've had a lot of people in key
positions."
>>
>> Many of those who have Regent law degrees, including Goodling, joined the
>> Department of Justice. Their path to employment was further eased in late
>> 2002, when John Ashcroft , then attorney general, changed longstanding
>> rules for hiring lawyers to fill vacancies in the career ranks.
>>
>> Previously, veteran civil servants screened applicants and recommended
>> whom to hire, usually picking top students from elite schools.
>>
>> In a recent Regent law school newsletter, a 2004 graduate described being
>> interviewed for a job as a trial attorney at the Justice Department's
>> Civil Rights Division in October 2003. Asked to name the Supreme Court
>> decision from the past 20 years with which he most disagreed, he cited
>> Lawrence v. Texas, the ruling striking down a law against sodomy because
>> it violated gay people's civil rights.
>>
>> "When one of the interviewers agreed and said that decision in Lawrence
>> was 'maddening,' I knew I correctly answered the question," wrote the
>> Regent graduate . The administration hired him for the Civil Rights
>> Division's housing section -- the only employment offer he received after
>> graduation, he said.
>>
>> The graduate from Regent -- which is ranked a "tier
four" school by US
>> News & World Report, the lowest score and essentially a tie for 136th
>> place --  was not the only lawyer with modest credentials to be hired by
>> the Civil Rights Division after the administration imposed greater
>> political control over career hiring.
>>
>> The changes resulted in a sometimes dramatic alteration to the profile of
>> new hires beginning in 2003, as the Globe reported last year after
>> obtaining resumes from 2001-2006 to three sections in the civil rights
>> division. Conservative credentials rose, while prior experience in civil
>> rights law and the average ranking of the law school attended by the
>> applicant dropped.
>>
>> As the dean of a lower-ranked law school that benefited from the Bush
>> administration's hiring practices, Jeffrey Brauch of Regent made no
>> apologies in a recent interview for training students to understand what
>> the law is today, and also to understand how legal rules should be
>> changed to better reflect "eternal principles of
justice," from divorce
>> laws to abortion rights
>>
>> We anticipate that many of our graduates are going to go and be change
>> agents in society," Brauch said.
>>
>> Still, Brauch said, the recent criticism of the law school triggered by
>> Goodling's involvement in the US attorney firings has missed the mark in
>> one respect: the quality of the lawyers now being turned out by the
>> school, he argued, is far better than its image.
>>
>> Seven years ago, 60 percent of the class of 1999 -- Goodling's class --
>> failed the bar exam on the first attempt. (Goodling's performance was not
>> available, though she is admitted to the bar in Virginia.) The dismal
>> numbers prompted the school to overhaul its curriculum and tighten
>> admissions standards.
>>
>> It has also spent more heavily to recruit better-qualified law students.
>> This year, it will spend $2.8 million on scholarships, a million more
>> than what it was spending four years ago.
>>
>> The makeover is working. The bar exam passage rate of Regent alumni ,
>> according to the Princeton Review, rose to 67 percent last year. Brauch
>> said it is now up to 71 percent, and that half of the students admitted
>> in the late 1990s would not be accepted today. The school has also
>> recently won moot-court and negotiation competitions, beating out teams
>> from top-ranked law schools.
>>
>> Adding to Regent's prominence, its course on "Human Rights, Civil
>> Liberties, and National Security" is co taught by one of its newest
>> professors: Ashcroft.
>>
>> Even a prominent critic of the school's mission of integrating the Bible
>> with public policy vouches for Regent's improvements. Barry Lynn , the
>> head of the liberal Americans United for the Separation of Church and
>> State, said Regent is churning out an increasingly well-trained legal
>> army for the conservative Christian movement.
>>
>> "You can't underestimate the quality of a lot of the people that are
>> there," said Lynn, who has guest-lectured at Regent and debated
>> professors on its campus.
>>
>> In light of Regent's rapid evolution, some current law students say it is
>> frustrating to be judged in light of Regent alumni from the school's more
>> troubled era -- including Goodling.
>>
>> One third-year student, Chamie Riley , said she rejected the idea that
>> any government official who invokes her Fifth Amendment right against
>> self-incrimination could be a good representative of Regent.
>>
>> As Christians, she said, Regent students know "you should be morally
>> upright. You should not be in a situation where you have to plead the
>> Fifth."
>>
>>

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