"Sound Like You're Educated"

[kia027]

Re: "Sound Like You're Educated"

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Gen</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> dem juss ruff enuff to have a slight edge but have the decent job, mba etc


<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: RichD</div><div class="ubbcode-body">what is a corporate thug? </div></div> </div></div>

corporate raider she mean

[Gen]

Re: &quot;Sound Like You're Educated&quot;

Turmoil at End of Path From Bed-Stuy to Harvard





During her spring break in March, Chanequa Campbell, a Harvard senior, traveled to Milan for at least the fourth time in two years.


Chanequa Campbell, 21, of Brooklyn, denies involvement in what prosecutors say was a botched drug theft by three men that ended in the killing of another man at Ms. Campbell’s Harvard dormitory.

In all, she had been away from Harvard for the better part of her junior and senior years, studying for four months of her junior year abroad in Italy, where she also took vacations during her senior year. This was partly wanderlust, partly a long-distance relationship and partly survival. <span style="font-weight: bold">She was, she says, “burned out” by pressures in college: the grueling work, continuing health problems and a lingering feeling that some of her peers judged her — for being a loud, proud native of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.</span>

“Italy was a place I could be without all of the pressures,” she said in a series of telephone interviews this week. On her latest trip, Ms. Campbell, 21, looked for a place to take language classes and an apartment, hoping to return to Italy after she graduated in June.

But three weeks before she was to graduate with a degree in sociology, prosecutors linked Ms. Campbell to a murder on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Mass. A man named Justin Cosby, 21, was fatally shot on May 18 in an entryway at Ms. Campbell’s dormitory during what prosecutors said was a botched drug theft by three men. A New York City man, Jabrai Jordan Copney, 20, was charged with the murder; the police were still searching for accomplices. Neither Mr. Cosby nor Mr. Copney was a Harvard student.

Prosecutors said that Mr. Copney and two men intended to rob Mr. Cosby, whom they called a local drug dealer, and that Mr. Copney knew Mr. Cosby through two Harvard students. Though the authorities did not publicly identify them, the news media soon reported that they were Ms. Campbell and a close friend, Brittany Smith, also a Harvard senior, who was dating Mr. Copney.

“Conversations that occurred between at least those four people — that led Jordan Copney to believe that he could rip off Justin Cosby for money and drugs,” said the Middlesex County district attorney, Gerard T. Leone Jr. “The common denominator between those four people is drugs.” He also said that the Harvard students had allowed the three men access to the campus.

Ms. Campbell, who said she had no part in the shooting, was not charged with any crime, but five days later, she said, a school official gave her a letter telling her that she had to move off campus and would not receive her diploma on Thursday.

She refused to show the letter to a reporter, saying she did not want to antagonize the university and still hoped to graduate. Her lawyer, Jeffrey T. Karp, said the letter referred to information the Harvard University Police Department said it had obtained about wrongdoing committed by Ms. Campbell in connection with the events of May 18. The letter was no more specific than that, he said.

Mr. Karp said he was appointed to represent Ms. Campbell when she was called to testify before a grand jury as a witness in the case.

The university, citing federal privacy rules and its own policy, released a statement that shed little light on its actions, referring only to “appropriate steps based on information we have learned about two female students identified by the Middlesex County district attorney’s office after the fatal shooting at Kirkland House.” The Boston Globe reported on Wednesday that Ms. Smith, who has not spoken publicly since the shooting, will also not receive her diploma.

In an apartment near the Harvard campus, Mr. Cosby’s mother, Denise Cosby, said she had not heard of Ms. Campbell or Ms. Smith before. The authorities say they found $1,000 in cash and a pound of marijuana next to her son after the shooting. Ms. Cosby refused to discuss the case, saying, “We don’t know what happened.”

In her dining room, lined with condolence cards, Ms. Cosby said her son had planned to work with computers. “He was a homebody,” she said. “He was my everything.”

Press accounts in the last two weeks have shifted attention to Ms. Campbell, especially after she said in an interview with The Globe that she was being singled out because “I’m black and I’m poor and I’m from New York.”

She was raised by a single mother in a three-story house in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and set out on a path to Harvard in the fifth grade, when she was nominated for Prep for Prep, a program that prepares minority students for elite schools. In the seventh grade, she was admitted to Packer Collegiate Institute, where she excelled and was a star athlete. She won a New York Times Scholarship in 2005, and was accepted by all 14 colleges to which she applied.

She was not sure she wanted to go to Harvard; she visited schools in California, which she said was “like a dream.” But she went to Cambridge, in part, because it seemed like a victory for her community. “It meant so much to them,” she said.

It was unfair, Ms. Campbell said, that some people had tied her current troubles to her upbringing in a poor neighborhood. She already felt pressure, she said, knowing how many people had helped get her to Harvard.

About 100 supporters have signed an online petition asking that Harvard explain its decision to Ms. Campbell, and hundreds of comments on newspaper Web sites — ranging from sympathetic to openly racist — have dissected aspects of Ms. Campbell’s life.

In the meantime, the authorities and Harvard officials have said little publicly, adding to the confusion over the shooting and its aftermath. The attention, Ms. Campbell said, has been painful for her family: About 20 of her relatives had been planning to travel to Cambridge to watch her graduate from Harvard.

Now she is back in Brooklyn, waiting for Harvard to ship her belongings home. In interviews, she responded to some of the whispers, saying she did not deal drugs — “absolutely not,” she said — and did not know Mr. Cosby.

She spoke guardedly of her struggles at the school, including a long history of health problems. She was diagnosed with lupus in high school, and underwent several medical procedures last year, she said.

Her remarks in the wake of the killing, she said, were taken out of context. “I did not say Harvard is racist,” she said. But race and class, she said, affect “how my peers perceive me and how my school has treated me.” It has not all been a struggle: She said she made good friends and found advocates among her professors.

She still plans to return to Italy, where she found a supportive black community of expatriate Americans and Africans.

The image of her Brooklyn neighborhood seems to be a casualty of the shooting, Ms. Campbell said. “<span style="font-weight: bold">I love where I come from,” she said. “I love being ‘from the hood.’</span> ”





yah suh