When most of the media was off on wild goose chases while the lacrosse case was in a slow-motion collapse, the Chronicle's Kristin Butler was embarrassing people three times her age with one perceptive column after another. Her article on Crystal Mangum's graduation is another plum for her and another embarrassment for members of the local and national media who, again, were outperformed by a college student.
When we heard about this column, we immediately went to look up NCCU's honor code, and the first story we saw was the column by Butler, where she explained that the honor code fairly specifically mentions "knowingly making in public a false [oral or] written or printed statement with the intent to deceive and/or mislead or injure the character or reputation of another."
First lesson: NCCU doesn't care about their honor code because they don't take it at all seriously.
Second lesson: the university has no sense of irony or idiocy. Why do we say this? Based on Mangum's degree: the woman who lied to police, who manipulated the investigation, who used the false accusation to score some good narcotics, earned her degree in - wait for it - police psychology.
Keep in mind that this is the woman who was said to be in an extremely fragile emotional state, who was too shattered to see her children, who hid from her family, who couldn't go to class because of her "ordeal."
Police psychology? If it includes conning cops, she's at the top of her class.