The good, the bad and the sleazy

It’s a good week for higher education in Columbus. The city’s two most prominent institutions of postsecondary learning have been singled out for honors of which their respective administrations can rightly be proud.

At Columbus Technical College, about 15 percent of the student body has some connection to the armed services — soldiers, veterans, spouses, dependants. For the third consecutive year, Columbus Tech, for the third year in a row, has been designated a Military Friendly School by Victory Media, a veteran-owned Pittsburgh-based business whose website describes the Military Friendly program as recognizing “the top tier of institutions who provide the best opportunities for military service members and their families.”

Columbus Tech has programs for military families not only at its main campus, but also on post at Fort Benning; it offers transferable credits and financial assistance through VA and GI Bill programs.

Columbus State University — which, incidentally, is also listed as a Military Friendly School — has been singled out as well for an individual achievement: recognition of a member of the CSU faculty as the most outstanding undergraduate professor in the state.

Kimberly Shaw, a Columbus State physicist, was accorded the distinction by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, self-described as “an international association of educational institutions.” The first CSU educator to be accorded that distinction, Shaw is an 18-year education veteran.

Kudos to Columbus Tech and CSU for much-deserved recognition.

Grim measures

It’s a tragic concession to a hideous reality. But in the aftermath of the Orlando nightclub massacre — just the latest, and certainly not the last, wholesale slaughter driven by terrorism, bigotry, hate, insanity or just incomprehensible, incoherent rage — Georgia is preparing for the possible necessity of a mass postmortem.

WSB-TV in Atlanta reported that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s chief medical examiner wants to expand the Atlanta morgue to accommodate more victims, speed up the forensics and get more answers more quickly. The grisly irony is that such an expansion can save lives.

According to the report, the morgue currently accommodates up to 50 bodies, and the GBI examiner wants room for 60 more.

Let us hope and pray it is never full.

Mercy? For him?

Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee Olympic athlete who shot his girlfriend to death on Valentine’s Day 2013 in his Pretoria, South Africa, home, made a cheap play for sympathy in his sentencing hearing Wednesday. He removed his prosthetic legs and hobbled before the judge to show how pitifully vulnerable he is, and how great is his need for leniency in his punishment for murder.

It’s a vulnerability he successfully overcame as a champion athlete.

Oscar Pistorius had no mercy when he shot 29-year-old model Reeva Steenkamp … three times. He deserves none now.

This story was originally published June 16, 2016 at 5:13 PM with the headline "The good, the bad and the sleazy."