I’ll be speaking with some college journalists at my alma mater tonight and next week about social media, but I’m also going to offer this pearl of wisdom: Don’t drink – even a sip – if you’re scheduled to see the university president and governor at a football game.

Just ask Daniel Burnett, editor-in-chief of the University of Georgia’s student newspaper. He was asked to leave the president’s box during Saturday night’s game against Georgia Tech and resigned Monday from his post at The Red And Black.

An assistant to Georgia’s president said Burnett’s behavior was “disruptive enough to the point” he was escorted out. Guests in the box included the governor and governor-elect of Georgia.

Burnett, 22, said he had been drinking at a tailgate prior to entering the president’s box. He said he did not think he was being disruptive but university officials also had the right to remove him.

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If you’ve never heard of Andrew Shirvell, I’ll let Anderson Cooper tell you about him in the video below.

(If you’d like Shirvell with a side of snark, check out this Daily Show story from last week.)

Shirvell was fired Monday from his position as an assistant attorney general in Michigan. His lawyer says Shirvell was exercising his First Amendment rights, but Attorney General Mike Cox said Shirvell’s conduct was “unbecoming for a state employee, especially an assistant attorney general.”

“Shirvell repeatedly violated office policies, engaged in borderline stalking behavior and inappropriately used state resources, our investigation showed,” Cox said, according to the Detroit Free Press.

Philip Thomas, Shirvell’s lawyer, said Shirvell has received excellent performance reviews and said the firing “smelled political.”

“There’s been a tremendous piling on against Andrew,” Thomas told the Free Press. “The liberal media started this tempest in a teapot.”

Sounds like this kettle might be boiling for the foreseeable future.

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Earlier this year we wrote about the upcoming nuptials of the Kunkel girls, three sisters who were sharing a wedding day. Well, that special day is Saturday in Wisconsin. And now their story has been picked up by the national media. The women and their soon-to-be husbands appeared Thursday morning on the CBS Early Show.

Full disclosure: I know Katie from our days at the University of Maryland; her dad, Tom, is the president of St. Norbert College in Wisconsin and the former dean of Maryland’s journalism school. (Her dad has also kept a blog leading up to the big day.)

Congratulations to the entire Kunkel family.

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Jay Perman, the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s new president, has no problem being known as a nice guy. His annual commencement speech while dean at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine was even about the importance of doctors being nice to patients.

But Perman told reporters and editors at The Daily Record last week that what surprises him are people who view nice as a liability. He recalled early in his career a colleague at the University of California, San Francisco, said Perman “would never make it” because of his niceness.

“So ha-ha,” Perman said dryly. “I’m here to say that’s not true.”

Perman describes himself as nice by nature but also in a pragmatic way.

“When you’re nice, it becomes that much easier to demand of those who are not nice that they shape up or get out,” he said. “That’s why it’s been so effective for me.”

That Perman is a pediatrician has also helped him as an administrator. (You can insert your own joke here about what caring for children and overseeing a faculty have in common.)

“I think if there’s a case for a leader being nice, that sort of self-selection goes into choosing pediatrics,” he said. ‘There are no harsher critics of nasty adults than children. They will not have it.”

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The Maryland Terrapins’ women’s lacrosse team won the national championship Memorial Day weekend, beating Northwestern University 13-11. The victory clinched the Terps’ record 10th title and broke the Wildcats’ five-year run as champions.

Now, I can’t say I’m a big fan of women’s lacrosse. But I am a proud Maryland alum, and I’ll always pull for the sports teams.

So I was surprised when I read earlier this week that Northwestern had sent a “letter of inquiry” to the NCAA alleging official shenanigans (literally) aided Maryland’s victory. Northwestern claims that a veteran referee, Pat Dillon, talked with the championship game officiating crew prior to the final. The problem, according to NU, is that Dillon’s longtime partner, Sandy Worth, is Maryland’s head athletic trainer.

According to the NCAA, Dillon mentioned her Maryland connections on a disclosure form, which means she cannot work any Terps games.

But Dillon, a Hall of Fame referee, was part of the crew that officiated Northwestern’s victory in the semifinals, an assignment NU had unsuccessfully asked the NCAA to remove her from.

My first reaction was two words: Sore. Losers. But then I imagined the shoe on the other paw, so to speak: if Dillion was in a relationship with someone connected to the Northwestern team, I imagine Maryland’s athletic department would be just as upset.

While I doubt a Hall of Fame referee would try to unduly influence her colleagues moments before the biggest game of the year, as NU alleges, it seems the general point about conflict of interest merits further investigation.

I guess that’s a question that will have to be addressed for next season – when the Terps will be defending their championship.

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Happy Monday! Here are some law blog posts for you to digest before you head downy ocean for the MSBA annual meeting:

• Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez has been teaching political science at Texas Tech University and peddling an autobiography, but he hasn’t been able to get a publisher to bite. “Given all the decisions that I was a part of, the decisions I witnessed, and the decisions I made, I think it will be something that will be of interest and I hope it will be a useful contribution to the historic record of the Bush legacy,” Gonzales tells Main Justice. Gonzalez is hoping book sales might generate some cash to cover his legal bills, which are extensive given the ongoing investigation into the attorney general firings that happened during his term. Would you plop down $25 for the hardcover?
• Our sister blog, DC Dicta, aggregates the latest commentary and analysis on the Kagan papers, the 46,000 pages of documents released Friday covering Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s work in the Clinton administration. Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions tells Reuters he’s already spotted “a leftist philosophy and an approach to the law that seems more concerned with achieving a desired social result than fairly following the Constitution.” Should make for an interesting Senate confirmation hearing, which is scheduled to start June 28.
• Not only do Wall Street bankers make scads of money, they’re also too attractive? (Hat Tip: Dealbreaker)
• The Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) wants law schools to quit giving LSAT scores to U.S. News, which publishes highly influential annual college rankings. SALT believes the pressure to nab students with high test scores is undercutting efforts to admit diverse classes. Above the Law has its own take: “You gotta love it when a bunch of law professors get in a room and collectively decide that silence is what prospective law students are really looking for these days.”

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Tania Arrya has no direct knowledge of the relationship between George Huguely and Yeardley Love, which irrevocably ended with Love’s death at her University of Virginia apartment and Huguely charged with killing her.

But the story and its emerging details sound familiar to Arrya, manager of the Teen Dating Violence Prevention Initiative at the House of Ruth.

“Everyone is at risk to end up in an abusive relationship,” she said Tuesday. “It doesn’t matter what your background is.”

The House of Ruth initiative teaches teens to identify qualities in healthy and unhealthy relationships, and how to be supportive of a victim or deal with a perpetrator of abuse. Teens can’t recognize warning signs unless they know what to look for, Arrya said.

What might start as verbal abuse or physical intimidation can escalate when those tactics stop working, Arrya said Tuesday. For example, Huguely might have removed Love’s computer because it contained evidence of previous threats he made against her, she said.

Arrya also suspects Love’s friends knew about the abuse but maybe not its extent, which might have been partly due to Love’s hiding it.

“You’re far away from home on a college campus and determined to be independent,” Arrya said. “Help might be available, but reaching out for help might be difficult in this age group.”

The sad irony, she pointed out, is that asking for help is the mature thing to do.

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(Note: The headline is the first of several bee references I plan to pollinate throughout this blog post. You’ve been warned.)

The University of Baltimore reintroduced its Bee mascot on campus Thursday. The Bee has been part of UB since 1937, but was largely extinct from campus for 30 years. It was more of a reflection of the campus demographics (a lot of part-time, adult students who commuted) than any allergic reaction to a mascot.

“I don’t think there was much of a push because people didn’t care,” said Susan Luchey, director of the Center for Student Involvement.

That changed in recent years with the re-introduction of undergraduate classes. The newest freshmen had been bugging the administration about a mascot, drawing bees in the school newspaper and even giving it a Facebook page.

“They’re looking for an identity in their school, and a mascot is one of those ways,” Luchey said. “Students are excited, but they’re almost embarrassed to say they’re excited.”

Spencer Mierzejewski, a first-year law student, is not one of those students. Mierzejewski got stung by mascot fever after he heard a UB alum utter the phrase “Super Bees.” Having never heard the phrase and shocked the school even had a mascot, he decided to find out more and wrote about spotting bees all over campus on UB’s official blog.

“It’s nice to have something recognizable that stands for the University of Baltimore,” he said.

Mierzejewski said he’d like to see the Bee land in a moot court session. Luchey said the Bee will be at many university functions, from open houses to orientations to graduations. Alumni have already inquired about the Bee making an appearance at their events, Luchey added.

“It’s another notch in the belt of UB becoming a traditional campus,” she said.

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A beaming Sen. Lisa A. Gladden took her seat in the Senate chamber this morning. The source of the Baltimore Democrat’s delight became apparent about one hour into the session.

Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., D-Calvert and Prince George’s, urged the lawmakers to take notice of “the vice chair” of the Judicial Proceedings Committee. Gladden revealed that under her dark-blue suit jacket she was wearing a light-blue shirt emblazoned with the name of her undergraduate alma mater: Duke University.

Yes, that Duke University — the school which defeated Butler University 61-59 last night to win the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship. And the school dubbed “The Evil Empire” in College Park and environs for its heated rivalry with the University of Maryland in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

“I don’t have anything to say today because I think everybody knows,” Gladden told her colleagues. “I don’t want to gloat. It was a great game and a great victory for the ACC.”

But Sen. James N. Robey, a University of Maryland alumnus, declined to let Gladden off so easy.

“Can you name one player on the Duke team?” Robey, a Howard County Democrat, asked in an effort to put Gladden on the spot.

Gladden was silent for about, er, one shining moment before responding, “Johnny Dawkins.”

Dawkins played for Duke but not last night. He was the team’s starting point guard in the mid-1980s — when Gladden was also a student at the Durham, N.C., school.

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During my days in College Park, I accumulated a pile of free Terps T-shirts that I would wear to football and basketball games. Some may have been a little big, and roughly 5,000 other students would be wearing the exact same shirt, but hey, they were free.

I say this because we all probably did something similarly resourceful while in school to save a few bucks. Two recent stories about law school students have reinforced my point.

First is Julia Neyman, a student at Columbia Law School. Neyman has a blog, the cleverly-titled “Buns of Steal,” in which she chronicles her attempt to work out at health clubs in New York City for an entire year without paying once.

Neyman found gym memberships too expensive upon moving to New York to start law school but soon noticed gyms around the city gave out free passes and coupons. Enter her blog and her goal.

“Most people aren’t cheap enough to do this for a whole year,” she told The New York Daily News. “But I am.”

Next is University of Baltimore School of Law student Burke Miller, who posted an ad on Craigslist seeking tickets to Wednesday night’s Duke-Maryland basketball game in exchange for providing a certain number of billable hours to the seller upon passing the bar.

Miller told The Baltimore Sun one ticket seller contacted him but declined the offer.

“I’m still hopeful,” he said. “I’d sit down with [a seller] and make a contract and look at the standard billable rate for a young attorney. I’ve got full faith that I’d be a good attorney.”

I wish them both the best. (Incidentally, I’d be willing to part with some of my Terps T-shirts for a ticket to the game.)

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