This would have to be a statistic of murderers per alumni, or else the oldest large universities would almost sertainly have produced the most students that ended up convicted murderers. Also quite possibly such statistics aren’t kept anywhere, which wouldn’t be surprising but would be a shame.
Probably not the answer you were expecting, but, for starters, Himmler, Mengele, and Hess all had degrees from the University of Munich. Given the importance of Munich in the rise of the Nazis, and the role of personal and social “connections” in one’s rise up the power ladder (with many of such connections formed at university), it’s a good bet that other top Nazis (and SS members) had their academic roots in Munich. But, just my WAG.
No that’s a good thought, Munich University. Though it is difficult to draw the line of which Nazi’s were or were not murderers, and so I put in the requirement of ‘convicted murderers’ . So Himmler ‘escaped’ through commiting suicide before standing trial, I’m not sure how many Nazis actually faced trial for murder or deeds tantamount to murder or worse.
Along that line of thinking, how about West Point?
The question still needs some additional refinement. In the U.S., the state universities of states like Texas, Michigan, Florida, and Louisiana are gigantic with up to 50,000 students in a single location and many more spread throughout the state. That is a huge (dis)advantage compared to the thousands of other schools that have fewer than 10,000 students if someone is just compiling a list.
OTOH, many state schools are relatively young whereas the Ivy League East coast schools and others can have histories stretching back almost 400 years. That is another way to rack up numbers if you want to interpret it that way.
What convicted murderers went to West Point?
Too political for General Questions. Don’t do this again.
samclem GQ moderator
What about the very old established universities: Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? They’d have several hundred years’ head start in producing murderer graduates.
That is why I said (quite poorly) that it needs to be the number of murderers per 100 alumini. Otherwise institutions like UK’s Open University would be very high since they are open enrolement for anyone to join, and require little or no on site learning.
I know my university’s law school has produced at least one. Last week in Evidence Law we went through the transcript of his trial for triple homicide.
I was responding off of KarlGauss’ post, thinking along the lines of war and sanctioned murder, but seeing as Bippy wants to amend the OP to mean convicted murderers (I didn’t notice that at first), then it’s no longer relevant.
Oh, and now I see it was in the OP too, he was just pointing it out again. Fair enough.
A WAG but serious crimes are more likely to be committed by poorer people than wealthier people (and they’re more likely to be convicted as well). So if you actually did the research and tallied up all the college alumni who’ve ever been convicted for murder, you’d probably find that some third-rate community college you’ve never heard of has produced more murders per capita than Harvard or Yale.
Murder is, by definition, unsactioned. Perhaps you mean sanctioned killing.
I wouldn’t credit this fact too much importance. First of all, there were not too many universities in Germany in the first half of the 20 century - the word “university” is more sparsely used in Germany than in many English speaking countries, where it seems to be more of a generic term for institutions of academic education. There are plenty of other terms in German for institutions that would be called a “university” in English. So if you look out for Nazis with a “university degree,” you’re likely to find a considerable proportion of them from Munich. Besides, Munich is, and has been for a long time, one of Germany’s largest schools; in the 1960s, it was considered one of the focuses of the German left-wing student movement. There’s not necessarily any tendency of graduates from Munich to run havoc (yes, I know that the OP didn’t imply that and simply asked for mere facts, but I wanted to point that out).