By John Solomon
How the government's punishing of the exposure of official wrongdoing can linger for years
The vast collection of J.R.R. Tolkien manuscripts initially sold senior Joe Kirchoff on Marquette University, so when the school offered its first course devoted exclusively to the English author, Kirchoff wanted in. The only problem: It was full and he wasn't on the literature track.
Kirchoff said he started reading "The Hobbit" and the "Lord of the Rings" when he was in fourth grade, before the movies came out.
Undaunted, the 22-year-old political science and history major lobbied the English department and others starting last spring and through the summer and "kind of just made myself a problem," he said.
