Forget the FBI when college kids will do the job for free. Hell, they’ll even pay tuition to work. By enrolling in investigatory CSI-type courses, students across the country are attempting to make history, thinking that they will be the next Sherlock Holmes or Nancy Drew.

This fall, Georgetown will offer a class dedicated to solving the murder of Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. Taught by Prof. Asra Normani, a friend and colleague of Pearl, the course will tackle the open investigation and pick up where the FBI left off. The students of the “Pearl Project” seem optimistic, but it looks like the task will prove to be difficult—as already shown by this comment on the NY Daily News article:
 
Good luck with this. If they get any[where] near the culprits, they will end up with their heads cut off. You don’t send investigators for this, you send planes loaded with napalm and cluster bombs.

Yikes.

At Bauder College in Atlanta, students studying at the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute are calling themselves the “Campus Crime Club.” They’re in the process of investigating the unsolved cases of Natalee Holloway and Chandra Levy. No big breakthroughs yet; but good effort.

These forensics students may seem overambitious in accomplishing their objectives, but it’s not the first time that amateurs have taken it upon themselves to tackle federal investigations. Take Northwestern, for example: students made death penalty history when they proved the innocence of a death row inmate in 1999. So maybe it all isn’t in vain. Campus Crime Club—assemble!