Tod W. Burke likes to use examples from current events to illustrate points in his courses. On Thursday, the criminal justice professor at Radford University discussed with students the arrest of a Tennessee teacher who has been charged with the attempted murder, in school, of his principal and assistant principal.
It was “only a matter of time,” he told his students, until a shooting at a college would involve a professor as shooter, not victim.
Burke, who was a police officer before becoming an academic and who writes about workplace violence, said his sadly prescient point wasn’t that professors are more likely than others to be killers ”” he doesn’t believe that to be the case. But he said the issues associated with workplace violence can’t be ruled out in an academic environment. “We tend to forget as college professors that we are in a workplace, even if our institutions are very different from an assembly line or another kind of business,” he said.
That take on the shooting of three biology professors at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, apparently by Amy Bishop, another faculty member, is similar to those of a number of experts on campus security and workplace violence.
This was an odd article.
RE: “They stressed that there is no epidemic of such incidents on campuses, and generally dismissed the idea that the shootings could be blamed on a recent tenure denial.”
Good grief — then why, since this was her final year teaching at the college upon being denied tenure, would she take a gun with her to a faculty meeting and shoot her peers and colleagues?
RE: “Burke, of Radford, said that workplace killers tend to “feel they were denied a promotion or some benefit they thought they deserved,” and feel that this loss is going to have a huge negative impact on their lives, and that some person or persons mistreated them. While that may sound like those denied tenure, Burke said that in almost all of these cases (and perhaps in the Bishop case, considering the news that she killed her brother), there are underlying mental health issues as well.”
Isn’t this sort of a “duh” statement? In the midst of an article denying that a tenure-denial was a trigger for a professor going on a homicidal rampage amongst those who denied her tenure, we have an article claiming that there were “underlying mental health issues.”
All murderers have, in a sense, “underlying mental health issues.” It takes a lot to kill someone in cold blood, with malice aforethought.
But this article seems to be implying that one cannot point to motive, only “mental health issues” for murders.
Agreed Sarah.
On a related note, the whole question of tenure seems odd in this day and age. There’s now a growing underclass of adjunct professors (many of whom have taught for years and are really good – I’ve met some) whom colleges and universities cheerfully pay peanuts (even as they charge their students top-of-the-line prices), and an elite “tenure-track” group, many of whom have ended up there by a fortunate conjunction of circumstances.
Perhaps colleges should start thinking in terms of better protections for those who actually do the teaching (bare-bones health insurance for part-timers and less ability to repeatedly hire teachers at three-quarter time and yet continually to insist that they are part-time). It’s interesting that if one were to hire a temporary administrator, you couldn’t get away with paying what colleges do with abandon when it comes to their teaching staff. And yet the “savings” are never passed on to the student consumer.
The irony of the recent tragedy is that the professor in question would have been able to live comfortably – and productively – regardless of whether or not she received tenure.
“The irony of the recent tragedy is that the professor in question would have been able to live comfortably – and productively – regardless of whether or not she received tenure. ”
She would not have starved. However she was denied tenure despite the fact that she produced a multimillion dollar invention (replacing the petri dish) for the UofA. When one leaves the university, the university keeps your intellectual capital. It is not likely she would have gotten another university position in a recession in Biology. She might have been able to teach high school or something.
Having said that the woman does seem to have significant violence issues. The brother’s shooting, which was followed by her running out into the street and trying to hold up a car. Her mentor’s pipe bomb. Now this, which apparently took place after she went to a gun range and practiced.
So, yes, she was robbed. It is pretty common practice for universities to rob their nontenured faculty, and it was done legally. The whole tenure thing is a ponzi scheme. We produce too many phDs, because universities like free labor. The folks on her tenure committee are thieves, and so is her provost. However that does not justify murder. Bishop is not an innocent victim, nor did she “just snap”. This appears to be premedidated homicide in a person who has killed or tried to kill previously.
http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/posted/archive/2010/02/16/survivors-recount-amy-bishop-shooting-more-details-emerge-of-professor-s-past.aspx
Actually the more I read about her the more scary and murderous she appears.
Clueless, my understanding is that the invention was a part of a separate research non-profit and that she would have maintained her position there — that the tenure had nothing to do with her work in that non-profit. Are you reading differently somewhere?
All universities require that their tenure track faculty give the rights to any inventions and other intellectual capital to the university. This is pretty standard, and the only recourse would be to sue the university who obviously is much better positioned to withstand a lawsuit than is an individual. I have read nothing to suggest that the UoA permitted Bishop to keep her intellectual capital – it would be unheard of. Nor would it need to. There is a hoard of unemployed pHDs out there. The person who was number 2 for last years Nobel is currently I’m told working at a car dealership, having lost his grant, and with it his position at a university.
In point of fact, the whole tenure system is heavily flawed, and I have always felt sorry for the phDs stuck in it. Every university produces an average of 4 phDs in biology a year, yet there is less than one new job produced in the field yearly (and even fewer since the beginning of the recession).
We hear a lot about how America needs to get more “competitive in math and science”. That is true. However the answer is not more biology, chemistry, physics or math phDs, we already have too many, and they are waiting tables, just like the folks who did their pHDs in music or English literature. What we need to become competive is to break the stranglehold of universities and lawyers on intellectual capital. We need less regulation, and fewer lawsuits.
It should be possible for a bunch of pHDs to get together and set up their own university and get it accredited without having to spend 20 million dollars in lawyers, and bureacrats to jump through the hoops. Right now it is impossible to start up a new university without having a huge research lab, and library and a bunch of flunkys to ensure that you are not violating any EEOC laws etc.
In India, 10 pHDs (English Lit, Math, Biology, Chemstry, Foreign languages, Physics, Fine arts, Philosophy etc) could get together and set up their own school, offering intensive small classes, tutoring and preparation for national exams.
If they charged a two thousand a semester per person, they could pay themselves 30 thousand even if they had less than 250 students. And they would enjoy doing so, and the students would have a great education with a lot of personalized input, and would be able to pay the full 4,000/year with a summer/afterschool job and not have huge student loans.
But it is not possible to do this in america because the government is in bed with the universities and the banks and prefers that students graduate 100,000 in debt and then be unable to find a job in their field. The universities prefer to keep their monopolies that allow bureacrats cushy jobs, and the bankers like to have a hoard of debt slaves with the government to ensure that those debts can never be cancelled in bancruptcy.
But none of this justifies murder.
It appears that the company on which she sat as a board member owned the intellectual property — here is the relevant section from the NY Times article:
[blockquote] Dr. Bishop may have had academic problems, but her business prospects seemed bright. She had developed a new approach to treating Lou Gehrig’s disease, which a company was in the process of licensing for development. And she and her husband, a computer engineer with a biology degree, had invented an automated system for incubating cells that investors said would be a vast improvement over the petri dish. The system is to be marketed by Prodigy Biosystems, which raised $1.2 million in capital financing.
“From the way it looked to us, looking from the outside, she’s had success,†said Krishnan Chittur, a chemical engineering professor. “I’ve been here longer than she has, and she’s had more success raising money than I’ve had.â€
The tenure decision would not have affected Dr. Bishop’s standing at Prodigy, where she sits on the board, but it would have lowered her status among her peers and deprived her of a laboratory and institutional support for further research, Mr. Reeves said, adding that she had already begun to look for another job.[/blockquote]
This kind of corporate startup is also common here in the Upstate of SC, where professors are going into business right left and center with their inventions.