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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201d\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n