The person doing ASL during the press conferences, Jennifer Alleman, really emotes during the ‘translation.’ Not sure what’s going on with her mouth, though. Sometimes it looks sunken in as though she doesn’t have teeth.
The facial expressions are part of ASL that the signs themselves don’t convey.
There is the classic saying that academic politics is so vicious precisely because so little is at stake.
This case would seem to be the exception that proves that rule. Academic politics that results in murder-then-suicide is anything but small-stakes.
This whole story reminds me of these cases, which were big news when everything was exposed. One has to wonder how this guy got into, let alone stayed in, medical school.
They’re still gathering information. The security would have changed since he was a student at Brown. Camera coverage in 2001 would be sparse. But he had current information.
Link https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/20/us/brown-university-mit-professor-shootings-investigation
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It’s not very difficult to wander around a college campus off and on for 6 months while paying attention to what you see as you walk around seemingly nonchalantly.
It’s called “Casing the joint.”
It doesn’t require “current information”, much less “casing the joint” to anticipate that there are probably cameras all over the place these days, from front door cameras across the street to red light cameras at intersections to security cameras in the target building itself to randos with their cellphones out and take generic precautions like (1) rent a car, (2) swap out the plates on said car, (3) cover your face, and (4) leave the cellphone off or at home (because by now anyone with half a brain knows they can track those things).
Honestly, “casing the joint” for months on end seems like it’s more likely to generate evidence because it significantly increases the exposure time (and leads to rando like some “John” noticing suspicious behavior). It’s not like this crime could only be pulled off between shifts when security guards let their guard down, for instance. There’s only so much “casing” that needs to happen if the goal is simply to go in, shoot up a bunch of unarmed college kids, and make it out without being identified at an unprotected crime scene (eg: where are the exits? When are clases held?). Doing any more than that only unnecessarily increases the risk to the perpetrator.
by opening fire in a building equipped with only two exterior cameras, and with multiple exits and entrances.
This quote is misleading. Remember the shooting took place in the Barus & Holley building, which is where the Department of Physics is located. He chose the building not because of a shortage of security cameras; he chose it because this was the building (or one of them) where his earlier educational/professional disaster started.
That certainly seems likely.
Also, we have no evidence it was a disaster. Just that it wasn’t successful. People who don’t make it in academia are common. My husband is a brilliant mathematician who competed in the international math olympiad for the US and earned a PhD at Princeton, and then his academic career petered out. One of his high school frenemies became one of Harvard’s youngest full professors. His story sounds like this guy’s. Except, you know, my husband pivoted to rearing children and then to web development. He did something constructive instead of killing people.
I’m sure PastTense meant it was a disaster to him (the perp), even if it was a common course of events, like the one you described. Unrealistic expectations may have been to blame.
(BTW, I’m sure your husband is tired of being reminded how his trajectory vis a vis his frenemy resembles that of the Robin Williams and Stellan Sarsgard characters in Good Will Hunting.)
Lotta people with emotional or psych issues fail at work that’s highly social. Such as academia. And their mental problems help them to misattribute the cause of that failure. Some fraction of those failures and misattributions turn to revenge.
Certainly not a new story. Good thing it’s as rare as it is.
Naw, honestly, it’s common enough on his social circles as to be unremarkable.
If “make it” means “find a stable job in your field,” I’d say “the norm” rather than “common.”
I’ve long heard that “washing out in academia”, whatever that may entail, ranks right up there with not marrying that person, or not getting into medical or law school, as an experience that is devastating at the time but most people to whom it occurs are later not sorry, or even outright glad, that this happened.
Well, i know a few who failed to get a tenured position, and a few who succeeded. I think the ones who failed would have liked to, and don’t feel happy about it. But i don’t think they are any less happy than the ones who succeeded. 
And of course, just like most people who don’t marry that person don’t go on to commit mass murder, neither do most people who don’t make it in academia.
Still, it’s a ginormous personal failure at the time. If one is already a wacko, that’s all the motivation needed to start the dive off the deep end.
And if one is not a wacko, it’s time to find your next gig, and to rationalize the non-success of the one just ended. At least that’s what I did the first 5 times my big plans blew up in my face.
It is something of a cruel irony that we tell our society’s most bookish, introverted types “Hey, you know what would be a great job for you? Giving lectures in front of hundreds of people!”
If only the work of academia was solitary library research or solitary field or lab work, followed by writing a solitary paper, and sending it off to a journal for publication. If only.
One of my nephews is a successful academic. Good degrees from prestige schools, hired promptly to a tenure track position at a prestige Uni, etc. He’s destined to go far. He’s certainly better educated than I. But it struck me even from when he was a pre-teen that he probably wasn’t any IQ-smarter than I was at his age. But dayum was he also a whiz at all the interpersonal stuff I sucked at.
Had I tried to emulate him but 30 years earlier I’d have failed somewhere along the process of getting into the high end ultracompetitive MS or PhD programs. I probably wouldn’t have then gone on a shooting rampage, but I’d certainly have resented being weeded out for something that I’d have (mistakenly) believed was irrelevant: getting along with others and being a team player.
This is so true. (But I do agree with LSLGuy’s point about successful research requiring team-player and all-around people skills).
This is the premise of the TV show AP Bio. The main character loses his position at Harvard to his frenemy, is stuck teaching AP Bio in Toledo, Ohio, and spends every class period plotting ways to get even/get his job back with the help of his reluctant students.