Not mundane or pointless news, but a biology professor at the University of Alabama-Huntsville has been arrested for shooting 6 people, killing 3. The story from CNN is here. The comments section is saying that the professor is Dr. Amy Bishop of the biology department. Some are saying that she was upset that she was denied tenure and that an invention of hers now belongs to the university.
As far as I know, if that’s the case, I thought that was pretty standard practice for academia. Any patents, inventions, or research done while a faculty member of a university are remitted to the university automatically, regardless of whether the person remains on the faculty in the future. So I think there must be more to her motivation than that.
If anyone has relatives or friends affected by this tragedy, I send my condolences.
ETA: I searched for a thread about this story before I started this one. If there is an existing thread, there’s no need for this one.
Yes, I agree. I can think of only one other case. For the life of me, though, I can’t remember her name. But it was quite a while ago, and if I recall, the woman fired a rifle into a school that was across the street from her house. She gave a very chilling quote to the media that became notorious enough to get the attention of a band, who wrote a song about it. Something like, “I felt like shooting”,but that’s not it.
I know it’s pretty vague, but it just goes to prove your point. Women don’t tend to do stuff like this.
Apparently she was denied tenure and pissed about it. What she did was unforgivable and horrendous, but it speaks to the pressures of the tenure track. It doesn’t sound like she sat on her ass for 7 years. It may even be that she felt some people sabotaged her case for tenure, which does happen.
My heart goes out to the families of the victims and the victims themselves. I can’t imagine anybody throwing an eraser in one of our faculty meetings, let alone resorting to violence. It’s pretty amazing too, because it’s not like the University of Alabama-Huntsville is anywhere near a top-tier institution where you might bust your ass and not get tenure. Some places, it’s just known that they don’t tenure damn near anyone, so you show up, get your name out there, and move on. Without knowing much about this, it sounds like something stinks about the decision of the promotion & tenure committee.
Saw the picture of her being arrested after the shooting. Seriously, who wears jeans and a t-shirt to a tenure hearing? Isn’t that the time to look your best?
Was the tenure hearing today as well? If so, it’s kind of odd that she had the gun ready to go. Or did she leave after the hearing, decide to kill people, grab the gun, and head back for the meeting? I don’t know if there’s any good information out there at this point. But, again, it’s odd that she would make such a big decision–I hate to put it that way–in such a short time.
I also heard that her husband was arrested too. The weirdness continues.
The tenure meeting was in the morning, she taught her regular A&P class in the early afternoon and the department faculty meeting was in the late afternoon. I’ve heard that it was actually a tenure denial appeals meeting, not just tenure. It sounds like she had been fighting the University for a while.
There’s also the issue of her invention. Since she likely worked on it on University time, her contract most likely states that it belongs to the University. If that is the case, they let her spend her time thinking she and her husband were set with this side-business. Then, they deny her tenure and take away her side-business.
This is really stunning to me. It hits way too close to home. I have no idea how UAH is going to get through emotionally or logistically. Three-quarters of their Biology department is dead, in the hospital or in jail.
I’m hoping the University saw the volatility and instability in this woman. I’d be afraid if they gave tenure to her. You don’t want to be permanently attached to someone as wacko as her.
My heart and prayers to out to those affected by the tragedy. I’m still shocked by it.
I am guessing this is the basis of her tenure denial. She had a reasonable publication record (particularly since UAH is primarily a teaching institution), reasonable (not stellar, but reasonable) teaching evaluations on Rate My Professor (now currently being vandalized), received a federal grant from the NIH a year or 2 ago and was active in technology transfer. The only thing left for a tenure denial is lack of collegiality.
On edit - one of the news articles I saw quoted the husband of one of the victims who stated that Bishop seemed unstable and difficult to get along with.
Actually, I think her publication record could have been part of the problem. It really isn’t that good. she published pretty much once a year coming out of her postdoc (which would be assumed to be largely due to the advisor), then nothing until three back-to-back pubs in 2009. There’s a good chance that the 2009 pubs were too late to do her tenure file any good. And some of her previous pubs are reviews which contribute less to the overall quality than do primary articles.
Granted, UAH isn’t Yale or Harvard, but it isn’t Backwoods U. either. She needed to publish more and/or better papers than she did.
Dr. Davis’ husband said that his wife thought Bishop was “not as good as she thought she was”. Her pub record would support that, in my opinion
This what I’ve been told too. The university owns all your thoughts and deeds. If you discover something while working in your own garage, it’s theirs. You can get royalties but I don’t know how much.
Science, especially the biomedical sciences, has been horrible for about 6 years now (in the US). Nearly everyone is struggling. Assistant professors are hit the hardest. Since science is their lives, not just a career, not getting tenure is a real identity crisis (especially if they’re a little older and can’t go to another school). Not excusing this person’s actions, just saying that this kind of thing could easily make an unstable person lose it.
There is a lot of controversy about the relative value of patentable inventions vs. publications in tenure decisions. This case puts that debate into a very personal context. If you are trying to get a patent, you can’t publish the material until the intellectual property rights have been established. So it is possible to see her tenure denial in that light.
