I’m not one to assess the quality of her pub record - I have no idea what the expectations are in bio. I know in my field there is no “set” prereq for tenure - like needing a book, or 10 pubs, or anything like that. It’s about productivity and impact. So somebody might get tenure because they wrote a kick-ass article and not much else, and someone might not because they wrote 20 articles but nobody ever read them. Being a bit extreme of course, but there you go.
It seems that there were some indicators that she was a little mentally unstable perhaps. And this might explain why a Harvard biologist ended up at Alabama-Huntsville. Schools that could be selective might have something a little off in her package, and Alabama-Huntsville might have fallen in love with her credentials and ignored the troubling stuff.
Popularity, or “collegiality,” as we call it in academia, is actually a justifiable and important part of the tenure process. As anyone who works in the academy knows, once you have tenure nobody can tell you a damn thing. In the hands of a selfish, insane, or arrogant person, it can be quite dangerous and ruin a department. I always take academic exchanges with a grain of salt, but I’ve been fortunate that I’ve dealt mostly with people in the normal range. I have colleagues who have been racially and sexually harassed and so on - and though there are safeguards people still get away with fucked up stuff. So someone who has the potential to be a permanently employed needs to play well with others, too.
This news about the death of her brother makes it even more sketchy. Was this something that others knew about?
I just saw where she told a news crew (as she was being led into jail) who apparently asked her why she did it, that “It didn’t happen. There’s no way” and “They are still alive”.
Is she laying groundwork to set up a mental illness or insanity defense?
I saw the footage of that. It happened as she was being put into the squad car. When asked, “What about the people who died?”, she responded “It never happened. They’re still alive.”
She taught her regular class that day. Thankfully she didn’t start shooting in a lecture hall. This could have been much, much worse.
Maybe I’m out of line here but… shooting? Really? I mean, you’d expect a biologist to use some exotic, untraceable poison, wouldn’t you?
I can’t tell from the articles available whether or not Bishop ended up with a record from shooting her brother. She was certainly an adult, but it sounds like her mom somehow got the charges dropped. Does that mean that if UAH did a backgound check it would come up clean?
Now the University is saying that tenure was denied in April 2009 and the appeal had also been resolved prior to Friday. So, those 2009 pubs definitely didn’t add to her tenure file. That leaves her with one primary and one review article during her time at UAH. I don’t see how she could have expected that to be good enough with UAH’s current push on research.
They also said that, despite the tenure denial, she would have retained about half of the profit from her invention.
http://blog.al.com/breaking/2010/02/amy_bishop_had_been_denied_ten.html
And you wonder why she didn’t get tenure?
I wonder why she was allowed to have a gun. If you are white ,you can get away with one, but 2 steps over the line.
Hi Hippy Hollow. Sorry to jump on you about that one little remark, but it sounds like the tenure committee’s decision was absolutely non-stinky.
She didn’t have a permit for the gun (cite).
There’s no permit requirement to own/possess handguns in Alabama, or, to my knowledge, Huntsville/Madison County. Cite.
The only Pistol Permit info I could locate at the Huntsville PD website is for concealed carry permits.
Not at all. I didn’t know much about this when I posted, but subsequent information suggests that she wasn’t that productive, and Red Stilettos’ link states that the tenure denial was a while back. It also sounds like they were pretty humane post-denial. Still, if you’re a paranoid person, there’s a lot of grist for the psychological mill. Maybe she thought that someone conspired against her, or her colleagues were less than supportive. Tenure track life makes you a little nutty and paranoid by its very nature.
and now add in a bombing incident at harvard. she has quite the pattern emerging.
Just saw that as well—Anyone care to make a friendly little bet (say five bucks will get you ten) that she has an insanity defense pending in her near future???
I find the facts that her brother was an accomplished violinist and scientist intriguing. Perhaps Amy has trouble with those who are more successful than she?
What a tragedy for those killed. I have no doubt she’ll go for insanity defense, but really–is she sane? :dubious:
She’s probably not mentally sound, but to be sane legally only requires the defendant to know the difference between right and wrong.
Not too much to add right now, except that it looks like our classes have been suspended for next week. Mine are, in any case.
My building, the Business Administration building, is a few hundred yards away from the Shelby Center (where the shootings took place), but still I’m glad I wasn’t attending class when all of this went down.
We’re all kinda still in shock here over this.
UAH was my Alma Mater (my B.A. is in Philosophy), so this is kind of surreal for me. I don’t know the biology department that well, but I did handle academic reserves for at least one person listed in critical condition.
And yet, the news brought me a flood of memories about a similar incident at the University of Iowa. Not even memories, really. Feelings. At the time I was a regular on their student-run telnet bulletin board ISCABBS. I logged in from Huntsville. This was nearly 20 years ago, but the internet was a lot smaller back then, and so even though it wasn’t my campus, I saw a community that I had been marginally involved in go through a palpable shock that came across even at 80 by 25 characters of ASCII. Odd, to feel more personally affected by an event older and further away. I heard about Huntsville, I thought about Iowa.
Yeah, this is kind of surreal for us all (I work across the road from the Shelby Center, can see it from my office window), we saw it all unfolding from our offices and was really quite shocking. The building is eerily quiet today. Whether that’s a result of Friday, or because of the snow day, I don’t know.