What bombing incident at Harvard?
I think all classes are canceled this week. I passed by Shelby Center yesterday and it was completely closed off (“police line” tape all the way around).
Actually the whole university is closed today because of the snow. All other buildings are supposed to be open starting tomorrow. Staff/faculty are encouraged to work, but allowed to stay home if they prefer.
It still seems taped off today too. And yeah, all classes are canceled for the week as far as I’ve heard.
My condolences to everyone who’s been affected by this. The shooter definitely sounds like she had mental issues; it’s appalling that she wasn’t arrested for her brother’s murder.
FYI, We got this message from the president:
I thought these extra details were interesting about the incident where she shot her brother:
Before she “accidentally” shot her brother, she shot a hole in her bedroom wall with that gun.
After the shooting, she allegedly ran outside, held two guys at an auto repair shop at gunpoint, and demanded a car. She claimed that her husband and she had argued, and she was afraid he was going to kill her, so she needed to get away.
This was long before she had ever been married—she had no husband when she murdered her younger brother.
This woman is a highly intelligent sociopath—she MAY well be mentally unbalanced, but she is also calculating and coherent, and is perfectly aware of the difference between right and wrong. That said, she has been quite adept in gaming the criminal justice system, but I have a feeling that her days of playing assorted cops, prosecutors and judges for fools are over.
Her “guilty but mentally ill” defense will not fly in Alabama, and I wouldn’t be suprised if she ends up having a date with a needle…
Yeah, I didn’t emphasize that, sorry - that’s the really whacked-out part. Well, more whacked-out than other parts, maybe.
She was, however, dating Anderson at the time.
I’ve been following this story very closely. The strangest detail to me is perhaps the least mentioned. Her most recent paper had as it’s authors Bishop, her husband and their three daughters. I’ve never heard of such a thing and I can’t for the life of me figure out why an elementary school student would be on a neuroscience paper. Even in the bottom-rung journal that it is in, that’s still just mystifying.
… Wow. That’s just mind-boggling.
:eek: Holy fucking shit. That’s bag lady crazy. I suppose word of this never got back to the UAH faculty.
Most faculty appointments, with or without tenure, have “moral turpitude” clauses for this kind of stuff. Not saying they would have fired her for something like this, but that’s beyond fucked up behavior for a college professor.
Here’s a linkfrom The Huntsville Times that shows Bishop’s CV, old police reports, and a picture of Bishop on the cover of The Huntsville R&D Report, which had an article about her invention.
My neighbor works for UAH and knows the staff member that was shot, and knew one of the professors who died. I have heard a little pure gossip from her: the blond woman who was taken into custody briefly on the day of the shooting is Bishop’s lab assistant, a grad student. My neighbor says she spoke with the lab assistant who told her that Bishop gave her a bullet on the morning of the shooting, telling her “Happy Valentine’s Day”. Also, my neighbor (who is very upset) insists that the husband must be involved in this some way, claiming that he appeared on campus not long ago and cleaned some personal stuff out of Bishop’s lab and office.
Here is a very interesting summary of her purported research, with some more discussion of the paper she published with her kids as coauthors.
That, and the probability that you might shoot all your colleagues.
But mainly popularity.
More like “ability to work reasonably well with others”. Professors don’t do all their work alone, or at least in astronomy they generally don’t. They collaborate with others, and they teach students. Someone who can’t do those things can’t do an important part of the job of being a professor.
I would expect this sort of behavior from a professor named Ash. But Bishop? That’s a professor you initially distrust until she proves herself and ultimately earns your begrudging respect. Something was wrong with her programming.
Unless they have a really tiny lab, they also employ technicians and supervise postdocs. I was a biomed research tech for many years, and I have friends who still are. I knew a professor whose career never measured up to his undoubted excellence as a researcher, because his arrogance, unreasonable expectations, and disregard for deadlines and schedules alienated every collaborator he ever had; some ended up never speaking to him again. He’d had tenure for decades and there was nothing to be done (I don’t know if he was so obnoxious when he first got it, but I doubt it).
Someone as volatile and off-putting as Amy Bishop seems to have been really shouldn’t get tenure in the first place. Remember, tenure=can’t be fired; think of the most annoying, useless or downright scary co-worker you ever had, and imagine having that person underfoot forever and ever, world without end, with no recourse. You’d end up praying for them to commit SOME felony, preferably non-violent and off the premises, just so the police will take them away.
Just from my limited experience in academia as a doctoral student, I think many professors see tenure as an all-purpose Asshole License. Many assistant professors I’ve known go from being moderately civil to others to being insufferable after obtaining tenure. This causes department chairs to pull out their hair because there is very little they can do to make sure tenured faculty behave themselves. I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about that.