<p>Its probably not all that surprising.<br>
First, LORs usually are bland instead of negative when the writer is not enthusiastic. LOR writers do not want to state explicit negative comments that could get them sued at later points if the letter was made available (even in a redacted state) to the applicant.
Second, LORs are usually provided by individuals who are friends or supporters of the applicant. These LOR writers from Boston likely thought that helping Dr. Bishop obtain a position at a lower tier university would be advantageous for all involved.
Third, UAH may have been happy to obtain an individual with a doctoral degree from a first tier university. UAH may have taken ho-hum or friendly LORs as indicators that Dr. Bishop was not a star or competitive for a faculty position at a first tier university but probably wouldn’t think that these comments indicated psychological problems! They may even have taken the LORs from non-Harvard sites as indicators of her greater reputation in her field</p>
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<p>Or sometimes not. I can think of quite a few tenured professors at top-tier universities who are, frankly, neither doing much research nor much teaching. Instead, they seem to spend most of their time on their own personal endeavors, such as their own side consulting businesses. </p>
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<p>I’m not entirely sure about that. Frankly, it’s hard for me to see what harm the abolition of tenure would generate. Note that such abolition wouldn’t mean that all of the senior faculty would lose their jobs. Those who continue to be productive would be allowed to remain and would therefore enjoy ‘effective tenure’. We would simply remove the lifetime guarantee that the tenure system provides. </p>
<p>The best argument in favor of tenure - and where I might agree that harm might be engendered if abolished - is that it allows faculty to tackle politically unpopular research topics without fear of repercussions, and for that reason tenure probably did provide social value in the past. But, honestly, how many tenured faculty actually do that nowadays? Tenure may therefore merely be an anachronism. </p>
<p>We should also keep in mind that the tenure system does not actually create overall job security, but rather redistributes job security. The tenure system provides lifetime job security for the senior faculty, but only at the expense of tremendous job insecurity among the junior faculty. Every year, boatloads of assistant or untenured associate professors are ‘fired’ every year because they failed their tenure reviews, despite their work usually being good enough to allow them to remain at the university at the assistant or associate level if that choice had been available. To replace the fired professor, the university then has to hire another junior faculty member, often times newly minted from a PhD program or post-doc, who would then surely have fewer research credentials or teaching experience. </p>
<p>Ultimately, who seems to be hurt the most are the students. In all of my years of schooling, the least experienced teachers I ever had were college professors. All throughout K-12, I can’t recall a single teacher who didn’t have at least 2 years of prior teaching experience. {Granted, K-12 schools obviously do hire new teachers, but I didn’t encounter any, and their ranks are obviously dwarfed by the sheer number of experienced teachers.} But I’ve been taught by numerous college junior faculty who had less than 2 years of prior teaching experience, and in some cases, no prior experience whatsoever. The constant cycling of junior faculty due to the tenure process serves to ensure that many faculty members will have minimal teaching experience. With only rare exceptions, it is usually a painful experience to take a class taught by somebody who has never taught before. </p>
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<p>Let’s just say that I understand the system all too well.</p>
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<p>Well, in fairness, there is no evidence that Amy Bishop’s research was actually ridiculed.</p>
<p>However, I would also advance the example of Stanley Prusiner, whose work on prions was widely ridiculed for decades, and he was initially denied tenure at UCSF (although he did win on appeal), until his work was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1997. </p>
<p>*The response from many researchers to this prion hypothesis went well beyond normal scientific scepticism. Prusiner was ridiculed and vilified. His hypothesis was dismissed as so ridiculous that it wasn’t worth checking out. *</p>
<p>[Mad</a> cow cause is still a mystery](<a href=“http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/sweats52503.cfm]Mad”>http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/sweats52503.cfm)</p>
<p>One can also consider the example of Barbara McClintock, whose discovery of the transposon ‘jumping gene’ was greeted with stony silence followed by vicious mocking, only to be awarded the Nobel Prize decades later as transposons have become a pillar of modern-day genetic science. {It didn’t help that she was a woman and her discovery was first put forth in 1950; her Nobel wasn’t awarded until 1983.} </p>
<p>One can also consider the example of the Wright Brothers’ airplane. After the successful first flights in Kitty Hawk, they returned to Dayton to demonstrate their invention for nearly an entire year in an open field next to a busy railyard, in the wake of utter disbelief and disinterest by both the scientific/engineering community and the media. No serious academics came to view any of their demonstrations, nor did even any of the local Dayton newspapers send a reporter, although they did run op-eds complaining about the piles of letters they were receiving from startled local onlookers who must have ‘clearly’ been cranks concerning the brothers’ flights. Scientific American ran a now infamous article entitled “The Lying Brothers”. The USPTO rejected the brothers first patent application on the grounds that their achievement was ‘scientifically impossible’. The Wright Brothers had to move to Europe to make an impact, where their public demonstrations caused a sensation. </p>
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<p>Sure, but having your obscure work rediscovered years later doesn’t exactly help the junior faculty member who has already been denied tenure and was relegated to a lesser university or perhaps drummed out of academia entirely.</p>
<p>I again restate that compared to many of us with substantial good and bad experience with the academic enterprise, you seem very negative and frustrated. I do hope that venting in this forum is relieving you of some of the very obvious stress that you display in your long postings. I also hope that this is not the only method or forum that you deal with this. I also hope that you are not trapped in a poorly fitting academic situation and have found something more rewarding for yourself.</p>
<p>Ha! One need not worry about me: my ties to academia are tenuous and becoming ever more so. </p>
<p>However, who I really worry for are other people. I can easily walk away. I know many others that cannot, either for family reasons, and/or (frankly) a lack of marketable skills. They feel that they have to continue to play the game whether they like it or not. Nor would they dare to post controversial topics such as this on this discussion board for fear of possibly being found out and having their job prospects damaged, whereas I don’t care.</p>
<p>To return to Amy Bishop, I think the most telling anecdote in the NYTimes article was her demand for a booster seat and her stated sense of entitlement – “I am Dr. Amy Bishop!” She obviously thought that her Harvard degree should earn the respect – and subservience – of all. The denial of her tenure case contradicted something she believed deeply, that she was better than most, if not all, of her colleagues, even though she did not have the research results to back that up. Although I’m not a psychologist, I recognize that kind of thinking as sociopathic, especially when combined with inappropriate rage every time her beliefs were challenged by reality. The university is not at fault. The tenure process isn’t at fault. The system, however, did indeed fail to identify and help such an individual. She should have been evaluated after she shot her brother, regardless of what her parents told police. Even if it had been a true accident, she clearly had some kind of break afterwards.</p>
<p>The possibility that she went to Harvard and therefore might have been doing research at such a high level that no one understood her is unlikely. After all, some extremely bright individuals, many of whom not only received their degrees from the likes of Harvard but who also teach at top programs, have judged her work insufficient for widespread publication. Although it is possible she made some misunderstood or politically risky discovery, it is unlikely. The fact that she kept dismissing or losing graduate students suggests that she may not have made much headway in her research. Ideas don’t warrant tenure; the meticulous support of them and the dissemination (publication) of the results that add to the literature of the field do. Tenure cases are supported not only by university colleagues but also, and, most importantly, by outside evaluations from people at the top of their fields. Usually, those letters, at least in part, must be written by people who have not collaborated with the individual. A well-known individual in the specific research community will get admiring and detailed letters; someone who has not published much or who has not invested herself in the community will get only thin ones. None of us are privvy to the details of her case to know whether she was a borderline case or an easy rejection.</p>
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<p>Now come on, there’s no need to take extraneous shots at Harvard. Nobody actually knows why she might have felt any sense of entitlement, if that was indeed the driving force. Maybe it was her Harvard credentials, maybe it was simply the fact that she had a PhD (regardless of the conferring school), or maybe she had always felt that the world owed her something. It is not ‘obvious’ in the least that her Harvard degree had anything to do with why she felt the way that she did.</p>
<p>I didn’t take a potshot at Harvard. I was referring specifically to Amy Bishop. I don’t know how you came to that conclusion.</p>
<p>I agree, there was no potshot at Harvard. I thought your post was excellent Momwaitingfornew.</p>
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<p>It’s quite elementary from the following quote:</p>
<p>"She obviously thought that her Harvard degree should earn the respect – and subservience – of all. "</p>
<p>Like I said before, there’s nothing ‘obvious’ about that. Maybe she had that attitude regarding her Harvard degree, or maybe she didn’t. Nobody knows. I certainly don’t see any a priori reason to believe it to be so. </p>
<p>Not every Harvard graduate, even those that are mentally unstable, think that their Harvard degree demands respect or even (in your words) subservience. That is indeed a shot at Harvard.</p>
<p>I am Super Moderator Momwaitingfornew! :)</p>
<p>I think it is pretty clear that Amy Bishop was not prepared to be denied tenure. Was she surprised? I don’t know, by the time the decision was handed down she must have known it was going that way. But she found the decision unacceptable and maybe the fact that her degree was from Harvard played into that, who knows.</p>
<p>I think the key to what went so wrong was in an email the police found when they were investigating the mail bomb sent to one of Amy Bishop’s Harvard professors. It alluded to the terrible shooting years before and how being a brilliant academic could somehow atone for what had happened. Without tenure she now couldn’t atone for the terrible incident from her past.</p>
<p>Believing that you’re better than everyone else isn’t socipathic per se. It is sometimes a characteristic of sociopaths but an entitlement complex in and of itself isn’t sociopathic behavior.</p>
<p>I think some of us are forgetting that tenure is based mostly on your productivity and research strength but also your fit with the department. No one wants to grant a lifetime lease to work with someone they can’t stand, especially if they themselves are already tenured and have another 20-30 years or more to work at a university department. Perhaps her instability was partially belied in her personality - the other professors may have disliked her and her research wasn’t outstanding enough to make up for that.</p>
<p>It’s also not a pot shot at Harvard to imply that Amy Bishop may have thought that her PhD should inspire respect and servitude. The same thing could have been said about Columbia or Yale or UA-Huntsville, really, and the meaning wouldn’t have changed. The only reason Harvard was even in there is because that’s the place where she actually got her PhD from. It has nothing to do with Harvard and everything to do with Bishop’s own supposed superiority complex.</p>
<p>I’m with Momwaitingfornew on this one. I guess the conclusion Sakky draws from his quote is not so elementary after all… or maybe I’m just not intelligent enough to understand latin phrases and words longer than five letters. :P</p>
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<p>Not by itself, of course. But now that I have the attention of a psychologist: isn’t uncontrollable rage when confronted with an unexpected obstacle one of the hallmarks of sociopathy? Yeah, yeah, I know that it has to be accompanied by a deficiency of empathy as well as other symptoms. But several people have come forward to describe her volatility when something or someone got in her way or criticized her professionally. </p>
<p>@sakky: her degree could have been from anywhere. Several accounts say that she mentioned her Harvard degree often, every semester, to students and faculty members. How often do students know where their professors attended graduate school? She seems to have lived in her own Harvard bubble. It could have been a Yale bubble or a UCSD bubble or anywhere else, as long as it somehow enforced her idea of superiority.</p>
<p>I hate when professors drop where they got their PhD. Nobody cares.</p>