<p>Three people killed today in a shooting at the Univ. of Alabama in Huntsville. No word if they are students, but the shooting was on campus. My local news is reporting they have a female in custody. </p>
<p>Prayers to all those in the University of Alabama family.</p>
<p>Not students. Our news is saying it was a woman who was p*ssed she didn’t get tenure, so she shot people on the tenure committee.</p>
<p>Reasonable reaction. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Guess she won’t get tenure anywhere, now.</p>
<p>Also heard it had something to do with a faculty meeting. My god friend’s s is a freshman there. He happened to be on his way home (in the snow!) for the weekend sow as already off campus when the shooting occurred.</p>
<p>Here’s an article:</p>
<p>[Campus</a> Shooting: UAHuntsville On Lockdown; Four People Reportedly Shot at UAHuntsville’s Shelby Center - latimes.com](<a href=“http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/whnt-shooting-uahuntsville-021210,0,1338502.story]Campus”>http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/whnt-shooting-uahuntsville-021210,0,1338502.story)</p>
<p>It is surprising when college students kill people, but it is even more surprising when faculty do so. I don’t think there is any place in America that is safe from violence.</p>
<p>The shooter is reported to be Dr. Amy Bishop, a Harvard-trained biologist. Her husband opened the door for her; both have been arrested. Besides the three dead people, all members of the Biology Dept, there are several wounded, including one critically.
Dr. Bishop had learned yesterday that she would not be granted tenure.</p>
<p>This is all very sad. My thoughts are with the victims and their families.</p>
<p>I am so dumbfounded by her actions. Her huge over-reaction. Unbelievable. I can’t get my mind around this at all.</p>
<p>I know nothing about this person, but I would be willing to guess that she had shown signs of instability and that contributed to the negative vote by the department. Then, she proved them right.</p>
<p>All across the country, right now, faculties are voting on tenure decisions. How would you like to be the department chair who has to call in assistant profs next week and tell them the vote went badly?</p>
<p>We have no way of knowing if there was more to this or not. The tenure deny may have been the final straw that pushed her over the edge. She may have had other longstanding differences with the department over her work and the the rights to it. She may have been very ill. There is so much we don’t know.
My heart goes out to all the victims and their families. The whole community must be in shock.</p>
<p>[Professor</a> Is Held After Three Are Killed in Alabama - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/us/13alabama.html?]Professor”>http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/us/13alabama.html?)</p>
<p>Shocking.</p>
<p>I work as a lab assistant in the Biology department, and my boss is the lab manager. She’s been saying that some professors are unreasonably impatient – but I think this takes the cake.</p>
<p>Well she doesn’t need to worry about getting tenure now –</p>
<p>UA-Huntsville. This is terrible.</p>
<p>That’s a hell of a way to say “Screw you, I quit.”</p>
<p>She was not quitting. She was being fired (not granted tenure).
It seems that she was an excellent researcher but a poor teacher and already displayed some difficult behavior.</p>
<p>Her Rate my Professor reviews are ok. It seems some articles I read this morning mention she and her husband felt the school was attempting to “steal” some idea they developed.</p>
<p>There are 2 threads on this topic. They should be merged.</p>
<p>The thread in the parents forum should be merged with this one.</p>
<p>Having lived through a negative tenure vote (as well as a positive one!) I know the stress and anguish it can cause. In DW’s case there were bi-annual reviews for junior faculty, plus a printed set of university-wide guidelines to assure “fairness” in the process. Whatever. The decision is very political regardless, and it’s always painful when two decades of work are reduced to whatever political situation exists when the vote is taken. That said, there is no excuse for executing colleagues.</p>
<p>Stress and anguish and set-backs are part of the human experience and certainly tenure reviews are fraught with all sorts of difficulties.</p>
<p>I am pretty sure that the decision to execute colleagues is an indication of severe personality disorder or other obvious distorted thinking and mental illness factors that would have made this person someone colleagues realized needed to go long ago. </p>
<p>Sometimes people aren’t sure that the “constantly offended” person is nuts but at some point you have to go on your gut instincts. </p>
<p>Some people can’t handle anything that feels like a narcissistic blow…just thinking about the young man at Yale who was on the surface “successful” in high school but who was in fact a cauldron of inflated narcissistic injury. He has pled not guilty and granted we don’t know the facts yet and may never know them, but he reportedly felt wounded and irrationally “put down” by a graduate student who was not keeping his animal cage area up to “his standards”. </p>
<p>The poor girl may have been a bit afraid of him and realized he was unhappy with her work, but felt she could handle it and that she could reason with him. </p>
<p>It is pretty hard to predict a rage episode like this minus a history of violence.</p>