<p>seriously, it may have to do with the recommendation thing. DS runs a warehouse club, has some 250 employees at any given time. They are not allowed to give a recommendation other than verifying years of employment etc. The guy who gets fired and jailed for major theft gets the same reference as the star employee. I’m sure it is done to eliminate lawsuits as his company tends to be a big target (shoot, even Lucky on King of the Hill got a 30K settlement for slipping on pee in a Costco).</p>
<p>So if an employee threatened another’s life, or got fired for sexual harassment - they can’t say. Criminal record is another thing but that doesn’t come from the employer. Maybe it’s the same with universities like Harvard?</p>
<p>how does this not come up when applying for a job (at UA)? I do think hands are tied as far as giving negative recommendations, I know DS cannot give one for a former employee, but certainly this was common knowledge around Harvard at the time. How does this not come up?</p>
<p>First of all, this was not at UA, this was at UAH…a totally different university.</p>
<p>Harvard awarded this lady a PhD after this odd bomb threat, and obviously after the whole killing the brother incident. Since she was a local girl, Harvard would have had an easier time finding out about the brother issue. Plus, they went ahead and gave her the PhD…were they satisfied that it wasn’t her?. </p>
<p>I imagine that an internet search would not have turned up this info about Dr. Bishop before these recent events since no charges were ever filed.</p>
<p>I don’t think a person has a “criminal record” if they’re never really arrested or found guilty of anything. It sounds like she was never formally arrested with the brother’s death. The booking process was stopped, and the records destroyed.</p>
<p>I wonder that now, in the internet and google age, will it be easier to do informal background checks? Google someone’s name and it may bring up arrests and other info even without convictions. </p>
<p>It may not be valid info to deny employment but it would give the employer/university some inkling of what this person’s past life was. Any info before 1995 or 2000 when newspapers etc. went on line would not be available. Come to think of it, the Boston Globe and New York Times put their entire archives on line.</p>
<p>So what was Bishop doing between 1993 and 2003? That is enough time to do two post-docs and a tenure-track appt. somewhere else that failed to produce tenure. I am suspicious that she just kept getting passed on to someone else. </p>
<p>Last night I asked a prof. who was a long-time dept. chair and is still involved in hiring committees if they do background checks. I wasn’t all that satisfied with the answer, but he did make the point that in this case, the shooter didn’t have a criminal record, not even a formal arrest (at least she wasn’t booked and charged), so nothing in a standard search would have come up.</p>
<p>Perhaps UAH should have been suspicious if she had moved around a lot–can’t say, because I don’t know her professional history. Perhaps former employers and grad. school officials were just glad to sweep her out the door and let someone else have the problem? I am curious to read more.</p>
<p>An Alabama professor accused of shooting six colleagues was a suspect in the attempted mail bombing of a Harvard Medical School professor in December of 1993, the Boston Globe reported.</p>
<p>Thanks to all who have discouraged further discussion of the death penalty and gun control. </p>
<p>I send my condolences to AL34 and my thoughts go to the friend of mom2collegekids for his complete recovery and to the families of the victims. I do feel sorry for the children of Amy Bishop, but I feel even more sorrow for the anguish of the families of those she killed and critically wounded.</p>
<p>Regarding the admission of Amy Bishop to Harvard and her receiving a Ph.D., and then her being hired at UAH, if the death of her brother was ruled accidental, then I do not think a selection committee would have learned of it. Applicants are asked if they have been charged or convicted of a crime–and technically, she was not (we can second-guess this). Even though Braintree is quite close to Cambridge, there is no reason for a selection committee to know what happened there. The death must have happened many years before she applied for the Ph.D. program, members of the committee may have been more recently appointed, and her name is not so unusual as to stick in the mind of people who might have read about that incident years earlier. Universities are not like the FBI or other agencies or companies that conduct background checks on applicants. </p>
<p>“Collegiality” is a criterion considered in promotion reviews, but how much weight is has must vary from place to place. There are plenty of irascible profs, profs who shirk their administrative duties at all universities. Bishop, who was quite productive, must have thought that she deserved tenure, while her colleagues probably dreaded having her around for the rest of their working lives.</p>
<p>Well, someone knew about the brother’s murder based on this in the latest story:</p>
<p>“Bishop surfaced as a suspect because she was allegedly concerned that she was going to receive a negative evaluation from Rosenberg on her doctorate work, the official said. The official said investigators believed she had a motive to target Rosenberg and were concerned that she had a history of violence, given that she had shot her brother to death in 1986.”</p>
<p>I had not read the latest article on the Boston Globe before posting my last post. It sounds even weirder. And yet, it also seems that the police had no proof, otherwise, Bishop would have been charge in 1993. </p>
<p>I am disappointed in Delahunt; I thought he was a great congressman (not my own). I can only hope he truly did not have a role in covering up the brother’s death.</p>
<p>So what was Bishop doing between 1993 and 2003? That is enough time to do two post-docs and a tenure-track appt. somewhere else that failed to produce tenure. I am suspicious that she just kept getting passed on to someone else.</p>
<p>I was wondering that, too.</p>
<p>It’s possible that she “family-tracked” herself for awhile when she was having 4 children.</p>
This doesn’t really answer the question, but perhaps is interesting to note – I’ve seen a few sources list her as an “instructor” at Harvard Med, which is the title given to postdoctoral fellows in HMS-affiliated labs who have been postdocs for >5 years. (As you can imagine, it’s not always a badge of honor.) So there is evidence that she was in at least one postdoctoral position for an extended period of time.</p>