a first?

After the BIZARRE EVENT IN HUNTSVILLE, I’ve been searching my memory banks for any other faculty-on-faculty mass shooting, and can’t recall any others.

One of the first and only mass shootings of professors by a graduate student occurred in my own hometown, IOWA CITY, IN 1991. (I was living in Chicago at the time.) But I think faculty-on-faculty is a new one.

I’ve seen a few ugly faculty disputes, but never anything reaching the level of genuine threats, let alone actual death. However, I do know someone who says that during graduate school, the police were called to break up a nasty fight at a Department meeting.

Obviously I don’t know the whole story, but several things make this strange…

*Amy Bishop had just finished teaching her normal class, then went into the Department meeting, sat quietly for 30 or 40 minutes, and then took a gun out and started shooting her colleagues.

*All right, she was denied tenure. But she and her husband were also sitting on what looked like a potentially very lucrative patent. I would have laughed and walked away.

*She had accidentally killed her brother with a gun in 1986. And it does sound like a real accident.

Weird, weird.

If a few more of these were to happen, I wonder if it would affect hiring in some way… In the sense of, “no one who comes off as a bit strange in interviews will be hired during this search.” Academia has always been a refuge for unusual personalities, but if there were, say, 5 more of these incidents in a short span of time, I wonder if that could change.