8 ms·

At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly

44 points by rglovejoy 17y ago

mnemonicsloth 17y ago
When a postal worker goes postal, it's going postal. When a PhD from Harvard -- the first detail mentioned, note -- goes postal, they are suffering in an academic pressure cooker. Dumbly applying the nearest pop-psych explanation to hand to explain the inexplicable only makes it more difficult to show respect for the victims and sympathy for the grieving.
- chancho 17y ago
  "Dumbly applying the nearest pop-psych explanation..." If describing this tragedy as "someone going postal" isn't dumbly applying pop-psych, then I don't know what is.
  - mnemonicsloth 17y ago
    "At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly," tells a simple little story. She was under great emotional stress, lost her bid for tenure, and snapped under the strain. "Going postal" is comparatively mum. It's a hybrid of "Going crazy" and "disgruntled postal worker," and suggests only that we think the perpetrator is not sane -- that we can't understand why they would do that. Where is the pop psychology?
- timr 17y ago
  "Going postal" is hardly a tactful way of describing that situation. I don't think it's pop psychology to acknowledge that a small percentage of people in extremely stressful situations lose control, and end up doing awful things. It's impossible to have sincere sympathy and respect without a healthy dose of empathy. And to have empathy, you have to be able to acknowledge truths about situations that may not be politically correct. We don't know if this woman lost control because of mental illness, or stress in her personal life, or simply because her superiors were assholes. But if it's the latter, I'd rather hear a discussion about the ugly realities of academic life, than another cliché conversation demanding "respect and sympathy" from total strangers.
  - narag 17y ago
    ...or simply because her superiors were assholes Really? I've had some of this kind, and even when I was in a very stressful personal situation, I've never even thought of resorting to any kind of violence, even less shooting anyone. These cases seem to be caused by mental illness. I agree with the person you're answering to that trying to "explain" a shooting this way is plainly wrong.
    - timr 17y ago
      Regardless of what you've personally experienced, I would imagine that everyone has a limit, beyond which they lose control of their emotions. It happens. The question of whether this is called "mental illness" is open for debate. As far as I'm concerned, it's an academic question, unless the distinction can somehow lead to prevention of the act.
- physcab 17y ago
  I don't think the author was applying an explanation either dumbly or trying to reduce its significance. I think it is part of our human nature to try and contain a tragedy by labeling or attributing some cause to it. I'm not a therapist, but I sincerely believe this human trait persists in many people as a coping mechanism. That's why it makes sense (even as an academic myself) in some weird, comforting way.
  - flatline 17y ago
    Exactly - for columbine, it was the video games and music, which is much more of a non-sequitur than working in the high pressure environments of academia and biotech startups. This did read like more of a human interest story though.
  - joe_the_user 17y ago
    I think it is part of our human nature to try and contain a tragedy by labeling or attributing some cause to it. Are you implying that tragedies have no cause. It seems like human to try understand tragedies as they are significant part of our human world. Moreover, tragedies usually do have causes. Claiming that there is no cause to an event may serve some psychological purpose...
    - nostrademons 17y ago
      Tragedies usually have so many causes that it's impossible to point out a single cause in a 3-paragraph comment and have it mean anything. Usually, if you do a root cause analysis of anything, you come up with so many contributing factors that the resulting document is hundreds of pages long. Think of industrial postmortems or court proceedings. Everything is more complicated than it seems at first. Saying "This was because she was denied tenure" does a disservice to everyone involved. It was probably partly because she was denied tenure. It was probably partly also because she had easy access to guns, and she was super focused on her research, and she didn't get along with the school administration, and she had once accidentally killed her brother, and plenty of other factors that we could never know about.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  Hey, you could combine the abusive terminology and talk about "postal-track professors". But the need to "help the victims grieve" by labeling every killing "inexplicable" and so casting maximal moral unction on the killer is also just a variety of pop-psychology. However, this doesn't seem to be an "inexplicable" event. There's probably no single, easy explanation but there seem to be a variety of causal factors we can trace. "People with a history of violent behavior don't do well in situations of all-or-nothing achievement".
  - mnemonicsloth 17y ago
    "help the victims grieve"... maximal moral unction... When an event like this touches your life, very few stimuli from outside your own personal bubble of pain and confusion have any chance of registering with you [1]. But having the national paper of record print headlines half-excusing your friend or family member's killer [2] because she's the right kind of people would definitely do it. [1] Some people express surprise that there are other people "out there," still going about their lives as if nothing had happened. [2] allegedly.
    - joe_the_user 17y ago
      What does "half-excusing" mean? Or... In what way was does describing the factors influencing a person's behavior excuse it?
      - narag 17y ago
        In a pressure cooker the vapour has not many options: going through the security valve or making the cooker to explode. I don't think that's an accurate "description of factors", unless you take into account the killer is crazy, in which case the most important factor is precisely that.
anamax 17y ago
See http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=392617&page=1 http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=392617&#...
maxharris 17y ago
What Dr. Bishop did was unjustified, no matter what other facts we may find (excepting force initiated by the victims); justice requires her death. (Because this penalty is irrevocable, and all possible legal systems are fallible, the closest we can get to this ideal is life imprisonment.) Having said that, look at how the system worked. These guys were stringing her along for six years (or so?), while maintaining the illusion that her activities (against university initiatives and attitudes) would have no impact on her career. Obviously her against-the-grain attitudes had a great deal to do with the way they treated her. What's the best way to prevent a similar tragedy from occurring? The only way is to take the pressure off by eliminating tenure completely. That way, there's no insane buildup of emotion on either side. In a properly functioning organization, people that don't work out (for whatever reason, including personality conflicts) should be informed of the situation as early as is possible, which takes what, about a year? Existing faculty could be offered buyouts (which, of course, would have to be lucrative enough to be accepted), and you're at a nice clean slate.
- neurotech1 17y ago
  I would suspect Dr Bishop has a personality disorder, such as Borderline Personality Disorder. I find it interesting that they have a 6 year rule, when the average is around 10 years to get tenure. I think that people missed warning signs, that she was feeling stress, and that there is a stigma against seeking help, and people often deny they have a problem. I agree with most of your comments, except the bit about "requires her death". She was possibly suffering major depression at the time of the incident, and other mental health issues.
  - maxharris 17y ago
    How do you "recover" from something like this? If I had done something like what she did, and I had full memory of it, I would attempt suicide - not out of some perverse sense of duty, but as a way to escape. (I believe that the soul dies with the body, and that supernatural events are categorically impossible. So when I say "escape", I mean a completely different thing than a religious person would mean.)
houseabsolute 17y ago
I find it veeery interesting that she "accidentally" killed her brother when she was twenty. Casts some doubt on that situation too.
- maxharris 17y ago
  Wrong conclusion. I think that she must have been emotionally scarred by the accident. Did the accident make it easier for her to kill those faculty members yesterday? That's really hard to say. Would it be easier for the former first lady to murder someone because of the deadly car accident she was involved in? I'm inclined to say no.
  - julius_geezer 17y ago
    The Braintree police don't seem to think that it was an accident. To be sure, they seem to be operating on "oral history".
    - hga 17y ago
      Not much choice when all the official records are "missing" except for one recording it as an accident. If the reports that 3 rounds were fired are correct, that's some "accident".
  - houseabsolute 17y ago
    I've seen no more evidence for your guess than I have for mine.
- niels_olson 17y ago
  Sounds like the circumstances of that case are more like people not having adequate respect for firearms. In fact, having killed her brother in a firearms accident, I can easily see her spending the rest of her life as a desperate overachiever, and feeling unable to take credit for her success because she "owed" it to her brother. Imagine the depression and motivation that would induce. Finally, having hit such a dramatic obstacle, her previous experience with death would lower her visceral revulsion to the idea of further death. The effects of repetitive exposure to death are well studied in soldiers and healthcare workers.
amichail 17y ago
Why did she care about tenure? She could have just focused exclusively on the startup, making it more likely to succeed.
- ams6110 17y ago
  Perhaps she had received information or suspected that she was going to be left out of that as well.
- rewind 17y ago
  Just because you're successful in one area doesn't necessarily mean you should stop caring about your goals in another area. Most PhDs care about tenure. Academic and entrepreneurial goals are not necessarily compatible.
- nostrademons 17y ago
  Remember that not all people have the same goals as HN readers. We self-select for people whose goal is to found a successful startup. For many other people, their goal in life might be to be a good parent, or to be a professional sports player, or to be a tenured professor. It seems like she was well on the road to success by our standards, but that doesn't mean she was successful by her standards.
  - amichail 17y ago
    What gave her the idea that being a tenured professor is better than a founder of a successful startup? Perhaps this is the result of societal pressure on intelligent people rather than her own thinking?
    - rdtsc 17y ago
      > What gave her the idea that being a tenured professor is better than a founder of a successful startup? The same thing that gives HNers idea that starting a startup is better than being a tenure professor -- personal choice and personal set of goals and motivations.
- 17y ago
Eliezer 17y ago
When will people come to their senses? How many more senseless killings are required before we can take action? Ban academia now!
hyperbovine 17y ago
"Ms. Bishop, a grant-winning scientist" That is like saying, "a salary-earning division manager." I don't know of any serious academic scientist who isn't funded by grants. Seems like the writer really wanted to put "award-winning," but there were no awards.
- scott_s 17y ago
  There are academic scientists who don't get grants. They are denied tenure outright. Since she was denied tenure, it's worthwhile to note that she did have grants. If she had no grants and expected to get tenure, then that would tell us something. This also tells us she met some requirements for tenure. (But not much, because we don't know how much money these grants were, and how much her department expects.)
razerbeans 17y ago
The irony of this is the fact that I had a lecture that very day across UAHuntsville's campus in which my literature teacher said often times, when a person murders someone, there is a significantly higher chance they will do it again. I'm not saying that the death of her brother was indeed a murder, but I couldn't help but get a chill when I found out the news later that day. All of the teachers at UAHuntsville have passion about what they do; this is evident especially in the passion that the teachers seem to imbue in us as students. It is saddening to hear that three faculty have been killed, especially since one of those teachers was my own this past semester.
patrickgzill 17y ago
This is one of the things I hate about the NYT... an imposed narrative contained in a headline without any identifying details. Wouldn't "Huntsville University Killer May Have Killed Over Lost Tenure" be a) more accurate b) less obtuse?

44 points by rglovejoy 17y ago

When a postal worker goes postal, it's going postal. When a PhD from Harvard -- the first detail mentioned, note -- goes postal, they are suffering in an academic pressure cooker. Dumbly applying the nearest pop-psych explanation to hand to explain the inexplicable only makes it more difficult to show respect for the victims and sympathy for the grieving.

chancho 17y ago
"Dumbly applying the nearest pop-psych explanation..." If describing this tragedy as "someone going postal" isn't dumbly applying pop-psych, then I don't know what is.
- mnemonicsloth 17y ago
  "At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly," tells a simple little story. She was under great emotional stress, lost her bid for tenure, and snapped under the strain. "Going postal" is comparatively mum. It's a hybrid of "Going crazy" and "disgruntled postal worker," and suggests only that we think the perpetrator is not sane -- that we can't understand why they would do that. Where is the pop psychology?
timr 17y ago
"Going postal" is hardly a tactful way of describing that situation. I don't think it's pop psychology to acknowledge that a small percentage of people in extremely stressful situations lose control, and end up doing awful things. It's impossible to have sincere sympathy and respect without a healthy dose of empathy. And to have empathy, you have to be able to acknowledge truths about situations that may not be politically correct. We don't know if this woman lost control because of mental illness, or stress in her personal life, or simply because her superiors were assholes. But if it's the latter, I'd rather hear a discussion about the ugly realities of academic life, than another cliché conversation demanding "respect and sympathy" from total strangers.
- narag 17y ago
  ...or simply because her superiors were assholes Really? I've had some of this kind, and even when I was in a very stressful personal situation, I've never even thought of resorting to any kind of violence, even less shooting anyone. These cases seem to be caused by mental illness. I agree with the person you're answering to that trying to "explain" a shooting this way is plainly wrong.
  - timr 17y ago
    Regardless of what you've personally experienced, I would imagine that everyone has a limit, beyond which they lose control of their emotions. It happens. The question of whether this is called "mental illness" is open for debate. As far as I'm concerned, it's an academic question, unless the distinction can somehow lead to prevention of the act.
physcab 17y ago
I don't think the author was applying an explanation either dumbly or trying to reduce its significance. I think it is part of our human nature to try and contain a tragedy by labeling or attributing some cause to it. I'm not a therapist, but I sincerely believe this human trait persists in many people as a coping mechanism. That's why it makes sense (even as an academic myself) in some weird, comforting way.
- flatline 17y ago
  Exactly - for columbine, it was the video games and music, which is much more of a non-sequitur than working in the high pressure environments of academia and biotech startups. This did read like more of a human interest story though.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  I think it is part of our human nature to try and contain a tragedy by labeling or attributing some cause to it. Are you implying that tragedies have no cause. It seems like human to try understand tragedies as they are significant part of our human world. Moreover, tragedies usually do have causes. Claiming that there is no cause to an event may serve some psychological purpose...
  - nostrademons 17y ago
    Tragedies usually have so many causes that it's impossible to point out a single cause in a 3-paragraph comment and have it mean anything. Usually, if you do a root cause analysis of anything, you come up with so many contributing factors that the resulting document is hundreds of pages long. Think of industrial postmortems or court proceedings. Everything is more complicated than it seems at first. Saying "This was because she was denied tenure" does a disservice to everyone involved. It was probably partly because she was denied tenure. It was probably partly also because she had easy access to guns, and she was super focused on her research, and she didn't get along with the school administration, and she had once accidentally killed her brother, and plenty of other factors that we could never know about.
joe_the_user 17y ago
Hey, you could combine the abusive terminology and talk about "postal-track professors". But the need to "help the victims grieve" by labeling every killing "inexplicable" and so casting maximal moral unction on the killer is also just a variety of pop-psychology. However, this doesn't seem to be an "inexplicable" event. There's probably no single, easy explanation but there seem to be a variety of causal factors we can trace. "People with a history of violent behavior don't do well in situations of all-or-nothing achievement".
- mnemonicsloth 17y ago
  "help the victims grieve"... maximal moral unction... When an event like this touches your life, very few stimuli from outside your own personal bubble of pain and confusion have any chance of registering with you [1]. But having the national paper of record print headlines half-excusing your friend or family member's killer [2] because she's the right kind of people would definitely do it. [1] Some people express surprise that there are other people "out there," still going about their lives as if nothing had happened. [2] allegedly.
  - joe_the_user 17y ago
    What does "half-excusing" mean? Or... In what way was does describing the factors influencing a person's behavior excuse it?
    - narag 17y ago
      In a pressure cooker the vapour has not many options: going through the security valve or making the cooker to explode. I don't think that's an accurate "description of factors", unless you take into account the killer is crazy, in which case the most important factor is precisely that.

anamax 17y ago

See http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=392617&page=1 http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=392617&#...

maxharris 17y ago

What Dr. Bishop did was unjustified, no matter what other facts we may find (excepting force initiated by the victims); justice requires her death. (Because this penalty is irrevocable, and all possible legal systems are fallible, the closest we can get to this ideal is life imprisonment.) Having said that, look at how the system worked. These guys were stringing her along for six years (or so?), while maintaining the illusion that her activities (against university initiatives and attitudes) would have no impact on her career. Obviously her against-the-grain attitudes had a great deal to do with the way they treated her. What's the best way to prevent a similar tragedy from occurring? The only way is to take the pressure off by eliminating tenure completely. That way, there's no insane buildup of emotion on either side. In a properly functioning organization, people that don't work out (for whatever reason, including personality conflicts) should be informed of the situation as early as is possible, which takes what, about a year? Existing faculty could be offered buyouts (which, of course, would have to be lucrative enough to be accepted), and you're at a nice clean slate.

neurotech1 17y ago
I would suspect Dr Bishop has a personality disorder, such as Borderline Personality Disorder. I find it interesting that they have a 6 year rule, when the average is around 10 years to get tenure. I think that people missed warning signs, that she was feeling stress, and that there is a stigma against seeking help, and people often deny they have a problem. I agree with most of your comments, except the bit about "requires her death". She was possibly suffering major depression at the time of the incident, and other mental health issues.
- maxharris 17y ago
  How do you "recover" from something like this? If I had done something like what she did, and I had full memory of it, I would attempt suicide - not out of some perverse sense of duty, but as a way to escape. (I believe that the soul dies with the body, and that supernatural events are categorically impossible. So when I say "escape", I mean a completely different thing than a religious person would mean.)

houseabsolute 17y ago

I find it veeery interesting that she "accidentally" killed her brother when she was twenty. Casts some doubt on that situation too.

maxharris 17y ago
Wrong conclusion. I think that she must have been emotionally scarred by the accident. Did the accident make it easier for her to kill those faculty members yesterday? That's really hard to say. Would it be easier for the former first lady to murder someone because of the deadly car accident she was involved in? I'm inclined to say no.
- julius_geezer 17y ago
  The Braintree police don't seem to think that it was an accident. To be sure, they seem to be operating on "oral history".
  - hga 17y ago
    Not much choice when all the official records are "missing" except for one recording it as an accident. If the reports that 3 rounds were fired are correct, that's some "accident".
- houseabsolute 17y ago
  I've seen no more evidence for your guess than I have for mine.
niels_olson 17y ago
Sounds like the circumstances of that case are more like people not having adequate respect for firearms. In fact, having killed her brother in a firearms accident, I can easily see her spending the rest of her life as a desperate overachiever, and feeling unable to take credit for her success because she "owed" it to her brother. Imagine the depression and motivation that would induce. Finally, having hit such a dramatic obstacle, her previous experience with death would lower her visceral revulsion to the idea of further death. The effects of repetitive exposure to death are well studied in soldiers and healthcare workers.

amichail 17y ago

Why did she care about tenure? She could have just focused exclusively on the startup, making it more likely to succeed.

ams6110 17y ago
Perhaps she had received information or suspected that she was going to be left out of that as well.
rewind 17y ago
Just because you're successful in one area doesn't necessarily mean you should stop caring about your goals in another area. Most PhDs care about tenure. Academic and entrepreneurial goals are not necessarily compatible.
nostrademons 17y ago
Remember that not all people have the same goals as HN readers. We self-select for people whose goal is to found a successful startup. For many other people, their goal in life might be to be a good parent, or to be a professional sports player, or to be a tenured professor. It seems like she was well on the road to success by our standards, but that doesn't mean she was successful by her standards.
- amichail 17y ago
  What gave her the idea that being a tenured professor is better than a founder of a successful startup? Perhaps this is the result of societal pressure on intelligent people rather than her own thinking?
  - rdtsc 17y ago
    > What gave her the idea that being a tenured professor is better than a founder of a successful startup? The same thing that gives HNers idea that starting a startup is better than being a tenure professor -- personal choice and personal set of goals and motivations.
17y ago

Eliezer 17y ago

When will people come to their senses? How many more senseless killings are required before we can take action? Ban academia now!

hyperbovine 17y ago

"Ms. Bishop, a grant-winning scientist" That is like saying, "a salary-earning division manager." I don't know of any serious academic scientist who isn't funded by grants. Seems like the writer really wanted to put "award-winning," but there were no awards.

scott_s 17y ago
There are academic scientists who don't get grants. They are denied tenure outright. Since she was denied tenure, it's worthwhile to note that she did have grants. If she had no grants and expected to get tenure, then that would tell us something. This also tells us she met some requirements for tenure. (But not much, because we don't know how much money these grants were, and how much her department expects.)

razerbeans 17y ago

The irony of this is the fact that I had a lecture that very day across UAHuntsville's campus in which my literature teacher said often times, when a person murders someone, there is a significantly higher chance they will do it again. I'm not saying that the death of her brother was indeed a murder, but I couldn't help but get a chill when I found out the news later that day. All of the teachers at UAHuntsville have passion about what they do; this is evident especially in the passion that the teachers seem to imbue in us as students. It is saddening to hear that three faculty have been killed, especially since one of those teachers was my own this past semester.

patrickgzill 17y ago

This is one of the things I hate about the NYT... an imposed narrative contained in a headline without any identifying details. Wouldn't "Huntsville University Killer May Have Killed Over Lost Tenure" be a) more accurate b) less obtuse?