Amy Bishop

Amy Bishop redux: her husband knew about the gun after all

Nitay Arbel (a.k.a. New Class Traitor) Academentia, Crime, Psychology , ,

Dan Riehl (TypePad trackback URL)draws my attention to this post:

er husband denied knowing where she’d gotten the gun, he said previously, and (oddly, since she’d killed her brother with one) didn’t think to ask. Turns out, it seems, that it was his gun, which he’d asked a friend to purchase for him a couple of decades back, when he was “having trouble with a neighbor.” The weapon was purchased in New Hampshire, because of Massachusetts’ waiting period, so apparently needed somewhat urgently at the time, but ready to hand when once again other people’s reality threatened to intrude.

“She said it was no way she was there, no way it happened. ‘I wasn’t there.’ That kept being a reoccurring thing throughout the interview,” Gray said.

Bishop’s attorney has said that that she doesn’t remember the shootings, and she herself said the shootings “didn’t happen” in her only public comments since the killings.

“What about the people who died?” a reporter asked as she was led to a police car hours after the killings.

“There’s no way. They’re still alive,” she responded.

What she means to say is that it’s simply too inconvenient for her that they died when she pumped bullets into them. (Thanks to Sarah W.)

See the right sidebar for links to our earlier posts on Amy Bishop.

By the way, I get a nontrivial number of Google hits for “Amy Bishop Asperger” and variants thereof. I know a thing or two about “aspies” and I can tell you there’s nothing Asperger about Amy Bishop’s deeds or behavior. A textbook case of extreme NPD (narcissistic personality disorder), probably with borderline disorder thrown in, is much more like it.

(Grossly oversimplifying: To a narcissist other people count as nothing except as sources for narcissistic supply. To an “aspie”, other people and their needs and wants are quite real — their emotions are just very (to extremely) hard to read. I will return to this subject in a separate post, time permitting.)

Amy Bishop update: some observations on tenure

Nitay Arbel (a.k.a. New Class Traitor) Academentia, Crime, News of the weird, Psychology, Science ,

Following the U. of Alabama “tenure denial massacre” by Amy Bishop [see here, here,  here , and especially here, here, and here for our earlier coverage], the Chronicle of Higher Education has gathered a series of responses to the question: “Is tenure a matter of life and death?”

The answers of course generally reflect New Class sensibilities, but are generally well worth reading. The single most horrifying thing I read was quoted by KC Johnson (who had to suffer through quite a  via dolorosa of his own to get tenure): “[…] as in American Association of University Professors President Cary Nelson’s recent claim that it was acceptable to consider a candidate’s personal or political views in the hiring process[…]”

Let me offer my own two cents on academic tenure. As I see it, it exists primarily for three reasons:

  • Originally, it came about to protect scholars from being dismissed for stating views or findings that were impopular, ‘heretic’, ‘subversive’, or more than one of the above. (For example, ss incredible as this may sound to us today, the act of dissecting a corpse to see human anatomy with one’s own eyes rather than relying  on the ancient writings of Galen, was once considered a subversive act.)
  • In some technical and professional fields (e.g., law, some specialties of medicine, some fields of engineering,…) a practicing professional could earn many times over the salary of a professor. Tenure is perceived as one form of compensation for ceasing to practice in one’s specialty or working reduced hours in it.
  • Finally, in many fields in the hard sciences, tenure is seen as giving scholars the chance to engage in high-risk, highly innovative, research that might pay off big time — or turn out to be a years-long wild goose chase with nothing to show for it. As the latter is obviously the ‘kiss of death’ in the absence of tenure, assistant professors on the tenure track tend to ‘play it safe’ by restricting their research to projects that have a reasonable chance of publishable outcomes.

In the American system, one typically becomes an assistant professor after a Ph.D. and at least one postdoctoral stint. One thus becomes an independent researcher and head of one’s own group (“captain of one’s own ship”) at a pretty young age, but without certainty of employment, and with the ‘Remember Tomorrow’ of a tenure decision ahead. There is no denying that it is a pretty stressful experience, not just for the academic but also for his/her partner: I’ve seen more than one marriage break up over this. But, of course, the payoff of success is a level of job security virtually unmatched in the USA outside government service.

However, many Euro countries have a different academic structure where there is a fairly large “NCO corps” in between the graduate students (and, in the last 20-30 years, postdocs) on the one hand, and the titular professors on the other hand. Anybody eyeing a spot in the “officer corps” needs to do their time in the NCO corps first, but tenure is reached after some years there, after which one finds oneself being groomed/in a ‘holding pattern’ for years  (depending on one’s perspective) until a titular professor retires. Needless to say, this system is much less dynamic than the US one, and the reduced stress is outweighed by the frustration of possibly being stuck in an ‘NCO slot’ for decades, or even until retirement.

Israel has a US-style tenure system: it does have an ‘NCO corps’ of ‘staff scientists’ who however represent an alternate career path rather than an entrance hall to the faculty track. Also, further promotion (from associate professor to full professor) generally takes longer and is subject to closer scrutiny than in the US.

Germany and many Eastern European countries do their ‘faculty filtering’ in a different way than the USA: by demanding an additional credential for faculty in the guise of a Higher Doctorate (known as a Habilitation in Germany). This typically consists of a much heftier thesis than the original Ph.D., and is supposed to be a body of independent research (perhaps with some mentoring) rather than work carried out under the guidance of an advisor. France has a similar post-Ph.D. credential called “Habilitation à diriger des recherches” (accreditation to supervise research), which entitles the holder to act as the Ph.D. advisor to graduate students.

Each system has pluses and minuses. The Euro system is much less ‘sink or swim’ in that one is more gradually groomed for ‘captaincy’, and that job security is reached much more easily. On the other hand, many of Europe’s best and most dynamic researchers seek out academic positions in the USA precisely because of the greater independence and flexibility it affords. Yet on the third hand, dependence on grant money encourages faddishness in research, while somebody who does high-quality research in a ‘no longer fashionable’ subject may have a much easier time of it in France, Germany, Switzerland, or even Israel than in the USA. But on the fourth hand, this same set of circumstances may lead a researcher to remain ‘stuck in a rut’ rather than try to reinvent themselves.

Thomas Sowell’s famous aphorism, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs”, applies here as well.

Amy Bishop update: still more details emerge

Nitay Arbel (a.k.a. New Class Traitor) Academentia, Crime, News of the weird, Psychology, Science

Having an unexpected bit of idle time, we continue our coverage of the Amy Bishop./U. of Alabama “tenure killer” case. [See here, here,  here , and especially here and here for our earlier coverage.]

Today the New York Times has a long in-depth story on the incident — if you can’t deal with the NYT’s registration wall, there is an apparently identical version online here, for instance. (In addition, a slightly different version at the Seattle Times incorporates some additional details — notably that Amy Bishop is a second cousin of writer — and whackjob — John Irving.)

While both versions are of course silent about Bishop’s far-left politics and obsession with 0bama, they are overall a pretty good recap of what we already know, plus add some new information:

  • she had aspirations as a writer, and collaborated with somebody named Lenny Cavallero on an unpublished novel named “Amazon Fever”, “in which a herpes-like virus spreads throughout the world, causing pregnant women to miscarry”. Her co-author: “When I worked with her, I found she was always within striking distance of the edge”
  • “Over the years, Dr. Bishop had shown evidence that the smallest of slights could set off a disproportionate and occasionally violent reaction, according to numerous interviews with colleagues and others who know her. Her life seemed to veer wildly between moments of cold fury and scientific brilliance, between rage at perceived slights and empathy for her students.”
  • Somebody who collaborated with her on a paper in 1996 remembers her flying into a white-hot rage when she wasn’t given the coveted first author slot. “She broke down. She was extremely angry with all of us. She exploded into something emotional that we never saw before in our careers.”
  • “She rejected criticism and fudged her résumé. Her scientific work was not as impressive as she made it seem, according to independent neurobiologists, some of whom said she would have been unlikely to even get the opportunity to try for tenure at major universities. [See also here — NCT.] She was known to have cyclical “flip-outs,” as one former student described them, that pushed one graduate student after another out of her laboratory.”
  • Following the shooting of her brother, “as Officer Solimini and a partner drove Amy Bishop to the police station, she made a remark that surprised him, according to the report. “She stated that she had an argument with her father earlier,” Officer Solimini wrote. “(Prior to the shooting, she stated!)””
  • “Dr. Bishop also arrived in Huntsville with a padded résumé, giving the impression that she had worked at Harvard two years longer than the university’s records indicate.” [This AP story also mentions that she claimed an IQ of 180 — which would be in the 99.99997th percentile!]
  • “Graduate students did not last long in her laboratory, and those familiar with the department said that most transferred to a different one before completing their degree. In May 2006, she dismissed a graduate student from her lab. The student promised to return some notebooks and a set of keys the next day, a person familiar with the incident said, but Dr. Bishop called the campus police that night, according to a campus police report. The student filed a grievance against her.”
  • when denied tenure, “Her attitude was not, ‘I’m going to have to go find another job,’ ” said Eric Seemann, an assistant professor of psychology. “It was more like, ‘When are these idiots going to clear this up?’ ”
  • contrary to what has been claimed on some antisemitic conspiracy sites [which I refuse to link to], her father was not a Jewish business mogul but a professor of film at Northeastern University [this web page refers to Sam Bishop as Northeastern’s “one man film program” in the 1970s — there even appears to be a school award named after him at Northeastern], while her mother was involved in local politics in Braintree, MA, a middle-class suburb of Boston.
  • the fatal shooting of her brother happened following an argument with her father, who was out on an Xmas shopping trip while it happened

If I’d have to venture an amateur psychological diagnosis, it would be an extreme form of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD — note all the incidents of “narcissistic rage”), possibly with borderline personality disorder (BPD) thrown in. (Both are “Cluster B personality disorders“.)

Amy Bishop/U. of Alabama shooting update: warning signs

Nitay Arbel (a.k.a. New Class Traitor) Academentia, Crime, News of the weird, Psychology, Science

Some more information has emerged in the strange case of Amy Bishop, the assistant professor of biology who killed 3 and wounded 3 of her colleagues after she was denied tenure at U. of Alabama, Huntsville.  [See here, here,  here , and especially here for our earlier coverage.]

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a special section on the Huntsville shootings.

Some new information that has emerged:

“At one meeting I was with Amy, she was complaining to a group of us. She said she was denied tenure not because she was a lousy researcher — she’s not, quite the opposite — and not because she didn’t have good classes, she believed she did — I think some might say otherwise — but because she was accused of being arrogant, aloof and superior. And she said, ‘I am.’

  • another professor, who asked that his name not be used, expressed concern about her mental health during her tenure review.

    The professor said that during a meeting of the tenure-review committee, he expressed his opinion that Ms. Bishop was “crazy.” Word of what he said made it back to Ms. Bishop. In September, after her tenure denial, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging gender discrimination. The professor’s remark was going to be used as possible evidence in that case.

    It was then, the professor said, that the associate provost of the university, John Severn, came to him and asked whether he truly believed what he had said about Ms. Bishop. (Reached by phone, Mr. Severn declined to comment.) The professor was given the opportunity to back off the claim, or to say it was a flippant remark. But he didn’t. “I said she was crazy multiple times and I stand by that,” the professor said. “This woman has a pattern of erratic behavior. She did things that weren’t normal.”

    No one incident stands out, the professor said, but a series of interactions caused him to think she was “out of touch with reality.” Once, he said, she “went ballistic” when a grant application being filed on her behalf was turned in late. The professor said he avoided Ms. Bishop whenever he saw her, on or off the campus. When he spotted her not long ago at a Barnes & Noble bookstore, he made sure he was out of sight until she had left the store. He even skipped a faculty retreat because he knew she would be there.

    To be clear, it wasn’t as if the professor told the university that he thought Ms. Bishop was potentially violent. And, at the time, the university was narrowly focused on the legal fallout from a possible lawsuit by Ms. Bishop, he said.

    […] When the professor found out on Friday afternoon that there had been a shooting on the campus, he didn’t immediately hear exactly where it happened, who was involved, or whether the shooter was a faculty member, student, or someone from outside the university. Even so, the professor said his first thought was: “Oh my God. I bet it was Amy Bishop.”

A roundup of coverage from academia-bloggers can be found here. I must say I am rather unenthused by some of the suggestions being made, such as that “collegiality” and “personality” should be given more weight as tenure considerations. There’s a world of difference between being a “lone wolf” (as some of the world’s best scientists are) or an egomaniac, and the behavior Amy Bishop was displaying well before the shooting.

Speculating on her often-remarked on lack of eye contact, the autism/Asperger Syndrome self-help site wrongplanet.net has a thread on whether Amy Bishop may have been an “aspie”. (As anybody who’s familiar with research academia knows, it’s one of the most congenial environments for people with Asperger’s, if not the most.) One of the denizens hits the nail on the head: “From what I have read, I believe she is a narcissist. Her lack of eye contact is more like antisocial, rather than nonsocial. There is a lack of respect, rather than not understanding it.”
UPDATE 1: From Instapundit:

MORE TROUBLE FOR BILL DELAHUNT: DA Rips 1986 Bishop Report. “Three people might be alive today if Delahunt had done his job in 1986. The blood is on his hands. Instead he made a phone call and the case disappeared. Thanks to him, Amy Bishop went on to become a one-woman crime wave.”

[…] Related: The inevitable effort to link Amy Bishop to Tea Party protesters.

It would be easy to dismiss the attempt to link Bishop and the Tea Party movement given the absurdity of the connection. After all, Bishop loves Obama, so how could the “anti-Obama” nature of the Tea Party movement have caused Bishop to do anything?

It’s just that these things have a way of working their way into the mainstream media, regardless of how outlandish the supposed connection.

Keep repeating Amy Bishop and Tea Party in the headlines, and it will not be long before 35% of Democrats believe there is a connection.[…]

Who was it again who invented the “big lie” technique?

UPDATE: Donald Douglas points out that the 3 dead include 2 blacks and one Indian-American, and wonders (half sarcastically) whether there may have been a racist angle. I very much doubt this (Debra Moriarity, for instance, was saved only by the magazine having run empty), but agree that this for sure would have been imputed if the killer had been anything other than a flaming left-winger.

UPDATE 2: James Taranto has a good recap in Best of the Web, and displays his usual irreverent humor in the title: “Going Postdoctoral“.

Amy Bishop case updates: eyewitness account by unsung hero, IHOP incident, neighbor altercations

Nitay Arbel (a.k.a. New Class Traitor) Academentia, Crime, News of the weird, Politics, Psychology, Science ,

The case of Amy Bishop, the assistant professor of biology who was denied tenure at U. of Alabama, Huntsville, and opened fire on her tenure committee, killing 3 and wounding 3, just keeps getting weirder and weirder.  [See here, here, and here for our earlier reporting.]

[Go to bottom of story for important update]

Boston.com:

In March, 2002, Bishop walked into an International House of Pancakes in Peabody with her family, asked for a booster seat for one of her children, and learned the last seat had gone to another mother.

Bishop, according to a police report, strode over to the other woman, demanded the seat and launched into a profanity-laced rant.

When the woman would not give the seat up, Bishop punched her in the head, all the while yelling “I am Dr. Amy Bishop.”

Bishop received probation and prosecutors recommended that she be sent to anger management classes, though it is unclear from court documents whether a judge ever sent her there.

And Solomonia has a web-interview with the Bishop’s next-door neigtbor in Ipswich, MA:

…She was such a trouble maker. I disengaged from them early on. I literally did not have any conversation or interaction with either her or her husband (also a nutball) for over 3 years. Nothing…

…She made a big stink about the kids playing basketball in the neighborhood. On the day they first moved into the house they drove their moving truck into the basketball post that was situated between our two driveways and under the streetlight. For years all the neighborhood kids played ball there (and so did some of the Dads). When they ran the post down we thought it was just a dumb-ass accident. We soon found out that they did it on purpose.

One of the other neighbors put up a new hoop on his property and she complained about the kids. It was a protracted fight that involved multiple calls to the police. The end result was that the kids in the neighborhood couldn’t play ball after 7pm at night. She also complained about street hockey, skate boarding, tag, etc., etc… […]

What pissed me off was the loony venom and fury that accompanied her attacks. She alleged that the basketball players were smoking pot at night and causing other trouble. Totally untrue. Look at the newspaper, the Ipswich Police were in the Globe today calling her a “regular customer”. [NCT: presumably referring to this article.] She complained about everything.

She nearly got into a fistfight one night with one of the Moms who was defending her son’s right to play.

She complained so much the ice cream truck stopped driving through our street. If the kids wanted ice cream they had to go over to the next street and stop the truck.

Just this past Sunday morning as we were watching the news my son said, “Remember how she wouldn’t let us have ice cream?” He was about 8 at the time and thought that it really sucked. All the kids knew that she was the cause. […]

The day they moved out I was getting home as their moving van pulled away and went up the street. I got out of my car and a bunch of the neighbors were outside and I yelled “Ding Dong the witch is dead!” and a cheer went up all around. Soon after the new people showed up to clean the house and move some things in and the whole street celebrated with a pizza party. We welcomed the new folks with open arms. It was like the sun finally came out again.

[Minor update:] Concerning the ice cream truck, we learn here (h/t: Kathy Shaidle) that:

Bishop once stopped a local ice cream truck from coming into their neighborhood. According to WBZ-1030 radio, she said it because her own kids were lactose intolerant, and she didn’t think it was fair that her kids couldn’t have ice cream.

The much simpler expedient of buying Lactaid™ or one of its competitors didn’t occur to a biologist?!

More updates to follow here as they come in.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: this blog (via Israel forum), has a story at the Chronicle for Higher Education (academia’s main “trade newspaper”) which relates a first-person account by the unsung hero of the day, Prof. Debra Moriarity:

Moriarity, 55, has been at UAH since 1983. She is a professor of biochemistry, and the dean of the graduate school. Her laboratory was located next to Amy Bishop’s. Here are snippets of her story:

For almost an hour, the meeting focused on departmental business. Ms. Moriarity was looking at some papers on the table when the first shot was fired, killing the chairman of the department, Gopi K. Podila.

Ms. Moriarity looked up and saw Ms. Bishop fire the second shot. Apparently, Ms. Bishop was simply going down the line, starting with the people closest to her, killing Mr. Podila, Adriel D. Johnson Sr., and Maria Ragland Davis, all professors, and severely wounding Stephanie Monticciolo, a department administrator, and Joseph G. Leahy, a professor. All were shot in the head.

Another professor, Luis Rogelio Cruz-Vera, was shot in the chest.

After the second shot, Ms. Moriarity dove under the table. “I was thinking ‘Oh, my God, this has to stop,” she said.

Ms. Moriarity crawled beneath the rectangular table toward Ms. Bishop, who was blocking the doorway. She grabbed at Ms. Bishop’s legs and pushed at her, yelling, “I have helped you before, I can help you again!” Ms. Moriarity had in fact worked with Ms. Bishop, and they shared some similar research interests.

Ms. Bishop stepped away from her grasp. While still on the floor, Ms. Moriarity managed to crawl partially out into the hallway. Ms. Bishop, who continued shooting the entire time, then turned her attention to Ms. Moriarity, placing two hands on the gun and pointing it at her. Ms. Bishop’s expression was angry—”intense eyes, a set jaw,” Ms. Moriarity recalled.

With Ms. Moriarity looking up at her, Ms. Bishop pulled the trigger twice. The gun clicked, apparently out of bullets.

Ms. Moriarity scrambled back to the room. Meanwhile, Ms. Bishop, now barely in the hallway, appeared to be rummaging in her bag, perhaps attempting to reload. Ms. Moriarity took advantage of Ms. Bishop’s fumbling and closed the door. Others in the room then helped her push the table against the door, fearing that Ms. Bishop would continue her rampage.

Dr. Moriarity’s colleague, Joseph Ng, said her actions took a lot of guts, and saved lives. In the meantime, Amy Bishop Anderson is said to be on suicide watch, which may be routine for a week or two. Jail officials say she is interacting normally, “just like anyone else,” and a psychiatric nurse working with Bishop says she has not exhibited any suicidal tendencies.

The stories about Bishop are beginning to leak. According to an unnamed source who knows Bishop, she was an enigmatic egghead and talking to her was “like crawling to the bottom of a coal mine with the lights off. I don’t think [her husband] ever really understood her. I don’t think anybody did.”

For reasons that require no elaboration, the CHE is covering this story extensively. All five of the most popular articles are about the case (this one was the top article):