Academia, Criminal law, Society

Professor Arrested for Murders at University of Alabama

The academic community is shocked by the news that not only were three faculty members murdered at the University of Alabama but that the suspect is a fellow academic. Amy Bishop, a biology professor, is facing murder charges in the shooting deaths of three faculty members and will be charged with the wounding of three other employees Friday.

In relation to the Virginia Tech shootings, I wrote about how such acts shatter the protected realm of the “academic circle,” here. It is particularly shocking to see a faculty member causing such mayhem.

Bishop is an assistant professor of biological sciences and allegedly killed the professors at Shelby Hall, named after U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama.

It has also been reported that Bishop shot her brother 25 years ago, here.

Killed were professors Gopi Podila, chairman of the biological sciences department; Maria Davis, associate professor of biology; and Adriel Johnson, associate professor of biology.

Bishop is a neuroscientist who joined the faculty in 2003. With her husband, Jim Anderson, chief science officer of Cherokee Labsystems in Huntsville, she created a portable cell-incubator called “InQ” which won a state prize. In one possible contributor of the incident, she was denied tenure. For those details, here.

Our condolences to the entire Alabama faculty, students, and families.

For the full story, click here and here.

47 thoughts on “Professor Arrested for Murders at University of Alabama”

  1. Anonymously:

    I didn’t say tenure was good if it was at a private school. I said it was a remnant of an old system of private institutions. My point is that it is only justifiable in a private setting and completely unjustifiable in a public one (where federal dollars are used). Whether or not it is fair in the private setting is not my point.

    I never said Hillsdale College used the tenure system. I only pointed out that it, and one other institution, is among the only two schools in America that rejects students bringing federal dollars. If more schools do the same, I’d be happy to hear it. And as such only those two schools could rightly use the tenure system. I did not say they must use it.

    You seem to be spreading rumors about Roche and using a fallacy to make your argument. Roche denies any affair with his now dead daughter-in-law and here you seem to be using her tragic suicide to advance an argument that since Roche might have had an affair with her it must have some application to the fact that there is no tenure at Hillsdale.

    Why resort to silliness and fallacy?

    You can easily make a case for private schools and tenure without dissing Hillsdale, if you wish.

    But perhaps what is really happening is that you are having a problem defending the wholly unjustifiable tenure system among schools which feed from the federal pig-tough.

  2. I am very aware of Hillsdale College. Oh they have had problems of there own. The professors DO NOT HAVE TENURE. I think if I recall correctly, they even had a scandal with the conservative College President Roche have an affair with his daughter in law Lissa. Yes, he was doing the bump and grind on his son’s time. Apparently, she ended up committing suicide. I think that Buckley and Newt considered him a dear, dear friend while slamming Bill Clinton.

    They do not accept any federal funds. They do not want the scrutiny of admissions or the faculty employed.

    So far Vince Foster is the only person that committed suicide on the Clinton’s watch and I have my suspicions on that one.

  3. Anusmously Yours,

    I don’t care what a private school does in their hiring process. There are only two schools that I know of which are truly private (they take no students bringing federal dollars). They are Grove City and Hillsdale Colleges.

    I’m saying that when federal dollars go to colleges and universities (and that means virtually all of them), then hiring practices should be regulated like any other government jobs: job descriptions, benchmarks, evaluations, etc.

    Tenure in America is a remnant of a private system that no longer exists because colleges and universities feed at the public pig-trough.

    It is now a political tool/weapon used mostly by leftists to keep right-wingers out of the Ivy League and state schools. The better to grow Marxism and fascism.

  5. Blousie

    “A Harvard educated thug is still a thug … witness all the Ivy League educated gang-bankers freely roaming the streets wrecking havoc on law abiding citizens.”

    That’s why I keep a red sharpie under my pillow.

  7. Toasted,

    It would be nice if we could go back to the days of academic freedom and have the colleges funded with money that had no strings. That was the time frame that I went. Towards the end of my academic career (long btw) they started getting Corporate Dollars. At first it was joint ventures one particular department of the school. Then the college (Business) sold out. Then the whole university became an alter ego for a major corporation.

    Not only is the Football team whores for the rest but the department learned to become sluts for grants. Then once they own you, well, is slavery really over, or does it have a different name?

    Taxes come to mind as a form of slavery.

  8. To bad someone wasn’t packing in that meeting, she could have been stopped.

    That said, the tenure system is a dinosaur. It is now an immoral remnant of a system that (almost) no longer exists: the private college or university. There are only two exceptions now as all colleges and universities received federal dollars (this is called fascism).

    Tenure came out of an era when moral character was important and now character is now only what the fascists say it is. For example, your research must show that global warming is true.

    Anyway, a person shouldn’t be denied advancement because of politics at work when work is under the auspices of federal dollars. There should be benchmarks, which when achieved, lead to promotion. All should be equally free to advance.

    If advancement is not happening (as clearly revealed when not achieving those benchmarks), then the employee can make other arrangements before a lifetime of effort is cut off by some sums of britches who have an attitude and wish to destroy your career.

    Nevertheless, this woman was CLEARLY not stable. That said, tenure is a brutal in immoral system that doesn’t guarantee intellectual freedom, but buries it and ruins the lives of people who hear different drummers.

  9. According to the NY Times, she was questioned in the investigation of the bombing at Harvard a number of years ago. The husband appears to exaggerate: he speaks of many papers and bringing in “millions”. the only thing I’ve seen is the 1.5M for a device she and her husband developed. No mention of federal or other grants. At her career stage. only people at major research institutions are likely to have even anywhere near even $1M in their own grants. Her publication list is not what one would normally expect in a successful tenure applicant in the sciences. Apparently she had appealed the dept’s decision, the appeals board ruled in her favor, but the provost decided differently. She probably has no more appeals, but in most places she would have another year of appointment, so she could find another job.

  10. Puzzling:

    thanks for the info, it appears she was a wackadoodle from the get go and her parents covered it up to keep her out of prison.

  11. From the link supplied by puzzling, “Everybody described her as gentle.” This was said by her husband, I believe.

    Thanks for the additional information, puzzling.

  12. This case will be remembered for government corruption that allowed Bishop to walk away free the first time she went on a shooting rampage in 1986.

    Bishop shot her brother in an argument with a shotgun, and attempted to carjack a passing motorist with the same weapon when she fled. Bishops mother was a public official on the Personnel Committee at the time, and the DA ordered Bishop released before the booking process was even completed.

    More here.

  13. A Harvard educated thug is still a thug … witness all the Ivy League educated gang-bankers freely roaming the streets wrecking havoc on law abiding citizens.

    How fitting that the murders should occur in the building named for Shelby who believes that “gun control legislation is violative of both the letter and the spirit of the United States Constitution. … I will vote against all attempts to infringe upon the rights of law abiding citizens.”

    On the other hand Shelby also believes that “Individuals who commit crimes with firearms should be dealt with quickly and effectively. I support the death penalty and imprisonment without parole.” Of course he does.

  14. I think that you fine folks are confusing the gun culture with the thug culture.

    No gun lover I know advocates using guns for anything else than preservation of human life (self-defense; hunting) or the sheer enjoyment of shooting.

    I’m sure that this educated woman could have built a bomb or cultured some bacteria and killed some people. She just fell back on what she learned from the catch and release culture of Massachusetts.

    Maybe a future MIT graduate will invent a time machine and go back in time to wipe out the Chinese before they invent gunpowder.

  16. The latest NYT article links her publication history. She would have had trouble getting tenure in a lot of fields at a major research university, even one considered second- or third-tier Less than 1 paper/year in the last decade and the journals that I recognized weren’t very good. If her invention was as groundbreaking as described, I would think that they’d have raised more money and been picked up by a large multi-national.

    Biology is extremely competitive and she would up in an applied, multidisciplinary department (a common path, but one with little prestige for an Ivy PhD). I would guess that even in that environment her cv wouldn’t be highly competitive. No mention of what her grant history was like.

  18. “Three of Color Dead in Alabama Campus Shooting
    Suspect Bishop shot her brother in accident two decades earlier.
    By: The Root Staff | Posted: February 13, 2010 at 2:57 PM

    Three of Color Killed in University of Alabama Shooting
    Suspect Bishop shot her brother in accident two decades earlier.
    TheRootStaff
    Professor accused of killing three colleagues shot her brother two decades earlier.

    Professor accused of killing three colleagues shot her brother two decades earlier.
    02/13/2010 14:57
    The three University of Alabama Huntsville faculty members who were killed Friday were all people of color. Gopi Bodila, the, the chairman of the biology department, was of Indian origin. Dr. Adriel Johnson, an associate professor, and Dr. Maria Ragland Davis, an assistant professor who specialized in plant sciences, were both African-American.
    Amy Bishop, a Harvard PhD who was denied tenure, has been charged with capital murder in the killings. Three other faculty members were wounded, two of them critically, at a faculty meeting on the Alabama campus.
    Ray Garner, a spokesman at the Huntsville campus, said 42-year-old Amy Bishop had been denied tenure months earlier and this was to be her last semester at the school. She became an assistant professor at the school in 2003. Some news stories reported that Bishop was considered bright by students but had difficulty explaining difficult concepts.
    Authorities declined to discuss a motive at a Saturday news conference, though Garner said the faculty meeting wasn’t scheduled to discuss tenure issues. The neurobiologist, who became an assistant professor at the school in 2003, has been charged with capital murder, and other charges are pending.
    She was taken Friday night in handcuffs to the county jail, and said as she got into a police car: “It didn’t happen. There’s no way. … They are still alive.”

    The Boston Globe reported that Bishop accidently shot and killed her brother more than two decades ago. The paper cited earlier articles that Bishop shot 18-year-old Seth Bishop while cleaning a shotgun in the presence of their mother in December 1986.”

  19. Sorry for the double posting — I see that her brother’s death was mentioned in the primary article. So much for the news flash.

  20. About the 1986 shooting (refer to the aforementioned link):

    “She shot her brother, an 18-year-old accomplished violinist, in the chest, said Paul Frazier, the police chief in Braintree, Mass., where the shooting occurred. Bishop fired at least three shots, hitting her brother once and hitting her bedroom wall before police took her into custody at gunpoint, he said.

    However, the police chief at the time told officers to release Bishop to her mother before she could be booked. At the time, it was logged as an accident.”

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