Early reports say the motivation in this case was being denied tenure. If that holds up, it's surprising there are not more of these. The tensions around tenure decisions are very large. And when it involved mentally unstable folk, it gets quite worrisome. If that is the case here.
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The New York Times
February 14, 2010
At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly, Officials Say
By SHAILA DEWAN
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — This city of rocket scientists and biotechnology entrepreneurs prides itself on having one of the highest per capita numbers of Ph.D.s in the country.
On Saturday, it was still reeling from the news that one of them, a neurobiologist with a Harvard doctorate named Amy Bishop, was accused of opening fire in a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, killing three fellow professors and wounding three more people.
As of Saturday morning, the authorities said, Ms. Bishop had been charged with one count of first-degree murder and more charges were expected.
The shootings opened a window into the pressure-cooker world of biotechnology start-ups, where scientists often depend on their association with academia for a leg up. Ms. Bishop was part of a start-up that had won an early round of financing in a highly competitive environment, but people who knew her said she had learned shortly before the shooting that she had been denied tenure at the university.
On Friday, Ms. Bishop presided over her regular neuroscience class before going to a biology faculty meeting, where she sat quietly for about 30 or 40 minutes, said one University of Alabama faculty member who had spoken to people who were in the room. Then she pulled out a gun and began shooting, firing several rounds before her gun either jammed or ran out of bullets, the faculty member said.
After Ms. Bishop left the room, he said, the remaining people barred the door, fearing she would return. She was arrested outside the building, The Huntsville Times reported.
The shooting occurred in the Shelby Center for Science and Technology around 4 p.m., officials said. Few students were in the building, and none were involved in the shooting, said Ray Garner, a university spokesman.
Officials said the dead were all biology professors: G. K. Podila, the department’s chairman; Maria Ragland Davis; and Adriel D. Johnson Sr. Two other biology professors, Luis Rogelio Cruz-Vera and Joseph G. Leahy, as well as a professor’s assistant, Stephanie Monticciolo, were are at Huntsville Hospital in conditions ranging from stable to critical.
Mr. Garner said Ms. Bishop was first been told last spring that she had been denied tenure. Generally, the university does not allow professors to stay on after six years if they have not been granted tenure, and this would have been the final semester of Ms. Bishop’s sixth year.
The university does have an appeals process, and people who knew Ms. Bishop said she had appealed the decision.
Ms. Bishop was quick to talk about her tenure worries, even to people she had just met. A businessman who met her at a technology open house in January, and who asked not to be named because of the close-knit nature of the science community in Huntsville, said, “She began to talk about her problems getting tenure in a very forceful and animated way, saying it was unfair.”
“She seemed to be one of these persons who was just very open with her feelings,” he said. “A very smart, intense person who had a variety of opinions on issues.”
Ms. Bishop may have had academic problems, but her business prospects seemed good. She and her husband, Jim Anderson, had invented an automated system for incubating cells that was designed as an improvement over the petri dish. The system was to be marketed by Prodigy Biosystems, which raised $1.2 million in capital financing.
“From the way it looked to us, looking from the outside, she’s had success,” said Krishnan Chittur, a chemical engineering professor. “I’ve been here longer than she has, and she’s had more success raising money than I’ve had.”
He said Ms. Bishop was a respected scientist who nevertheless had trouble getting along with colleagues. As members of the biotechnology program, students have to pass core classes in biology, chemistry and chemical engineering. But Ms. Bishop became convinced, he said, that the chemical engineering professors were trying to keep biology students from succeeding by making the classes too difficult.
“It was one of those things that ultimately became irrational with her, in my opinion,” he said.
Ms. Bishop was also a vocal critic of a new policy to require freshmen and sophomores to live on campus, and helped lead an effort to censure the university president, David B. Williams, for that and other policies, The Huntsville Times reported.
Andrew Ols, a senior, said he had been in a biology lab in the Shelby Center less than five minutes before the shooting began. “Now that we realize that it was a faculty person that committed the crime, no students were injured and no students were targeted or anything like that, there’s more shock than there is fear,” he said.
Nick Zivkovic, a senior, was filling his gas tank around 4 p.m. after finishing a lab in the Shelby Center, he said. “Next thing I know, 40 to 50 police cars are flying by,” he said.
Emergency vehicles created an “ocean of lights” as police officers with SWAT gear and automatic weapons stormed into the building, said Mr. Zivkovic who passed out blankets and tried to comfort the evacuated students, who were trembling and mumbling in the parking lot.
“You just try to hand them some hot chocolate,” he said.
According to a 2006 profile in The Huntsville Times, Ms. Bishop and her husband had tired of using old-fashioned petri dishes for cell incubation and designed a sealed, self-contained mobile cell incubation system.
On Ms. Bishop’s faculty Web page, she said she was developing a neural computer that used living neurons taken from adult stem cells and the cells of bony fish.
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