According to a recent report from the AP, Amy Bishop’s students allegedly complained about her to the administration. The administration, according to these reports, did not seem to take the complaints of the students seriously.
As we know, lots of students complain about lots of teachers. This part doesn’t surprise me.
I believe (along with my students, who outraged CHE readers right before the holidays by writing about the things professors don’t know) that anyone who spends most of his or her time reading from a textbook and not making eye contact should not be considered an outstanding presence in the classroom. (Translation: If you can’t deal with people, don’t enter a profession where it is mandatory that you deal with people.) He or she should probably not be awarded tenure. And administrators on campus — from department chairs, through deans, and up to provosts and presidents — should listen when a large group of students show enough initiative to speak in one voice.
I know, I know: It’s easy to say all this in retrospect. Sure, sure, we should all pay attention to what everybody is doing, and besides, why listen to undergraduates, right?
We should listen because sometimes they might have information to give us that we could not otherwise possess; we should listen to them because they deserve our attention and shouldn’t be dismissed as disgruntled or grade-grubbing.
According to an article by the Associated Press concerning the Amy Bishop case, students (at UAH) said they “signed a petition and complained to no avail about the classroom conduct of an Alabama professor accused of killing three colleagues and wounding three others in a shooting rampage at a faculty meeting. The students upset with biology professor Amy Bishop told The Associated Press they went to University of Alabama in Huntsville administrators at least three times a year ago, complaining that she was ineffective in the classroom and had odd, unsettling ways. The students said Bishop never made eye contact during conversations, taught by reading out of a textbook and made frequent references to Harvard University, her beloved alma mater.” (Read the whole article here.)
Anyhow, that’s not the part of the Bishop story that genuinely surprises me.
What gets me is the story I read in today’s Boston Herald. And please let me emphasize, folks, that in this instance I’m particularly talking about my own emotional reactions (as I was when, in my previous post, I discussed the fact that the alleged shooting of Bishop’s brother changed my response to the initial reports of the Hunstville event).
The Herald reports that “Bishop was charged with assault and battery for a March 2002 incident, in which an enraged Bishop unleashed a profanity-laced tirade against a mother whose child got the last booster seat at the Peabody International House of Pancakes, according to a Peabody police report. She yelled ‘I am Amy Bishop’ and then punched the frightened mother in her head. When police questioned Bishop, she claimed to be the victim, the report stated.” (Read the Herald’s piece here.)
Look, I am not even attempting to offer some bigger-picture perspective. All I’m saying is that, for me, these new pieces of the puzzle have confirmed this is not a story about tenure or the denial of tenure. It’s about Amy Bishop.
22 Responses to Amy Bishop: More Information, Fewer Answers
macheath - February 17, 2010 at 5:18 pm
Well, now we have the post from Gina entitled “Amy Bishop: More Information, Fewer Answers.” Actually, this is an incomplete title. It should read “Amy Bishop: More Information, Fewer Answers, and More of My Opinions About Alleged Facts That I Read in a Newspaper and Now Take to be True.”
literarytype - February 17, 2010 at 5:56 pm
an unfunny attempt at a witty complaint about someone who get facts from a newspaper? macheath, you are too cool for us, truly. we are in awe of your awesome hipsterness.
deanette - February 17, 2010 at 9:33 pm
IHoP? I’ve never witnessed violence in a pancake establishment. I agree with the writer that this story has gone way beyond discussions of fair vs. unfair within educational institutions. What I would like know more about in order to make my own decisions concerning how to read the events, though, is from her professional colleagues outside the department. How she regarded by her peers from other research institutions?
nordicexpat - February 18, 2010 at 12:47 am
Obviously there is a history here that needs to be uncovered: I’m sure there were a lot of warning signs that were missed. But the reference to the student petition complaining about her teaching makes it seem as if there was all her students “spoke with one voice” in protest to the administration. If one goes to http://www.ratemyprofessors.com, one would find a range of student comments that goes against the monolithic view presented in the blog. Obviously, there are problems with that source as well, and, just as obviously, there were warning signs that were missed. But I would think that a Chronicle blog writer should do more than just simply report the latest newspapers articles uncritically.
deanette - February 18, 2010 at 6:56 am
Students who sign a petition with their names in order to protest usually agree to blend their voices into one voice because that’s why combined group action is effective. The anonymous commenters on the teacher-rating sites, in contrast, are just that, anonymous. For all we know. every good review is written by the professor him or herself and ever bad review can be written by a bitter colleague. There’s nothing to prevent a professor from writing excellent reviews about their own teaching every day. They are utterly and entirely useless.
snwiedmann - February 18, 2010 at 7:16 am
My own daughter had a professor (of genetics) at the University of Miami who simply read the assigned textbook to the class ( a huge lecture class of 200+). The textbook had, not surprisingly, been written by the professor in question. The professor, while a pretty lousy classroom instructor, was a brilliant researcher in the lab. Like many tier 1 research universities, the U of M requires even their best researchers to teach on occasion. Perhaps this is one of the things that needs to change regarding tenure and promotion evaluations at tier 1 institutions.
che08 - February 18, 2010 at 9:08 am
I’ve been reading all of these blogs in the CHE and find it amazing that anyone would consider the Amy Bishop case one having to do with tenure!It seems as though everyone who has any bit of trepidation regarding getting tenure themselves or the tenure process in general to be using this case as a sounding board. Amy Bishop flipping out obviously had nothing to do with tenure or everything who didn’t get tenure would have taken the same course of action.
landrumkelly - February 18, 2010 at 9:14 am
“I am Amy Bishop!” If the account is true and she actually said that before striking a woman in the face in a pancake house, then the person who is now a mass murderer has long had problems that would have made her a menace in any area of work that she might have gone into. Her case is surely one of a kind. Aristotle’s statement regarding characterological defects comes to mind: “Virtue is uniform. Vice is multiform.” In spite of the limitations of that observation, it does remind us that each pathology is unique, and that every pathological person is unique in his or her pathology. Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Amy Bishop and many others can be lumped into that strange category called “mass murderers,” and yet they and their crimes otherwise bear little resemblance to one another. Prima donnas abound in academe as in all other fields, but it appears that it will never be possible to offer a single psychological profile for all potentially dangerous persons. In addition, not all dangerous and destructive individuals will be wielding weapons of physical violence. The most common (and arguably most destructive) actions of dangerous individuals will likely generally be of a psychological–or even an economic–nature. One can almost see the beginnings of what one might call the “Amy Bishop syndrome” emerging–not a syndrome about Amy Bishop or other potentially dangerous individuals, but a much more discomfiting tendency to start some kind of simplistic profiling to weed out the really dangerous persons among us. Who might those be? What will be their weapons of choice? Firearms make the most noise and do the most obvious physical damage, but it is not obvious that the greatest damage will be wielded by persons using firearms–even among mass murderers. Indeed, in some institutional settings the truly dangerous persons might be viewed as “pillars of the community,” whether that phrase is used to refer to a slaveowner in a town in the antebellum South or a pathological professor in romance languages–or even an academic administrator who just happens to believe that his or her wealth and social status justify untold (and often unseen or unspoken) violence against others, violence that will unfortunately come around in so many possible ways that there likely will never be any effective way of anticipating it until it has already happened. One nonetheless hopes that it might be possible to recognize AS VIOLENCE the more common forms of violence after they have occurred, lest they be allowed to compound themselves in the lives and careers of those who manage somehow to stay sufficiently within the law that their crimes and injuries are never obvious enough to warrant any kind of action. The generally greatest menaces, that is, will still be “flying under the radar,” and they will abound–and there does not seem to be any obvious way of spotting them until they have already done their damage.Landrum Kelly, Jr.
megginson - February 18, 2010 at 9:15 am
Concerning many tier 1 research universities requiring even their best researchers to teach on occasion: Many such institutions do also have research scientist or research practitioner positions that require no teaching. While models vary greatly, these spots often do not involve any sort of tenure (with or without that label), and sometimes require that the researcher raise all or almost all of the salary through external funding. Many people do excellent research from such positions and prefer them, but the problem snwiedmann mentions can certainly happen when a person accepts a standard tenure-track position, which includes the teaching and service expectations, and then tries to treat it as a research practitioner position. The problem is greatly compounded when the institution does not seem to understand the difference at tenure time.
celdjt12 - February 18, 2010 at 9:53 am
Go
celdjt12 - February 18, 2010 at 10:16 am
Bear with me for a moment while I quote from an e-mail I received this morning from the UM executive vice president and health system CEO:”As entrepreneur Ray Kroc once said: “The two most important requirements for major success are first: being at the right place at the right time, and second, doing something about it.”That’s right. Not something from folks like Einstein about deepening our understanding of the cosmos, or from Albert Schweitzer or Mother Theresa on humanitarianism, but from the founder of the world’s largest fast food chain! Entrepreneurship is now the most highly prized attribute in the academy, with teaching increasingly decoupled fom research, and with the latter engendering ever narrower forms of specialization that tend to mitigate against the capacity to perform in the classroom. So, when it comes to teaching, I suspect that there are increasing numbers of Amy Bishops out there. And, as Barreca suggests, I’m not sure that within research universities, and those aspiring for that status, this is necessarily seen as a negative thing.But that’s not all of course. Amy Bishop wasn’t just a poor teacher; she went “postal” in a context allegedly ruled by reason. I don’t doubt that something in her psychology caused her to do what she did when she did it. So the question for me is about the underlying processes that resulted in her being employed in a university to begin with. Or, more generally, why has my risk of being killed by a colleague in the hallowed halls of the Academy just gone up? I suspect the answer lies somewhere in the processes that have elevated entrepreneurship to a crucial academic value, that it concerns things like globalization, the proliferation of alternate knowledge producing sites, the increasing emphasis on producing knowledge for use, and so on. At the same time, I suspect it also has to do with the fragmentation and delegitimization of knowledge itself, which has helped to degrade perceptions of universities as important cultural institutions. Bit of a cliché I know but maybe it is time to do a little navelgazing and ask whether, when it comes the increasing risk in the Academy of situations like this, the enemy we see is at least in part ourselves.
sponsa9 - February 18, 2010 at 10:32 am
Whatever happened to scholarly inquiry? The newspapers are not a reliable source of information. Anyone who has been interviewed by the press knows the press distorts the facts. The fact is Dr. Bishop was not charged with murder of her brother. Maybe she did murder him, but we certainly cannot convict her of that based on newspaper accounts. The possibility exists that it was a tragic accident. The bomb investigation by the FBI also cleared her and her husband. The case at the restaurant, who knows what the truth is? But since when is it considered scholarly to use newspaper accounts to try and convict a person? From the evidence given in the press of her publication record and teaching, a negative tenure decision does seem justified. However, that does not mean that personal animosity of her peers wasn’t a factor too. Tenure decisions and life itself are full of grey areas and ambiguities. For a mother of four, a wife, an intelligent person to murder her colleagues is a serious matter. From her bizarre reactions after the murders (no attempt to escape, calling her husband as usual, her comments to police), I suspect mental illness is a distinct possibility. It is a sad case for everyone: the victims, her husband and children, Amy Bishop, and our society.
drj50 - February 18, 2010 at 12:53 pm
The question beneath much of this discussion is, “how much smoke does there have to be before we conclude there really is a fire?” As readers have pointed out, newspapers are not infallible, allegations are not charges, and charges are not convictions. At some point, however, many reach the same conclusion from these reports that Gina has, that there was something amiss with this individual.
laughin_otter - February 18, 2010 at 3:20 pm
So a professor was “ineffective in a classroom” and had “odd, unsettling ways.” So what? What students do when they mount petitions and campaigns to get someone fired, is much, much worse. What they are learning is that if you don’t like it, get rid of it–which is the obverse of “If it feels good, do it.” They clearly have no regard for the realities of the situation. In the old days, students sat and listened to professors drone on, the students did their work, they learned (or didn’t) and it was all a part of being a student. Many students learned in spite of themselves and were able to look back with respect, if not admiration, at the doddering prof who showed them there was more to life than their own navels.This type of mobbing carries into the later workplace because it was effective, mostly due to college administrations’ cowardly acceptance of every student whine, snivel, and sob.I have had students during end-of-term evaluations choose a leader who led a discussion where they all agreed what to write. One of the common complaints in that instance was that since I wore my overcoat into the classroom, they concluded I was “unprepared.” Also, I wasn’t a “bubbly personality,” which they apparently expected to see. Whether I actually had anything to teach, apparently wasn’t the issue.
laughin_otter - February 18, 2010 at 3:25 pm
P.S. to Post 14–I should also mention that in that same school, I had students do a separate evaluation questionnaire, in class–signed, so I could pass it back once I had looked them over. The difference between the signed responses and the unsigned responses on the college-provided questionnaire was stunning, and I came away with the absolute understanding that THEY LIED.Students will lie, complain, fudge, and ultimately run, to cover their fears that they will not do well. In the abovementioned case, they all passed honestly. But they weren’t sure they would, so they preempted the process by complaining in advance, thus putting the onus on me, my alleged lack of preparation, etc.Caveat: when the students run the show, education goes out the window.
goxewu - February 18, 2010 at 6:55 pm
“Whatever happened to scholarly inquiry?” This is not a story about the Pelopennisian War, the price of cotton in Georgia in 1856, or what killed King Tut. This is a murder case, in the news, right now. There is a time for journalism and a time for scholarly inquiry.”The newspapers are not a reliable source of information.” Within limits, yes they are. The New York Times is fairly reliable and the Huntsville paper is, too.”The fact is Dr. Bishop was not charged with murder of her brother.” That’s exactly the point; many people, including law enforcement officers at the place and time, thought she should have been. (The fact is, O.J. was acquitted.)”The bomb investigation by the FBI also cleared her and her husband.” Not quite–the husband is the one who says he has a letter from the ATF clearing him. Oops! Bulletin from one of those notoriously unreliable newspapers, The Boston Globe: the Feds deny that any such letter was ever sent. The bombing case is unsolved; nobody was “cleared.”"The case at the restaurant, who knows what the truth is?” Well, Dr. Bishop hired an attorney, who pleaded her GUILTY of assault and battery, and a judge sentenced her to probation and suggested she attend anger management classes.”But since when is it considered scholarly to use newspaper accounts to try and convict a person?” Convict in the court of public opinion and convict in a court of law are two different things. Dr. Bishop won’t receive legal punishment until she’s convicted in a court of law. What the public thinks of her is another matter. “…a negative tenure decision does seem justified. However, that does not mean that personal animosity of her peers wasn’t a factor too.” If the negative decision was justified, “personal animosity” of her colleague is irrelevant. Besides, there’s a difference between some of her colleagues thinking her acting unprofessionally or uncollegially and “personal animosity,” which implies prejudice.”For a mother of four, a wife, an intelligent person to murder her colleagues is a serious matter.” What? If a single, childless, unintelligent person kills three colleagues, it’s not a serious matter? “From her bizarre reactions after the murders (no attempt to escape, calling her husband as usual, her comments to police), I suspect mental illness is a distinct possibility.” Her reactions weren’t so bizarre. Plenty of revenge killers, having accomplished what they wanted, make no attempt to escape. As for her remarks to police, some consider it likely to be as cold and calculated as the killings, i.e., the laying the groundwork for an insanity defense.”It is a sad case for everyone: the victims, her husband and children, Amy Bishop, and our society.” This is the kind of moral equivalence that used to make anticommunists so apoplectic when people would say, “Well, you know, all societies have faults, ours under Harry Truman, and the Soviets’ under Joseph Stalin.” Forty years ago, this comment might have read, “This is a sad case for everyone: Sharon Tate, her fetus, Abigail Folger, Patricia Krenwinkel, Tex Watson, Charles Manson, and our society.”
suomynona - February 19, 2010 at 7:41 am
Thank you, goxewu. This thread was suffering from a bromide overdose.
johntoradze - February 19, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Yes. Thank you. Her attorney has made the case de facto not guilty by reason of insanity. He announced that Amy is insane and does not remember the killings. Amy is clearly a sociopathic personality with a history of violence to get her way. I am certain she planned this weeks in advance, knowing when the meeting would be. She killed as many people as she could, then calmly walked to the bathroom, left the gun there and faced the camera as she delivered her planned statement, “It didn’t happen. They are still alive.” She knew exactly what she was doing, and exactly what she had to say to get away with it.
cheri28 - February 19, 2010 at 2:44 pm
She actually yelled “I am Dr. Amy Bishop” while she was striking the woman holding the baby.However, could those of you who are qualified PLEASE investigate her VERY WEAK and seemingly fraudlent academic record?I mean, it is common practice in academia to vanity press publish your papers and claim that your underage children are your co-authors? Is it also common place for tenure track employees to claim that their under age children are employees of a non-existent “research lab” that the same tenure track employee claims to own?Does it happen often that professors on the tenure track go many years without reaching any of their published research goals? Is it common for people on the tenure track to never update those same reports with any results?Are professor on the tenure track commonly rewarded for sitting in a class and simply reading out of a textbook?Because unless some of you folks who are qualified to investigate such things as Bishop’s paltry academic record do so, you are all going to be painted with the Amy Bishop brush: a slacker who never performed up to par but thought she deserved tenure anyway.
cheri28 - February 19, 2010 at 2:47 pm
“The bomb investigation by the FBI also cleared her and her husband.”That is completely untrue. Law Enforcement stated yesterday that Jim Anderson is lying and they were never cleared and also that Anderson is lying when he claims he received a letter from the ATF stating that he was cleared.
cheri28 - February 19, 2010 at 2:49 pm
“From her bizarre reactions after the murders (no attempt to escape…”She did attempt to escape by leaving the premises and she attempted to cover up her connection to the crime by hiding the murder weapon.
goxewu - February 19, 2010 at 5:23 pm
Owing to the murder-suicide yesterday in Austin, Texas, in which a man with a brief against the IRS (he left behind an online 3000-word de facto suicide note crashed his light plane into a building containing some IRS offices, killing himself and an innocent person in the building, are we now going to see on “Brainstorm”:Calls for a revision of, or end to, our tax system because it, like tenure, “drives” people to do what this man did?Calls for psychological counseling for taxpayers so that they won’t be “driven” to do what this man did?Statements saying that the murder-suicide is a “tragedy” (you know, something out of the blue that no specific person actually caused to happen), and a sad day for the pilot, his family, uh, oh yes, the innocent victim, and our country?