At church yesterday one of our parishioners mentioned the tragic faculty shooting in Hunstville and asked me, "You don't have any professors down at Marietta like that, do you?"
My immediate response was "No, of course not," but the problem with this kind of tragedy is that the perpetrator seems like a fairly harmless person until she suddenly starts shooting. We do have a lot of fairly harmless people here, but if I suspected any of them of being capable of committing such an act, I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. And if I thought the tenure process could bear the entire blame for transforming a fairly harmless person into a killer, I would quit my job today.
Amidst all the shrill voices eager to blame academe or the tenure process, an interesting statement caught my eye. Professor Robert O. Lawton, who chaired the committee that recommended against tenure for Amy Bishop, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that "a tenure denial is a failure for everyone involved. 'It means you screwed up a hire and you screwed up a mentoring'" (read it here).
I don't know the details of Amy Bishop's case or how Hunstville's tenure process differs from ours, but Lawton makes a good point: we hire people because we believe they are tenurable and we mentor them to help them become tenurable, so denying tenure feels like failure for all of us. I suppose there are academics out there who take pleasure in setting bars impossibly high and then laughing when their colleagues can't make the jump, but I've more often seen faculty members and administrators going the extra mile to help their colleagues succeed. We mentor, we workshop, we support research and conference travel, we welcome new faculty members into the campus community, the faculty bowling league, the faculty publishing group, and more. That's one of the reasons I love my job--I get to be part of that process.
Right now information about the Hunstville shooting is sketchy and incomplete so it would be a mistake to draw firm conclusions about what made Amy Bishop snap. The tenure process is tough all over and it would be the height of hubris to say it couldn't happen here, but I will say it shouldn't happen here. Not while we're all in this together holding out a hand to help our colleagues jump those high hurdles.
2 comments:
I think the failure in the Bishop case was the failure in not fully vetting her. It's such a simple thing, but googling a person now-a-days should be common practice at any organization - sadly she was not googled or her past would have shined through. And okay, offering the benefit of the doubt here - perhaps google wasn't available or a common practice when she was hired on at Huntsville (obviously her Harvard days were pre-google), there have always been background search firms available who can and do every day look into a person's past to ensure the hiring company is not surprised by something that may come up.
No one is to blame for the tragedy in Huntsville except for Bishop herself, but all institutions of higher learning, nay, all companies, should learn a lesson about what happened and screen applicants appropriately. A general background search would have resulted in the info about the shooting death of her brother and the suspicions at Harvard and that alone should have made all sorts of bells go off.
You're right, there are multiple ways that a "fledgling" prof can be helped to climb the ladder, but sometimes, in the sickest of minds, even that doesn't help. No one wants to accept that "these things happen," but they do.
As the wife of an HR professional (usually the first person targeted in a "revenge killing" i.e. I didn't get the promotion, I got fired, I didn't get the raise I deserved) and communications professional who has studied too many of these situations in her life, all I can hope for is that everything is done before the troubled person makes it onto a site to ensure they don't infiltrate it enough to do any harm.
That said - these things happen. And they shouldn't. And I pray for those whose lives are devastated in their wake.
I don't think it was tenure any more than I think that it's religion that causes people to shoot others in church. It's mental illness, and it's heartbreaking.
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