IT IS rather chilling to read about someone who has killed three people in cold blood and find oneself muttering "I don't blame her". But so it was with the story of America's latest campus shooter, a biology lecturer called Amy Bishop (45), who killed on Friday and is now banged up, presumably awaiting charges, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
Amy Bishop is a Harvard-educated mother of four children, aged between nine and 18, and she is – or at least was – mad as hell. If you have ever wondered what would happen if middle-aged women were given access to firearms you need wonder no longer. Amy Bishop killed three of her colleagues at the University of Alabama, and wounded three others. (No students were injured.)
The horrible history of campus killings both in the United States and elsewhere has created the stereotype of the lone, white middle-aged male perpetrator who is either recently divorced or thinks that Pamela Andersen is his girlfriend.
Or of sad teenage boys with too many guns and not enough historically accurate views of Nazism. However, Amy Bishop looks like a plump, comfortable hockey mom with a good fringe.
One of the most astonishing things about her is that, according to reports in the Boston Globe and the New York Times, Amy Bishop has killed before. In 1986 her brother Seth died in Boston, after either a misunderstanding as to the functioning parts of the family shotgun, or a bitter family row, depending who you talk to. No charges were brought on that occasion.
So it looks like the University of Alabama picked the wrong person to mess with when they picked on Amy Bishop. Because mess with her the university most certainly did, while remaining, we can be sure, strictly between the tramlines of employment law and best academic practice. Amy Bishop’s crime lifts the lid on a private hell of the academic classes.
Bishop had lectured at the biology department of the University of Alabama for almost six years. But she had never been given tenure – in other words the security and prestige of a permanent job. She was told last spring that she had not gained tenure, and she appealed the university’s decision. On Friday the result of that appeal was made known – Bishop had been refused tenure once and for all.
In the words of yesterday’s New York Times: “If a tenure-track professor is not granted tenure after six years the university will no longer employ them.” Bishop was about to lose her job.
And so the shooting started. There can be no doubt about Amy Bishop's targets. As the New York Timeshad it, "the dead were all biology professors". One, Prof GK Podilla, was the head, or chairman, of the University of Alabama's department of biology.
Now one can see how Bishop’s argument would go. She was good enough to teach an important course – biology is a core subject on several courses at the University of Alabama. The university was happy enough to have her teach it for six years, a pretty long time in anyone’s employment history.
It is true that the nursing students at the university, for example, had complained about Bishop. She was lacking in social skills, they claimed, and would not meet their eyes. She was socially awkward.
Again in the words of the New York Times: “She was quirky, but no more so than other scientists.”
Quirky or not, the University of Alabama left Bishop in her teaching position until the very end of its permitted time to grant her full-time employment.
When the deadline came they decided not to appoint her, and Bishop, who had railed publicly against this cynical system, decided to get herself a gun.
It is interesting that she did not need even need the money from the putative permanent position she desired so desperately. She and her husband, James Anderson, had developed an automated method of incubating cells in the laboratory, much more reliable than the old-fashioned Petri dish, which was coming along nicely and looked as if it would be successful for them.
But still Bishop wanted, presumably, the prestige of a full-time teaching appointment. She felt, presumably, humiliated that she had worked at the university and been rejected by it at the last minute. She wondered, presumably, if someone younger and better connected was being lined up for the job she had done.
She will not have been the first academic to have been driven crazy by the injustice of it all; she will simply be the first – as far as we know – to leave a fatal familial shooting off her resume.
Many universities rely on the indentured labour of the temporary worker to carry out their primary function – teaching. It is a situation that does not lend itself to loud or public protest on the part of temporary staff – hence the arrival of the court case against the university, quietly settled, and the anti-depressants for a lot of its lecturers, quietly unsettled.
Unfortunately for the six people shot by Amy Bishop she does not appear, in the end, to have been the quiet type.