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UCLA Shooting: It May Have Been a Student Killing a Professor

Coverage here.

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Now confirmed: A graduate student “despondent about his grades” kills his professor.

Margaret Soltan, June 1, 2016 3:30PM
Posted in: headline of the day

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9 Responses to “UCLA Shooting: It May Have Been a Student Killing a Professor”

  1. Polish Peter Says:

    I’m going to guess grad student-adviser, which is the usual pattern, of which the shooting of math professor Walter Koppelman by a sometime grad student in 1970 at the University of Pennsylvania was the modern prototypical case:
    http://www.library.upenn.edu/docs/kislak/dp/1970/1970_02_12.pdf
    After initially appearing to improve, Koppelman later died of his wounds.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Polish Peter: Yes – I’ve been figuring something like that from the outset. Koppelman is unfortunately one of several examples of this scenario. I’m thinking in particular of the University of Iowa killings.

  3. wayward Says:

    Curious why these cases seem to be mostly related to grad students and advisors in STEM fields. Is STEM grad work more of a pressure cooker, or are those departments more likely to attract grad students with limited personal skills?

  4. Anon Says:

    It may just be that STEM, especially engineering, skew male.

  5. charlie Says:

    Wayward, in 2010, Amy Bishop, a biology prof at University of Alabama, Huntsville, shot and killed several of her colleagues during a department meeting. Her gripe, she was denied tenure and her research was going to be taken by the university. It would be interesting to see how many grad students have a seething hatred for their advisors….

  6. wayward Says:

    Isn’t biology also a STEM field?

  7. charlie Says:

    Yeah, it is and you have one of the shooters telling you why she did the killing, money. Money woes contribute to a whole range of personal issues. Why wouldn’t it carry over to STEM? FED research subsidies being cut, more researchers clawing for that money, careers being ruined, you get the picture….

  8. wayward Says:

    Charlie, that’s a good point. I worked in a computing research organization for a while, and it seemed to get less stable and less pleasant over the years. Of course, I never considered any kind of violence, but I did suspect that constricting resources contributed to the situation and decided that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to go back.

  9. charlie Says:

    Wayward, this is totally anecdotal, but after I graduated with a BS Physics, my close buddy asked me if I would accompany him on some tours of schools for possible grad school. We were both older students and had worked for years prior to returning to college. One of the profs flat out told us the hard cheese. We worked for him, what we accomplished was to be given to the department. He would determine when we were ready to move on. Byron was a former Army Ranger and told the prof to, ahem, drop dead and that he would make more money as an engineer than he would in academia. But I can imagine that a younger, less experienced undegrad would be overwhelmed at the pedigree of the professor and department. With the current drop in STEM funding,the academic snake pit becomes ever more dangerous…

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