… sort of theory should be aware of this.
… Zinkhan didn’t set the schedule for a planned trip to Amsterdam or even buy the airline ticket for the flight out of Atlanta.
Harmen Verbruggen, dean of Vrije Universiteit (Free University) in Amsterdam — where Zinkhan has taught part-time for two years — invited Zinkhan to help the university start up a marketing master’s program, Verbruggen told the newspaper Tuesday. The dean’s secretary made travel arrangements with Delta Air Lines three or four days before the triple homicide, he said.
Zinkhan’s travel plans had been widely reported as an indication he had planned to flee to Europe after the shootings.
At this point, I’m seeing him push his car into a body of water and then head for the remotest part of the Appalachian Trail he knows and shoot himself.
Via Wendy, a reader.
Three people have been shot and killed in Athens, Georgia, and police are looking for a professor at the University of Georgia, George Zinkhan, in connection with the killings.
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Update: Seems to have killed his wife and two bystanders.
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Another Update: An earlier UD post on the subject of professors who murder. All of the cases she’s encountered since starting this blog involve men murdering their wives — estranged, ex-, current. (The man featured in the post, Rafael Robb of the University of Pennsylvania, eventually confessed.)
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Witnesses.
… [A]n argument between the suspect, who was well known to the theatre group, and an unidentified man immediately preceded the shootings.
According to [police], witnesses told police that Zinkhan left the event and returned a few minutes later with two handguns. He fired both guns… and afterward walked away, got in a car and drove off.
…“At high level of threat for anyone who comes into contact with him,” said [an investigator].
Adams said after the shootings, Zinkhan apparently took both [of his] children to another neighbor’s home.
“He said he had an emergency,” Adams said Saturday evening. Police questioned neighbors on the street.
The two children are now in police custody…
The two wounded people did not suffer life-threatening injuries… Both were injured by ricochet — one victim in a leg and the other in a foot… Both were taken to St. Mary’s Hospital in Athens.
A man outside the shooting scene said his son was a witness to the slayings.
John Hardy of Conyers said his son, Matt Hardy, was standing next to one of the victims. John Hardy says his son told him that the victim, Tanner, was shot twice — once in the front and the back.
John Hardy said Matt Hardy, who lives in Athens, was a friend of Tanner’s. His son was being questioned by Athens police and released. He declined to comment on what he told investigators.
“At 22 you’re not supposed to watch people die,” said John Hardy.
According to Tanner’s Facebook profile, he has acted in 50 productions, including “Sherlock Holmes – The Final Adventure,” the current play being produced at the theater.
Gary Moon of Athens had just left classes at nearby Piedmont College when he heard gunshots.
“It was like pow, pow, pow. At first I thought it was just somebody fooling around with a cap gun or something,” Moon said. “Then I saw a lady who was walking her dog. She took off running and screaming down the street.”
Moon called 911 and reported the shooting, then drove up to the scene. Trained in CPR he sought to help. “I was too late. There wasn’t anything I could do.”…
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A couple of random thoughts:
1.) I think it likely that Zinkhan will be found dead by his own hand.
2.) I would guess that Zinkhan and his wife were estranged, and that the man with whom he had an argument before leaving and returning with guns was protecting her from Zinkhan.
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This report calls Marie Bruce Zinkhan’s ex-wife.
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Ex-wife, but apparently they still lived together in the same house with their two children.
Was she going to move out? Had she fallen in love with one of the men Zinkhan apparently argued with and then returned to shoot? If she’d told Zinkhan she was leaving him to move in with a lover, that could have set him off. Custody issues, too, would have played a part in his rage, as they did in the case of Thomas Murray and Raphael Robb, two other professors who killed their wives.
The profile here, whether it turns out to match Zinkhan or not, is that of a control freak who thinks he’s a genius to whom no rules apply. And who’s not going to let some woman get away with messing up the carefully crafted pattern of his life.
A professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who was fired over plagiarism allegations is suing the graduate school for $200 million.
Madonna Constantine filed a lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court on Tuesday calling her 2008 firing an “academic lynching.”
Constantine was a clinical psychology professor at Teachers College, which is affiliated with Columbia University. She says her firing was fueled by “academic rivalry and political intrigue.”
Teachers College says the lawsuit has no merit and intends to defend itself vigorously.
Constantine’s firing came after a noose was found dangling from her office door. Police never determined who put it there…
Associated Press.
Feral rabbits have been the bane of the University of Victoria for years, but now the problem is moving off campus.
No one knows when the first rabbit appeared on campus, but an estimated 1,500 of them currently call it home.
The university has come under pressure to cull the animals by angry neighbours but how that might be accomplished is fuelling a raging debate.
Proponents of the doomsday approach have taken a shine to something called the Rodenator.
The device, according to its U.S. manufacturer, “delivers a precisely measured mixture of propane and oxygen into the tunnel or burrow of invasive pests. This mixture is then detonated by the operator, causing an instantaneous underground shock wave of concussive force that eliminates the pests and in some (species specific) cases collapses some of the existing tunnel structure thus preventing immediate reinfestation.”
Not surprisingly, animal rights advocates are not wild about that option, and university officials have said they plan to try non-lethal approaches first.
Local veterinarian Nick Shaw has offered to perform vasectomies on the rabbits, but he says even that won’t solve all of the bunny problems…
CBC
… are excited about the prospect of travel to Cuba, and this news will certainly cheer them:
President Obama will announce today that he is lifting travel restrictions that block Cuban Americans from traveling to Cuba and will relax the rules governing what items can be sent to the island, a senior White House official said.
The decision does not lift the trade embargo on communist Cuba but eases the prohibitions that have restricted Cuban Americans from visiting their relatives and has limited what they can send back home.
No, UD still can’t go. But maybe soon.
Got an email a moment ago telling me students have occupied the graduate building at the New School in New York, barricading themselves in until the president and vice-president of the school resign.
Background here.
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Update: Police have ejected the protesters.
What can UD tell you about the friend she’s known for almost thirty years now that he’s a very big deal?
He was the best man at her wedding. He gave a glorious toast.
He and Mr UD go way back. Both sons of Harvard professors, the two lads lived only a couple of blocks away from one another in Cambridge, and they were among the first to attend Charles Merrill’s Commonwealth School in Boston. (Mr UD loves to tell the story of Merrill one afternoon awkwardly announcing that the kids were going to have a guest speaker that day, a poet… Uh… the headmaster’s brother… Guy named James Merrill…)
Both went to Harvard, where they remained close friends. Both moved to Washington, Peter to work for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Karol to work at the University of Maryland.
Over the years, Mr UD has accompanied Peter to Kurdistan, Baghdad, and East Timor to work with him on political issues.
Les UDs have spent many moody, meditative New Years in Vermont with Peter (he has long had a house there), his family, and other friends.
Peter is a loyal and loving friend.
He has an excellent sense of humor. UD once made him laugh so hard he almost lost it. Les UDs and Peter and Peter’s girlfriend were driving back from kayaking in Virginia somewhere. Peter was at the wheel. UD, notorious for being unable to tell even a simple joke correctly, was trying to tell the first of these two jokes. It all went terribly wrong, and became far more obscene than necessary, in her hands.
Somehow the total ineptitude of UD‘s telling, and the desperate obscenity of her version, sent Peter into such a spin that he almost lost control of the car.
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Peter has the driven, complex, difficult personality you’d expect with his high-powered background, his politically active and ambitious family, and the legacy of his world-historical father. In fact it looks as though the Number One diplomat in Afghanistan (Peter will be the second in command) didn’t want him appointed.
“Galbraith is a much stronger personality, he’s a bigger name, from a bigger country and he is going to carry more weight [than the Norwegian at the head of the UN team,” one diplomatic] official said.
Yeah, I guess he’s a strong personality. Sure. Very strong.
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Update: UD doesn’t have any pictures of herself with Peter on this computer, so she’ll run this one instead. He’s standing somewhere nearby.
Les UDs visited Peter when he was the American ambassador to Croatia, and they spent a day yachting and eating excellent food on various islands with Croatia’s then-president, Franjo Tudjman. In this photo, La Kid, showing a good deal of sense (Tudjman was an unsavory character), is hiding her face rather than be photographed with him. UD has no such reservations, and smiles, as you see, broadly.
“I’m going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there’s an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened,” [George W.] Bush said [of his projected autobiography].
Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley suggested that AIG executives should accept responsibility for the collapse of the insurance giant by resigning or killing themselves.
“I suggest, you know, obviously, maybe they ought to be removed,” Grassley said. “But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.”
… little essay in today’s George Washington University newspaper quotes your UD.
There are a few errors of writing in this piece, which I will hereby diplomatically correct.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm keeps her trap shut when UD‘s getting any form of media attention. Rule Number One of this blog.
Some excerpts.
The excerpts that quote me.
As a new generation of writers, we cannot help but … internalize [the recent] deaths [of significant American novelists], some more deeply, or strangely, than others. This is because these artists […] matter greatly, because we make them matter. We internalized their sense of story structure, if only to reinvent, criticize or recreate what they meant.
“It does have an impact on you [as a generation] that these people are gone,” said GW English professor Margaret Soltan, known for her widely read blog, University Diaries. “They produced a version of the great American novel, but at the same time, it seems to me that you’re from a different world.”
We are from a different world, and our literature – with its adeptness [at] switching scenery and [its] emphasis on the self-reflexive, reflects this, perhaps best embodied in the work of David Foster Wallace …
“I would argue that the basic theme of human existence – everyone trying to organize their life so it’s not painful – that theme has been with us since Shakespeare. The basic dilemma of being is not changing,” Soltan said.
Whether we like it or not – personal preferences aside – these writers are important to us, because we have either read them, been influenced by them, or because we were told that they were important. For this reason, we exist in their shadow. To be relevant artists, we are … either [going to] be influenced by their work or make an informed move away from it.
“The whole question of influence and how powerful[ly] you’re going to be influenced is in play here,” said Soltan … Even the notion of artistic trauma is at play, she said.
“Why does an artist’s life seem more difficult, and does that have to continue to be the model?” she asked.
Must future work depend on the trope of the suffering artist? Perhaps not…
