… by reason of insanity is that her students reported she’d taught a class in her usual fashion – reading from the book, mainly, but nothing out of the ordinary – just before she opened fire on her colleagues.
(Click on the category of this post – Amy Bishop – for background.)
Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=32598
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
September 23rd, 2011 at 8:12AM
But she’s not pleading temporary insanity, is she? There’s substantial evidence that she’s been nuts for a long time – or are you arguing that craziness would of course preclude teaching at a university?
September 23rd, 2011 at 9:29AM
Mr Punch: I believe she’s pleading insanity – “mental defect” is the phrase I’ve been reading. And that’s the problem, it seems to me – though I’m far from a lawyer. She killed her brother decades and decades ago and has always been weird and even maybe a bit menacing… But she got her PhD, moved her career along, taught (Her students complained about her from time to time, but nothing came of it, so how bad could she have been? And some of her students praised her teaching.), married, raised children… So while there has certainly been evidence over many years of her strangeness, she has not been a psychotic who cannot function. Getting a Harvard PhD, marrying, raising a brood of children — these are not the acts of a psychotic.
September 23rd, 2011 at 10:15AM
It’s not as though she had a great deal of choice. She can’t say she didn’t do it. She can’t say it was accidental. She can’t say it was self-defense. Her choice is between guilty and insanity. In some states, a guilty plea will obviate the death penalty, but I somehow doubt that Alabama is one of them. There’s no motive for the prosecutor to do a deal to avoid a trial (the prosecutor is probably hungry for a trial). So an insanity plea is likely the only action that could lead to her surviving this. It may be a very small possibility, but it’s non-zero.
October 20th, 2011 at 6:59AM
Is not teaching in the usual manner and then blasting away at the faculty a sure sign of “insanity” in the colloquial sense? It seems “more insane”, if you will entertain such a phrase, than being upset and then pulling the trigger.
The legal “insanity” defense relies on establishing that the defendant didn’t know what they did was wrong (or that it would generally be perceived as wrong by others) at the time of the act. This would be a very different thing from the understanding of the term insanity by the average Joe.
(I am not a lawyer, and don’t presume to be authoritative here, just my understanding of the issue. How screwed is our society if I feel compelled to write that? Maybe it’s just me.)
My take: Sure, she’s “crazy” but not the kind of crazy that will result in acquittal by reason of insanity.
The guy in AZ who almost put Giffords six feet under… now that’s a good candidate for an insanity defense. Loughner is batsh@t insane.
August 30th, 2012 at 7:33PM
how did one university have the sense to say ‘do not admit under any circumstances’ about james holmes?
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/james-holmes-application-letter-iowa-163256614.html
the article doesnt say. does his application essay sound spectacularly off? Iowa ends up looking way astute.
February 21st, 2016 at 2:22PM
“Getting a Harvard PhD, marrying, raising a brood of children — these are not the acts of a psychotic.”
Well, seriously disturbed people can do it – absolutely! I don’t know what to call her, but I don’t think she acted normal during that time. She (undoubtedly) sent a pipe bomb to a former colleague, bashed a woman in the head at a restaurant, caused trouble in their neighborhood, killed her brother – and those are just the things we know about. One professor and UAH recognized immediately that she had problems, was “crazy,” as he put it. She complained about that remark, but he did not retract it. No, she is crazy all right.