In the aftermath of the UCLA shooting, Scott Jaschik reviews what we know about the origins and characteristics of such events. Which isn’t much. Fields like engineering, math, and biology do seem to produce most of the attacks, but nursing professors and comp lit professors have also in recent years been murdered by disgruntled students.
I think that “spark” idea gets us somewhere. My own review of these attacks conjures, pretty consistently, a paranoid loser smoldering with rage.
Et alors? All professors who teach long enough encounter students whose behavior unsettles them. Maybe frightens them. (Professors lucky enough to teach on gun-friendly campuses get to worry that these unbalanced individuals may be packing heat.) Behind the vague word assessment lies the hard reality that most of us will never actually report a student, that we expect university settings to be about intensity and struggle and not giving up on people. Several of these killings came after a perpetual grad student was finally dropped from a program. University settings tolerate the sort of bizarre behavior that corporations would boot out the door in minutes.
For what it’s worth – killers in university settings (I’m thinking of professors who kill professors too, like the notorious Amy Bishop) aren’t just paranoid, from what I can tell. They are often strikingly grandiose, arrogant people. They kill those who refuse to acknowledge their superiority. They are solving a problem: They are ridding the world of people whose existence threatens their god-like self-perception. Professors who give middling or failing grades to shaky people who consider themselves transcendent geniuses would be at risk.
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The gunman has been identified.
[William] Klug was an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and had been the target of [Mainak] Sarkar’s anger on social media for months. On March 10, Sarkar called the professor a “very sick person” who should not be trusted.
“William Klug, UCLA professor is not the kind of person when you think of a professor. He is a very sick person. I urge every new student coming to UCLA to stay away from this guy,” Sarkar wrote. “He made me really sick. Your enemy is my enemy. But your friend can do a lot more harm. Be careful about whom you trust.”
A source called the gunman’s accusations “absolutely untrue.”
“The idea that somebody took his ideas is absolutely psychotic,” the source said.
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… Sarkar has been studying for his PhD since 2006 with no graduating date, two years longer than any of the other researchers.
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The killer had a list of targets and killed one of them – a woman who lived in his Minnesota town – before driving to LA and killing Krug.
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The woman was his ex-wife.
June 2nd, 2016 at 10:18AM
In 1991 a graduate student named Gang Lu killed three of his physics professors and a university administrator, and critically wounded a student employee, in part because he was not awarded a prestigious prize. According to a story in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/04/us/iowa-gunman-was-torn-by-academic-challenge.html), “He had a very bad temper and saw himself as No. 1,” said Xuming Chi, a doctoral candidate who was a former roommate of Mr. Lu. “He had a psychological problem with being challenged.”
June 2nd, 2016 at 1:39PM
“All professors who teach long enough encounter students whose behavior unsettles them. Maybe frightens them.”
Professors stick their necks out, or so it seems to me. I hope the news offers enough detail to offer guidance to profs and admin folks. E. g., didn’t someone else notice the Klug-Sarkar relation was toxic or getting there?
June 2nd, 2016 at 5:32PM
It does take more than paranoia. I once had a student refer quite pleasantly, while sitting in my office and talking a great deal and somewhat quickly about why he hadn’t finished much assigned work that semester but not doing anything else particularly alarming, to that time a month or so ago his was sitting in his car in the parking lot and hesitating to come to class, and the whole class was talking about why he wasn’t there. Needless to say, that never happened.
I don’t think I challenged him at the time (in part because he immediately went on to something else; I wasn’t getting a word in edgewise in this conversation), but, once he finally left the office, I did report him as a “student of concern,” using my university’s established process. Despite the paranoia, I wasn’t really concerned that he was a danger to others, but I did worry that he might, once he came down from whatever high he was on and realized what a mess he’d made of the semester, be a danger to himself.
As I learned from an email he sent me later (explaining the continued absence of his work), within 24 hours of our conversation he was in an inpatient mental health facility, being treated for the manic phase of bipolar disorder. I’m not sure whether my report had anything to do with that, or whether others close to him realized that he had lost touch with reality, but in any case it seems he got the help he needed.
I did think at the time, and have periodically thought since, about how the situation could have been different if he had projected blame for his situation outward. I’m not quite sure why he could be paranoid but not angry or inclined to blame me or his classmates for his situation, while others act very differently. Of course, I didn’t spend the session telling him he was almost certainly going to fail the class, but he seemed to have a pretty good sense that that was the case all by himself, and accepted that as a logical consequence of not turning in work. Maybe if he’d turned in unacceptable work and I’d failed it things would have been different? Perhaps, but I don’t think so. It really seemed to be a matter of the student’s underlying personality, which, even when mixed with mental illness, still made him a reasonably pleasant — and safe — person with whom to deal.
June 2nd, 2016 at 5:57PM
“Professors lucky enough to teach on gun-friendly campuses get to worry that these unbalanced individuals may be packing heat.”
I’m going to have to flag that as a non-sequitur, UD. If an individual has resolved to commit homicide by killing university professors, it’s unlikely he or she is going to be affected one way or another by the niceties of gun permits or gun-free zones.
June 2nd, 2016 at 6:53PM
MikeM: Not so much a non-sequitur as a related point. The fact of an abundance of concealed guns on a campus will certainly raise anxieties among professors.