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In the matter of ex-UCLA lecturer Matthew Harris, there are a few things to say.

1.) A dismissed faculty member has had a psychotic break and has issued death threats against faculty, students, the whole school really. How well has the campus responded in terms of security?

2.) When did the school become aware (through student complaints, his Rate My Professor page, his social media, etc.) that Harris is a violent, mentally ill person? Did it act quickly, or did it drag its feet?

3.) How well has the administration kept students and faculty informed about the ongoing threat, and what people should do about it?

4.) The acutely psychotic condition of Harris makes me suspect that his madness was visible long before he began ranting about mass murder. Did anyone warn the philosophy department about him before they hired him? Did the department have reservations about hiring him which they decided to overlook?

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Oh. And don’t forget. 5.) “Every country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.” UCLA must certainly proceed on the assumption that Harris enjoys a massive violent arsenal to match his massive violent mental illness.

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UPDATE: “[A] former instructor in a philosophy department is alleged to have sent members of the department threatening messages and was revealed to possibly have a history of problematic interactions with students, and possibly was observed in the past as problematic by superiors at institutions which (for reasons unknown) do not appear to have effectively responded to the situation or informed relevant others of it.”

Margaret Soltan, February 1, 2022 9:36AM
Posted in: professors

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5 Responses to “In the matter of ex-UCLA lecturer Matthew Harris, there are a few things to say.”

  1. Rita Says:

    I think if there was a mental health issue, the school may be constrained by confidentiality rules from informing students or faculty about his history or even what was going on with him at present. I had a student once who made much less serious threats (also while having what appeared to be a psychotic break), and the faculty teaching him that semester were not told anything about his history or his current issues. If we had been, we could easily have put together from our various experiences with him what was going on, but left to our own devices to interpret his bizarre behavior, we spent half the term assuming it was isolated to our own classes and probably something about our individual teaching. (Ironically, it was ultimately my probable violation of confidentiality rules that got him removed – I complained about his behavior to a senior faculty member, who then emailed the dean and demanded that the student be removed from my class immediately, which resulted in his being removed from school entirely, in an email in which all his current profs were CC’ed, and then they started talking to each other and realized that this was obviously a crazy person all along and we could have been spared much class disruption if we had the slightest shred of info about this earlier.)

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Rita: Yeah, the confidentiality rules often play a woeful role in these problems.

    In the particular case at UCLA, we need to know a lot more about the timeline, since I’m beginning to think Harris was pretty obviously unstable back when the hiring discussions took place, so the problem predates the confidentiality business, and has rather to do with whether the hiring committee/philosophy faculty did in fact have reservations from the outset, but for whatever reason proceeded nonetheless. And how about recommendations, or simple scuttlebut? It was scuttlebut that brought down Jessica Krug – people started openly talking about her.

    What went wrong here? How soon, after students loudly complained of his lunacy, was he removed from the classroom? Think back all the way to U Alabama’s mass murderer, Amy Bishop – there’s evidence the place knew she was a dangerous nut, and there’s evidence some people were positively afraid of her. Yes, they were in the process of finally getting rid of her — but it was just that dismissal, after allowing her to stay there for years, that set her off and starting her killing.

    I’m not saying universities have to have ESP and intuit the special danger of certain faculty. I AM saying that I worry about why universities seem to miss – or find a way to tolerate – those very rare people who seem quite overtly and menacingly mentally ill.

  3. Rita Says:

    It does seem that in some cases, the incentives pull both ways. Even if a person has a history of crazy, people can recover and improve, and you don’t want his every effort to do so to be tarnished by essentially announcing over the intercom, “HERE IS A PREVIOUSLY CRAZY PERSON.” But sometimes recovery also fails (or never even starts), and then it really would be in the public interest to reveal this information. Not sure what the situation with advisors at Duke was; even if there were signs, maybe they mistook some of them for brilliance? I wish I could say that this would never happen, and the difference between brilliance and insanity is self-evident, but I’m not sure that is always the case, particularly in some humanities fields…

  4. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Rita: In the Duke case, there’s an uglier possibility: What if the professors/administrators didn’t care, weren’t particularly watching? Busy with other things. Where are the statements from his Duke mentors lamenting the loss of what they remember as an exceptional student to mental illness?

  5. Rita Says:

    Maybe they were careless. On the other hand, if one of your students ends up doing something like this, might you not hide from the media to avoid being implicated, even if you at the time did think he was brilliant? Subsequent events have now made it crystal clear that what appeared to be brilliance was actually just insanity, and you were dumb. But, at least from my experience of graduate advising, your conjecture that they just turned a blind eye is probably more likely.

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