He talks like mad to the press although lawyers have told him not to.

He lies. First he said this:

The New York Times reported that Anderson said he did not know his wife allegedly had a gun when she went to the meeting Friday at the university. “I had no idea,’’ he told the paper. “We don’t own one.”

Well, but you have one. And you and your wife have taken it to shooting ranges very recently. From The Chronicle:

… James Anderson, told both The Chronicle and The New York Times on Sunday that the family did not own a gun. But in an interview with The Chronicle today, he acknowledged that she had borrowed a gun, though he wasn’t sure from whom. “She was very cagey and didn’t say,” he said.

Mr. Anderson said he had told his wife he didn’t want the gun around the house because of their children, who range in age from 8 to 18. “Get rid of it,” he recalled telling her. “I didn’t want to have it. I didn’t feel we needed it.”

Ms. Bishop, according to her husband, had borrowed the gun and was considering buying it. Last summer, he said, someone followed her across the campus. “She was worried about crazy students,” he said.

… Mr. Anderson said he had gone with his wife to an indoor shooting range once, a couple of weeks ago. He said she had been there at least once before with a friend.

Don’t believe any of the bullshit coming out of the husband.

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Update on the century’s great psychotic romance:

She’s on suicide watch. This was predictable, since now that her brilliant scheme has been carried out, she doesn’t feel better, but worse.

Not only did she fail to kill everyone. After ditching the gun and going out to dinner with her beloved, she was supposed to go undetected as the author of the crime.

But she got caught, and now it looks as though the state’s going to hold and then execute her! How dare they! Crappy little state! Absurd little Alabamians! She is so far above them all. And yet they seem to have some legal right to continue to hold, and then execute her. Why go on.

And how will she end it all? In the great Wagnerian tradition of their long love affair, she will do it with the help of her adored James. She will stage a liebestod. He will smuggle in the drugs that will dispatch her before she has to undergo the degradation of being handled by people so contemptibly beneath her.

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Some speculation about future events.

Bishop may ask her husband to kill her children. He is almost as crazy as she is. They should be in protective custody.

The Wall Street Journal is annoyed that one of its reporters had his prose stolen by a New York Times reporter.

And so quickly!

Mr Efrati’s Wall Street Journal story, titled “Madoff Sons, Brother, Niece, Being Sued by Trustees for Victims,” was published on Dow Jones Newswires at 12:25 pm on Friday, February 5, and was published on WSJ.com shortly thereafter. At 2:31 pm Mr Kouwe published a related, in fact, a remarkably related story…

Side by side examples follow.

The NYT acknowledges the lifting here.

UD‘s friend and editor, Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed, alludes to UD‘s most recent IHE column – which includes criticism of an article in the Christian Science Monitor – in a piece this morning in USA Today:

… Almost as soon as word of the Alabama murders spread came the news that [Amy] Bishop, who has been charged in the killings, had been denied tenure and that an appeal of the denial had been rejected. This news prompted some media speculation that tenure stress may have led to the killings. The Christian Science Monitor ran with this theme, prompting criticism from academic bloggers (including one on Inside Higher Ed) who have noted that people are rejected for tenure all the time and don’t kill anyone.

Scott quotes psychology and security experts “dismiss[ing] the idea that the shootings could be blamed on a recent tenure denial.”

Likewise, in Psychology Today, the president of the American Psychoanalytical Association, Prudence Gourguechon, writes:

Stress, disappointment, PTSD, frustration, burnout, loss, shame and humiliation DO NOT LEAD A HUMAN BEING TO PICK UP A GUN AND START KILLING HIS OR HER FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS. Not having examined them, I can not know what is wrong, psychiatrically, with these killers, but I know that something is. And it’s not these human difficulties I just listed that are constantly referenced in the media stories.

It is important to distinguish between triggers–what might light the fuse–and the explosives that lead to the catastrophe.

Getting it wrong in the media does us all a disservice. If true but irrelevant facts are continually referenced, we start to think these things (eg stress) are relevant and truly causal, as opposed to possible triggers. And the media rarely or never mention the factors that are more important to consider: Delusions. Paranoia. Major Mental Illness. Schizophrenia. Psychosis. The vast majority of human beings who suffer from these symptoms or disorders are not violent or dangerous and can do very well with appropriate treatment. But these might be the things that lead a few human beings [to] pick up a gun and shoot their colleagues. That, plus easy availability of firearms.

Why have we substituted “stress” for psychosis as a causal concept? Why have we confused triggers for causes? What is the consequence for our society? One consequence I fear is that there will be a continually diminished tendency to consider and diagnose and treat psychosis and major mental illness, and therefore there will continue to be undiagnosed and untreated disordered minds picking up guns and going to a meeting to kill.

Society needs to know and be reminded that people can– in rare but significant instances– lose touch with external reality, and substitute a dangerous irrational inner world where, for example, they feel persecuted and terrorized.

With her long history of violence, paranoia, and cold-bloodedness (After the massacre, Bishop’s husband told a reporter, she phoned him, and in a perfectly calm voice said to come to the building and pick her up for their dinner date.), Amy Bishop is a poster child not for tenure unattained, but for psychosis misperceived.

Boston Globe:

The professor who is accused of killing three colleagues at the University of Alabama on Friday was a suspect in the attempted mail bombing of a Harvard Medical School professor in 1993, a law enforcement official said today.

… [Dr. Paul] Rosenberg was opening mail, which had been set aside by a cat-sitter, when he returned from a Caribbean vacation on Dec. 19, 1993…

Opening a long, thin package addressed to “Mr. Paul Rosenberg M.D.,” he saw wires and a cylinder inside. He and his wife ran from the house and called police.

The package contained two 6-inch pipe bombs connected to two nine-volt batteries.

[Investigators] focused on Bishop, a Harvard postdoctoral fellow who was working [with Rosenberg] in the human biochemistry lab at Children’s Hospital at the time, and her husband, Anderson.

Bishop surfaced as a suspect because she was allegedly concerned that she was going to receive a negative evaluation from Rosenberg on her doctorate work, the official said. The official said investigators believed she had a motive to target Rosenberg and were concerned that she had a history of violence, given that she had shot her brother to death in 1986…

The Globe interviews a woman who worked with Bishop at the time:

… Bishop had been in a dispute with Rosenberg shortly before the bombs were discovered.

Shortly after the attempted bombing, [Sylvia] Fluckiger said, Bishop told her she had been questioned by police one day in the lab. According to Fluckiger, Bishop said police asked her if she had ever taken stamps off an envelope that had been mailed to her and put them on something else.

“She said it with a smirk on her face,” said Fluckiger. “We also knew her husband was a tinkerer. We knew she had a beef with Paul Rosenberg. And we really thought it was a really unbelievable coincidence that he would get those bombs.”

Sergeant Mark Roberts, a spokesman for the Huntsville Police, said today that police in Alabama had been informed that Bishop was a suspect in the 1993 mail bombing case…

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We need to proceed with caution here.

But – let us assume that Bishop is guilty of non-accidentally killing her brother, and of trying to kill Rosenberg. There seems no doubt at all that she just killed three people and attempted to kill — I think there were sixteen in the room.

UD is now prepared to say something about Amy Bishop, and it’s got nothing to do with tenure.

When Amy Bishop perceives a problem in her life, a quandary or annoyance of some sort, she kills it. She takes it out. Bullets or bombs.

So… How does it come about that a veteran killer — if Bishop is indeed a veteran killer — has so thoroughly eluded capture?

Capture? How about thoroughly eluded being charged? In 1986, the Boston police let the little wisp of a twenty-year-old go home with Mommy the same afternoon she killed her brother. No charges. They can’t even find the case file. There probably isn’t one.

In 1993, authorities were apparently unable to make a case against her, their prime suspect.

No wonder Bishop ended up in Alabama. In Massachusetts, at least, she was beginning to gain something of a reputation… Prime suspect in a bombing… Shooting of her brother…

Poor University of Alabama. This isn’t a story about tenure. It’s a story about background checks.

Let me say something else about Amy Bishop. I think the reason she was denied tenure was that her colleagues were afraid of her.

A Valentine’s Day poem, short and sweet.

By Marvin Bell.

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MARS BEING RED

Being red is the color of a white sun where it lingers
on an arm. Color of time lost in sparks, of space lost
inside dance. Red of walks by the railroad in the flush
of youth, while our steps released the squeaks
of shoots reaching for the light. Scarlet of sin, crimson
of fresh blood, ruby and garnet of the jewel bed,
early sunshine, vestiges of the late sun as it turns
green and disappears. Be calm. Do not give in
to the rabid red throat of age. In a red world, imprint
the valentine and blush of romance for the dark.
It has come. You will not be this quick-to-redden
forever. You will be green again, again and again.

****************************************

The poet considers various symbolic values of the color red. He begins with his title – Mars, the planet named for the god of war, is red; and warlike rage makes us red – we become crimson with rage, etc. So red isn’t merely the color of hearts and love; it’s the color of hate. The poem will play among the symbolic values of red, and it will urge one sort of redness upon us.

Being red is the color of a white sun where it lingers
on an arm. Color of time lost in sparks, of space lost
inside dance.

Red is our burning, our brightening; it is our flushed and feverish sensual dance, whose intensity makes us lose all sense of time.

Red of walks by the railroad in the flush
of youth, while our steps released the squeaks
of shoots reaching for the light.

Red is the shade of our most vivid memories of passionate youth, our very steps animating the natural world. (Notice the assonance here: youth/shoots; released/squeaks/reaching.)

Scarlet of sin, crimson
of fresh blood, ruby and garnet of the jewel bed,
early sunshine, vestiges of the late sun as it turns
green and disappears.

[Red is the color of sex, the jewel bed, one’s early years of erotic bliss. You barely register, from that ruby bed, the sun turning the world from amazing red to ordinary green as it sets.]

Be calm. Do not give in
to the rabid red throat of age.

[Here the lover turns to his beloved with his urgent imperative: Reject the martial red, the red of screaming rage and conflict. Be calm, not warlike. Have the passion of youth, not the aggression of age.]

In a red world, imprint
the valentine and blush of romance for the dark.

[In a dark red bloody world of wars, keep always in your mind and heart the light red blush of lovers’ bliss. This will lighten the darkness of warlike red.]

It has come. You will not be this quick-to-redden
forever. You will be green again, again and again

[At this very moment, Valentine, another one of our fires of passion has kindled. Our various forms of reddening (the poem leaves nothing to the imagination here) will not unfold so quickly forever. We’re going to get old and green, like the late sun. Read your Andrew Marvell! Calmly but determinedly, it’s time for us to blight the world of hate, and light the world of love.]

In Newsweek:

… Have you ever had a discussion about higher education that wasn’t polluted with babble about the college team and the amazingly lavish on-campus facilities for the cult of athletic warfare? … By a sort of Gresham’s law, the emphasis on sports has a steadily reducing effect on the lowest common denominator, in its own field and in every other one that allows itself to be infected by it.

… are a mite pissed. With the university’s sports-mad president. Because of the recent report on SUNY’s excruciatingly corrupt athletics program. (Background here.)

[President Lois DeFleur was] conveniently out of town when the audit results were released. The hypocrisy is sickening, especially coming from the woman who has continuously touted our claim as the Premier Public University of the Northeast. All the while, she has been privately putting academics second to her NCAA dreams.

And now, after dragging this school through the mud on her quest to D-1 fame, DeFleur is leaving the premises and not looking back, leaving us to deal with the mess.

With all due respect Ms. President, we’ve been taught that it’s honorable to own up to your mistakes, not set up others to take the fall and cover your own ass. Your skeletons are coming out of your airplane hangar, and if you have any respect for the school you’ve claimed to love for the past 20 years, you should show your commitment by sticking around to help us salvage this school and its reputation.

It hasn’t appeared on the site yet, but should soon. As always, check the LATEST UD BLOGS AT IHE column on the right of this page.

It includes this latest piece of information:

University spokesman Ray Garner said Saturday that the professor had been informed months ago that she would not be granted tenure.

He said the faculty meeting where she is accused of gunning down colleagues was not called to discuss tenure.

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Mug shot. That’s a bullet-proof vest she’s got on.

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More details. Husband was not on the scene.

A professor used a 9 mm pistol to shoot six people, killing three, before ditching the weapon in a second-floor bathroom at UAH, police say. She then called her husband for a ride.

—————————————-
Blog, AL.com, Huntsville Times:

A Massachusetts police chief is now saying that UAH shooting suspect Amy Bishop shot and killed her brother during an argument, and the case may have been mishandled by the police department more than two decades ago when the fatal shooting occurred.

… Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier is now offering a different account of the shooting to The Globe: “Bishop had shot her brother during an argument and was being booked by police when the police chief at the time ordered the booking process stopped and Bishop released to her mother,” the paper reports on its Web site. Records from the case have been missing since 1987.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘coverup,’ but this does not look good,” Frazier said.

Another newspaper, The Boston Herald, is reporting that Bishop also pointed the gun at a passing car after her brother’s shooting.

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My Inside Higher Ed post is here.

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Update: More on the tenure-made-me-do-it thing:

Even without tenure … Bishop would retain a share of the fruits of her research. [The CEO of the company promoting her work] said whatever happened on Friday wasn’t related to financial concerns.

“My opinion is no,” [he] said, “and that’s an educated one.”

_____________________________

Yet more on tenure-made-me-do-it. This is from a Decatur Daily interview with a psychology professor who was also a friend.

… “It’s not like she would never have another job,” [Eric] Seemann said. “With the research she did, there are other universities that, if she threw her hat in the air, they’d be lining up to hire her.

“She’s not some random schmuck. She’s Harvard educated. She could have doubled her salary going to these other schools. For whatever reason, she was so ego-invested that not being here was intolerable.”

I’ve already written a long post tracking the Amy Bishop story. As more details emerge, I’ll post them. Here are a couple of things worth noting.

The first isn’t about her, but about her university. Just last year, another UAH professor was convicted of murdering his wife.

As to Bishop: The Boston Globe reports:

The University of Alabama biology professor accused of slaying three of her colleagues fatally shot her brother in an apparent accident in Massachusetts more than two decades ago, a local police chief said.

Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier confirmed the 1986 shooting in his town and slated a news conference this afternoon to discuss the incident.

She was twenty, he eighteen. While trying to “unload a round from the chamber of a 12-gauge shotgun,” she shot her brother in the abdomen.

The Globe article comes close to suggesting it might not have been accidental.

*****************************************

As details of Bishop’s earlier killing emerge, things get a bit stomach-churning:

The Braintree police chief said today the woman accused of gunning down three in an Alabama shooting rampage shot and killed her brother during an argument in 1986 – but no police report exists and she was never charged.

Chief Paul Frazier said Amy Bishop shot her brother in the chest, fled the house, pointed the shotgun at another car, then fled into woods.

Police found her and arrested her, but during the booking process the former police chief called and interceded, Frazier said. No investigation took place after that and the incident report was lost or discarded.

“This would never happen in this day and age,” Frazier said.

Frazier has forwarded the case to the Norfolk DA’s office for investigation…

**********************************

Another account:

She fired at least three shots, hitting her brother once and hitting her bedroom wall, before police took her into custody at gunpoint, he said.

Before Bishop could be booked, the police chief back then told officers to release her to her mother, Frazier said.

Howard Jacobson, a British novelist, teaches at GW next semester. As he notes in The Independent, his arrival has been bumpy.

… I am in Washington being a visiting professor. Seemed like a nice gig when I was offered it, but that was before the snow fell. Let’s not be churlish: it still is a nice gig, or it will be if George Washington University ever reopens. The minute we landed, the city’s institutions began to close their doors. You’ve never seen so much snow. Lock yourself in your room and don’t come out is the advice on radio and television. Which is all very well if you’re in your own home and have a freezer stuffed with pizzas, but an apartment hotel with a complimentary sachet of coffee, two tea bags, and a packet of chocolate chip cookies – the difference between civilisation and barbarism is the difference between an English biscuit and an American cookie – is no place to be holed up in for a month.

… Trader Joe’s turns out to be the best grocery store with principles I have ever shopped in, and that isn’t just desperation talking. Yes, you can get your slivered seeds if you want them, but you can also get salamis soaked in red wine, puttanesca sauce made with red wine, excellent red wine vinegars, red wine mustard, and best of all, red wine itself, organised not only by country but by grape. Suddenly I don’t want the siege to end; God willing I won’t have to do an hour’s teaching and can sample every pinot noir the state of Oregon can produce before I fly back home again, assuming a thaw, in March…

[Please note: This is a big, quickly moving story. This post contains many updates.]

******************************

UD reader David sends this to UD. It’s from the Associated Press, published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

A woman opened fire during a biology faculty meeting at the University of Alabama’s Huntsville campus Friday, killing three people and injuring at least one more.

The shooter was in custody, but university spokesman Ray Garner said he could not identify her or the victims. Local television stations reported she is a faculty member.

Garner said three people were dead and a fourth injured. Trent Willis, chief of staff for Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle, said several other people had been shot, but he did not have an exact number or their conditions…

The university’s home page.

Faculty member Amy Bishop is in custody. Her home page has been taken down.

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I’m passing this along, but I’m skeptical:

WAFF also is reporting that law enforcement sources say a female faculty member learned during a Biology faculty meeting that she would not receive tenure. She then pulled out a gun and started shooting.

Since when are you informed you’ve been turned down for tenure in a meeting, in front of the faculty? I have trouble believing any department is this nasty. It is, on the other hand, possible that she had, maybe this afternoon, received a letter or phone call telling her she’d been turned down… And after thinking about this for a while, she decided to pack a gun.

UPDATE: From a National Public Radio blog:

The accused shooter was denied tenure by the university Friday morning. According to the reporter, the woman then returned to a biology faculty meeting this afternoon and allegedly started shooting her colleagues.

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The blog Media Elites

provides this picture.

Taken into custody.

*************************************

Live local coverage.

**************************************

Her archived web page.

***************************************

UD‘s sister sends her this detail from Britain’s Daily Mail — not an impeccable source, so make of it what you will:

The neuro-scientist’s husband opened the door for his wife before she started shooting, according to local reports.

*************************************

Names of those shot, from the Huntsville Times:

G.K. Podila, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson, all three faculty members at the university, died shortly after the afternoon shooting at the Shelby Center.

Joseph Leahy is in critical condition at Huntsville Hospital. Stephanie Monticello and Luis Rogelio Cruz-Vera are now stable, officials said.

****************************************

Update, Saturday morning: If the details in this Daily News piece are correct, we can begin to suggest a few things about this event.

As one might imagine, there’s now evidence that the shooter was known to be unstable. The husband of one of the killed “said his wife had mentioned the shooter before, describing the woman as ‘not being able to deal with reality.'”

If he is also correct that his wife “was at a meeting to discuss the tenure status of a faculty member who got angry,” then presumably this was a meeting to which Bishop had not been invited, because her tenure status was being discussed.

In which case, the detail from the Daily Mail (none of these details is yet confirmed) about Bishop’s husband (not a faculty member) opening the door for her before she began shooting suggests that she crashed the meeting — with his help.

It’s not clear whether Bishop had already been notified of denial of tenure, went into a rage, got her gun, burst into the meeting… Or whether this was the meeting during which faculty would discuss and vote on her tenure (but there were assistant professors there, so this seems unlikely), and she, knowing the likely outcome, attacked them before it could be reached.

*************************

According to this NYT account, published an hour ago, she did not storm the room.

On Friday, Ms. Bishop presided over her regular class before going to a biology faculty meeting where she sat quietly for about 30 or 40 minutes, said one University of Alabama faculty member who had spoken to people that were in the room. Then, she pulled out a gun and began shooting, firing several rounds before her gun either jammed or ran out of bullets, the faculty member said.

… George Washington University Hatchet.

… Georgetown University v. George Washington University snowball fight, in the Georgetown Voice.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm would, though, like to correct the following:

Once GWU began to flood the hill Georgetown students were standing on, the snowball fight digressed rapidly for the Hoyas.

Fights do not digress. People digress when they leave or lose the main point they were making in an argument. The writer might have meant deteriorated… ?

And this is just one case among many. Instead of sending fraudsters and insider traders and extortionists etc. to jail, their lawyers increasingly argue, sentence them to lecture in business schools.

Can you see where my mind’s going on this? We’ve got an economic crisis in this country (and in Canada, where Professors-to-be Drabinsky and Gottlieb live), and our universities are way stressed out. We’ve also got an ever-growing cadre of sophisticated businesspeople suddenly faced with a prison-or-community-service dilemma.

Hire them! Hire them all! They know a lot, and many of them are colorful characters who’d make good lecturers. And they don’t cost anything.

Take Ezra Merkin. Why shouldn’t Yeshiva University take him back? He was a trustee there for years; now he can be a lecturer.

Austerity measure bonus: Yeshiva probably still has stationery with his name on it.

Business school professors are expensive. If there were, say, a lottery system in which universities could bid on an active list of HAAs (House Arrest Adjuncts), some universities might be able to suspend their regular faculty altogether.

Yeah well. I just liked the word.