Posted on 02/13/2010 9:39:24 AM PST by Behind Liberal Lines
Amy Bishop, the professor that killed three of University of Alabama-Huntsville biology faculty members and wounded three others after being denied tenure, had very mixed reviews on her teaching abilities, according to the Web site ratemyprofessor.com.
While no students doubted her knowledge of the subject matter, a significant number of them accused Bishop of being an incompetent educator, unable to relate the subject matter to her students in a way that they could understand.
In addition, several made references to political comments Bishop made, including one who said "she is a socalist but she only talks about it after class." Another student wrote that Bishop, " She's a liberal from 'Hahvahd' and let's you know exactly how she feels about particular subjects."
The later user's comment had mysteriously been removed from Bishop's profile on www.ratemyprofessors.com/ by Saturday morning, the day after the shooting, after being referenced on multiple web sites and blogs.
I can’t say the majority of FReepers are surprised.
She’s a standard hate-filled leftist atheist, steeped in darwinism as a biologist, to whom people were nothing more than auto-improved pond scum.
Anyone know who maintains the leftism on campus ping list?
What do you want to bet she is deemed “unfit for trial” so she can live a life of luxury in some country club nuthouse. Meanwhile, the 3 dead people will still be dead.
Pretty much.
Well...she was also clearly a hard grader, whcich doesn't fit the "standard" profile you lay out.
Maybe this is the reason the liberal media has not from the start been reporting this shooting 24/7 non-stop they can not spin this story to their advantage, Their only hope is that their mindless sheepal following will forget about the story and move onto to more important news and stuff that the liberals want them to hear.
I'm pretty sure it's one of these two guys.
don’t confuse liberal with leftist..
“Maybe this is the reason the liberal media has not from the start been reporting this shooting 24/7 non-stop they can not spin this story to their advantage, Their only hope is that their mindless sheepal following will forget about the story and move onto to more important news and stuff that the liberals want them to hear.”
You are exactly right. A few months ago a muslim jihadist murdered an army recruit and shot another in Arkansas. But the same day an abortion doctor was killed. ALL we heard was about the abortion doctor.
This isn’t a particularly “fair and balanced” assessment. In terms of raw numbers, a) positive ratings outweighed negative ratings, so her overall rating was 3.6, which merits a “happy face” rather than frown or scowl on RMP’s ratings; b) compared to her peers in biology department, her average rating was better than the majority of her peers.
She also appeared to stimulate more “passion” than most other Biology professors at her university (only 1 other professor got more ratings than she did, while her 37 ratings typically were several multiples of the single-digit count of ratings for other professors). That per se, doesn’t make her good or bad as a professor, but she appeared to have had more of an impact on her students. In the context of having elicited so many ratings, it isn’t that surprising that at least some would have been strongly negative against her.
None of this defends her shooting anyone, but we should avoid the temptation to cherry-pick the evidence about her with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight. Pretend she’d been one of the professors shot. Would we look at her evaluations and conclude “no big deal: she was a lousy professor anyway, so her death really doesn’t represent much of a loss to the university or its students”?
Not to worry. I preserved the entire set of comments on FR last night: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2450256/posts?page=206#206
But I don’t think the “socialist” or “liberal/Hahvahd” thing is relevant at all. As a frequent user of RateMyProfessor, I can attest that there was nothing at all unusual about the comments or ratings for this professor. Her overall rating was a bit above average, including for this specific biology department. And since the vast majority of college professors are very left/socialist-leaning, that’s hardly a remarkable characteristic. If she’d been teaching anywhere less conservative than Alabama, it’s unlikely any student commenters would have seen that as an issue worth mentioning. Per some news articles today, the trigger seems likely to have been her concern over the negative effect the tenure denial would have on the prospects for her very capitalist-oriented invention.
What’s really weird about this is how *normal* she comes across from her RateMyProfessors comments. It’s like nobody saw anything coming at all, much less anything this serious.
That's almost certainly just a function of how long she'd been teaching there and the sizes of the classes she taught. Many of the professors/instructors included in a department on RateMyProfessor are adjuncts who only taught one course (or even just a lab or recitation section of a course) for one semester. Others are professors who only teach upper level classes with small classes of majors-only.
On the other hand, there are professors who've been teaching classes of several hundred students, semester after semester, for several years. It appears that she mainly taught a two semester Anatomy & Physiology course. Those tend to be huge, because they're a prerequisite for all nursing school programs, most physician assistant programs, and quite a few other health care-related programs.
I doubt that the “deletion” (it’s actually shown as “under review”) of the liberal/Hahvahd post was initiated by RateMyProfessors. Anybody can flag a rating/comment, including their own rating/comment. Of 34 ratings for her, this was one of only 3 that was for her 400 level neuroscience class (the rest all appear to be from an Anatomy & Physiology class, which is a non-Biology majors class at most schools). I’d guess it was flagged by the student who posted it, who’s understandably rattled, as a biology major who’s just had several of his/her professors killed or critically wounded by another of his/her professors. These comments can be traced by RateMyProfessors, and a student might fear they could somehow be traced by some other party as well, and worry they’d end up with reporters knocking on their door asking them to expand on their comments about the professor-turned-murderer.
I’ve put several ratings on RateMyProfessors myself, including one for a professor who really did seem mentally unstable and capable of something like this. If any professor I’d ever rated hit the news for something like this, I expect I’d be quick to flag my rating in order to get it pulled off public access. If RateMyProfessors was going to take any action in the case, it would likely be to take down the whole file for this professor (and that may yet happen, which is why I copied the entire thing into an FR comment last night).
I’ll wager that most easy graders are liberals and/or leftists....though there are many exceptions. She might be one.
I would agree. However, if this professor had a "teabagger" or "right-wing/Hillsdale" label in the student comments you can be sure that the MSM would be playing it up 24/7.
I’d guess it was flagged by the student who posted ...
Maybe. Maybe not. The left is known to prowl the web and get content that doesn't match their worldview flagged or deleted.
I think it's just as likely that's what happened here. Conservative blogs picked upon the "socialist...Hahvard...liberal" comment, which made the 'Rats take notice and head over to flag the material.
OK, maybe I’m not used to University attire, but this woman showed up at a Faculty Meeting to decide whether or not she got tenure dressed in THAT? She didn’t seem to have taken her possibility for career too seriously.
So why don’t you put a translation of the arabic on your about page?
An arab, muslim by birth that considers Christianity, and by implication 90% of Americans evil.
Well I’m SOOOOO SHOCKED. So are you the “moderate” one?
The reason many leftist professors are hard graders is that they think it means they have high standards. It has nothing to do with anything other than attention to their appearance.
Some comic or other has pointed out that after every mass shooting, the comments of the friends and neighbors about the culprit can be summarized by one of the following two sentences:
"He was always such a quiet, respectful kid."
or
"I always thought there was something a little funny about him."
BTW, have the gun nuts chimed in on the need for mandatory background checks for Harvard grads yet?
Have the feminists chimed in that she is a victim of the patriarchy?
And has anyone asked William "bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at" Ayers for comment yet?
Cheers!
SmokingJoe's comment provides a wealth of insight into the subtleties of natural selection -- i.e. fitness in one area does not necessarily lead to increased survival, either for the individual OR a population.
In fact, you may have just inspired a vanity, given that natural selection is a statistical process -- small population groups may just get "unlucky" and die out, just as someone may have a superior hand in poker, until their opponent, against all odds, draws to an inside straight.
(Visions of autocorrelation and random walk dancing in my head.)
Cheers!
Can you translate it please?
اود ان يموت بدلا من العيش في ظل الحر الاسلام.
Several online translators gave inconsistent results.
Thanks! g_w
Cheers!
Let's send her to Iran.
Problem solved...either way!
Cheers!
You make good observations about student ratings. The huge enrollments are in required courses for freshman and sophomore undergraduates. Tenured professors and professors in general tend not to like teaching those courses because they require a lot of organization and work relative to that required for a tiny upper level course. The student ratings of large, lower level “mass lecture” courses tend to average lower than those of the upper level small courses.
Full Disclosure: Larry Summers's fault.
Did you read today’s news? She shot her 18 year old brother to death in 1986 — her current age is in question, but she would have been about 19-20 (not a “juvenile”). Never got charged, and the police who responded and investigated weren’t happy about that — they knew it was no “accident”.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,585781,00.html
And I just love this helpful detail from the article: “A 9-millimeter handgun was found in the bathroom of the building where the shootings occurred, and Huntsville police spokesman Sgt. Mark Roberts said Bishop did not have a permit for it.”
Isn’t it great that Alabama has a gun permit scheme? Works so well. < /s>
Locking up murderers, permanently, would be a heck of a lot more effective.
But then again, maybe the fact they denied her, a HARVARD PhD, tenure, vindicates his thinking...
Cheers!
I'm not sure that's really true. At the very least it varies from school to school and department to department. The intro Biology course I took always has an enrollment of about 700 and the prof is *very* popular. Rating a little over 4 last time I looked, and lots of rave reviews on various internet forums, as well as RateMyProfessors. On the other hand, the Chemistry department at the same school has ratings in the cellar for virtually the entire department (chair had a 1-point-something rating last time I looked). Some departments (and probably some schools overall) have a habit of dumping lousy tenured professors they'd really prefer to get rid of into the intro courses that nobody wants to teach, and *that's* what generates the low ratings. I took a pre-Gen Chem course with a prof like this -- really a piece of work, obviously near retirement age, Ivy League PhD over 30 years earlier, pissed that he had to keep teaching this course (mainly for pre-nursing students, and non-science majors looking for an easy way to fulfill their science requirement), and was rude and patronizing to everyone. On the other hand, at this same school, the Psych department largely staffs its huge intro level courses with really *excellent* adjuncts, many of whom only teach there for a semester or two (I took Intro Psych with a guy who was doing the clinical year for his doctorate in clinical psych and moonlighting teaching this course -- he was really, really good, both in teaching/lecturing and in administrative management of the course).
I'm not a native speaker, so I'm taking it on "faith" in my translator.
I'm not a native speaker, so I'm taking it on "faith" in my translator.
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