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?
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.
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.
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).
Cheers!
Let's send her to Iran.
Problem solved...either way!
Cheers!
Full Disclosure: Larry Summers's fault.