Oh there is mania in those eyes. People have got to learn not to try to finesse and play mind games with unbalanced people. Crazy folks OFTEN DO know what other folks are thinking about them and are often sensitive to subtle speech nuances used to try to pacify them while at the same time criticize or exclude them. She took the denial of tenure as a total rejection of her as a person. I’m not sympathizing with her nor am I blaiming the folks she killed. As I understand the story, she was up for tenure consideration which meant the committee involved was in a position to offer tenure. If tenure was not to be available because of budget issues, they should have never started the process to consider her.
My guess, and I have seen this type of thing happen by experience, they went thru a shuck and jive exercise just so they could get rid of a person that most in that department found distasteful. They learned their lesson the hard way. Many crazy people define themselves by their own perceived jobs and the inflated value they place on their job. They have no strong internal compass so they use external structure to help them maintain some semblance of meaning and order in their lives. Threaten those structures and they will fight to the death to maintain those structures; to do otherwise means that the paranoid individual has no more being and is dissolved into nothingness.
Hence the psychology you find in Islamic extremist Jihadi movements!
My guess, and I have seen this type of thing happen by experience, they went thru a shuck and jive exercise just so they could get rid of a person that most in that department found distasteful. They learned their lesson the hard way. Many crazy people define themselves by their own perceived jobs and the inflated value they place on their job. They have no strong internal compass so they use external structure to help them maintain some semblance of meaning and order in their lives. Threaten those structures and they will fight to the death to maintain those structures; to do otherwise means that the paranoid individual has no more being and is dissolved into nothingness.
I think you've explained it.