Posted on 02/13/2010 11:47:33 PM PST by Bodleian_Girl
Colleague says suspect ‘aloof, superior’
The UAH professor accused of killing three colleagues Friday once called herself aloof, arrogant and superior, and a colleague did not disagree.
Psychology professor Eric Seemann also said he knew biological sciences assistant professor Amy Bishop was stressed about an adverse tenure decision, but he was shocked at how she dealt with her frustration.
Bishop, also referred to as Amy Bishop-Anderson by authorities, has been charged with capital murder. She is accused of killing three professors in her department — including department chair Gopi Podila — and wounding two professors and a staff member who were attending a faculty meeting.
‘Personal beef’
“What she told me was there were some people in her department — she did not name them — who had a personal beef with her,” Seemann said. “She said one or more of those people were directly involved with her tenure decision.”
Seemann said he had no clue Bishop’s frustration would lead her to the alleged shootings.
“She was sounding a little paranoid. I’m not sure she was taking responsibility for her part in the tenure decisions,” Seemann said of a conversation he had with her in November.
Seemann joined the faculty of the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s psychology department the same year Bishop joined its biological sciences department. Both were eligible for tenure in March 2009.
‘Not on list’
“They sent out the letter of everyone that was tenured,” Seemann said. “Amy’s name was not on the list.”
Bishop told Seemann she had hired attorneys to appeal the adverse decision, but in December she told him she was frustrated at her attorneys’ lack of progress.
The psychology professor said his counseling and forensics practices have exposed him to plenty of people with inclinations toward violence, but he saw no such signs in Bishop. He watched media reports as the public tried to understand what had happened.
‘How could this be?’
“I’m thinking, wow, who could this be? My thinking was some student went crackers and shot up a bunch of people for various reasons.
“Then they said it was a female, and I’m thinking it’s a female student who shot a bunch of people because of a lover’s triangle. Then they say a female staff member, and I’m thinking, ‘Who could that be?’ ”
Only when he heard the next report did it occur to him.
“Then they said biological sciences, and I thought, oh crap, it’s Amy Bishop. Because she’s the only one I knew in biological sciences that was under a tenure constraint.”
Bishop, who is in her 40s and the mother of four, was seen as an excellent researcher. Seemann said her dealings with other faculty members, however, hampered her efforts at tenure.
‘Given a raw deal’
“I saw her at a spring (2009) orientation for the new freshmen,” Seemann said. “She said she was not tenured and she felt like she had been given a raw deal.”
Despite her excellent research ability, Seemann was not surprised she struggled to obtain tenure.
“Amy was kind of hard to get along with,” he said. “I’ve talked to people who said, ‘Wow, she can be really arrogant,’ or be really headstrong. I knew that to be true. But at the same time she was brilliant. She was really one of UAH’s rising research stars. People I know in biological sciences would say, ‘She’s a great researcher, but she’s lousy to work with.’ ”
She was brilliant and she knew it.
“At one meeting I was with Amy, she was complaining to a group of us. She said she was denied tenure not because she was a lousy researcher — she’s not, quite the opposite — and not because she didn’t have good classes, she believed she did — I think some might say otherwise — but because she was accused of being arrogant, aloof and superior. And she said, ‘I am.’
“She said, ‘I am arrogant, I am aloof and I am superior in my attitude. But it doesn’t mean I don’t want to get along with people.’ ”
Seemann’s recollection of his frequent dealings with Bishop continued the theme.
‘I was arrogant’
“During a conversation she and I had at one point, she said she got into an argument with another faculty member who accused her of being arrogant and acting like she was better than him, and she told me, ‘That’s because I was arrogant and I was better than him.’ But that was in the context of a heated argument,” Seemann said.
“I think Amy was a little easy to provoke.”
He said his impression was students tried to avoid taking her classes.
“The comments I heard from students over the last several years was that she was brilliant, but she couldn’t teach and she’s was not personable.”
Seemann suspects Bishop had an unrealistic view of the likelihood of a successful appeal of her tenure denial.
Appealed decision
“Amy told me in November that she filed an appeal through the university and had retained an attorney. The appeal was based on her belief that somebody had a personal gripe with her on the tenure committee, and that she asked that the person or persons — there may have been more than one — be removed,” Seemann recalled.
“That request was denied. The appeal went through the appeals process. Amy told me she believed that there was a good chance of the appeal working.”
Despite her expressed hopes, Seemann said tenure denials rarely get reversed.
Seemann stressed he did not know what happened at Friday’s biology faculty meeting before Bishop allegedly began shooting, but he knew the deadline for final decisions on tenure appeals was nearing.
“I do not believe that a faculty would tell one person in front of other people, ‘By the way you’re not getting tenure, clean out your office.’ I can’t imagine that’s what happened. My guess is that Amy probably pushed the issue.
“I’ve seen her do that before, where she would ask a question, someone would say let’s discuss it later, and she would just become more insistent until someone said either just shut up or here it is, and it’s not what you wanted.
“I don’t know it for a fact, but I’m guessing she pushed the issue.”
Remains stunned
Seemann said he remains stunned by the shooting.
“Nowhere in any of my discussions with her did I get the idea that she was violent or that she had this inclination to bring a pistol to a meeting,” Seemann said. Behind the most tragic loss in Friday’s shootings — the death of three faculty members and the wounding of three others — is another tragedy, Seemann said.
“It’s not like she would never have another job,” 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 suspect that the University will soon be clamping down on people speaking out about what Amy Bishop was like so I think this is going to be an important article.
Sounds like a certain former college instructor from Chicago. Wonder how he’ll take his pink slip?
Hopefully better than she did.
I heard through the grapevine that someone who was involved in the cover up of her brother’s killing is now in the House of Reps.
So, now "crackers" is what, a clinical term?
We have IT people like this at work.
That was an unusually choice of words.
What were the details surrounding his death?
Whoever let her walk the first time bears a lot of guilt for this. She has probably been an unstable time bomb for the last 20 years. It takes a special kind of nut just to walk up and shoot someone who does not threaten them physically.
“Contradictory tales of 1986 Bishop shooting”
We have our chance to put him on notice that he probably won't receive tenure, coming this November.
Cheers!
There’s a great movie about college tenure called Oleanna with William Macy.
Lotta talking but good on academic politics and arrogance.
She’ll have a blast in prison. I suppose she wasn’t smart enough to think ahead.
I am at a smaller university and we sometimes we get applications from individuals from Harvard, Yale etc... Some are really good but some come across as very arrogant. We avoid messes by simply not hiring them in the first place.
For those who haven't followed it, the background to this is Amy Bishop, firing three shoots, killed her brother in 1986:
Braintree officers who remember the 1986 shooting said that former police Chief John Polio dismissed detectives from the case and ordered the department to release Amy Bishop after a telephone conversation with former district attorney William Delahunt, who is currently a U.S. congressman from Massachusetts."The police officers here were very upset about that," said Frazier, who was a patrolman at the time and spoke to officers who remembered the incident that day, including one who filed a report on it.
“Arrogant, aloof and superior” are wonderful traits to have in prison. Why, the other inmates will just adore that! ;-)
Delahunt’s involvement when he was DA, and an interview with former Police Chief Polio, who’s now 87.
Amy Bishop’s mother served on the Town of Braintree’s Board of Personnel.
Her father is a multi-millionaire & has a yacht club.
I just have to question this whole “brilliant researcher” thing. Clearly it was a facade, notwithstanding the given testimony. I think it’s the way things are these days.
The psychology professor said his counseling and forensics practices have exposed him to plenty of people with inclinations toward violence, but he saw no such signs in Bishop.
“Nowhere in any of my discussions with her did I get the idea that she was violent or that she had this inclination to bring a pistol to a meeting,” Seemann said.
He was "shocked at how she dealt with her frustration"?! What a perverse trivialization of the psychological mechanisms of a murderer! By his own repeated admissions, psychprof Seemann is utterly incompetent and clueless here. So why is he being interviewed? Because we're supposed to believe that rather than incompetent, he's actually an expert, and that if he couldn't see this coming no one could - which leads us to the inevitable MSM conclusion of - anyone, anywhere could go postal at any time, and no one could see it coming.
And just to rub this conclusion in, this idiot actually said he never thought she'd have an "inclination to bring a pistol to a meeting." Why say it like this? Because you're supposed to think, oh, if she just didn't have that evil gun available, none of this would happen (rather than seeing that she obviously brought the gun specifically to commit murder).
I knew the Leftist MSM would go into hyperdimensional spin mode over this one - they've spent the last 20 years turning women into monsters for Hillary, and now these arrogant, sadistic creatures are starting to lose it because their queen got kicked to the side of the road.
I can agree with that.
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