[Huebolt]

Good God! Who said understanding someone’s motive has anything to do with condoning their action. Knowing why Mao murdered millions of fellow Chinese doesn’t mean the action was rational or acceptable. It’s just understanding why something happened. Just like the murders. Everything has a reason. In murder investigations, it’s called motive. Here, it looks like the perpetrator perceived an unfair situation, and, whether real or imagined, we will NEVER know. It wasn’t that long ago that a person could legally and morally challenge another person to a duel to the death over real or imagined injury or insult. Aaron Burr comes to mind...times change, but humans haven’t changed that much.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Who said understanding someone’s motive has anything to do with condoning their action.

The problem here is that we don't know anything about the killer's motive aside from the fact that denial of tenure had something to do with it. You're making a completely unwarranted assumption that racial discrimination had anything to do with this denial. You don't have any good reason to believe that the university denied her tenure because of her skin color. You don't have any good reason to believe that she thought discrimination had anything to do with her situation. So why drag this completely unrelated topic into this?