One line stuck out to me in this piece about Professor Amy Bishop:
“You have to talk about Amy Bishop’s mental health in this situation as one of the variables, but being denied tenure when you’re in your mid-40s at an out-of-the-way obscure rural campus in the deep South is a catastrophic loss, and people don’t understand that,” says Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.
This looks like northeastern Ivy bigotry to me, and it seems to be driven by ignorance. I think that most people at UAH would be surprised to learn that their university is “out-of-the-way,” “obscure,” or “rural.” Huntsville is a non-trivial city (it has a major NASA center, and Army R&D facility, and a vast aerospace contractor industrial base), and UAH has an excellent engineering school, particularly for aerospace (despite their having picked up Mike Griffin as a professor, though it’s probably a job to which he’s much better suited than running NASA). I suspect that, to Mr. Levin, its real crime is being in the “deep” south (just below the Tennessee border). And he probably thinks that for someone with a post-graduate degree from Harvard, her willingness to subject herself to such a benighted place is just one more sign of a mental disorder.
Yes, but once you’ve been denied tenure at UAH, where do you go? If you are denied tenure at Harvard, there are still many places that will take you but if UAH rejects you, I think you are done in the research university category. A teaching school, maybe.
I’m not saying that his point wasn’t valid — just that he didn’t have to denigrate UAH to make it.
She also shot her brother with a shotgun (police report here). Some things smell funny about it (like Amy Bishop’s actions from obtaining the shotgun and accidentally shooting twice in her home to running away and refusing to drop the shotgun when first ordered to by the police), but I don’t see a case for implying that the police department might have acted in an unlawful manner. There was eyewitness testimony (her mother) backing the accidental discharge story (supposedly her brother approached Amy from behind while Mom was telling Amy not to point the weapon at anyone so even proving some sort of negligence would have been hard). It would have been a tough legal battle with no reasonably certain outcome.
Someone at Northeastern is casting stones at UAH? A criminologist, eh? Probably never heard of engineering or that whole space program business.
You can always try for tenure at another research school of the same caliber as UAH. There are a bunch of such schools. Or tenure at a teaching college where you are allowed to pursue research, it’s not that huge a step down in status. I have no idea why Levin thought it would be a catastrophic loss.
Also glancing at Levin’s Wikipedia page, he appears to be an expert on “serial killers, mass murderers, and hate crimes.” So I guess, this is sort of an appropriate topic for him. Still he seems to be more a book writer (with 28 books!) double dipping with a cozy academic gig (he has to teach one class, Sociology of Violence and Hate) rather than a serious academic. And he seems to be fully immersed in (and profiting from) the politically correct culture with several books out on hate crimes and bigotry.
I’ve read that she was also concerned because once she left UAH they retained rights to two of her inventions, ones she hoped to market.
“I’m not saying that his point wasn’t valid — just that he didn’t have to denigrate UAH to make it.”
Ah, I see.
Funny, I had exactly the same reaction, Rand. UAH is a very good research university, ideally located in the heart of Rocket City (and across the street from my office), and enjoying the synergy with Marshall, Redstone, and Research Park. I do think it is a national resource that is is undervalued. Maybe that means “obscure” in some dialects.
I think Levin is mostly guilty of ignorance, not animus, though. To many Yankees, anything outside of the Boston-Washington corridor is, by definition, “rural”, be it a respectable city like Huntsville or a larger metropolis like Atlanta or Chicago. And even if Levin paid us an anthropological visit, he would notice that Sparkman Drive bears practically no resemblance to Huntington Avenue. Actual grass, actual wildlife (there’s a duckpond outside my window), not a subway car to be seen or heard. Doesn’t seem like any city he’s lived in, no doubt.
BBB
Hmm. Doesn’t know much about the south, UAH, or tenure possibilities at mid-ranking universities.
Obviously Levin’s just another ignorant blue-neck bigot from some benighted backwater in our nation’s stagnating northeastern provinces.
“I think that most people at UAH would be surprised to learn that their university is ‘out-of-the-way,’ ‘obscure,’ or ‘rural.’
Oh, come on. It is. Huntsville ain’t no Boston. In the same sense that Northeastern ain’t no MIT.
I have no idea whether or not Levin is a putz, but his statement is really not all that controversial. But it isn’t very realistic, either. There are over a thousand “institutions of higher learning” in the US alone. It’s hard to claim that any one of them is actually the bottom of the barrel so far as the Great Tenure Hunt is concerned.
I wrote to Levin to object to his dismissal of UAH and Huntsville. He responded with the following:
Dear Ben,.
I apologize.
My intent was to explain the murders, not belittle UAH or the Huntsville community. Obviously, my choice of words was quite poor. Huntsville is not at all rural; to residents of Alabama, UAH is clearly not obscure, and the city sounds like a wonderful place to live. Moreover, many excellent schools are out of the way — In my neck of the woods, campuses such as Colby College in Maine and Hobart and William Smith in Geneva, New York.
You suggest that I stereotype, yet you stereotype me. I was born and raised in Louisiana and Texas, have talked to students and faculty at UAB, have a co-author who teaches at the University of Alabama, have travelled extensively throughout the South to visit college campuses, and have lived in a rural area of the “Deep South.” Actually, I love the South.
Again, I am sorry for offending you. Please accept my best wishes; I appreciate the feedback.
Regards
Jack Levin
As I explained to him, I was not so much personally offended as I was disgusted by his willingness to fall back on trite stereotypes rather than employ actual facts.
BTW, I have since learned that he sent the exact same note to at least one other person.
I’m with BBBeard. People like Levin really should get out of the NE corridor more often. If he thinks Huntsville is “rural” deep South, he’s been growing moss on his Yankee backside while reading Gone with the Wind.
Tom Swift,
Where UAH falls in the academic pecking order is a matter that can be debated. That said, there can be no doubt that Levin got one thing flat-out, undeniably wrong when he classified UAH as a “rural” school. It’s in the middle of a good-sized city and right next door to the second-largest research park in the world.
1) The statement, while bigoted, might well reflect Bishop’s own bigotry. They rejected ME??? This podunk place rejected ME???
2) The invention rights might indeed have been a big deal.
“…but being denied tenure…is a catastrophic loss, and people don’t understand that,” says Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.
Great analysis, from the coddled lap of academia.
Jackass.
I guess he’ll just kick back and bore some more undergraduates.
The rest of us have jobs to do and targets to meet…and we’ll likely not achieve career success unless we meet them.
Did I say “jackass” already ? Well, once isn’t enough.
Of course Mr. Levin is of the dated assumption that Ivy Leagers are superior academics. That hasn’t been true for decades.
“Oh, come on. It is. Huntsville ain’t no Boston”
And for that, we Southerners are most grateful. As far as we are concerned, civilization does not extend far above the Mason-Dixon line. The gentleman is welcome to denigrate the South as much as he pleases; it helps discourage our Nothern neighbors from immigrating to and despoiling our beloved homeland. One can find a sign posted almost anywhere here that says “I don’t give a damn how they do it up North.”
clearly everyone who doesn’t get their job-for-life is justifiable in shooting their interview committee. give me a break.
Maybe she watched Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? one too many times. It’s all about academic failure – plus it has gun-play in it and a story about a boy who shot and killed his mother…
Northeastern is not Ivy by any means. It has a good engineering school, workmanlike law school, nursing, and all the rest, but in terms of prestige I would rank it below BU, BC, Tufts, and several others. Harvard is not in Boston, but Cambridge. Harvard is also overrated.
She also could have gone to work for a private company,
Huntsville is not rural. It’s comparable to size and features of cities like Akron, Ohio; Salt Lake City, Utah; or Tempe, Arizona. If you stay in the city area, it doesn’t even feel like the South. It just feels like any other suburban city. Most population centers are like that; they are homogenized. It’s only out in the actual rural areas that you get that real Southern twang and chitlins. Many people are surprised when they find I’m from Huntsville, Alabama. I guess they’re expecting that I’ll have a drawl and I won’t wear shoes or something.
Well, perhaps it – Huntsville – is out of the way, but they sure did apprehend the killer a lot quicker than the good folks in Mass. Say what you want, but if the DA etc in Mass had done their job a long time ago – which they did not (ask Mr. Delahunt) – a few more people would be alive today. So much for the backward Southerners…they got it right, Yanks did not.
I guess the ivy is spreading. Northeastern an ivy school? Ajuga, maybe, but no ivy. Plenty of nose pickers at that school, believe me.
Tom Swift, Huntsville isn’t rural to anyone who has actually been in a rural area. It’s not a large city, but it is a city by any definition. It’s not like, say, Mississippi State in Starkville– which isn’t to denigrate them, either, but just to say that that’s what a university in a rural setting means to me.
And again, it’s only out of the way if out of the way means “can’t get there on a direct flight from London.”
For the record, there is some incredible technology being developed by various companies in Huntsville right now. Anyone who would regard the city as some kind of wasteland for research is simply ignorant.
Honestly, I’m not even sure where Northeastern University is. Somewhere North and East, I presume.
Karl – if this article is correct, there was some activity not disclosed in the police report to which you linked which was inarguably criminal.
the flaw in this guy’s reasoning is not that UAH is out of the way, it’s that her reaction was somewhat justified given the circumstances. the seeds of her reaction were well sown by then, and UAH recognized (and grievously, but understandably underestimated) this proclivity and tried to cut ties. So in sum, this guy has it exactly backwards.
If being denied tenure at such an obscure, out-of-the-way university is such an insult, one has to wonder what brought her there in the first place.
Well, as documented in the Princeton case affirmative action has dramatically reduced the quality of education at all schools including, if not especially the Ivy’s. With “scholars” like Skip Gates at Haavaad ’nuff said.
This looks like northeastern Ivy bigotry to me
Northeastern is NOT an Ivy League-type school. It has long had the reputation as being a working-class commuter school, where students earned money for college by working in its co-op program, though in recent years its reputation has improved.
That is bizarre. You have assault right there no matter if the shooting were accidental or not. How could police let that go?
I’m surprised this lady could even pass a background check to get into any positions considered for tenureship.
Apparently, she had assault charges filed on her in 2002 for punching another woman in the head at an IHOP. Bishop asked the waitress for a booster seat for her kid and was told the last seat was just handed out to another mother. Bishop marched over and in a profanity laced tirade demanded the seat from the other lady. The woman refused to give up the seat at which point Bishop punch the woman in the head while yelling “I am Dr. Amy Bishop!” Cuckooo…
Well damn a couple of you for arrogant Yankee assholes. You haven’t the least idea of what you’re talking about. And even you, Simberg, with that incredibly condescending “I’m not saying that his point wasn’t valid — just that he didn’t have to denigrate UAH to make it.” Jesus H. KEE-RIST!
Do you people really have no inkling of the kind of intellectual talent which is drawn to the Huntsville area? If I may be allowed the vanity, I would classify myself as a talented aerospace professional, and all my degrees are from within that supposedly poor, benighted state of Alabama. My colleagues in a private, international concern are a mixture of world-caliber talent from Europe, Taiwan and India, as well as from that erstwhile bastion of the US academe, the Ivy League.
Yes, among my peers are graduates from Harvard and Princeton and others of their ilk. In my 30 years of first-hand experience and observation I have found on the whole the Ivy Leaguers are living off a reputation which is at least a generation out of date. The Eastern establishment guys can’t even match the products of schools such as UAH, much less the Chinese and Indians who are so hungry and accomplished they burn with a white light. Plus almost to a man (yeah, they’re all guys) the Ivies exhibit a self-regard which must be experienced to be credited.
So perhaps you who think there is something to Levin’s sniffery (the man is from Northeastern, by God!) should stop relying on media-fueled stereotypes decades past their discard date, and make sure you really know your stuff before you simper knowingly again about what you think is the obvious low status of a teaching position at a regional university. Jackasses.
Slightly off-topic, Rand, but Mike Griffin tought several graduate courses at Goddard (sponsored and run by Geroge Washington University) and was actually quite good.
He has a nice sense of humor, understood that his students were GSFC direct employees/contractors (ie. working folks) and treated us more like co-workers than students. He is also amazingly bright and can speak quite thoroughly on many different topics.
As for running NASA, that is a whole different ball of wax.
Partially northeastern bias, partially the liberal arts vs science divide. I have a doctorate from a top midwestern non-Ivy and am a top professional in my narrow field (fish / pond), but I had never heard of UAH. Then again, what I know of rockets comes from Captain Kirk (Scotty, really) and I am challenged to help my second grader in mathematics.
She didn’t get tenure. That means that her “peers” rejected her research, and her. Rejection is hard to take. However, tenure is not paradise: I view it as golden handcuffs. Once gained, it is almost never relinquished. Which means the professor is then tied to an institution for the rest of their natural life.
What is up with her husband? He stated they went shooting a few weeks earlier, and she had this gun, and he didn’t know where it came from. I would guess that going down to the range and shooting a few rounds isn’t one of their usual activities. Didn’t it strike him as odd that all of a sudden she wanted to go to the target range? With a gun he had never seen before? That didn’t raise an eyebrow, or a question? Clearly there is a good deal here which is not right.
Oh, and I think we should investigate the whereabouts ofcomedian Emo Philips. If he has disappeared now that she’s been arrested then I smell a conspiracy coming on.
“But being denied tenure…”
Let me give you a second option:
But for goofballs similar to this bloviator at Northeastern, Amy Bishop would have been teaching “English as a second language” at a penal institution somewhere in the Northeast, and all of these people at UAH would be alive and expanding the mind of students, and raising their families.
Karl asks: How could police let that go?
Two reasons. 1. Massachusetts is, and has been for many decades, functionally a one-party state. Like any such, it is a province of men, not of laws. Bishop’s parents were connected to the local party establishment, and as always when insiders mess up, the case was broomed by another member of the party establishment.
2. Massachusetts prides itself on its liberal courts and gentle judges — at least, with actual violent criminals, as opposed to people who cross the nomenklatura. (There is a subset of MA criminals who can get off with a screamed, “Do you know who I am?” but most have to depend on the judges’ general love of criminals and contempt for victims). You will go a long time waiting to hear about a resident of Massachusetts victimized by a violent criminal turned loose somewhere in the other 49, but a Mass. criminal has probably killed someone in your state, while he should have still been in the jug in any normal jurisdiction.
That’s just the way they roll.
Jackie Levin might do better to question the inadequacies of Massachusetts law enforcement and prosecution that allowed that wack-job Amy bishop to get away w/ killing her brother and- allegedly- sending pipe bombs to the home of her Hah-vahd professor rather than denigrate a peer institution (Northeastern ain’t Harvard, Jack!)
UAH probably has a substantially *better* engineering school than Northeastern, but the UAH faculty clearly lags Northeastern in the area of ignorant, self-important a**hats.
Northeastern?
Good God, to have this kind of arrogance from a POS school like that?
Total joke.
Well damn a couple of you for arrogant Yankee assholes. You haven’t the least idea of what you’re talking about. And even you, Simberg, with that incredibly condescending “I’m not saying that his point wasn’t valid — just that he didn’t have to denigrate UAH to make it.” Jesus H. KEE-RIST!
Ah, some of that famous southern gentility…
I didn’t say his point was valid, either. It simply wasn’t the topic of the post, which was to point out the bigotry.
I will never forget as someone fresh out of a Big XII university many years ago, traveling to Boston thinking I was actually making it to the big time – getting away from the ordinary and working with the “enlightened.”
After living large in Boston for two months on the corporate dole, I returned home and kissed the tarmac, too ashamed to admit to my ordinary Big XII peers I had just worked two months with a team of the most overrated people on earth.
So, if you’re as a school with less prestige than the Ivy League, it’s ok to kill people when you get denied tenure? This “understanding” approach sounds like excusing murder to me, as long as the people you kill have southern accents.
There’s a simple solution to the tenure thing. Outlaw it everywhere. Let our pampered academics compete to keep their jobs just like everyone else.
You seek the proportion of PhDs in the population of Boston vs Huntsville as a metric for measuring how Amy Bishop fit in with the local population. Considering her early history, wouldn’t the proportion of serial killers in the two cities be a better measure?
I, too, was immediately struck by how condescending Mr. Levin’s description of Huntsville and UAH were upon reading the article. I need not go into any defense of the area or institution (others have done a fine job in previous comments) but I must say something rings a bit hollow with Mr. Levin’s apology. Is it just me, or does it come a little to close to “Some of my best friends are (insert insulted minority of choice here)”? Not to mention the rather patronizing, “The city sounds like a wonderful place to live…”.
“police department might have acted in an unlawful manner. There was eyewitness testimony (her mother) backing the accidental discharge story (supposedly her brother approached Amy from behind while Mom was telling Amy not to point the weapon at anyone so even proving some sort of negligence would have been hard). It would have been a tough legal battle with no reasonably certain outcome.”
For somebody who was a supposed IQ 160 genius, you would have think she would have figured out how to keep her m’fingn booger-hook of the go-bang switch when she didn’t have sights on target and hadn’t mentally comitted to it’s destruction.
One think I have noticed in the past is raw intelligence is way overated. It is like a fast boat with a broken rudder. Takes a bit of wisdom to keep it mastered to a higher purpose.
As a native of suburban Boston now living in the South, I’d like to make three points:
1. Levin sounds like a jerk, and an ignorant one to boot.
2. Northeastern University is no prize.
3. I’ve heard wonderful things about Huntsville, but commenter RR above who compares it to Salt Lake City is way off base. Salt Lake also is underappreciated by many who consider it a Mormon backwater. It’s population is 1.5 million (metro) compared to Huntsville’s 400,000.