You've probably heard about the horrible incident that took place Friday afternoon at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. A biology professor there shot six of her colleagues at a departmental meeting after being denied tenure. Three of the six are dead.
Here's the thing. I knew her. Sort of.
I also knew three of her victims. Sort of.
I've never known a mass murderer before. At this point the professor in question is only an alleged mass murderer, even if there's not much doubt about what happened in that conference room.
In my previous life as a sales representative for a college textbook publisher, it was my job to travel the state of Alabama in an effort to convince college professors to adopt (that's the term we used) the company's materials for their courses.
Amy Bishop, the 45-year-old professor and mother of four who came unhinged on Friday, was the main decision maker for human anatomy and physiology course at UAH. This course is taken by everyone who wants to go into a health related major like nursing, so it is always a large class. The textbooks used in A&P are very expensive, and this is an adoption every publisher's rep wants to have.
In the course of my job, I met with Dr. Bishop several times. She was always pleasant when I talked to her, but I never had any luck getting her to consider my offerings, even though my company published the leading title for her class. Usually, when a professor is completely closed to looking at other course materials, it's a sign that they are either lazy or bad teachers, and there are plenty of both types in the halls of academe, Discerning Reader.
A friend in the textbook business called me over the weekend and said Amy Bishop looked like "a beast" based on a picture he had seen. Not true. On campus she looked like a normal 45-year-old woman, although I see what he meant based on the mugshot of her that has been published everywhere. I guess when you've been denied tenure and shot six people, you're not going to look your best for pictures.
The head of the Biology department at UAH, Dr. Podila, was among those killed in the attack. I always found him to be a kind man and easy to talk to. He didn't teach any classes that my company published books for, but we'd have friendly chats occasionally.
I never would have dreamed that the woman I had met would be capable of such a horrible act, and that's the sum of my insight. Not much, is it?
I'm not a psychic and not given to premonitions, but I always thought that, if anything like the mass killing at Virginia Tech happened at one of my schools, it would happen at UAH. I'm not sure why I felt that way, but that thought was in the back of my mind whenever I visited this school. I never had that feeling at any of the hundreds of other colleges and universities I've visited over the years (including Virginia Tech), but I did at UAH and I can't explain why. Weird, huh? I was always a little uncomfortable there, especially when I visited the math and science departments. Something about the place reminded me of the Island of Misfit Toys.
Perhaps it's that a number of the professors at UAH struck me as more stressed than at my other schools. There are unhappy, stressed-out profs on every campus, but it seemed the ratio of unstable people at UAH was a little higher than usual.
Maybe I had subconscious thoughts of the other UAH murder, and they led to my weird premonition. The former department head of the physics department at UAH was convicted last year of murdering his wife and dumping her body in the river.
I knew him too.
I'm sure the academic pressure cooker environment had something to do with what happened on Friday. UAH isn't a top-tier university, but Huntsville is awash in aerospace money and some high powered research goes on there. A number of the faculty, especially in the sciences and engineering, are under pressure to bring in big research dollars and consider their teaching duties to be a necessary evil.
This will sound strange, but I also think the way academic buildings are designed today may somehow contribute to incidents like this one.
Modern academic buildings like the shining new Shelby Science Center (pictured above) that houses the biology and math departments at UAH, have wonderful open spaces and high tech classrooms. But the faculty tend to work in pods of cramped, anonymous offices. They're not quite cubicles, but they're not far from it.
You'll find this kind of faculty office in virtually every new building on any campus you visit. Everything about these modern faculty offices tells the people who inhabit them that they are tiny replaceable cogs in a huge machine.
Old academic buildings, those built prior to 1950, tend to have spacious faculty offices, lined with bookshelves--the kind of space where a person would want to spend time thinking great thoughts. They don't build 'em like that any more.
Or maybe she was just crazy.
I'm in the middle of writing a mystery. In it, two murders take place in a modern academic building in a pressure-cooker department of a state university in Alabama. I don't know what to think about that today.
There was a study several years ago about modern office spaces and the trend towards open floor plans. Many companies thought that large open spaces would be conducive to better communications between colleagues. It worked in residential structures so why not in business? Sort of a tear-down-the-walls approach to forcing people to get along.
ReplyDeleteWell, the study found that these new buildings didn't foster better attitudes or increase production. In fact, employees were more stressed by their colleagues, production and creativity went down as animosity increased. These employees felt they didn't have any private space to think, plan, create, etc. They were annoyed by every bad habit of every coworker within plain view, raising tensions and making relationships far worse.
USA TODAY in northern Virginia, where I worked, built one of these new-age buildings several years ago - won lots of architectual awards. They built it in the 'burbs well outside of D.C. While it looked spectacular from the outside or in the lobby, I would say the vast majority of employees longed for the old building with the quainter work spaces and scenic views of Washington and the Potomac River.
In the art department where I worked, the new building with the marble floors and fancy landscaping was hated for being sterile and cold. The workspaces looked like something arranged by IKEA. Tensions rose noticeably in the new building. And the whole theory of the modern work space improving communications was proven incorrect. People put on headphones to shut out their neighbors, got in more arguments, etc.
I have always felt that employers should pay far more attention to creating workplaces that are soothing and inspiring, not to mention functional. The old dingy places that haven't been kept up are kind of depressing. But the new grander buildings like the one pictured in your post have some serious flaws in design, that alone wouldn't trigger such a tragedy, but these modern places sure don't foster a whole lot of tranquility either.
Forcing people on top of each other isn't a good idea. Lab mice and tropical fish don't do well crammed together without any sense of their own space. The corporate geniuses who thought it would be a great idea to tear down the walls and throw everyone together, regardless of rank, function or responsibilities, don't really seem to understand human nature or how people work. It was naive to think that the open floor plans that might work well in a house would also work well eight hours a day in office or academic buildings. Yes, there should be some open space and community gathering places so that people can't simply hide in small offices or cubicles their entire shifts. But there also needs to be some separation in my opinion. I see far too many buildings today where the interiors look the old sewing factories but with fancier chairs and nicer lighting.
I thought about you and your idea for Book #2, wondering if you would stay on track with it. Truth is stranger than fiction, so maybe you should try your hand at a work of non-fiction. Just a thought.
ReplyDeleteMick: Agreed!
ReplyDeleteCathleen: Having too much fun with my imaginary friends.