At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
When a PhD from Harvard -- the first detail mentioned, note -- goes postal, they are suffering in an academic pressure cooker.
Dumbly applying the nearest pop-psych explanation to hand to explain the inexplicable only makes it more difficult to show respect for the victims and sympathy for the grieving.
We don't know if this woman lost control because of mental illness, or stress in her personal life, or simply because her superiors were assholes. But if it's the latter, I'd rather hear a discussion about the ugly realities of academic life, than another cliché conversation demanding "respect and sympathy" from total strangers.
Really? I've had some of this kind, and even when I was in a very stressful personal situation, I've never even thought of resorting to any kind of violence, even less shooting anyone.
These cases seem to be caused by mental illness. I agree with the person you're answering to that trying to "explain" a shooting this way is plainly wrong.
The question of whether this is called "mental illness" is open for debate. As far as I'm concerned, it's an academic question, unless the distinction can somehow lead to prevention of the act.
If describing this tragedy as "someone going postal" isn't dumbly applying pop-psych, then I don't know what is.
"Going postal" is comparatively mum. It's a hybrid of "Going crazy" and "disgruntled postal worker," and suggests only that we think the perpetrator is not sane -- that we can't understand why they would do that. Where is the pop psychology?
Are you implying that tragedies have no cause.
It seems like human to try understand tragedies as they are significant part of our human world. Moreover, tragedies usually do have causes.
Claiming that there is no cause to an event may serve some psychological purpose...
Usually, if you do a root cause analysis of anything, you come up with so many contributing factors that the resulting document is hundreds of pages long. Think of industrial postmortems or court proceedings. Everything is more complicated than it seems at first.
Saying "This was because she was denied tenure" does a disservice to everyone involved. It was probably partly because she was denied tenure. It was probably partly also because she had easy access to guns, and she was super focused on her research, and she didn't get along with the school administration, and she had once accidentally killed her brother, and plenty of other factors that we could never know about.
But the need to "help the victims grieve" by labeling every killing "inexplicable" and so casting maximal moral unction on the killer is also just a variety of pop-psychology.
However, this doesn't seem to be an "inexplicable" event. There's probably no single, easy explanation but there seem to be a variety of causal factors we can trace.
"People with a history of violent behavior don't do well in situations of all-or-nothing achievement".
When an event like this touches your life, very few stimuli from outside your own personal bubble of pain and confusion have any chance of registering with you [1].
But having the national paper of record print headlines half-excusing your friend or family member's killer [2] because she's the right kind of people would definitely do it.
[1] Some people express surprise that there are other people "out there," still going about their lives as if nothing had happened.
[2] allegedly.
Or...
In what way was does describing the factors influencing a person's behavior excuse it?
That is like saying, "a salary-earning division manager." I don't know of any serious academic scientist who isn't funded by grants. Seems like the writer really wanted to put "award-winning," but there were no awards.
Did the accident make it easier for her to kill those faculty members yesterday? That's really hard to say. Would it be easier for the former first lady to murder someone because of the deadly car accident she was involved in? I'm inclined to say no.
If the reports that 3 rounds were fired are correct, that's some "accident".
Having said that, look at how the system worked. These guys were stringing her along for six years (or so?), while maintaining the illusion that her activities (against university initiatives and attitudes) would have no impact on her career. Obviously her against-the-grain attitudes had a great deal to do with the way they treated her.
What's the best way to prevent a similar tragedy from occurring? The only way is to take the pressure off by eliminating tenure completely. That way, there's no insane buildup of emotion on either side. In a properly functioning organization, people that don't work out (for whatever reason, including personality conflicts) should be informed of the situation as early as is possible, which takes what, about a year?
Existing faculty could be offered buyouts (which, of course, would have to be lucrative enough to be accepted), and you're at a nice clean slate.
All do respect, but WTF?
There's no question that what she did was horrible, but how is it `just' to kill someone in response? Perhaps revenge and barbaric `justice' in the tradition of lex talionis (eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth) would encourage such a response, but I can see no benefit; it won't bring the dead back to life.
In fact, it is my opinion that the only valid motivations for punishment are: - deterrence. - protection of society and the perpetrator from each other. - rehabilitation. - moral denouncement.
These ideas are not unique to me. In fact, they're quite popular in international politics, and are part of the legal codes of certain countries. For example, The Criminal Code of Canada includes:
Purpose and Principles of Sentencing
Purpose 718. The fundamental purpose of sentencing is to contribute, along with crime prevention initiatives, to respect for the law and the maintenance of a just, peaceful and safe society by imposing just sanctions that have one or more of the following objectives: (a) to denounce unlawful conduct; (b) to deter the offender and other persons from committing offences; (c) to separate offenders from society, where necessary; (d) to assist in rehabilitating offenders; (e) to provide reparations for harm done to victims or to the community; and (f) to promote a sense of responsibility in offenders, and acknowledgment of the harm done to victims and to the community.
-- http://laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/C-46/page-16.html#anchorbo-ga:...
More to your point, though, I think that a justice system which was ultimately based on retribution would have all the positive qualities you speak of as valid motivations. Fitting the punishment to the crime is very difficult unless you have a way to measure how bad the crime was. An eye for an eye, as a default outcome, would provide a quantitative starting point for negotiations between (living) victims and the original aggressor. Of course, this doesn't help much for the dead.
Deterrence isn't preventing a person from repeating a crime, but ever doing it. The idea is that they won't do it to avoid the punishment -- a sort of sociopath's substitute for morality. I've yet to see any actual evidence that capital punishment is a more effective deterrent than long-term imprisonment and have heard claims (though no evidence) to the contrary (that the psychology of such large punishments leaves them effectively indistinguishable)... I've never researched it but I probably should.
As for preventing repetition, so do many other things, such as imprisonment.
>More to your point, though, I think that a justice system which was ultimately based on retribution would have all the positive qualities you speak of as valid motivations.
I'm sorry but I have to disagree.
You'll notice I said that I mentioned protecting the perpetrator from society... Killing them kind of defeats that. Also, they can't achieve rehabilitation if we kill them.
Essentially, I want a justice system based off compassion for _all_ parties. Call it naive altruism if you wish. This isn't to say we shouldn't make protecting ourselves from criminals a priority, but after that we should be trying to help them. As we do, in providing counseling, etc.
You focus on the single exception I mentioned to a retribution-based system as though I had not mentioned it as an exception at all. Why is that?
Our approaches lead us to different conclusions in this case, except for the fact that you look at reality and say that yours shouldn't be applied because in reality mistakes can happen. This is a perfectly valid stance, but it doesn't mean that the point shouldn't be looked at to analyse the differences in our approaches, as this is the most obvious case where they diverge.
There's also the fact that capital punishment is where this discussion began.
Wow, I strongly disagree. Our approaches diverge on virtually every case, as far as I can tell. My approach would be to apply the exact damage to the aggressor that they applied to the victim, except where the victim forgives all or part (for monetary "damages" or some other consideration or reason). If a mistake is made, the same procedure can be used to rectify it. This does mean that completely irrevocable damage (that is, death) can't be applied while keeping the property that mistakes can be fixed or paid for. Murder is already an exceptional situation, not like other crimes of violence, due to its finality.
As far as I can tell, your approach (along with the vast majority of existing legal systems today) requires sentencing or damages to be decided individually by a third party, rather than by the parties already involved, which seems inelegant.
There's also the fact that capital punishment is where this discussion began.
Oh. Well, there is something to be said for staying on topic, I suppose. :)
That was a poor wording on my part. Make that where they diverge most strongly.
>My approach would be to apply the exact damage to the aggressor that they applied to the victim, except where the victim forgives all or part (for monetary "damages" or some other consideration or reason).
I'm going to assume your talking about assault. If I'm wrong, sorry. In any case, we can't just let them settle it with a fee to cover damages. The aggressor demonstrated themselves a threat to the Public. Depending on the circumstances, the aggressor will need to spend some time in jail, with a psychologist, doing community service, reporting to a probation officer, et cetra, or most likely a combination of the above, for the protection of society.
If there was material damage in addition to that, it is not a criminal matter and can be settled in the way you described.
>As far as I can tell, your approach (along with the vast majority of existing legal systems today) requires sentencing or damages to be decided individually by a third party, rather than by the parties already involved, which seems inelegant.
As the previous example illustrates, this is only true for criminal matters.
In practice, it doesn't seem to work very well. There's a reason why most legal systems today rely on a third party to enforce justice. Civilizations that don't tend to devolve into a cycle of retributive violence, eg. medieval blood feuds in Italy, duels in the Wild West, and lynchings in the Reconstruction South.
I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect it's because every action you take not only has its material effects, but it's also taken as a statement of how you want the world to be. So if you steal something, you not only have taken the object, but you've declared that you want to live in a world without property rights. If you rape somebody, you haven't only traumatized her, but you've declare that you want to live in a world where sex can be used as a weapon. If you kill somebody, you haven't only taken their life, but you've declared that you want to live in a world where lives can be taken by conscious action.
If someone then does the same thing back at you, they don't just cancel out. Instead, both parties have declared that they want to live in the world where that crime is accepted behavior.
In the system I advocate, actual settlements or punishments might vary widely, but as long as the convict always had the option of taking a similar beating to the one he gave the victim, we'd know that the punishment or settlement couldn't be more than warranted. As long as the victim can refuse any proffered settlement in favor of having the default punishment administered, we know that the settlement can't be less than warranted. The "eye for an eye" standard is just a tool for allowing the convict and victim to negotiate a settlement, and I think it would be rarely fully carried out for anything major, if the victim has the option of accepting some amount of money to forgive some or all of the offense.
but it's also taken as a statement of how you want the world to be.
I don't think people who steal a TV would agree that they want to dissolve property rights. They don't want to have stuff stolen from them, only to get away with it themselves. One of the reasons that law is possible is that even thieves want to have their own property protected, and even burglars want to protect their homes from entry by others.
But whether or not they want to have stuff stolen from them, that's the message they're sending to the rest of the world. Hell, your proposal enshrines that into law.
It's like the observation I saw a while back on HN: People judge themselves by their intentions, but they judge others by their actions. It doesn't matter whether they intend to send the message that they don't think property rights are worthwhile, that's the message that will be inferred. And if both the criminals and the government agree on that message - what will the citizens think?
"Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification — that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero — that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement — that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence."
That's the moral case; note what I said in the parent comment about the practicality of capital punishment.
>That's the moral case; note what I said in the parent comment about the practicality of capital punishment.
All I can say is that I'm ideologically opposed to this. Most people who know me in person describe me as naive and it's probably true. But I'm not able to look at people that way, and quite frankly I don't want to.
I find it interesting that they have a 6 year rule, when the average is around 10 years to get tenure.
I think that people missed warning signs, that she was feeling stress, and that there is a stigma against seeking help, and people often deny they have a problem.
I agree with most of your comments, except the bit about "requires her death". She was possibly suffering major depression at the time of the incident, and other mental health issues.
I think you're interpreting this wrong; it's 6 years after the tenure decision, not 6 years to get tenure. As in, the articles says they denied her tenure back in 2004 and she would have to leave soon.
6 years is long enough that she had to have realized long ago that she would be leaving and so I'm not sure descriptions like 'snapping' is right; this seems more pre-meditated.
(I believe that the soul dies with the body, and that supernatural events are categorically impossible. So when I say "escape", I mean a completely different thing than a religious person would mean.)
John Hinkley, Jr who shot Reagan in 1981 was sent to a psych ward and is still under the care of the psychiatric facility, even though now allowed conditional release.
It wouldn't surprise me if she _is_ suicidal right now.
Please name some schools at or around that average.
Life imprisonment is irrevocable. In fact, many "not life" sentences end up being death sentences. Innocents die in prison infirmaries every day. The death chamber, not so much.
If you're actually worried about killing innocents, you want more death penalty convictions because they typically get decent review. Folks who get other sentences typically get squat.
I'm not arguing in favor of the death penalty. I'm pointing out that one of the most popular anti-death penalty arguments is crap.
If you like, it's an indictment of the folks who argue against the death penalty because it kills innocents. If they cared about killing innocents, the death chamber is the last place to look.
However, if you're looking to feel good about yourself, have at it.
Perhaps this is the result of societal pressure on intelligent people rather than her own thinking?
The same thing that gives HNers idea that starting a startup is better than being a tenure professor -- personal choice and personal set of goals and motivations.