Originally published at: UNC shooting: Student arrested for murder of associate professor | Boing Boing
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Not to mitigate in the least the horror of out-of-all-control gun violence, but this (old) senior (old) fellow was personally witness to a half dozen physical dust-ups between grad-students/post-docs and "P.I."s (principle investigators). It’s a situation which is fated by tradition to generate outrage. (mostly in the form of “You stole/published my data that I sweated to collect over the last three years!” “Your data? My lab my data!” or “Why haven’t you approved my thesis after six years!?”) People’s entire passionate careers are twisted and destroyed by faculty members all the time; and universities really ought to take intervening steps to reduce the tension. Always thought that a grad-students/post-doc union was waaay overdue, m’self.
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You know what ingredient was missing from all of those dust-ups?
This is a bit off-topic, but even full-time UNC employees can’t collectively bargain, by law.
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True enough… however…
Most people don’t kill the other person involved in such a dust-up.
It’s happening all over. The people most left out are all the struggling part-timers, who should also have access to unionization.
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The one that ammosexuals will desperately pretend isn’t a factor here?
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Unionization is happening … slowly.
Grad students are kind of the platypus of the university system. They’re students… Or they’re employees…whichever is most expedient for the University at the time.
Stress levels are higher than Willie Nelson at a Snoop Dogg concert. I saw a grad student threaten another student in our lab with a syringe full of dimethyl mercury.
Fun!
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I’m almost certain that once we learn more about the killing that it will be something like this. It’s pretty frightening how little recourse a grad student or postdoc has when their principal investigator is toxic, overbearing, harassing, etc.
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Oh yeah. The inside line (or at least the scuttlebutt; apply appropriate disclaimers) among my UNC friends is that the victim was the shooter’s academic advisor. I should have mentioned this.
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No amount of toxic behavior on the part of the professor justifies murdering herhim. Well, I suppose maybe if she were actually threatening imminent violence against the student, but that seems unlikely.
I was very lucky when I got my MS in engineering. My advisor was awesome. He made sure that his research assistants (which included me) were doing research for him in areas that aligned with the research we were doing for our theses/dissertations, he did not overwork us, and he allowed us to be the primary author on any published papers. I was aware even at the time, though, that this was very unusual. It shouldn’t have been.
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I think the prof was a man…
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He was indeed.
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Oops, I don’t know why I thought otherwise.
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Via kottke
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Those two stoners have never looked particularly stressed to me.
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Clearly this guy didn’t like his advisor, but some of the weird complaints he posted on Musk’s garbage site are difficult to interpret:
“handle with these girls and tattletales”???
Know what though? I don’t really care what his grievances were. Once you murder someone in cold blood (especially someone who isn’t posing any physical threat) you lose the right to have me sympathetically listen to your tales of career-related hardships.
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I might be overly uncharitable, but I read that as “the professor needs to learn to ignore the complaints of sexual harassment against me”
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In all honesty the DTH is doing a better job than the Chancellor. Other than communicating about campus support services, none of the Chancellor’s messages to campus have really done anything to acknowledge the collective trauma that having an active shooter on campus, and a faculty member murdered, not to mention the lockdown that these events triggered, have inflicted on the community as a whole.
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Not sure how else to read that. But with no further info, best to not assume.
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I don’t know, but it’s not a bad guess that it would have been a woman who was the victim, especially given the often problematic dynamics of gender in grad school, especially in the sciences.
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