Congressman's shooting and relationship (if any) to current political situation

It has been a while.  I didn't know if I would ever come back to this blog.  I have not received any emails or contacts so I assume no one has been reading.  I made an effort to reach out to other people who have been denied tenure and while I am grateful for the few replies and comments I did receive, it appears that this it just not the platform for doing this.

But, I have a blog set up.  And it is pseudo-anonymized.  I'm sure that anyone who really wanted to find out my identity could but really, is it that important?  Perhaps a more real issue is how I personally feel about anonymous content on the web.  In general I'm against it.  But I felt that in this case there was value to be gained, because tenure denial is such an enormous stigma, people who've been through it often never speak of it again.


Again, I have this blog set up.  So I might post occasionally if things cross my mind that I find myself wanting to write about.  Since the tenure-denial thing seems to be pretty much dead material now, I might post on other topics too.

Which brings me to the shootings this weekend, of whom the primary target apparently was Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, but there were many other victims as well.  This event, and the political discussion around it, reminds me of the Amy Bishop story.   Again, the same issues are being laboriously batted back and forth, in this case in the setting the current left-right political wars.  And it surprises me how dense people are sometimes.  Especially, right now, those on the left for, first, jumping too fast to try to make political gain out of this, and second, not being careful enough in their attacks.

We've been over this again and again.  No reasonable person would EVER seriously think that something like Sarah Palin's crosshairs led directly to this shooting.  Of COURSE NOT!  (Yes, I'm yelling).  Those of you on the right with your aggrieved victim poses I can see you all now.  Or hear you, in advance, because I have listened to thousands of hours of right wing political talk radio.

BUT, to completely deny that the underlying rightwing political attacks had NO bearing, that is insane.  What the left needs to attack, at a time like this, is not the event itself (the killings) but the things that the right is still now currently saying.  They do say that we (the left) are borderline traitors, that we hate America, that our main aim is for bad things to happen to this country.  They do say that we are implicitly murderers for supporting abortion.  They do say that we are Godless and work to destroy Christianity.   You need only turn on the radio to hear these things.

Those are the things that should be attacked at a time like this.

In fact, the best option, in terms or political warfare, at a time like this, is to publicly very scrupulously absolve the right from any direct, immediate blame.  That kind of position, in the long run, gains you traction, especially since they would never do the same thing on their side.  But, I still have a hard time convincing my liberal friends of this.

University of Alabama shooting

See the NY Times article today, Professor Is Charged After 3 Are Killed in Alabama.  This is an amazing and horrific case where a tenure denial has (apparently) led to violent retribution by the one who was denied.  We don't know all the facts yet but the Times says that she was denied tenure recently and she went to a faculty meeting with a gun and killed and injured several people, all other faculty members.

I want to post about this more later, but as someone who is trying to reach out to others who have been denied tenure, let me just make clear--while I am interested in the issues this will raise related to tenure denials, this was an absolutely bloody and uncalled for murder.  I have no sympathy for the perpetrator.  My guess is that since this is a clear cut case with several witnesses, it was clearly premeditated, and is in the south, she will be executed.

One of the frustrating things about the NY Times article is that it does NOT mention the denial first as the possible spark for the killings.  Instead it discusses the "pressure cooker" of biotech startups.

I am assembling links related to this story on my delicious site, see http://delicious.com/deadprofessor/UAH_shooting.  Now I notice that the LA Times is saying one of the victims was a staff member.

I will be very interested to see just how random her victims were.  Was she in there to get revenge on certain people?  Or was she also just randomly killing people?

As I said, this is clearly a crazy act by a crazy person, but in both of my denials I'd be lying if I didn't say that I did have thoughts like this.  In my case (and I suspect in most cases) they ran more to the just plain suicide bent.  But I hope this case does raise some discussion about this important issue.  A tenure denial was once described by someone on sci.research.careers as like having a nuclear bomb descend on your house.  It does feel like that.  It is like everything you worked for has been destroyed.  And not by something out of your control, like being layed off or having a business fail.  This is a long, reasoned judgement by your peers and they have decided you need to be out.

Closure

So it is closing in on two years since this all went down, the second denial I mean.  I am working on setting up a meeting with the two tenured professors who supported me, primarily for the purpose of making sure we are organized if some teaching opportunity should come up in the next year or so.  I am not talking about anything full-time, but I am currently working in an IT support position at the main state university here, about an hours drive away from the small, church-related liberal arts college that flushed me out two years ago.  So, I am hoping that some opportunity might present itself to teach a class here.  That was the biggest frustration for me after the second denial; as it was all about teaching, and it was from an essentially unknown very small college, I saw it as just about driving a stake into the chance that I would ever be able to be in the classroom again.

These two people I am going to meet with, they were the two who supported me in my tenure application and in the appeal process.  Recall, this liberal arts college has a small department and only in the range of 4-6 fulltime faculty.  These two were the only tenured faculty members there during my tenure application.  One was chair for the first part of my six years, the other chair during the second part.  (Another tenured member retired a year before I put my dossier forward, and another member was on the same track as me and got tenure the same year I was denied.)

Excuse me--a digression; I promise I will get back to what I was going to say--I have not mentioned yet that one of the important details of my situation was that there was another faculty member in my department who came up for tenure the same year as I did.  And this was a person who was killing all along the board--teaching, research, and service.  Let's put it this way: they were using her in the fundraising letters before she even applied for tenure.  So she was a lock; I knew that.  But I had been led to believe that the denial rate was very small at this obscure, cash-strapped private school.  It was--before we got the new president, dean, and division chair.  So there is a whole world of hurt we could go over about the RYS (rising young star) situation and as it impacted me.  For now, I will leave it at this: the salient part of that whole situation was that she was the kind of person who was very passive aggressive, always playing the victim.  Cutting down colleagues in the department or the College but never to their face.   Before this happened I thought I had her support (or at least that she was neutral), but now I am pretty sure that was not the case.

OK, back to this meeting with the two people who supported me.  As I said, I want to try to plan out a strategy with them if a single-class teaching opportunity comes up.  It will be an uphill battle as the tenure decision letter mentioned only teaching as the reason for the denial.  It we are going to overcome that, even to convince a department chair that it makes sense to take a chance on me for even a single course, it will take some over-the-top kinds of things being said, not just in letters, but probably phone calls, etc.

Now, the question is, what else?  I have pretty much avoided much contact with them since this all went down, it being just too painful and I wanted to get some distance from it.  And the other point being it is pretty pointless from my point of view socializing with them without talking about it.  I mean if we avoid it totally that seems artificial and if we do talk about it I can't imagine it being too enjoyable for them.  OK.  But now what I have been thinking about is should I make some effort (perhaps with their help) to try to get closure to some kind of closure on this?

There are a couple of options this might take.  One is I write a letter to the editor of the paper or something and lay out everything, naming names, etc. and point out that in my opinion the revered church school is morally bankrupt.  Again, not because of the decision but because of the complete abandoment by the community which portrays itself as so inclusive and compassionate.  There is another possible option.  My next-to-last year at the college there was a very divisive denial in the humanties division.  That one was all about research.  The people over there got so up in arms they had an article in the student newspaper and the chair came before the faculty at a monthly meeting and he laid out all of his beefs for everyone to hear.  The admin. did not respond to this at all, they just allowed the presentation.  And now, get this, it turns out they did NOT fire the guy!  They found him a non-tenured instructor position!  Fer crissakes!  They get to rail before the whole faculty about their denial and the guy is still employed there.

My case, by contrast, I think there are people there who don't even realize I'm gone.  Or if they do realize it, they might think it was my idea.  I am constantly meeting people in the grocery store and amazed by the complete misconceptions they have about what happened.  So I am contemplating asking the two faculty members who supported me if they would consider asking the admin. to make a similar presentation at a regular faculty meeting.  The idea is that this presentation would say that the point of it is most emphatically NOT to address the denial, but to address the atrocious behavior of the college afterward.  You could argue that this is a win-win.  I could get some catharsis, knowing that at least my story got out to the faculty, and they (the admin.) could feel good that this story did not go out to the public at large.

But...what do you think?  It  probably is a mistake to do something like that.  At this point, I'm just contemplating discussing it, not getting close to doing it.  It will be interesting to see what my two former colleagues say.