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THE LAST LAUGH:
I'm as Mad as Hell and I'm Not Going To Take This Anymore
Mary Dee Wenniger, Editor/Publisher

In the 1976 movie “Network,” soon-to-be-unemployed TV news anchor Howard Beale called coach potatoes everywhere to action. Get off your butts, he urged, open a window and stick your head out and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

While he was referring to the nation’s economy, murder rate, infl ation, pollution and general malcontent in 1976, recent events at the University of Alabama in Huntsville suggest that discontent with colleges is more widespread than expected, both inside and outside the academy.

If you’ve been sealed in a spa for the last three weeks, you missed some tragic action. Dr. Amy Bishop, an assistant professor in the biology department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, reportedly brought a 9-mm handgun to a faculty meeting on Friday February 13 and methodically went around the table shooting colleagues and staff members.

Before she left the room, three colleagues were dead and three others injured, two critically. While the world condemns her and searches for clues to its causes, and without detracting from the enormity of her acts toward the unfortunate victims, let’s try to identify some contributing factors.

A December 2009 survey of 1,000 Americans revealed that they too are losing confi dence in the American system of higher education. More than half (60%) believe that colleges today act like businesses, more concerned with their own bottom lines than with the educational experiences of their students, an increase from 52% just two years earlier. Colleges could admit and educate a lot more students without lowering quality, and do it at a lower cost, they said.

Patrick Callan, president of survey co-creator The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, called it a “vote of no confidence” from the public, who believe that college is essential to success, yet are “losing trust in the management and leadership.” College costs too much, the public believes, and 83% of those surveyed said that students have to borrow too much to pay for college.

An untenable position

Dr. Bishop is a neurobiologist whose bid for tenure the university denied several months ago, as well as her recent appeals. She was quite bitter and had hired a lawyer to challenge the denial. Since tenure is a watershed event in the lives of academics, its denial could certainly trigger outrage.

Consider these facts, from a series of articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times in February:

• A Harvard-trained neurobiologist, Dr. Bishop currently worked at the University of Alabama, a thousand miles apart in distance and light-years away in prominence. Differences in the schools’ cultures could create dissonance.

• Although her tenure denial allegedly was based on a relatively thin record of publications and grants, others consider her record to be more than respectable. Could personal biases of committee members have influenced the decision?

• Women in science have a particularly hard time in the academy, as noted by the National Science Foundation awarding almost $8 million in ADVANCE grants to 26 schools in 2009 alone to support the recruitment and retention of women in the STEM fields. One of Bishop’s students reported that she “spoke about the general difficulties of women in science on more than one occasion.” Think of former UC chancellor Dr. Denice Denton.

• Dr. Bishop is the mother of four children aged 8 to 18, a rare accomplishment for a woman in science. The challenges of balancing the responsibilities of motherhood and a career in academic science cannot be overemphasized. Not all respond with a gun, but certainly the stress has unhinged more than one woman.

• Her colleagues didn’t like her. One reportedly said he’d decided she was “crazy” just five minutes after meeting her, and had steered clear of her ever since. He reported avoiding her in the local bookstore and skipping a faculty retreat because he knew she’d be there. Another told her husband “she’s not as good as she thinks she is.” With that sort of collegiality in the department, who knows what to expect?

• Nobody debated her brilliance. Four years ago she and her husband had invented a portable device called InQ for growing and monitoring nerve cells, which could replace the century-old Petri dish technique. She is a director of Prodigy Biosystems, a company licensed by the university to build the $30,000 device, which was expected to produce net revenues of $25 million by 2014. She had discussed ideas for two more inventions with a university tech-transfer official.

• University leaders had a habit of sending out “nastygrams” by email on Fridays. Her husband wondered if she’d received one that day, reaffi rming the tenure denial.

What’s next?

Nationally, women are half as likely as men to gain tenure. Does this system treat women fairly and appropriately? How many more brilliant women academics will the academy lose to a tenure system that has an overwhelming potential to base decisions on subjective evaluations, personal biases and murky standards?

Should colleagues persist in applying sky-high criteria to tenure candidates, when most of them passing judgment would not meet the standards themselves were they to be candidates today?

What support mechanisms will the academy put into place to assure that those denied tenure in the future are treated with humanity and respect? Those in the quirky terminal year following tenure denial, as Dr. Bishop found herself, are at great risk for negative outcomes. Would mentor programs work? Exit plans coordinated through an HR department? Psychological evaluations?

If it takes an outcry of the academic masses to echo the cry, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore,” the result will be a further blow to the eroding prestige of the American academy. And nobody will get the last laugh.