Amy Bishop is a neuroscientist who was on the tenure-track faculty at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. She allegedly shot dead three colleagues in the Biology department, and wounded two others.
The motive most commonly speculated is that she was enraged over a convoluted tenure process that ended up ultimately in her being denied.
Press accounts also tend to describe her and her research as brilliant, and note her having achieved a Ph.D. at Harvard. There is some suggestion that the knowledge that she had that kind of record, but was nonetheless denied tenure may provide an explanation of why she felt so unfairly treated and had become so violent.
But this may be a case of misplaced sympathy, because it lacks insight into all the different reasons why tenure is awarded or not at a particular school, and it introduces assertions about her superior publication record without placing it in the context of others in her specialty, or even others within her own department.
I am not an attorney, psychotherapist, or criminal profiler, but I am a recent expert on the arduous process of applying for ( and in my case getting) tenure and perhaps more importantly, I am a longstanding expert on publication records in the sciences and the ways they might be weighed in tenure cases.
The only rule about the tenure process is that there is a consensus formula about what goes into it in an idealized university in unchanging times, but there are few if any idealized places where the formula does not have to be adjusted over time
No university has to give a person tenure, and an increasing number of them do not. Tenure is, in effect, a lifetime guarantee of a job, save for the worse cases of professorial malfeasance, absenteeism, incompetence, dementia, or institutional financial collapse.
While many academics regard tenure as a self-evident right, or at least a rite of passage that preserves the best and screens out the less , the rest of the world is often mystified over the process and particularly over this almost ironclad job security, particularly in this era of joblessness for tens of millions.
In many cases now, universities have two tracks of faculty. There is “tenure track” with many fluctuating demands, despite a written contract, and “non-tenure-track “ with limited duties delineated by contract, and which are actually adhered to by both parties.
Quite competent non-tenure-track faculty can serve for decades, with no job security, but also with no particular pressure to do as many of the things that are required of the tenure-track faculty.
Most of them, in fact, are hired to teach multiple sections of courses that tenure track faculty do not want, or cannot find the time, to teach.
Nonetheless, largely owing to a tradition that tenure-track professors eventually have to be assured a level of freedom to speak their minds and do the kinds of research they want, without worrying about job security, lifetime tenure is still more commonly than not offered to those faculty who fulfill a sometimes variable------ but almost always lengthening----- laundry list of criteria over a set probationary time.
Usually tenure requirement feature some combination of :
· The ability to teach undergraduates in the classroom
· The willingness to counsel students in office hours or in the lab
· Getting graduate students to complete their dissertations in places that offer Ph.D.s
· The ability to perform research
· That gets published in prestigious journals
· That attract fame
· And bring in more grant money
· And the great miscellaneous duties as assigned : Usually performance of service to the department or to the larger university by participating in a number of committees, assisting in the administrative or business functions of the department, coordinating with the Registrar, serving as advisors of student activities and/or doing community outreach., etc.
Faculty at Elite National Research Universities & at Elite National Liberal Arts Colleges Know What’s Expected & Can Do It with the Available Resources. But What Are the Realistic Expectations Made of Tenure-Track Faculty at Schools that Want to Be Elite But Don’t Have the Same Needs or Resources?
The correct proportions of obligations and achievements among these requirements , is however, not the same for given categories of schools and colleges, and it would be a classic mistake to assume that what worked in one general category of school was what works in another.
This is despite the fact that all institutions, in all parts of the country, claim to provide the best university experience or education or make some similar assertion about their excellence.
The fact is that the institutions that are the nationally most admired generally have a massive cumulative advantage over those which are less famous nationally. This is not say that other schools cannot aspire to become nationally famous, and sometimes succeed. But basically there are only two categories of school where the ideal formula for tenure track faculty is pretty much the actual working formula:
These are the top 50 schools in each of two US New & World Report categories: National Research University and National Liberal Arts College. How does a school become one of these?
· It helps to be at least 100 years old.
· With an alumni who have been extremely successful for generations and repaid the school many times over in annual donations and in social, political, and business connections.
· With billions in long term endowment (the research universities need several, the liberal arts college can probably do with just one) which are used to:
· Provide the finest facilities
· Pay the top salaries to recruit the most competitive faculty
· Have enough money to fund the most talented students who cannot afford to pay to attend.
All this leads to the rich getting richer, for it has the ironic effect of also attracting the most talented students who can easily afford to pay, as well as foundations and government grants for research.
Basically this is because a school with these attributes tends to be a consistent deliverer of results in terms of great prospects for its new alumns and great breakthroughs in terms of research.
But Even at the Elite Schools There Are Still Some-Tradeoffs, Some Subtle, Some Not So Subtle
This seemingly ideal combination of high expectations of tenure-track faculty, with fabulous resources, however, hides trade-offs in terms of what the tenure track faculty are actually expected to do, because even among these nationally prestigious institutions, there is an Orwellian Animal Farm hierarchy of requirements : All Duties are Equal but Some Duties Are More Equal Than Others.
In the most prestigious national research universities in the United States (The Ivy League, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and the like) it is axiomatic that repeatedly publishing research in the world’s most prestigious journals, in a manner that brings in fame and grant money to the school is so overwhelmingly important, that in many cases, the ability, or even an interest in teaching and counseling undergraduates is quite frankly a trivial concern that only unworthy tenure-track faculty who have taken their eyes off the Nobel Prize entertain. (Be ready to hear all manner of outrage from those university’s PR departments that this is untrue, but then ask them how many contact hours their most famous senior professors actually have with undergraduates on a weekly basis as compared with how many contact hours their many non-tenure track faculty and/or grad students have with them.)
A similarly cynical attitude can sometimes be found about performing service (instead of the more highly valued grant-writing, breakthrough-making, and publishing ).
Attendance at committee meetings is often thought to represent a good time to check you-e-mail and twitter, correct exams (assuming the grad students don’t do that for you) and nowadays to do text messaging, while the minority of committee members who actually care, or maybe just the blowhards, exhaust themselves making speeches and endlessly revising draft reports or new regulations.
In nationally known, elite small liberal arts colleges (Amherst, Williams, Wellesley, Smith, Swarthmore, and yes, my own alma mater Holy Cross and about 40 other institutions like them) the ability to teach, counsel, and inspire undergraduates is actually the most important criterion for a tenure-track faculty member to meet, but rarely is it sufficient any more.
Particularly in the sciences, getting published in places that matter still counts, and bringing in grant money still matters, although the frequency of publications and the dollar amounts are not usually so high as in national research universities.
However, in the absence of graduate students, tenure-track science faculty at national liberal arts colleges are held far more accountable for their ability to involve undergraduates in meaningful laboratory or field research, including co-authorship at this early age, and for the subsequent placement of these science students in medical schools and in prestigious graduate programs.
National liberal arts college science professors aren’t expected to win their own Nobel Prizes, but they are expected to prepare and send their graduates to places where they can subsequently do so themselves.
The Most Difficult Places To Get A Handle On What Is Required For Tenure Are the Places That Fall Somewhere in Between the Two Ideals and Have Fewer Resources
The most unpredictable position in terms of what the administration and senior faculty want of their probationary professors is found at universities that are neither elite and primarily dedicated to research with some instruction, nor elite and primarily dedicated to teaching with some research.
These are the schools, like the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) that naturally want to become elite, but have yet to fulfill completely their institutional mission, because they very likely have more aspirations for their institution and for their tenure-track faculty than money on hand to make it happen easily or by a use of uniform checklist for each person.
UAH describes itself as “a research intensive university, committed to rigorous scholarship, innovative education, technological research, cultural growth, and entrepreneurial creativity in order to enrich our global community.”
The school has set the laudable goals of $100 million in annual research expenditures, $100 million in endowment, $10 million in annual giving, 10,000 students, 100 Ph.D.s a year and many other praiseworthy benchmarks, but even the attainment of these would not make it a national research university in terms of its ability to adopt the norms of the Harvards, Yales, or Stanfords in terms of what it can expect of its tenure candidates.
And the notion of graduating 100 PhDs and having 10,000 students pretty much rules out the school becoming the next Washington & Lee or Harvey Mudd.
Very likely the proportions or mix of qualities and attributes expected of tenure track faculty at UAH would have to be somewhat different, because this school is, at this particular stage of its development, a very different place than where Amy Bishop came from (Harvard) and a tenure track faculty member like Amy Bishop should have known this.
Agreeing to Undergo The Tenure Process over 5 or 6 Years Is Like Racing Up Stairs To Catch The Elevator, Only You Don’t Know For Sure On What Floor It Will Stop 5 or 6 Years From Now.
Ideally the candidate tenure-track faculty member and the senior members of the department to which he or she belongs, and the assortment of Deans, Provosts, Chancellors, Presidents, and Trustees all share a mutual and consistent understanding of just what proportions of duties or attributes are necessary and of just what constitutes sufficient proof of worthiness.
In point of fact, consistency in the application of these rules and formulas tends to vary among, and even within, departments, and even the nominally individualized formula necessarily gets adjusted between the time when the person is hired and when the probationary period is over.
The real world often intrudes on these arrangements, sometimes in favor of the probationary faculty member, and sometime to his or her detriment .
A new hire’s competitiveness on the academic job market in his or her specialty at the time of his or her hiring, and especially the presence of competing offers, tends to favor the candidate having his or her own way in the good times at the beginning of their probationary period, while a slow market in a field from which the school has many options to fill the vacancy tilts the balance in favor of what the senior members of the department or its chair feel like demanding.
Senior faculty members can die or retire suddenly, requiring different courses to be taught, or more sections to be offered, even as they open up more slots for the tenure candidate.
Financial crises can cut support for research, but new grants can enhance it.
Shifts in student enrollment in the department or an overall declines in university matriculation or in some cases of state legislative or alumni support are common events that can change the personnel requirements of department in ways that cannot always be foreseen at the beginning of a probationary period. In some cases this will mean a reduced teaching load favoring research, in others this may mean a layoff among the untenured faculty or increased class sizes or numbers of sections for them stifling the time and attention for research.
The need to hire hot new scientists in newly emerging specialties, or scientists from groups underrepresented on the faculty, are other possibilities, that can be forced on faculty from above, or proactive gambles made when new talent comes unexpectedly on the market.
Building renovations, the unexpected sharing of lab and office space, and even the needs of oneself or of other department members for family medical leave, or the winning of a travel grant, can all complicate matters.
Over the course of time, the tasks that have to be performed and overall standards (and generally pressures) increase to the point where it can often be fairly said that the newest tenure track faculty have to achieve much more now than did their already tenured colleagues in their own probationary days.
While this upwards demand spiral is how university faculties on the whole improve evolutionarily, it can seem maddeningly unfair to the young faculty member.
An additional criterion is that at the time of tenure application, experts from outside the university, ideally from peer institutions (schools that are at least as reputable and ideally of similar size, endowment, research activity, etc.) read the dossier and offer the senior faculty and pertinent officials a candid assessment, usually focusing on the quality of the published research of the tenure candidate. (They generally know little about the teaching or service of the candidate on a distant campus). If there is a split opinion, the probationary scientist may well be in trouble. But the probationary faculty member is also in trouble if they think that an endorsement of research from outsiders is a sufficient substitute for the dismay that insiders have within the department for what is perceived to be shortcomings that affect the overall good of the department.
Because added to all this is a hidden criterion, the person has to “fit in” socially with the networking and group think of the existing faculty, and often with their spouses or significant others if the department has frequent social gatherings. The polite term for this is “Be a good fit” for the department.
A probationary tenure-track faculty member has to avoid being negative, disruptive, or acting out bizarrely, and ideally, actually make nice as often as practical. Deference to the senior members is usually expected. Volunteering for unpleasant or mundane tasks is de rigeur.
I have no way of knowing what Amy Bishop said or implied to her faculty colleagues, but I can safely say that letting it be known that you think you’re superior just because you came to UAH from Harvard strikes me as a “kiss of death” attitude, should she have displayed it.
I know whereof I speak, when I talk about the self-damning nature of academic pedigree conceit. While it was my wife who had the job that got us the on-campus housing, we actually lived right in Harvard Yard before we moved to the University of Arkansas .
Fortunately I quickly learned before embarrassing myself too often, that abundant academic talent exists outside of New England, particularly among my colleagues here in Fayetteville!
My personal opinion (and experience) is that you do what is required the best you can, because the university in which you wish to gain lifetime tenure, has been built by the efforts of all those people before you, including those tenured members whom you may rightly or wrongly vaguely feel did not have to work as hard as you do.
Consider the following:
· Your senior colleagues must have done something right in a past era whose own changing expectations were probably as mysterious to them as the current ones are to you.
· If you don’t like the process for incoming tenure track faculty, you can always work to change it after your own tenure is won.
· And if you feel if you have a superior record and were unfairly denied, you usually can appeal it, and ultimately, if still unsuccessful, you can take your record away with you and get hired elsewhere.
Of course in this general economic downturn and especially in this era or freezes in academic hiring, that is an admittedly hard task.
From all accounts, the senior faculty members in the Biology Department did not vote to tenure Amy Bishop.
The sticking point or points cannot be known to us, because the full extent and content of tenure deliberations are generally confidentiality protected.
It may well have been that in a place that still needed consistently good teachers or advisers, she might not have been one. She may not have been the person who took on the service work that the department or the school needed at this stage of its development. She may not have been a person who was “a good fit” in that she made the department run as well as it could through being as cooperative as possible.
She appealed and won her appeal. But then, the Provost, the chief academic officer, overturned the appeal.
Provosts are generally accorded that responsibility and right, but even they can be countermanded by a Chancellor or President or the Board of Trustees, if there is flagrant foul being committed.
Most often, however, the higher an appeal goes, the more likely it is that the higher levels of administration and oversight side with the longstanding expertise on campus. The President rightly assumes that he or she is not going to know this person or the peculiarities of what constitutes excellence in a discipline better than the people who know that person best and who have been doing that work for decades.
In a sense, if Amy Bishop were going rationally to shoot anyone, she should have shot the Provost. (Thank God, she did not.)
But there is no rationality in any of this, just tragedy for the victims of the shooting, because those senior faculty members were just doing an important part of their job, recommending or not, lifetime tenure for someone they would have to work with for the rest of their professional lives.
Was Amy Bishop’s Publication Record Clearly Superior to That of the Other Biology Faculty She Allegedly Shot?
While it is not always clear which author with the same name did what (there are other Amy Bishops who are publishing biologists ; one of whom lives and works in the UK) and it is also not always clear what work is to be attributed to the University of Alabama at Huntsville vs. to her time at Harvard, the short answer is that Amy Bishop had a very good record.
It cannot, however, be claimed that it is one of the very best in her field on a national sense, nor even clearly the very best at UAH’s Biology Dept., when comparing the journals within which it appears compared to the very best journals of their type (a method of comparison in which I am frankly an expert, and which is also based on professional consensus exemplified by the votes of the premier organization for biology librarians, the Biomedical & Life Sciences Division of the Special Libraries association, for the 100 most influential journals of the last 100 years, the DBIO 100, whose titles in the following discussion are indicated by asterisks*.
Professor Bishop basically had seven papers which I would attribute to her time at UAH.
Three appear to be review or professional tutorial papers. Each appears in a highly reputable journal known to publish this important genre: Current Drug Metabolism, Current Medicinal Chemistry, and Toxicology. None of these journals is however, truly among the elite in it field or of its type. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Pharmacological Reviews, the Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology are among those that surpass these.
Three papers appear to be original research. Once again they were published in good mid-range journals: Two in the Journal of Neurochemistry; one in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications. Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, and the Journal of Neuroscience are clearly more prestigious in the first instance, and Cell*, the Journal of Biological Chemistry* , Biochemistry*, and Biochemical Journal are in the second.
Her most recent paper appears in the International Journal of General Medicine. This is one of a new wave of electronic-only Open Access journals, in this case emanating from an organization not well known to me, Dove Press Ltd., from New Zealand. Frankly this journal is a cipher in terms of where it fits in the hierarchy, although it is safe to say that literally hundreds of other journals would probably surpass it in reputation and citations. Even among the Open Access journals, it is clear that PLoS Medicine, the Journal of Clinical Investigation, and BMC Medicine would be vastly superior outlets.
Gopil Podila, the murdered department chair, had nine papers in roughly the same time frame, as well as two book chapters.
He had three papers in Gene, a very well established journal of molecular biology with an emphasis on genomic sequencing. It is however, not at the top of its field; that honor is shared by two or more of the following, Cell*, Molecular Cell, EMBO Journal*, the Journal of Molecular Biology*, Nucleic Acids Research*, or Genome Research.
He had four papers in three sound journals in the area of plant biology. The New Phytologist and the Canadian Journal of Botany are journals with distinguished histories spanning several decades. Plant Cell Reports is newer but still quite reputable. The consensus leaders in this area are Plant Cell, Plant Physiology* and the American Journal of Botany*.
He also had a paper in a much lesser known publication, In Silico Biology. While its publisher IOS Press and BioInformation Systems is rather well known, this title has not yet made a mark in any rankings of which I am aware.
What Gopil Podila had that Amy Bishop had not yet achieved was a spectacularly successfully paper in the journal voted as the single most influential in biology and medicine of the last 100 years, Nature*. While it appeared less than two years ago, it has already attained a remarkable 90 citations.
It is true that most of the remaining casualties had fewer papers, but numbers alone do not tell the whole story of what they had to contribute to science or to the University of Alabama at Huntsville.
The murdered Dr. Maria Ragland Davis had recent papers in the Canadian Journal of Plant Physiology, a sound title of many decades standing, and a review paper in Plant and Molecular Biology of Plants, a rising journal that was making its niche over this past decade.
The murdered Adriel Johnson, had apparently not been active in the major venues for publishing scientific papers for some time, but was active in minority recruitment and retention. Just as importantly, he was a pre-med advisor, one of those trusted individuals who have to be encouragers of the dreams of kids to get into medical school but also a gatekeeper guarding against incompetent or irresponsible students who might cause all of us to have nightmares.
The wounded Dr. Luis Cruz-Vera had at least four papers I could trace. Two were in the consensus leader in its field, the Journal of Bacteriology*. Two appeared in journals that are definitely clustered at the top of their molecular biology specialty: Molecular Cell and Nucleic Acids Research* .
The wounded Dr. Joseph Leahy had not been as recently published as some of his peers in the department, but had a paper in the Journal of Environmental Quality, a title jointly sponsored by a trio of highly reputable societies.
In sum, it would be a mistake to say that Amy Bishop’s tenure was a sure thing, unjustly denied, because she clearly must have fit all of the requirements of her position and the needs of the university over the course of her probationary period.
We do not know her personally , nor can we know better all tenure requirements attained by Amy Bishop in either absolute terms, or in relative terms compared to others in her department, so we are not likely to have a better informed judgment when compared to the more intimate knowledge and experience that the senior members of her department and the Provost acquired in their dealings with her, and upon which they presumably made their decision.
We can say that she did do a great deal of good research work that appeared in reputable journals, indeed more than most of her colleagues, but clearly short of the existing achievement of Dr. Podila, and quite likely short of the promise of some younger members of the department, Dr. Luiz Cruz-Vera in particular.
My own sense is that she failed to grasp the formula for tenure based on what was really needed at this particular time in order to be awarded a lifetime contract at UAH because she thought its day-to-day needs, attitudes, and mission, were essentially the same as Harvard’s.
She clearly knew Harvard, but she probably did not know UAH as well as she should.
This does not automatically make her a victim of the changing requirements or aspirations of UAH.
This makes her more likely a victim of her own inflexible thinking .
Tony Stankus, FSLA tstankus@uark.edu Professor, Life Sciences Librarian & Science Coordinator
University of Arkansas Libraries MULN 233 E
365 North McIlroy Avenue
Fayetteville AR 72701-4002
Voice: 479-575-4031
Fax 479-575-4592
Dewan, Shaila & Katie Zezima. (February 15, 2010). Eye-opening to jaw dropping: Twists multiply in shooting case. New York Times 159 (54,952),: p. A1, A6.
Dewan, Shaila & Katie Zezima. (February 16, 2010). Staggered by a shooting, a small biology department tries to regain its footing. New York Times 159 (54,953): p. A11.
Special Libraries Association. BioMedcial & Life Sciences Division. 2009. Top one hundred journals in biology and medicine.
http://units.sla.org/division/dbio/publications/resources/dbio100.html
Special Libraries Association. BioMedical & Life Sciences Division. 2009. Top ten journals in biology and medicine. http://units.sla.org/division/dbio/publications/resources/topten.html
Stankus, Tony. 1992. Making Sense of Journals in the Life Sciences. New York: Haworth Press, 331p.
Stankus, Tony, Editor-in-Chief. 2002. The Journals of the Century . NY: Haworth Press. 506p.
Stankus, Tony & Barbara A. Rice. 1983. Publication quality indicators for tenure or promotion decisions: What can the librarian ethically report?. College and Research Libraries 44: 173-178.
Stankus, T. & Sarah E. Spiegel. 2009. The SLA DBIO 100 poll: 100 journals voted by SLA’s Biomedical & Life Sciences DIvision as the most influential over the last 100 years.” The Serials Review 35: 202-212.
I just reviewed the information about co-authors in the American Medical Association (AMA) Manual of Style, as it seems so odd that almost Amy Bishop's whole family co-authored "her" most recent paper on her UAH Web site. If anyone is interested, that Manual has a section 3.1.5 titled Order of Authorship. Guideline number 2 in that section states that "The first author has contributed the most to the work, and the last author has contributed the least."
If the publisher was using AMA style, then it would seem that one of the daughters had primary responsibility for "Amy's" last paper, and her husband had the least responsibility.
I really wonder about two things Number one: How did the first listed daughter manage to do school and also be primarily responsible for this paper? Number two: Did all the coauthors meet the criteria for authorship?
In sections 3.1 and 3.1.1, the AMA Manual discusses Authorship Responsibility and Authorship: Definition and Criteria, respectively, giving some excerpts from a JAMA article concerning authorship and ethics. The manual states the excerpts show "a deep appreciation of the basic ethical responsibilities of authorship and point to the basic ethical obligations of authorship..."
The AMA Manual indicates to me that maybe having all those family members as coauthors might have been unethical. It is hard to imagine the younger coauthors having all the listed qualifications d responsibilities that the AMA Manual describes.
This last paper that Amy was involved with was a medical, not a scientific paper, and it should have been undertaken in a serious, ethical manner. If her young kids did help out on this research and paper, it would be really interesting to know exactly what they did. I am willing to bet that whatever they did did not meet all the listed requirements in the AMA Manual of Style.
Posted by: Sara | February 20, 2010 at 04:28 PM
Thank you for the information. It is notable that her last paper, her only one in 2009 in a medical journal, as opposed to a scientific journal, has four co-authors who are all her family members. Also notable is that the subject matter had to do with anti-depressants, and was an apparently radically different subject from her prior work.
I am guessing that their kids got badly used and she (also husband?) was taking the studied antidepressants under the table.
I have read other peoples' blogs about Amy Bishop to get this information; but the conclusions are mine. They could be wrong.
Posted by: Sara | February 19, 2010 at 06:39 PM