Student Feedback On Accused Murderer Dr. Amy Bishop

Dr. Amy Bishop,  Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has been charged with capital murder in connection with a shooting spree that left three wounded and three dead at a faculty meeting on Friday, February 12, 2010. Early reports are that Dr. Bishop open fired at the faculty meeting after it was announced that she had been denied tenure.

The three victims dead at the scene are Department Chair Dr. Gopi K. Podila and Department Faculty Dr. Maria Davis and Dr. Adriel Johnson:

 

The three wounded are Department Faculty Dr. Joseph Leahy and Dr. Luis Rogelio Cruz-Vera and Department Assistant Stephanie Monticciolo,

Dr. Leahy and Ms. Monticciolo are reported to be in critical condition. Dr. Cruz-Vera is reported to be in stable condition. 

Braintree, Massachusettes authorities indicate that Dr. Bishop shot and killed her younger brother in 1986 when she was 19 and he was 18 years old.  At that time his death was reportedly ruled accidental and Dr. Bishop was never prosecuted.  In light of Friday's massacre,  authorities must now question whether Dr. Bishop's shooting of her 18 year old brother was, in fact, accidental.

Whenever killings of this magnitude occur, we feel compelled to look for signs or clues of the depravity that we believe must exist to allow such ruthlessness. Certainly Dr. Bishop's students are a group with whom she has had substantial interaction on a regular basis over the years. As such, they may have observed such clues or signs.

The website Rate My Professors at www.ratemyprofessors.com claims to publish in the range of ten million student ratings of approximately one million college professors at more than six thousand schools. Among the millions of ratings reported on its website are numerous student ratings of  Dr.  Amy Bishop dating as far back as April 2004 and as recent as May 2009.

Below are quoted excerpts from the student ratings of Dr. Amy Bishop as reported on the Rate My Professors website:

• "she is a socialist but only talks about it after class"
• "Dr Bishop is very intelligent but a horrible teacher"
• "Dr Bishop is an excellent teacher! She is very helpful and nice. She does everything to help students do well. She even offers extra classes! "
• "Never met anyone who knows more random knowledge. Sci-fi to quantum mechanics with a little art history thrown in the mix"
• "She's super smart and thinks everyone else is too so sometimes she goes too fast"
• "She gets off on random**** all the time and is sooo completely scatter brained!"
• "Dr. Bishop is brilliant. Her research is fascinating. She will surely get the Nobel Prize. She is the best teacher I have ever had."
• " Her lectures are disorganized"
• " I am in her lab and her class. She is smart, talks about more stuff than just the book. She lets me sit in her office and study. She always dresses nice. She should stop trying to straighten her hair and go natural!"
• "Horrible teacher!"
• "She is an excellent professor! very helpful and very intelligent!"

What a review of Dr. Amy Bishop's student rating shows is that at least in the classroom, Dr. Bishop seems to have been loved and hated much like many other professors.  Certainly no clues or signs of Dr. Bishop's capacity for Friday's massacre is revealed in her student ratings.