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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Just read a report that he might have gone into the wrong room.  instead of a review session for econ. he may have intended to shoot up a similar room having a physics final.

Also, read that the guy had been in the storage room since an hour after killing the professor from MIT--in other words, he had been dead a while.

Would be interesting to know what he has been doing since 2017 when he received the green card.[/quote]

I teach at a university. When you need a classroom for a review session or other event at a time that you don't normally teach, you make the request through a centralized system which assigns you an empty room at the time you requested. So this was just a horribly unlucky thing for this econ class to be in the engineering building for their review session. It obviously would have been equally tragic for a classroom of engineering or physics students to have been the victims.

As someone in academia this feels like a familiar story with the worst possible outcome. There are always people at the fringes of academia who couldn't make it through a program, or made it through but couldn't get a good job, due to mental illness. They either don't want to or can't do anything else because of their difficulty with executive functioning and reading social cues/learning professional conduct. They see being an academic is a core part of their identity, and are very smart, but can't manage the non-academic skills required to be successful. Because academia is such an exploitative system, some of these people who manage to get a Master's degree will work for years as adjuncts or visiting professors because they are desperate and therefore willing to work for the low pay and lack of job security. It's not hard to see how someone with a tendency to externalize when they feel shame will blame others and want to exact revenge. Just a horrible story all around.[/quote]

I also worked in higher ed and this sounds right. According to information from the case affidavit as reported by The Boston Globe, at one point the shooter was a promising physics student. "At his high school, he was reportedly an accomplished physics student. As a 17-year-old student, he competed in a national physics competition, where he was selected to be one of five Portuguese students to attend an international competition in Australia the following year." In 2000, he came to the US on a student visa pursue a PhD in physics at Brown--but dropped out at the end of the academic year.

Interestingly, when he later applied for a diversity lottery visa in 2017, he "listed Brown University as his educational institution, and the Barus and Holley building, where the shooting took place, as the address for the institution. Under degree or diploma, he wrote 'None-Dropout,'” according to the affidavit. Why would someone applying for permanent residency in the US bother to mention a university that he studied at--but never graduated from--many years before applying for permanent residency? And why would he use the word "dropout" (which is somewhat stigmatizing) under degree/diploma rather than "n/a" or just "none" alone? It sounds to me like he never got over the humiliation of not living up to his promise as a physics student. I think we will find that mental health problems played an important role here--as is usually the case in these shootings.
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