Amy Bishop, who had problems with “noise and kids” when she lived in MA, recently opposed a policy that would require all freshmen and sophomores to live on campus.  She spoke against it during one of UAH’s Faculty Senate meetings late last year [al.com].

Most of the UAH Faculty Senate website is currently inaccessible, but Google again does its job [Minutes] [Senate Journal][Resolutions Passed] [Executive Committee Reports] [Upcoming Meetings] [Bills Pending]

Bishop’s Faculty Senate involvement, bills proposed, and other things we found after the jump:

Maria Davis, one of victims, was in the Faculty Senate with Bishop. (There is a “Davis” from SCI, the College of Science, in the Faculty Senate.  When she was absent to a meeting the full name was listed as “Maria Davis” [December 4, 2008 Minutes])

A perhaps cryptic note from the January 27, 2010 Faculty Senate Executive Committee meeting:  “We have received all files for Promotion and Tenure except one and met URB and handed over all but one, we do not have one” [January 27 Minutes].

The only bill Amy Bishop motioned in her four years as a Faculty Senate member was Senate Bill 316, which was related to UAH’s 64 Hours Policy.  As the school newspaper points out, the policy says that “All single students who have earned less than 64 hours of college credit, are enrolled in 12 or more hours at…[UAH] are required to live on campus” [The Exponent].   It would presumably also affect transfer students, who only need 24 semester hours of credit to be eligible to enter the university [UAH Transfer].

The bill was about “transfer hours and allowing them at any time” [February 12 Minutes, Point 6].  It lets students transfer a maximum of 64 hours of junior, community, or two-year college credits to UAH.  Before that, UAH students could not transfer outside credit once they had “accumulated 64 hours of credit from all sources,” including UAH.  [SB 316].

In sum,  it appears that SB 316 makes it easier for students to meet the 64-hour threshold promptly and not have to live on campus.

UAH President David Williams reported that UAH is in deep financial trouble, a lot of jobs/groups will be cut,  the university has to meet budget needs, they have to come up with ideas to work with what’s given, and that they should “not hold out great hopes for the ‘stimulus package’” (Point 3).

Near the end of the meeting Bishop motioned for something called the “Sense of the Senate Resolution:  Shared Governance” (Point 7).  We don’t know what that means, but it may be related to faculty participation in the governance of the university as outlined in the faculty handbook [Shared Governance, UAH].

Was Bishop mad at the administration?

Someone on Wikipedia wrote that Bishop actually led a motion to officially censure President Williams at the same November 12 meeting in which she decried the new housing policy.  However, we were unable to find proof of who first proposed the bill, known as SB 331.  The Faculty Senate voted to consider the bill [The Exponent], but it failed by two votes earlier this year [January 7 Minutes].  Note that Bishop was absent at the January 7 meeting and no longer listed in the Faculty Senate roll call.  She was also not present (though still listed) for the second reading of the bill [December 3 Minutes].  A stable online copy of SB 331 can be found via the local NBC affiliate [WAFF 48].  It is safe to assume that Bishop was one of the members who voted to consider the bill.

But was there a “shared governance” problem after all?

When the new student housing policy was unveiled later that year, the Faculty Senate voted against it for the “scholastic effects” it would have [SR 09/10-04], but not before resolving that “the Senate is without response to numerous Bills and Resolutions” from the UAH administration [SR 09/10-03].

The Faculty Senate felt that there was a lack of communication between the faculty and President Williams, especially over the new residency policy.  Note the second, third, and fourth bullet points in the summary of the November 19 Faculty Senate Executive Committee meeting [FS Executive Committee Summary], which took place on the same day the al.com story was published.

And there was something about a Moody’s report in all of this? Part of the upset was due to the President’s unwillingness to give the Faculty Senate full disclosure about “a business plan, (Moody’s plan) for bond rating purposes that was understood by [the Faculty Senate's Undergraduate Scholastic Affairs Committee] to contain statements regarding residency policy commitments or the effect of policy on housing subscriptions”  [Faculty Senate Resolutions Passed] [SB 328, Release of Moody's Plan Resolution] (listed under 01-Dec-09, but proposed October 27). According to the November 19 FS Executive Committee minutes, President Williams did not give the information for “legal reasons.”

One reason why the Faculty Senate cared about  Moody’s plan: SB 331 notes that “the bonds issued for financing of the new dormitory complex may be purchased by retirement systems, such as the Retirement Systems of Alabama.”  Furthermore, the al.com story reports that the money to pay the interest on the bonds would come from student rent, i.e. from students who live on campus.

The Faculty Senate also passed a resolution asking the administration for better communication channels, more faculty and student input, and that President Williams release all communications he had received about the housing policy.  We only found it in a Word document, but it’s worth a read [Faculty Senate Resolutions Passed] [SB 329, Faculty Input on Student Housing Resolution] (again listed under 01-Dec-09, but proposed October 27).

The censure bill came less than a month later.

And no, no one bought a horse [February 26 Meeting, Point 1.2]

She often called the police to complain about “noise and kids in the neighborhood.”  Bishop had been outspoken at the November 12 faculty senate meeting against a new university policy that would have required all freshmen and sophomores to live on campus [al.com].  And what does the faculty senate do? [UAH Faculty Senate]

(Here are details on some of the specific things that ticked Bishop off and what she and her husband tried to do about them [Boston Globe].  The general perception is that they ostracized themselves from the local community).

The Mercedes Paz in the Channel 7 report is likely the M.A. Paz who in the early 1990′s authored papers with Amy Bishop and Paul Gallop, Bishop’s dissertation advisor [UAH] [ProQuest snapshot].

The reporter interviews a woman named Sylvia Fluckiger, who is listed as a former colleague of Bishop’s.  There is a person named R. Fluckiger on some of the Bishop-Gallop papers.  Perhaps she used a different name back then or the author was her husband/relative?  She mentions in the video that Jim Anderson, Bishop’s husband, was a “tinkerer” who could have made the pipe bombs mailed to murder Professor Paul Rosenberg.  According to the Boston Globe’s story yesterday, “Anderson was questioned about whether he had purchased any of the components used to make the bombs” [Boston Globe].  In that story Fluckiger made the connection more overt, saying that “we knew she had a beef with Paul Rosenberg. And we really thought it was a really unbelievable coincidence that he would get those bombs.”

Now we find that Bishop was allegedly a suspect in the attempted bombing [Boston Globe]:

Bishop surfaced as a suspect because she was allegedly concerned that she was going to receive a negative evaluation from Rosenberg on her doctorate work, the official said.

Result: no charges.  Anderson says that they were not suspects and the police “questioned everybody that ever knew this guy” [NY Times].

And meanwhile she wanted to write a novel about a scientist who kills her brother.  Sound familiar?

EDIT: Bishop’s dissertation was also published in December 1993.  For anyone who is interested and has access to ProQuest, it is called The Role of Methoxatin (PQQ) in the Respiratory Burst of Phagocytes. You can search for it and buy a copy [ProQuest]

The only listed advisor in the full ProQuest summary (only available to subscribers, snapshot here) is the late Harvard professor Paul Gallop, not Paul Rosenberg.  Both professors worked at Children’s Hospital Boston and co-authored papers from time to time [NCBI] [Harvard Catalyst].  Bishop and Gallop also shared some publications in the early 1990s [UAH].

The UAH President’s blog praises Dr. Bishop: [Dave's Blog, UAH]

And Amy Bishop talked about balancing family life and academic career? [Harvard Medical School]

And theblogprof calls the shooting “going professorial.” [theblogprof]

And what does a “Delegate” do? [Harvard Marshal's Office]

And in 2003 Harvard School of Public Health had a retreat where she presented a poster [HSPH]

And the status of a pending patent by J. Anderson [USPTO]

Turns out this patent is “CellDrive” which is also mentioned in that business-plan competition [Launchpad] that all the media reports are mentioning in relation to Amy. Well, looks like this particular has been rejected once since then…

Apparently Dick Reeves is the chairman of the company, Prodigy Biosystems, because his little group of investors, Huntsville Angel Network invested over a million into Prodigy.

Archive.org does its job. [archive.org]

Can’t forget to direct you to the Godlike Productions thread about this whole deal. [Godlike Productions]

And a press release about it from A. Bishop’s lab [Google cache, of UAH]

Some sources: [National Post] and [al.com]

Company profile of Cherokee Labsystems [Manta]

Her husband, Jim Anderson, is a coauthor on a number of her recent papers. I’m not terribly impressed with anyone writing a letter like this?

Wed 5/18/2004

Dear FTC,

Why should these companies be allowed to turn our computers into a Reality TV show for their pleasure? What is the legality of an individual or the Government doing this?

The government is not allowed to intrude on us without a court order. These companies (often foreign or foreign owned) should not have more rights to us than our own Government. The Constitution protects us from the Government, what protects us from these voyeurs?

High priced lobbyists are not a replacement for democracy. Our privacy needs armor plated protection.

“By the people … for the people …” not “Buy the people … for the Corporations …”

James Anderson

Cherokee Labsystems

AL

[FTC] (Comment no. 657)

The current Cherokee Labsystems website is “down for maintenance” but a cached version of old website exists. [Google]

…more stalking to come?