By now, we all know about the past of Amy Bishop, the professor facing murder charges for killing three coworkers and injuring three others:
1986 – Kills her own brother in an “accidental” shooting.
1993 - Questioned when a former colleague at Harvard University, with whom she had a conflict, received a pipe bomb in the mail.
2002 - Charged with Assault when she punched a fellow customer in her head taking the last booster seat at a restaurant. She was given probation and anger management classes were recommended. Charge was later dismissed.
2010 - Charged in 3 deaths and wounding 3 others in a staff meeting at the University of Alabama – Huntsville.
While it is true that a criminal background check on Ms. Bishop would have yielded no results because she wasn’t actually convicted of any charges, this whole incident has shed light on the fact that background checks haven’t really been enforced for higher education. However, in the wake of the tragedy at the University of Alabama –Huntsville, colleges and university are considering tighter background check restrictions for vetting prospective faculty.
Officials are already anticipating a negative reaction to background checks from professors who fear adverse actions from arrests for civil disobedience. The American Association of University Professors, which is the largest faculty union in the United States, believes that benefits of background checks “are dwarfed by the grave invasions of privacy caused by such investigations, as well as by their great potential to facilitate the misuse of sensitive information.”
Ada Melloy, general counsel for the American Council on Education, actually acknowledged that background checks on faculty at colleges and universities has been fairly lax and that most checks are only done on administrative staff. The perception seems to be that if a person has top credentials (Bishop graduated from Harvard) then a criminal background check probably isn’t necessary.
Sure, a background check probably wouldn’t have stopped the tragedy at the University of Alabama, but who’s to say it won’t stop a similar tragedy from happening in the future? The assumption made by the faculty union, that background checks would lead to a potential for misuse of information, in my mind is preposterous. Rules and laws are set in place to regulate background checks for a reason. Just because an entity starts running background checks, doesn’t mean they can, or will, break the law.
Should we hold professors to a different standard just because they’re professors? Personally, I don’t think so.
It’s also important to note that companies should run background checks from reliable sites such as www.backgroundsonline.com or similiar. These companies comply with the Federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). The information they provide is much more credible than generic public record search websites.
