For Anyone Considering Grad School . . .

We present: A Brief Documentary History of Graduate Students Who Murdered Their Advisors

1. We begin with the legendary Theodore Streleski, who after 19 years of graduate work, killed his advisor with a ball-peen hammer, and told the court that he found his act to be "logically and morally correct." I heard that for a while it was fashionable at Stanford to bring a ball-peen to your dissertation defense. Any news about this estimable tradition, please let me know.

2. On a cold and dreary November day at the U of Iowa, a recent Ph.D. graduate in Physics from Beijing, disgruntled because he had not won the $2,500 prize for outstanding doctoral thesis in 1991, and who felt his appeal of that decision was not being handled promptly or fairly, shot and killed five people, shot and paralyzed for life a clerical worker, and then killed himself . .

3. A University of Arkansas graduate student was found dead near an English professor in an apparent murder-suicide. He had been kicked out of the degree program one week earlier, after a decade of lackluster work.

4. Harvard's Jason Altom left behind 3 suicide notes, one to his parents, one to his graduate advisor Nobel laureate chemist Elias J. Corey, and one to the chemistry department chair.

5. Basilis (Vasilis) Xanthopoulos was a Greek theoretical physicist who made important contributions in Relativity and gravitational physics. Xanthopoulos and Stephanos Pnevmatikos were shot to death by a mad student, 32 year old Giorgos Petrodaskalakis.

6. Valery Fabrikant was a professor at the time he killed 3 other professors, but hey, close enough.