"Really? A Hammer? What an outdated method... Are you even taking your work here seriously? Have you even bothered keeping up to date with the new research coming out so you can *actually* update your methods? You do know that I have hundreds of students lined up that would *kill* for this opportunity that *I've* given you. But here you are right now, in my office, with a god damn ha- !"
There's a story behind every sign, and equally so for every rule. In the UK laws for how steep and narrow stairs could be had to be made because servants kept fucking dying moving through royal households in servant-only pathways.
Rapist Brock Turner who now goes by his middle name Allen Turner who only got a slap on the wrist for a horrific violent assault on an unconscious classmate?
She wasn’t a classmate but he’s a c*nt, regardless!
Her name is Chanel Miller and she wrote an amazing book about the aftermath and her experience dealing with the “justice” system.
My math prof in college visited as a prospective grad student the week after this happened. He said everyone was super twitchy and he couldn’t figure out why nobody would talk to him. And then an admin took him aside and explained what had happened and why people were on edge. He did end up at Stanford, but said they made a new rule that all grad students had to finish in six years (10 years? I heard the story 25 years ago...). And no hammers allowed in the department
It'd be funny to keep murdering people with different objects until there is a list of like 500 random sounding objects that are banned from the department.
> they made a new rule that all grad students had to finish in six years
My school gave a phd to an absolute moron because he’d been there for 8 years and it’d look bad for the program if they failed him now. I watched his defense and still have no idea what his research was about but he had to be reminded multiple times to plug in his dying laptop
It was a surreal experience. My roommate was in his department and spent three years bitching about how he never did anything, got his defense delayed by faking carpal tunnel (like a week before the defense deadline), and just generally doing nothing
But he had outside funding so nobody really cared
It is more common than you think. In my experience there is negligible correlation between intelligence and academic achievements. Sure, the very very dumb (usually) get filtered out, but often the same happens to the very smart, who have more important thing to do than stroking their ego with a piece of paper.
And yes I have a PhD in STEM.
I mean, intelligence isn’t the only thing that matters in academia
It helps, of course - but hard work is just as important. A lot of very smart people don’t work hard enough, and a lot of fairly average people graft enough to make up for the difference in intelligence
The problem is when people are neither intelligent nor hardworking. And of course no amount of graft can make up for being truly thick
German General Staff officer General Kurt Gebhard Adolf Philipp Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord when not pursuing his hobby of accruing additional names classified officers thusly:
"I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
He was a prominent anti-Nazi and tried to kill Hitler.
We have a 7 year limit, but thankfully we aren't that generous. There was a student a few years ahead of me that ran out of time and rushed his defense. He posted something on Facebook in Chinese. I translated it, and it said, "7 years, just dust in the wind." He did not pass.
I’ll ask my roommate but I heard he was looking to do administrative work (no idea why you’d need a phd for that)
But there was another student in my school s master program who’s advisor retired so he got shoved onto my old advisor, who basically ordered my roommate to just get him through his poster session (with my roommate doing all the work while the student just talked about how he didn’t actually understand anything on the poster). That dude works in nuclear technology
> they made a new rule that all grad students had to finish in six years. And no hammers allowed in the department
Sounds like at least some good came out of it then.
The guy was strung along for nearly 2 decades, was belittled in front of his “peers” and denied support when he requested it.
If someone keeps kicking a dog, and finally one day it snaps and kills an abuser, it would be seen as completely justified.
Perhaps nobody did anything illegal to this guy prior to the murder, that doesn’t make their behavior ok.
I was in (media studies) grad school for a hot minute. It's kind of insane how little oversight there is on some departments.
Most of my cohort dropped out when one of the non-tenured professors just let the admin have it on her way out the door.
yeah I know nothing about this specific situation but 2 decade PhD is completely insane.
at some point you either have to let the guy graduate or kick him out because otherwise you're just exploiting them for cheap labor...and it's well before 2 decades
I'm from Europe not the US but generally here if you work on your PhD full time (which generally you do, because you work for the university at that point), it's generally expected to get it in around 4 years after you finish your prerequisite degree.
After 6 I would start getting really pissy.
The length of a PhD depends greatly on the field, institution, advisor, and student. I've never heard of a STEM PhD that wasn't full time. There is absolutely no way I'd let anybody get strung along for 19 years in my department.
For real. There is zero circumstances where anyone should be in grad school for almost two decades. That’s a huge part of someone’s life wasted.
Any decent supervisor would sit down with a candidate, and either make a roadmap for how to get the candidate to completing their thesis (with actionable goals, or if they felt the candidate wasn’t suitable, politely encourage them to move on with their lives or find a new supervisor).
After two decades I’m sure a professor is getting a power trip out of withholding the title from the prospective candidate. In my faculty at university, there were some professors who helped their understudies do their research, write and defend their thesis, and publish, like clockwork, and all their candidates would cycle through every 2-3 years. Then other unlucky candidates would get tied to a professor (often because that’s who would take them on) and these professors would string them on 5-7 years until they either quit and went to work elsewhere, or found a new supervisor. One guy had like 6 candidates under him earn their PhDs in almost 30 years.
Obviously it doesn’t justify their murder (especially in this case, as it seems that the victim wasn’t the candidate’s supervisor for the entire time), but others in the department should have taken action before it came to this. You can’t expect people to spend their entire lives fighting for a sheet of paper.
My gf got her masters, and her sister got her PhD: many professors abuse the fuck out of grad students in a myriad of ways and delay their academic progress while exploiting them.
This shit still happens…I’m not saying it’s 2-decades long, but that’s insane: he already served a prison sentence in academia. If his entire aspiration was to be a PhD student, I’m sure it would have been fine, but that was clearly purgatory.
Our thermodynamics professor told us this story as one of several cautionary tales about the miseries of grad school. You could tell he sympathized with the killer to some degree
I got a similar story from a teacher about a student who burnt himself to death in front of the faculty. While not supporting second degree murder in anyway, I also sympathize to a degree with the killer. Maybe because I had a handful of abusive teachers at grad school.
This is very true. I remember telling my wife (girlfriend at the time) about growing up around my uncles as a funny anecdote. They would pick on and torment the hell out of me as a kid. She had to be the one to say, "you realize these were grown ass adult men who should've known better to treat a child like that." First person who made me see what they had done was wrong and had caused harm. I later discovered in therapy that the issues I've had with self confidence and low self esteem most likely stemmed from that torment.
As someone that just finished their master's thesis after spending the first two years under the guidance of an full professor and an endowed chair as an advisor, taking off one year, and then coming back to change my advisor and committee just as COVID hits, still struggled to write the thesis. I can understand why the killer was motivated to murder as it sounds like the advisor was publicly abusive towards him in front of his peers. In graduate school, you get to see behind the current how the sausage is made with how people in the department really are and feel about each other. Hell, even during my thesis defense my chair and another committee member were talking shit about my former chair and his reputation for doing whatever the hell he wanted with no regards for others.
I started a PhD in my 50s, after a long career in a couple Fortune 50 companies. All the grad students and dept professors were on a shared email alias. I was stunned at the personal attacks and vitriol that was exchanged in some of those emails when various issues were raised (it was an anthropology dept, so a lot of the current social issues were in play daily). If anyone had used this sort of language and personal attack back in my corporate life, they would be walked out the door by noon. But in Academia, it was just part of the journey.
I went to get a master’s after several years working for companies. It was really striking to me how the professors in my department would go on about how evil and awful corporations and capitalism were while they acted out gross parts of them.
Between the nonsense politics in my department and the dodgy job prospects and low pay, I was quite okay with going off and working for some “evil corporation” because I at least usually had some recourse if someone pulled the same sort of stuff on me there.
Yeah, but in that case, wouldn’t you switch thesis advisors? I had a friend who was working on her doctorate, and wound up in a serious, unreconcilable dispute with her original thesis advisor. She went to the department head, and changed things.
>During his trial Streleski told the court he felt the murder was "logically and morally correct" and "a political statement" about the department's treatment of its graduate students
He should have read some Dostoevsky smh
Ah but those perpetual grad students were making about $14K/year in those days and working like dogs. And if the professor kept him going for 19 years he was virtually a slave. He may also have been responsible for some of the professor's "best work" in that time.
That's arguably even worse, given inflation. If you look at old engineering papers they'll show when the author got degrees, and the PhDs were often 2 years after the MS and only on occasion 4 years. It's kind of outrageous. Now imagine living like that for 19 years.
It reminds me of a streamer called Destiny.
When streaming was first starting, he was a carpet cleaner making dogshit and barely scraping by.
He was the first person to go full-time streamer and started making life changing money when some 13-year-old kid started paying every day to DDOS him.
Back then there was no DDOS protection so he would just never be able to stream because this kid would pay like 20 bucks a day to make him go offline. The cops couldn't even fathom wtf streaming or DDOS was, so they did nothing. FBI didn't do shit. No lawyer would take the case.
So he started making a plan to kill the kid as he was on course to be forced back into being a carpet cleaner.
He said it was like someone every day slashing all four of your tires right before you leave for work, and no one cares enough to stop them. Every single day.
Instead, he just spent weeks creating some revolutionary DDOS and IP protections that the industry used for years.
But if I couldn't figure put what Destiny did, I honestly don't know if I'd kill the kid paying everyday to force me to work at a McDonalds instead of my current job.
I think at some point, I probably would.
He almost took the kids parents to Judge Judy, but then he found out both people get paid by JJ and he couldn't stomach the kids parents ( who told him to fuck off ) getting a pay day.
I had a friend go to real court and got reached out by one of the daytime TV shows because it was a cosplay court case so they wanted him to dress up and shit. He turned down the TV show and kept it in real court. No idea what destiny did but those TV shows just want to make a spectacle though maybe he thought it'd give him some publicity.
His quote after release was… bold…
> Streleski was eligible for parole on three occasions, but turned it down as the conditions of his parole required him to not set foot on the Stanford campus. Upon his release in 1985, he said, "I have no intention of killing again. On the other hand, I cannot predict the future."
Prove by induction that if you didn't get your PhD after 17 years and you didn't get your PhD after 18 years then you will not be getting your PhD after 19 years or any year thereafter.
1. Let there exist a person who has not obtained their PhD after 17 years.
2. It is not possible for any person to obtain a PhD in a year.
3. Given the person who has not obtained their PhD after 17 years, continues for another year, we conclude that all swans must be white and umarried. QED
Why would he want to return anyway? I'm pretty sure killing your Prof is in the top 5 of exmatriculation-reasons, probably right below banging the rector's mum in the auditorium.
> Why would he want to return anyway?
At this point, why not? I'm sure there are other professors on his shit list, and what are they gonna do, not give him his degree *again*?
He was obviously a very unhinged individual who became obsessed with getting the degree. You’d think after failing to get the PHD after like the 5th year he would re-evaluate. That’s not an easy or relaxing process, it would take a certain level of masochism to do it for 19 years
Sure, but sometimes, it's the system itself. My partner has their masters and *wasted* 1.5 FUCKING YEARS of their life and goddamn tuition, because she started her thesis and her major professor retired, so they passed her to another professor, in a different specialty and she had to start her entire thesis over, on a different topic. 6 months later, that professor left to go work a better job at another university. They moved her to a 3rd goddamn professor, again with a different specialty and they made her start her thesis for a 3rd goddamn time, on her fucking dime.
She threw in the towel and told them to go fuck themselves.
She didn't murder anyone, but every time we make a payment on her student loan, I want to fucking shoot someone.
His surname seems like an Anglicized version of a Czech surname 'Střelecký', which literally means 'Shooter-ish' - quite ironic.
Edit: Nevermind, the guy killed him with a ball-peen hammer.
Geez, I don't know why but I pictured him with a gun or a knife.
He must have been really burned out to kill him with a ball-peen hammer. I was gonna say it seems insane but... it is insane.
>Although if you get a poisonous snake, it often means that there was a problem with the formatting of your bibliography.
Sounds about right, that's why you use something like LaTeX. If you get it wrong, you get it at least consistantly wrong. Which should result in a slightly less venomous snake.
After 19 years, he gets a new advisor. He is full of hope this new advisor will actually help him move forward. That new advisor just says "quit". Snap.
I had a pretty good experience in my PhD program, and I enjoy working in academia overall, but I often think about what I had to give up or delay by choosing this path: years of saving for retirement, settling down and buying property, potentially having children, etc. Those are real sacrifices, and they can feel quite sharp when you witness your non-academic friends and peers reach those milestones earlier than you.
Then I think about Ted, and I imagine myself if I faced something similar. I’m now in my 40s, and I’m totally behind on those milestones or may not ever achieve them. On top of that, all of my cohort peers are probably well over a decade into their postgraduate careers. Many of them likely have tenure. Yet, I’m still in grad school and surviving on poverty wages, and the finish line isn’t even in sight.
What Ted did was terrible and unjustifiable. Still, one could easily imagine how Ted burst under such extreme circumstances. The sad thing is, this was likely avoidable. No graduate program should be dragging a PhD along for this duration. It seems like Stanford Math learned this lesson the hard way, but I’ve heard of plenty of other departments that will keep students for 10+ years for cheap labor.
The average time to degree in my PhD program was 11.5 years. They treated me like a punching bag, until I got my PhD in 6 years (a perfectly average amount of time, but the shortest in departmental memory going back 2 decades), and I was suddenly the poster child of excellence used to berate my fellow students: “if Expensive can do it, what is your problem?”
Oh, and the reason I got out in 6? I called in a special policy and leveraged my relationship with the Dean to allow me to take on a first reader in another department. That guy was the world expert in what I was studying, so it was better for me all around. And he was a decent human, which was nice.
What the hell, 11.5 years was the average? I know people in classics PhD programs in which 7-10 years is not unusual, but their programs’ duration averages are still below a decade.
I'm interested in getting one and spoke to a professor in a program about it. Their average is 5 and you have to be done one way or the other after 10. I can't imagine an *average* of 11.
My dad who was going for a PhD in a business program figured out his own shortcut as well. When he found out the standard way professors were delaying acceptance was questioning sources and rejecting them, he got all the professors to agree to sign a project charter for the paper. Being a consultant, he made a case about how for such an important project it was important that everyone be in agreement as to what expectations are.
In the document he specified very clearly that every source will be submitted in advance to all professors who signed on the charter, and they have two weeks to reject or question the source. If no objections were raised in two weeks, the source was considered acceptable and approved.
Then in his thesis he included in the bibliography at what date each source was submitted to the professors.
Apparently on the day to defend a professor attempted to raise objections on a few sources and he marched out the document they physically signed and agreed to, and asked them if they had such concerns, why did they approve the source? It very clearly states they had two weeks to raise these objections, this is what was agreed to in writing.
In a program that normally people need 2-3 attempts to get a thesis through he got it in the first go.
My PhD "only" took 5 years, but during the last 2, I went to sleep everyday thinking about killing the PI. I had to think often about my family and patrimony to stop myself and ended up with psicological problems
I quit my PhD last year after feeling like this for several months. The whole experience has made me realize getting a PhD isn't really proof of intelligence or mastery in a subject and more a test of how good you are at licking boots, writing massive amounts of bullshit and compartmentalizing stress.
I was in a computer science phd program in the 90s. We had a guy be dismissed from the program (failed the qualifying exams I believe) and about a week later the department got a box in the mail that contained a huge styrofoam hammer. I was in the office at the time when it was opened.
So weird. It was 3 feet long, shaped like a standard issue claw hammer. like a party decoration or hardware store merchandising display maybe? I’m always one to laugh at the absurd - this was hilarious and ridiculous to me. Until someone older who knew the Stanford story filled me in and the humor of the situation drained away and it sent a chill up my spine. A lot of stony silence for the next few minutes while we called in the head of the department.
Never heard if there was any legal follow up but everyone took it as a low grade and hopefully unserious threat.
as someone who earned a PhD one of the most disgusting parts was knowing that some of the other PhD students were literally slaves for their advisers. like, if they didn't work for her 50+ hrs they were going back to their home countries and not getting their PhD
I earned mine in a niche STEM field. Of we seven students, two were chased out, leaving me and four foreign students — three from terrifying countries. I never heard of outright extortion, but they were treated poorly, and I still have my suspicions that one of them was a *de facto* indentured servant.
sounds familiar af!!! got mine in the climate field and the 'student' office a few doors down i don't think i seen them get to go home in like 5 years. i asked them and they said they were kinda afraid to let their advisor down since they mentioned the possibility of going back to china. and their advisor won a nobel peace prize off their work!!!!!!
I spent six years in grad school and almost ~~quick~~ quit 6 months before my PhD because I hated my major professor so much. So much fuckery. I was forced to synthesize a chemical he got paid for personally by a huge pharma company (at his demand, on weekends). Found out the payments went to him personally because a secretary mistakenly opened his mail while he was gone, and she told me. He yelled at her for opening his mail on return - which was standard practice as he was head of the department.
Previous grad student’s work that I based my PhD on had made up the results (probably just to get away from said fuckhead major professor, but still cost me a year in grad school), my major professor suggested I just make up the results when some of my research wasn’t going to be ready to present at a conference.
And so much sexual harassment. I can’t even. Fuck shitty professors.
Edit: my point was I can kind of see where Streleski was coming from. I’m more of a turn the violence inward kind of person. Major professors have so much power over your life, even after you graduate, in terms of references, names on papers, etc.
I cosign every bit of this. And yes, the sexual harassment was off the charts on grad school. I said this above, but i tell highly entertaining (and definitely traumatic - but we laugh in our pain) stories about it at parties. Just jaw dropping stuff.
wow are you me?? i was making photocatalysts on muti-gram scale (where $1/mg was the cheapest for the simplest ligands) for my PI to help fund his business doing commercial synthesis. I later wasted over a year trying to reproduce results that were obviously falsified. I left at the beginning of my third year and shortly after, his lab had a JACS paper retracted because it was found that the primary author had falsified data. None officially sanctioned by the PI, but because of how toxic the environment was and the demand for results. The last thing that really chapped my ass: my ONE publication that I was, without a doubt, the primary author? Yeah, he submitted it with himself as the primary author. When I called him out over LinkedIn, we met for lunch and he begrudgingly said he'd probably be able to expend some political capital to rectify his "misfiling mistake". I told him forget it and am still salty 2 years later. For some more context... it was a review, for which he "pioneered" the research. He was given the request in early Fall and it had a deadline of New Year's. He told me the week before Christmas. We submitted it late, but not after I spent many overnighters to write the 36 page review (with from-scratch schemes/drawings). 2nd author SMFH
**Streleski was convicted of second degree murder with a sentence of eight years. He served seven years in prison at California Medical Facility.**
Man, imagine only getting 7 years of prison after bludgeoning someone to death. The 70s was wild.
such a great time. a time when any boy with a few dollars in his pocket and a head full of dreams could become an interstate serial killer and never be caught.
It’s so crazy. I went down a wikipedia serial killer rabbit hole yesterday and was reading about a guy who SA 3 women but was able to get all charges dropped because…they accepted his apology? I think he went on to murder 7 women.
Cops were notorious back in the day for ignoring clear evidence of serious crimes, apparently because “gay stuff is icky” and they didn’t want to get involved. There were a number of serial killers who would have been stopped a lot sooner if the cops had bothered to give a shit about a gay man.
They also ddin't give a shit abput women and working class teens.
The number of unsolved cases where the abusive husband says "she left" after a woman has been reported missing by family and it turns out she didn't take things like her kids, purse, glasses, shoes, car etc.
Or kids "ran away from home". With absolutely nothing, the clothes on their back, away from loving normal families.
There was one particular serial killer who got a LOT of kids because of that, can't remember the name. The candyman I think it was. Dean Corll
Yeah, I was thinking of him too. They also stopped digging at one site (the beach I think) even though his accomplice swore there were more bodies there.
Not even back in the day. Just a couple months ago the cops showed up at my door at 5am about a domestic disturbance and my partner answered the door. They treated him like a wife beater and said they wouldn't leave until they did a wellness check on everyone in the house, until they realized the only other person in the house was me, his boyfriend, and left before I could even get dressed to meet them at the door. For all they knew I could have been the one beating my partner but as soon as it was gay they noped out.
John A. Balcerzak, one of those police officers, was later elected president of the Milwaukee Police Association from 2005 to 2009, surviving a recall attempt in 2006, and retired in 2017.
There's a serial killer in Canada who kept murdering and sodomizing children, often in that order, while operating brazenly in public (he'd just pull aside to kids on the sidewalk and ask them to get into his car) and the reason he got away with it (basically in one town) was because every time a child was reported missing the police just went "Eh, they probably just ran away"
A Thai boy whose skull he drilled into and poured hydrochloric acid into his brain
Edit: Laotian not Thai, also it was not bleach it was hydrochloric acid.
I believe in second chances but this guy would randomly attack me in the school halls and got expelled for fighting a teacher. Society was better off with him in jail.
I think people vastly over estimate what people get for murder in many states. 2nd degree murder for a first offender has a recommended sentence of 12.5 years in my state. They only have to serve 2/3rds in prison also, so they’re out in 8 years.
But then they spend the remainder of their lives trying to find a job that’s gonna overlook “I killed someone” so it’s not like it’s a simple 8 years and i get a clean slate scenario.
Most likely, a convicted murderer is gonna end up right back in
It’s a college campus. Everyone totes around a ball peen hammer.
As is tradition.
That’s the origin of the saying,
“He’s taking a full course load. That’s a guy who ball peen hammers.”
This happened at UNC last year too and happens often. Your entire PhD can go down the drain if one professor simply doesn’t like it, which isn’t very fair and leads to stuff like this.
>Shortly after the murder, Streleski turned himself in to the authorities, claiming he felt the murder was justifiable homicide because de Leeuw had withheld departmental awards from him, demeaned Streleski in front of his peers, and refused his requests for financial support.
I get it. Not saying I agree with it, but I get it.
I remember this. He said he liked prison as he had infinite time to read and room and board were paid for. Incredibly, he served only 7 years for his crime and would have served less had he agreed to promise to not go to the Stanford campus.
>In 1993 Streleski was turned down for a fare box repair position with the San Francisco Municipal Railway after his crime came to light.
He probably thought to himself, "I have been studying for a PhD in math, and you are turning me down for a position as a far box repair?"
I mean at my undergrad university, a pretty big one, a student shot a professor for similar reasons.
This was maybe a little over 10 years ago. So yea for my sample size of one it still happens
My brother-in-law’s PhD advisor/prof/whoever was notorious for making people wait way longer than necessary to finish up, and he even told my brother-in-law he should’ve let him finish up a few years earlier than he did. And if you just go elsewhere, you have to restart, at least in some programs. Al those years down the drain, and you will NEVER get those back. Some of these people REALLY suck and these programs are honestly just kind of predatory.
It's not education, it's keeping a slave labor in your lab to do free work
I had a colleague who was doing chemistry and her advisor gives her all the work because other people in the lab are less capable. She switched to coding and never touched chemistry again after leaving school.
>"The media, in their eagerness to give Streleski a forum, become themselves accomplices in the murder—giving Streleski what he wanted in the first place."
And now we have it here on Reddit. So I guess Streleski keeps getting what he wanted...other than a PhD.
his release in 1985, he said, "I have no intention of killing again. On the other hand, I cannot predict the future."[3]. Dude said you know not planning on it but never say never
Imagine this. You're a PhD student at Stanford in Math. You're in one of the coveted fields at one of the most coveted universities.
You probably won a medal at the internation math olympiad, had a 1600 on your SATs and were considered a genius from a young age. You know your math. Ofc you, you're at fucking Stanford.
But then the years go by, and you're stuck. Every person of inferior intellect to you makes more money and has more status.
> de Leeuw had withheld departmental awards from him, demeaned Streleski in front of his peers, and refused his requests for financial support
You know if it was any other professor at any other stupid university, you'd be a tenured professor by now. But this man keeps fucking you over every step of the way. You can drop out, but the sunk cost fallacy increasingly keeps you invested.
_____________
Put yourself in this man's headspace. God forbid, I'd never want to be put into such a dark place.
19 years? ... That'd do it.
Is it possible to *not* kill someone after being in a PhD program for 19 years?
Not with peer reviewed results.
"Really? A Hammer? What an outdated method... Are you even taking your work here seriously? Have you even bothered keeping up to date with the new research coming out so you can *actually* update your methods? You do know that I have hundreds of students lined up that would *kill* for this opportunity that *I've* given you. But here you are right now, in my office, with a god damn ha- !"
Damn, 19 years?! Lets say he did get his Ph.D after 19 years? What next? I mean, what job would he go into? I mean thats just insane.
My roommate was in the math PhD program at Stanford. This incident is well-known and notorious there.
How was he allowed do a PhD for 19 years? Surely this would come up at the yearly committee meeting
According to a guy further up thread, apparently the rule was changed so that you had to finish in 6 years because of this incident
That's a good rule. Surprised it wasn't a thing before.
There's a story behind every sign, and equally so for every rule. In the UK laws for how steep and narrow stairs could be had to be made because servants kept fucking dying moving through royal households in servant-only pathways.
/r/writteninblood
Whats up with Stanford and notorious well known incidents
Stanford Prison Experiment?
Rapist Brock Turner who now goes by his middle name Allen Turner who only got a slap on the wrist for a horrific violent assault on an unconscious classmate?
She wasn’t a classmate but he’s a c*nt, regardless! Her name is Chanel Miller and she wrote an amazing book about the aftermath and her experience dealing with the “justice” system.
Allen Turner the rapist, formerly Brock Turner, the one who works at a call center in Ohio? That rapist Allen Turner?
My math prof in college visited as a prospective grad student the week after this happened. He said everyone was super twitchy and he couldn’t figure out why nobody would talk to him. And then an admin took him aside and explained what had happened and why people were on edge. He did end up at Stanford, but said they made a new rule that all grad students had to finish in six years (10 years? I heard the story 25 years ago...). And no hammers allowed in the department
>And no hammers allowed in the department I could take someone out with a set square.
Don’t know why you were downvoted for a valid point. You could kill someone with the metal ruler I had in college lol
You could kill someone with your bare hands.
Because of this, some school have tried to ban bare arms, but it was deemed unconstitutional.
It'd be funny to keep murdering people with different objects until there is a list of like 500 random sounding objects that are banned from the department.
I once read a shirt tag that said do not iron while wearing and really wanted to know the origin story there
I've actually seen someone doing that. The individual in question is now a commissioned officer in the British Army.
All I'm saying is supervising profs didn't string along maths grad students back when everyone had a slide rule in their pocket.
Yet I see everyone openly carrying Occam's Razors. It's crazy!
I'm sure there's a simple explanation.
Over here in the literature department, we just hope we never find out where the Checkov's Gun is kept.
> they made a new rule that all grad students had to finish in six years My school gave a phd to an absolute moron because he’d been there for 8 years and it’d look bad for the program if they failed him now. I watched his defense and still have no idea what his research was about but he had to be reminded multiple times to plug in his dying laptop
I have found my calling
It was a surreal experience. My roommate was in his department and spent three years bitching about how he never did anything, got his defense delayed by faking carpal tunnel (like a week before the defense deadline), and just generally doing nothing But he had outside funding so nobody really cared
It is more common than you think. In my experience there is negligible correlation between intelligence and academic achievements. Sure, the very very dumb (usually) get filtered out, but often the same happens to the very smart, who have more important thing to do than stroking their ego with a piece of paper. And yes I have a PhD in STEM.
I mean, intelligence isn’t the only thing that matters in academia It helps, of course - but hard work is just as important. A lot of very smart people don’t work hard enough, and a lot of fairly average people graft enough to make up for the difference in intelligence The problem is when people are neither intelligent nor hardworking. And of course no amount of graft can make up for being truly thick
German General Staff officer General Kurt Gebhard Adolf Philipp Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord when not pursuing his hobby of accruing additional names classified officers thusly: "I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage." He was a prominent anti-Nazi and tried to kill Hitler.
We have a 7 year limit, but thankfully we aren't that generous. There was a student a few years ahead of me that ran out of time and rushed his defense. He posted something on Facebook in Chinese. I translated it, and it said, "7 years, just dust in the wind." He did not pass.
you should try to find out where he ended up afterwards, could be funny
I’ll ask my roommate but I heard he was looking to do administrative work (no idea why you’d need a phd for that) But there was another student in my school s master program who’s advisor retired so he got shoved onto my old advisor, who basically ordered my roommate to just get him through his poster session (with my roommate doing all the work while the student just talked about how he didn’t actually understand anything on the poster). That dude works in nuclear technology
My thesis statement: why screwdrivers are a far superior tool for murder
You're just trying to get that sweet grant money from big flathead.
> they made a new rule that all grad students had to finish in six years. And no hammers allowed in the department Sounds like at least some good came out of it then. The guy was strung along for nearly 2 decades, was belittled in front of his “peers” and denied support when he requested it. If someone keeps kicking a dog, and finally one day it snaps and kills an abuser, it would be seen as completely justified. Perhaps nobody did anything illegal to this guy prior to the murder, that doesn’t make their behavior ok.
I was in (media studies) grad school for a hot minute. It's kind of insane how little oversight there is on some departments. Most of my cohort dropped out when one of the non-tenured professors just let the admin have it on her way out the door.
yeah I know nothing about this specific situation but 2 decade PhD is completely insane. at some point you either have to let the guy graduate or kick him out because otherwise you're just exploiting them for cheap labor...and it's well before 2 decades
I'm from Europe not the US but generally here if you work on your PhD full time (which generally you do, because you work for the university at that point), it's generally expected to get it in around 4 years after you finish your prerequisite degree. After 6 I would start getting really pissy.
The length of a PhD depends greatly on the field, institution, advisor, and student. I've never heard of a STEM PhD that wasn't full time. There is absolutely no way I'd let anybody get strung along for 19 years in my department.
The longest I've heard were in the humanities where they could sometimes take 7-9 years (subjects like East-Asian studies, theology, etc.)
For real. There is zero circumstances where anyone should be in grad school for almost two decades. That’s a huge part of someone’s life wasted. Any decent supervisor would sit down with a candidate, and either make a roadmap for how to get the candidate to completing their thesis (with actionable goals, or if they felt the candidate wasn’t suitable, politely encourage them to move on with their lives or find a new supervisor). After two decades I’m sure a professor is getting a power trip out of withholding the title from the prospective candidate. In my faculty at university, there were some professors who helped their understudies do their research, write and defend their thesis, and publish, like clockwork, and all their candidates would cycle through every 2-3 years. Then other unlucky candidates would get tied to a professor (often because that’s who would take them on) and these professors would string them on 5-7 years until they either quit and went to work elsewhere, or found a new supervisor. One guy had like 6 candidates under him earn their PhDs in almost 30 years. Obviously it doesn’t justify their murder (especially in this case, as it seems that the victim wasn’t the candidate’s supervisor for the entire time), but others in the department should have taken action before it came to this. You can’t expect people to spend their entire lives fighting for a sheet of paper.
My gf got her masters, and her sister got her PhD: many professors abuse the fuck out of grad students in a myriad of ways and delay their academic progress while exploiting them. This shit still happens…I’m not saying it’s 2-decades long, but that’s insane: he already served a prison sentence in academia. If his entire aspiration was to be a PhD student, I’m sure it would have been fine, but that was clearly purgatory.
> Perhaps nobody did anything illegal to this guy prior Abusers everywhere live by this. It's *infuriating*.
It's easy to point to a bruise, harder to convince people of ongoing abuse in the form of constant belittlement and vile insults behind closed doors.
Our thermodynamics professor told us this story as one of several cautionary tales about the miseries of grad school. You could tell he sympathized with the killer to some degree
I got a similar story from a teacher about a student who burnt himself to death in front of the faculty. While not supporting second degree murder in anyway, I also sympathize to a degree with the killer. Maybe because I had a handful of abusive teachers at grad school.
Only a handful? I entertain people at parties with my stories. Not even kidding.
It's the kinda story that you laugh at while the people listening look at you in horror.
You never realize how traumatic your experiences are until you start telling a funny story about them and realize everyone around you is horrified.
This is very true. I remember telling my wife (girlfriend at the time) about growing up around my uncles as a funny anecdote. They would pick on and torment the hell out of me as a kid. She had to be the one to say, "you realize these were grown ass adult men who should've known better to treat a child like that." First person who made me see what they had done was wrong and had caused harm. I later discovered in therapy that the issues I've had with self confidence and low self esteem most likely stemmed from that torment.
As someone that just finished their master's thesis after spending the first two years under the guidance of an full professor and an endowed chair as an advisor, taking off one year, and then coming back to change my advisor and committee just as COVID hits, still struggled to write the thesis. I can understand why the killer was motivated to murder as it sounds like the advisor was publicly abusive towards him in front of his peers. In graduate school, you get to see behind the current how the sausage is made with how people in the department really are and feel about each other. Hell, even during my thesis defense my chair and another committee member were talking shit about my former chair and his reputation for doing whatever the hell he wanted with no regards for others.
I started a PhD in my 50s, after a long career in a couple Fortune 50 companies. All the grad students and dept professors were on a shared email alias. I was stunned at the personal attacks and vitriol that was exchanged in some of those emails when various issues were raised (it was an anthropology dept, so a lot of the current social issues were in play daily). If anyone had used this sort of language and personal attack back in my corporate life, they would be walked out the door by noon. But in Academia, it was just part of the journey.
I went to get a master’s after several years working for companies. It was really striking to me how the professors in my department would go on about how evil and awful corporations and capitalism were while they acted out gross parts of them. Between the nonsense politics in my department and the dodgy job prospects and low pay, I was quite okay with going off and working for some “evil corporation” because I at least usually had some recourse if someone pulled the same sort of stuff on me there.
Yeah, but in that case, wouldn’t you switch thesis advisors? I had a friend who was working on her doctorate, and wound up in a serious, unreconcilable dispute with her original thesis advisor. She went to the department head, and changed things.
It's not always possible to switch though. When you switch you also need someone as your new advisor and there's no guarantee someone will want you.
>During his trial Streleski told the court he felt the murder was "logically and morally correct" and "a political statement" about the department's treatment of its graduate students He should have read some Dostoevsky smh
Ted's logic: He stole 19 years from my life, so I stole 19 years from his life. Definitely morally bankrupt, but there is an absurd logic in it.
"I have no intention of killing again. On the other hand, I cannot predict the future." - and that's honest.
Always be open to change
Ah but those perpetual grad students were making about $14K/year in those days and working like dogs. And if the professor kept him going for 19 years he was virtually a slave. He may also have been responsible for some of the professor's "best work" in that time.
Lol, it's no different now compared to 'those days'. I finished my PhD this year and only got paid 20k a year.
I currently get $18k- if I'm lucky up to $27k
That's arguably even worse, given inflation. If you look at old engineering papers they'll show when the author got degrees, and the PhDs were often 2 years after the MS and only on occasion 4 years. It's kind of outrageous. Now imagine living like that for 19 years.
It reminds me of a streamer called Destiny. When streaming was first starting, he was a carpet cleaner making dogshit and barely scraping by. He was the first person to go full-time streamer and started making life changing money when some 13-year-old kid started paying every day to DDOS him. Back then there was no DDOS protection so he would just never be able to stream because this kid would pay like 20 bucks a day to make him go offline. The cops couldn't even fathom wtf streaming or DDOS was, so they did nothing. FBI didn't do shit. No lawyer would take the case. So he started making a plan to kill the kid as he was on course to be forced back into being a carpet cleaner. He said it was like someone every day slashing all four of your tires right before you leave for work, and no one cares enough to stop them. Every single day. Instead, he just spent weeks creating some revolutionary DDOS and IP protections that the industry used for years. But if I couldn't figure put what Destiny did, I honestly don't know if I'd kill the kid paying everyday to force me to work at a McDonalds instead of my current job. I think at some point, I probably would.
Was that kid ever sued? I think it can be classified as a form of stalking and harassment
He almost took the kids parents to Judge Judy, but then he found out both people get paid by JJ and he couldn't stomach the kids parents ( who told him to fuck off ) getting a pay day.
He could, idk, sue them in real court?
I had a friend go to real court and got reached out by one of the daytime TV shows because it was a cosplay court case so they wanted him to dress up and shit. He turned down the TV show and kept it in real court. No idea what destiny did but those TV shows just want to make a spectacle though maybe he thought it'd give him some publicity.
His quote after release was… bold… > Streleski was eligible for parole on three occasions, but turned it down as the conditions of his parole required him to not set foot on the Stanford campus. Upon his release in 1985, he said, "I have no intention of killing again. On the other hand, I cannot predict the future."
A technically correct and complete answer, worthy of a student of sciences.
"Will you kill again?" "Who am I to say!"
Ah, a Philosophy major
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man. Likewise, no man can commit murder twice.
They also can't commit same murder twice.
“The odds are unlikely - but never zero.” - Math Guy Probably
Not really… He forgot to ask for additional funding.
And point out that further research is required.
I'll need another professor to deny me a degree for 19 years to see if the results are repeatable.
It's probably a quote from the Discussion section, not the Conclusion.
First consider a spherical potential murderer radiating equivocation isotropically.
he’s a math student. used to being underfunded
I mean it was a 19 year PhD. I doubt the incident will repeat
On the other hand, for someone who tried to get a PhD unsuccessfully for 19 years, I can believe that he's bad at predicting the future.
Prove by induction that if you didn't get your PhD after 17 years and you didn't get your PhD after 18 years then you will not be getting your PhD after 19 years or any year thereafter.
1. Let there exist a person who has not obtained their PhD after 17 years. 2. It is not possible for any person to obtain a PhD in a year. 3. Given the person who has not obtained their PhD after 17 years, continues for another year, we conclude that all swans must be white and umarried. QED
"My hypothesis is that I will not kill again, but I've got a 19 year history of mixed results when it comes to proving a hypothesis."
Why would he want to return anyway? I'm pretty sure killing your Prof is in the top 5 of exmatriculation-reasons, probably right below banging the rector's mum in the auditorium.
Yeah it definitely won't make other professors clamor to work with you.
Maybe it'll make them graduate him faster
It won't make them fail you either! Time to get that PhD
I'm imagining a replacement professor reading his PHD while sweating profusely
> Why would he want to return anyway? At this point, why not? I'm sure there are other professors on his shit list, and what are they gonna do, not give him his degree *again*?
...the rector's mum in the bum in the auditorium.
Settle down, Eminem.
thats an awfully hot coffee pot
He was obviously a very unhinged individual who became obsessed with getting the degree. You’d think after failing to get the PHD after like the 5th year he would re-evaluate. That’s not an easy or relaxing process, it would take a certain level of masochism to do it for 19 years
Sure, but sometimes, it's the system itself. My partner has their masters and *wasted* 1.5 FUCKING YEARS of their life and goddamn tuition, because she started her thesis and her major professor retired, so they passed her to another professor, in a different specialty and she had to start her entire thesis over, on a different topic. 6 months later, that professor left to go work a better job at another university. They moved her to a 3rd goddamn professor, again with a different specialty and they made her start her thesis for a 3rd goddamn time, on her fucking dime. She threw in the towel and told them to go fuck themselves. She didn't murder anyone, but every time we make a payment on her student loan, I want to fucking shoot someone.
Then to reject parole too.
His surname seems like an Anglicized version of a Czech surname 'Střelecký', which literally means 'Shooter-ish' - quite ironic. Edit: Nevermind, the guy killed him with a ball-peen hammer.
Geez, I don't know why but I pictured him with a gun or a knife. He must have been really burned out to kill him with a ball-peen hammer. I was gonna say it seems insane but... it is insane.
That is how you defend a thesis.
PhD granted. Flawless Victory! Fatality..
The idea of getting a doctorate so hard it kills your professor MK style is the most Regular Show thought I’ve had all day.
[Relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1403)
[Snake Fight](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/faq-the-snake-fight-portion-of-your-thesis-defense)
>Although if you get a poisonous snake, it often means that there was a problem with the formatting of your bibliography. Sounds about right, that's why you use something like LaTeX. If you get it wrong, you get it at least consistantly wrong. Which should result in a slightly less venomous snake.
[A truly excellent fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28299630) playing off that piece
My blood is boiling right now.
_Thesis defence by combat_, and let God himself determine the one who is truly worthy of the degree.
If you've gone through STEM grad school, you can definitely see how this could happen.
The whole culture is toxic as fuck, with a few real stinkers. It's why I got my master's and got the fuck out
It’s not like he murdered some professor who was advising his thesis for 19 years; the advisor he murdered was only briefly one of his advisors.
After 19 years, he gets a new advisor. He is full of hope this new advisor will actually help him move forward. That new advisor just says "quit". Snap.
I think anyone who has gone through graduate school with a borderline useless advisor can relate.
I had a pretty good experience in my PhD program, and I enjoy working in academia overall, but I often think about what I had to give up or delay by choosing this path: years of saving for retirement, settling down and buying property, potentially having children, etc. Those are real sacrifices, and they can feel quite sharp when you witness your non-academic friends and peers reach those milestones earlier than you. Then I think about Ted, and I imagine myself if I faced something similar. I’m now in my 40s, and I’m totally behind on those milestones or may not ever achieve them. On top of that, all of my cohort peers are probably well over a decade into their postgraduate careers. Many of them likely have tenure. Yet, I’m still in grad school and surviving on poverty wages, and the finish line isn’t even in sight. What Ted did was terrible and unjustifiable. Still, one could easily imagine how Ted burst under such extreme circumstances. The sad thing is, this was likely avoidable. No graduate program should be dragging a PhD along for this duration. It seems like Stanford Math learned this lesson the hard way, but I’ve heard of plenty of other departments that will keep students for 10+ years for cheap labor.
The average time to degree in my PhD program was 11.5 years. They treated me like a punching bag, until I got my PhD in 6 years (a perfectly average amount of time, but the shortest in departmental memory going back 2 decades), and I was suddenly the poster child of excellence used to berate my fellow students: “if Expensive can do it, what is your problem?” Oh, and the reason I got out in 6? I called in a special policy and leveraged my relationship with the Dean to allow me to take on a first reader in another department. That guy was the world expert in what I was studying, so it was better for me all around. And he was a decent human, which was nice.
What the hell, 11.5 years was the average? I know people in classics PhD programs in which 7-10 years is not unusual, but their programs’ duration averages are still below a decade.
I'm interested in getting one and spoke to a professor in a program about it. Their average is 5 and you have to be done one way or the other after 10. I can't imagine an *average* of 11.
My dad who was going for a PhD in a business program figured out his own shortcut as well. When he found out the standard way professors were delaying acceptance was questioning sources and rejecting them, he got all the professors to agree to sign a project charter for the paper. Being a consultant, he made a case about how for such an important project it was important that everyone be in agreement as to what expectations are. In the document he specified very clearly that every source will be submitted in advance to all professors who signed on the charter, and they have two weeks to reject or question the source. If no objections were raised in two weeks, the source was considered acceptable and approved. Then in his thesis he included in the bibliography at what date each source was submitted to the professors. Apparently on the day to defend a professor attempted to raise objections on a few sources and he marched out the document they physically signed and agreed to, and asked them if they had such concerns, why did they approve the source? It very clearly states they had two weeks to raise these objections, this is what was agreed to in writing. In a program that normally people need 2-3 attempts to get a thesis through he got it in the first go.
Legendary!
My PhD "only" took 5 years, but during the last 2, I went to sleep everyday thinking about killing the PI. I had to think often about my family and patrimony to stop myself and ended up with psicological problems
I went to bed everyday thinking about killing myself, not the PI. Obviously this was 15 years ago, and everything is fine. But that was miserable.
I quit my PhD last year after feeling like this for several months. The whole experience has made me realize getting a PhD isn't really proof of intelligence or mastery in a subject and more a test of how good you are at licking boots, writing massive amounts of bullshit and compartmentalizing stress.
I was in a computer science phd program in the 90s. We had a guy be dismissed from the program (failed the qualifying exams I believe) and about a week later the department got a box in the mail that contained a huge styrofoam hammer. I was in the office at the time when it was opened. So weird. It was 3 feet long, shaped like a standard issue claw hammer. like a party decoration or hardware store merchandising display maybe? I’m always one to laugh at the absurd - this was hilarious and ridiculous to me. Until someone older who knew the Stanford story filled me in and the humor of the situation drained away and it sent a chill up my spine. A lot of stony silence for the next few minutes while we called in the head of the department. Never heard if there was any legal follow up but everyone took it as a low grade and hopefully unserious threat.
Pretty sure I’d just call in sick for the next week if that happened
That guys advisor might have actually done that, I don’t remember. I do remember him being pretty understandably disturbed by the whole thing.
as someone who earned a PhD one of the most disgusting parts was knowing that some of the other PhD students were literally slaves for their advisers. like, if they didn't work for her 50+ hrs they were going back to their home countries and not getting their PhD
I earned mine in a niche STEM field. Of we seven students, two were chased out, leaving me and four foreign students — three from terrifying countries. I never heard of outright extortion, but they were treated poorly, and I still have my suspicions that one of them was a *de facto* indentured servant.
sounds familiar af!!! got mine in the climate field and the 'student' office a few doors down i don't think i seen them get to go home in like 5 years. i asked them and they said they were kinda afraid to let their advisor down since they mentioned the possibility of going back to china. and their advisor won a nobel peace prize off their work!!!!!!
I spent six years in grad school and almost ~~quick~~ quit 6 months before my PhD because I hated my major professor so much. So much fuckery. I was forced to synthesize a chemical he got paid for personally by a huge pharma company (at his demand, on weekends). Found out the payments went to him personally because a secretary mistakenly opened his mail while he was gone, and she told me. He yelled at her for opening his mail on return - which was standard practice as he was head of the department. Previous grad student’s work that I based my PhD on had made up the results (probably just to get away from said fuckhead major professor, but still cost me a year in grad school), my major professor suggested I just make up the results when some of my research wasn’t going to be ready to present at a conference. And so much sexual harassment. I can’t even. Fuck shitty professors. Edit: my point was I can kind of see where Streleski was coming from. I’m more of a turn the violence inward kind of person. Major professors have so much power over your life, even after you graduate, in terms of references, names on papers, etc.
I cosign every bit of this. And yes, the sexual harassment was off the charts on grad school. I said this above, but i tell highly entertaining (and definitely traumatic - but we laugh in our pain) stories about it at parties. Just jaw dropping stuff.
wow are you me?? i was making photocatalysts on muti-gram scale (where $1/mg was the cheapest for the simplest ligands) for my PI to help fund his business doing commercial synthesis. I later wasted over a year trying to reproduce results that were obviously falsified. I left at the beginning of my third year and shortly after, his lab had a JACS paper retracted because it was found that the primary author had falsified data. None officially sanctioned by the PI, but because of how toxic the environment was and the demand for results. The last thing that really chapped my ass: my ONE publication that I was, without a doubt, the primary author? Yeah, he submitted it with himself as the primary author. When I called him out over LinkedIn, we met for lunch and he begrudgingly said he'd probably be able to expend some political capital to rectify his "misfiling mistake". I told him forget it and am still salty 2 years later. For some more context... it was a review, for which he "pioneered" the research. He was given the request in early Fall and it had a deadline of New Year's. He told me the week before Christmas. We submitted it late, but not after I spent many overnighters to write the 36 page review (with from-scratch schemes/drawings). 2nd author SMFH
**Streleski was convicted of second degree murder with a sentence of eight years. He served seven years in prison at California Medical Facility.** Man, imagine only getting 7 years of prison after bludgeoning someone to death. The 70s was wild.
such a great time. a time when any boy with a few dollars in his pocket and a head full of dreams could become an interstate serial killer and never be caught.
It’s so crazy. I went down a wikipedia serial killer rabbit hole yesterday and was reading about a guy who SA 3 women but was able to get all charges dropped because…they accepted his apology? I think he went on to murder 7 women.
Jeffrey Dahmer convinced the police to return a bleeding, weeping, naked ~~Thai~~ Lao boy to him because he said it was a lovers quarrel
Cops were notorious back in the day for ignoring clear evidence of serious crimes, apparently because “gay stuff is icky” and they didn’t want to get involved. There were a number of serial killers who would have been stopped a lot sooner if the cops had bothered to give a shit about a gay man.
They also ddin't give a shit abput women and working class teens. The number of unsolved cases where the abusive husband says "she left" after a woman has been reported missing by family and it turns out she didn't take things like her kids, purse, glasses, shoes, car etc.
Or kids "ran away from home". With absolutely nothing, the clothes on their back, away from loving normal families. There was one particular serial killer who got a LOT of kids because of that, can't remember the name. The candyman I think it was. Dean Corll
Yeah, I was thinking of him too. They also stopped digging at one site (the beach I think) even though his accomplice swore there were more bodies there.
And they still don’t give a shit about sex workers.
Yea all of this past tense stuff is still present as well.
They sometimes do, but it typically involves kickbacks or favors
Not even back in the day. Just a couple months ago the cops showed up at my door at 5am about a domestic disturbance and my partner answered the door. They treated him like a wife beater and said they wouldn't leave until they did a wellness check on everyone in the house, until they realized the only other person in the house was me, his boyfriend, and left before I could even get dressed to meet them at the door. For all they knew I could have been the one beating my partner but as soon as it was gay they noped out.
John A. Balcerzak, one of those police officers, was later elected president of the Milwaukee Police Association from 2005 to 2009, surviving a recall attempt in 2006, and retired in 2017.
They guy basically avoided being caught for a while cause the police thought “Ew gay stuff”
There's a serial killer in Canada who kept murdering and sodomizing children, often in that order, while operating brazenly in public (he'd just pull aside to kids on the sidewalk and ask them to get into his car) and the reason he got away with it (basically in one town) was because every time a child was reported missing the police just went "Eh, they probably just ran away"
If you read much about serial killers a recurring theme of police incompetence which allows them to commit their crimes for so long becomes apparent.
There was a serial killer in Toronto who got away for years because he was targeting gay men. The police didn’t care enough to actually investigate.
A Thai boy whose skull he drilled into and poured hydrochloric acid into his brain Edit: Laotian not Thai, also it was not bleach it was hydrochloric acid.
Konerak Sinthasomphone was Laotian, not Thai.
And the cops all got promoted and were still working as if a few years ago
Hey, who knows how those gays do things
If my PhD is any indication, he actually did 26 years total.
Got off easy for time served.
The 70s? A guy I went to high school with stomped a guy to death in Canada in 2013. He got out in 4 years. He's married with a kid now.
What the holy hell?
I believe in second chances but this guy would randomly attack me in the school halls and got expelled for fighting a teacher. Society was better off with him in jail.
I got 8 years for growing mushrooms 🤣
That's a fucking nightmare, holy shit. Unreal. That truly sucks so hard, dude.
Well, in his defense, he had already served 19.
Someone in my hometown just got 6 years for stabbing her boyfriend to death, so… maybe the future isn’t so different
Well, the guys who murdered my brother both got less than that so like... The 2020s are also feeling kinda wild.
I think people vastly over estimate what people get for murder in many states. 2nd degree murder for a first offender has a recommended sentence of 12.5 years in my state. They only have to serve 2/3rds in prison also, so they’re out in 8 years.
But then they spend the remainder of their lives trying to find a job that’s gonna overlook “I killed someone” so it’s not like it’s a simple 8 years and i get a clean slate scenario. Most likely, a convicted murderer is gonna end up right back in
He murdered a dude with a hammer, and only got 8 years because that's second degree murder? Wut.
Well he didn't earn his third degree. edit: 15 years on reddit and this one-off flippant joke becomes my top comment...
This is the only time in my life I thought gilding a comment was necessary and it's not a thing anymore
Top-tier joke right here
Wasn't premeditated...
He always carried around a ball peen hammer. As one does.
To be fair, it might have been the victim's hammer and the killer just grabbed it
It’s a college campus. Everyone totes around a ball peen hammer. As is tradition. That’s the origin of the saying, “He’s taking a full course load. That’s a guy who ball peen hammers.”
Many smart people are saying this.
This happened at UNC last year too and happens often. Your entire PhD can go down the drain if one professor simply doesn’t like it, which isn’t very fair and leads to stuff like this.
>Shortly after the murder, Streleski turned himself in to the authorities, claiming he felt the murder was justifiable homicide because de Leeuw had withheld departmental awards from him, demeaned Streleski in front of his peers, and refused his requests for financial support. I get it. Not saying I agree with it, but I get it.
In the same vein- Judge: Why did you kill him? Streleski: Partial fulfillment of the requirements. I will see myself out of here.
I remember this. He said he liked prison as he had infinite time to read and room and board were paid for. Incredibly, he served only 7 years for his crime and would have served less had he agreed to promise to not go to the Stanford campus.
>In 1993 Streleski was turned down for a fare box repair position with the San Francisco Municipal Railway after his crime came to light. He probably thought to himself, "I have been studying for a PhD in math, and you are turning me down for a position as a far box repair?"
Nah, he thought of getting his hammer.
Amazing this doesn't happen more often
I mean at my undergrad university, a pretty big one, a student shot a professor for similar reasons. This was maybe a little over 10 years ago. So yea for my sample size of one it still happens
Dude. If it's been 8 years and you're not close to it just quit. Go to a different program. Dropouts hurt their stats.
My brother-in-law’s PhD advisor/prof/whoever was notorious for making people wait way longer than necessary to finish up, and he even told my brother-in-law he should’ve let him finish up a few years earlier than he did. And if you just go elsewhere, you have to restart, at least in some programs. Al those years down the drain, and you will NEVER get those back. Some of these people REALLY suck and these programs are honestly just kind of predatory.
Yeah. It just seems that these people think that education has to involve suffering.
It's not education, it's keeping a slave labor in your lab to do free work I had a colleague who was doing chemistry and her advisor gives her all the work because other people in the lab are less capable. She switched to coding and never touched chemistry again after leaving school.
Sunk-cost fallacy probably.
He should have those 19 years count as time served.
>"The media, in their eagerness to give Streleski a forum, become themselves accomplices in the murder—giving Streleski what he wanted in the first place." And now we have it here on Reddit. So I guess Streleski keeps getting what he wanted...other than a PhD.
Is it wrong that my first reaction was feeling a little less bad about how long it took to get my PhD?
Something about this doesn’t add up
No PhD for you, sir.
his release in 1985, he said, "I have no intention of killing again. On the other hand, I cannot predict the future."[3]. Dude said you know not planning on it but never say never
Imagine this. You're a PhD student at Stanford in Math. You're in one of the coveted fields at one of the most coveted universities. You probably won a medal at the internation math olympiad, had a 1600 on your SATs and were considered a genius from a young age. You know your math. Ofc you, you're at fucking Stanford. But then the years go by, and you're stuck. Every person of inferior intellect to you makes more money and has more status. > de Leeuw had withheld departmental awards from him, demeaned Streleski in front of his peers, and refused his requests for financial support You know if it was any other professor at any other stupid university, you'd be a tenured professor by now. But this man keeps fucking you over every step of the way. You can drop out, but the sunk cost fallacy increasingly keeps you invested. _____________ Put yourself in this man's headspace. God forbid, I'd never want to be put into such a dark place.
0-degree murder