Professor goes on anti-cyber rampage at upstate New York college...

AP / NEW YORK

Police are searching for an assistant professor of English who is wanted on suspicion of assault, vandalism and kidnapping in an incident that transpired on Tuesday evening on the campus of Big Mountain College in Ticonderoga. The incident began when the professor allegedly hammered on the door of a four-bed student dorm room at 7 PM. When freshman student Tracy Texter opened the door, he reportedly grabbed her by the throat and began screaming, "Get offline for one (expletive) day, you dazed zombie!" Eyewitnesses differ as to what happened next. There were five other students in the room at the time. After a altercation, the professor allegedly managed to seize three of them and drag them, flailing and screaming, out of the dorm and across campus.

When the combat reached the humanities library adjacent to the student center, the professor still had two students in his grasp. Campus security cameras show one female student (later confirmed to be Ms. Texter) being dragged by the hair and one male student in a headlock as the professor rammed his way into the library. According to witnessess, the professor, now bathed in sweat and with his glasses hanging down over his lip, reportedly yelled, "These are (expletive) books. They are made of paper. They contain ideas. They contain facts. They contain art. Read them!" and "Not everything is on google or facebook you moronic, shallow (unintelligible)!" He threw the students onto the floor of the library foyer and tipped a shelving unit of reference books onto his injured acolytes. He raved about the ground floor of the library smacking laptops off of reading tables, tossing random books at students and shouting, "Mastery takes time, you bastards. Open the book and start on page one. Read the (expletive) book. The paper ones. These!" before being tackled by campus police.

One victim told police that the professor had pinned him to a reading table, torn pages out of a history of India and actually tried to stuff the pages into the student's mouth, grunting, "These....are...citations....and...sources...and...
arguments...and...eat...them...you....knowledge-starved primate!" He is reported to have yelled, "Read real books!" over and over again as he was carried out of the library. Before reaching the campus constabulary office he managed to escape the grasp of the police, however, and disappeared into the nearby woods.

The police report lists five minor injuries and several hundred dollars in property damage. The most seriously hurt, freshman Tracy Texter and sophmore Dale Duzinhale, were treated for bruises and cuts at a local hospital and released.

Police are withholding the identity of the professor, but the victims and many of the witnesses recognized him as assistant professor Dr. James Endovrop who has been with the college for four years. The college has declined to comment while the investigation is still ongoing. The English department did release an unofficial statement expressing concern for Endovrop's wellbeing, referring to him as a valued colleague, and calling on Endovrop to turn himself in and cooperate with authorities. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior faculty member did remark to the press that Prof. Endovrop has been acting "quirky" at recent faculty meetings and that there have been student complaints about his dogmatic insistence on the use of scholarly sources.


Within 90 minutes of the attack, several dozen students from two fraternities, armed with cellphone flashlights, GPS-navigation devices, and rope, began a haphazard search of the area around the campus and the neighborhood near the professor's house, but police disbanded the effort and sent the students home. Several students without GPS devices were left stranded by the police call-off, however, and were reported wandering the streets in search of their frat house on Wednesday morning.

Police are recommending that people in Ticonderoga do not use electronic devices outdoors until the suspect has been apprehended.

The incident is only the most recent of a spate of attacks related to what psychologists are now calling "faculty anti-cyber rage". In early April five students were killed at New Mexico State University when an adjunct biology instructor demonstrated speciation by creating a new, deadly bacteria to prove, as he put it, "that your (expletive) creationist webpages really and truly are pure (expletive). It doesn't matter how many links they have or how many subcribers".

"Anti-cyber rage began with a few older faculty members at traditional colleges in the late 1990s. Now even adjuncts who had webpages as teenagers are being affected," Dr. Gabi Dornhofer, psychologist at Big Mountain College, told reporters. "There are young academics who feel at home online, but they still live in the past. They still know a bit about epistemology and source criticism. But within a few years, they'll be gone too." The rage attacks can be expected to become less and less frequent over the next two decades, she added, as SGOS - "some guy online said" - becomes the gold standard of scholarly data collection. Law enforcement unions and college administrators from around the northeast and congressmen from several states are now at work on new initiatives to accelerate the SGOS process and reduce anti-cyber rage by shutting down all the alternatives. Projects include moving paper books into restricted-access library zones, increased funding for mandatory blogging education at the elementary and secondary levels and assistance for public and private libraries and data banks as they transition to new SGOS cataloging and reference systems. Dornhofer, usually skeptical of political interference in education, said she is optimistic about the new process. "Anything that will move education into the 21st century and make our schools competitive with China is okay by me." She was confident and optimistic, adding, with her palinesque smile, "It is also a matter of public safety to move beyond the dinosaurs. Get the dead-enders proper treatment - lock'm up and move on!"