Two professors who taught James E. Holmes in a graduate neurosciences program at the University of Colorado at Denver’s medical campus are concerned about the media’s portrayal of what may have triggered the deadly killing spree that their former Ph.D. student is accused of carrying out in a movie theater last week.
The professors, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it is unfair for people to draw any conclusions, much less speculate that graduate-school pressures may have played a role in precipitating the shootings, until a medical diagnosis of Mr. Holmes is known.
The two professors and a campus administrator say they are worried that the shooting incident, which killed 12 people and injured 58 others, and the medical campus’s ties to Mr. Holmes will unfairly brand the university and the field of neuroscience. They also feared it would tarnish Aurora, the city in the Denver metropolitan area where both the movie theater and the medical campus are located.
“I worry that the campus will become associated with a young man who went crazy, that neuroscience will suddenly become a bad word, and that people will say that neuroscience is not something you want to be involved in because look at what it produces,” one of the professors said. “Our program has turned out some world-class educators and scientists who’ve made dynamic breakthroughs.”
Mr. Holmes enrolled in the university’s Ph.D. program in neuroscience in June 2011. In May, he gave a presentation on microRNA biomarkers, which are small molecules that regulate genes and are involved in most biological processes in the human body. These biomarkers have been implicated in diseases such as schizophrenia and may hold clues for therapies. The link between Mr. Holmes’s topic and a psychiatric illness figured in media speculations about his state of mind, but one of his professors said that it is hard to envision how preparation for a presentation on this topic could have influenced his behavior.
A month after that presentation, on June 7, Mr. Holmes failed a key oral exam. And then, three days later, he began the process of withdrawing from the program.
And now, a week after the shooting spree, emotions are still running high.
“We are all still shell-shocked,” one of the professors said. “People are asking the usual questions that get asked after a tragedy like this: How could this have happened? Could it have been prevented? No normal person can put themselves into the mind-set of a mass murderer.”
Quick Conjectures
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, some people started trying to draw connections between the former graduate student’s mental status, his decision to study brain disorders, his failed oral exam, and his withdrawal from his neuroscience program.
A criminology professor at Regis University, who studies mass killings, told the Associated Press that she was not surprised that Mr. Holmes was studying mental disorders because he may have known “there’s something different in him.”
A former researcher for the U.S. Secret Service told television networks that the suspect, who appeared dazed and bug-eyed in a court appearance on Monday, may have been in the midst of a psychotic break or faking mental symptoms that he likely learned in his studies.
When news outlets reported that Mr. Holmes had purchased a high-powered rifle hours after failing his oral exam, experts raised the possibility that Mr. Holmes had an underlying mental illness that was triggered by the pressures of graduate school and the stress of the test he failed.
Not likely, said the professors who taught the shooting suspect. No one really knows, they said, what made the young man apparently snap.
“People are trying to draw some association between a course on mental disorders and the manifestation of a mental disorder that resulted in this heinous act,” said one of the professors. “And frankly, there is no correlation.”
In fact, the courses that Mr. Holmes took in the first year of the university’s neuroscience program did not lead students in an exploration of their own psychoses. Instead, the students learned basic information about the molecular, cellular, and physiological structure of the brain.
In one spring-semester course, 21 different professors, including experts in neurology, psychiatry, pharmacology, and radiology, delivered one-hour lectures on a broad range of disorders, including substance abuse, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and mad cow-like diseases in humans. The second half of the semester included lectures on schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and childhood psychosis.
There was nothing in the course materials themselves, one professor said, that could have pushed Mr. Holmes over the brink.
“Just look at the title of the course,” the professor said of the course with multiple lecturers: “The Biological Basis of Psychiatric and Neurological Disorders.”
“It is not a clinical-based course for residents or medical students in their third or fourth year where they would see presentations of patients and their symptoms. This was a course that focused on the causes of disorders and potential therapies.”
People don’t need to take a course to learn about their own illness or how to fake one, the professor said. “You can turn to the Internet or WebMD to find that kind of information.”
Nor does the speculation that Mr. Holmes’s exam failure might have unhinged him ring true, the professors said. The preliminary exam, which students take at the end of the first year, is designed to test students’ basic knowledge in the core areas of their field. In neuroscience, students may be asked how the brain works, how it is structured, and what happens when things go wrong.
The exam committee also wants to see how well students can think on their feet. They want to see if students can apply knowledge they’ve learned in a textbook to real situations and if they can use course material to formulate a hypothesis and interpret data. It is not unusual for graduate students in any program to fail the exam the first time around, as Mr. Holmes did. And his exam failure did not mean that his ability to continue in his doctoral program was in jeopardy.
“Students are always given an opportunity to retake an exam,” said Barry D. Shur, dean of the graduate school. “The exam is not a screen that throws people out of the program. It is designed to identify students who need additional remedial work before they get approval to pursue their intensive lab work.”
Mr. Shur and Mr. Holmes’s professors described the neuroscience Ph.D. program as challenging, like most graduate programs. But they also described Mr. Holmes’s program as low-stress and operating in an open and nurturing environment where graduate students have daily contact with their advisers.
Mr. Shur said that neuroscience students are monitored closely and have one-on-one interactions in their lab rotations. There are faculty committees set up to monitor students’ performance in classes and their progress toward the degree. It is unusual, Mr. Shur said, for a student to drop out of the program, which has a completion rate of more than 90 percent.
Mr. Holmes’s professors declined to comment about whether he showed signs of mental instability, stress, or dangerous behavior. On Thursday a judge barred the university from releasing any records about Mr. Holmes’s time as a graduate student there, and the university has maintained tight control over the flow of information. So many details about Mr. Holmes’s time in the graduate program remain unknown.
An Isolating Pursuit
Whether or not Mr. Holmes’s graduate experiences played any role in his alleged actions, some experts say that, in general, more attention needs to be paid to graduate students’ mental health.
Nick Repak, founder of Grad Resources and the 24-hour National Grad Crisis Line, says graduate students are more at risk than undergraduates for depression and suicide because they are older. And, he says, mental illnesses can easily go undetected. Graduate school is often an isolating pursuit, he said, and students tend to hide their struggles from their peers and faculty mentors.
“There is a fear of allowing weakness to be shown and so they don’t seek help,” Mr. Repak said.
In academic environments, he added, fatigue, stress, emotional exhaustion, and living on the edge of poverty are often accepted as part of the graduate-student experience.
“Many graduate students see life on hold in order to jump through the hoops in order to secure a degree,” Mr. Repak said. “Life is out of balance, so relationships get neglected. Health care and personal development get set aside because there is an inherent pressure from advisers and peer competition to produce results, publish papers, and to crank out new information that will set a person apart as a graduate student.”
Graduate students need greater connections, someone to check in on them and to ask how they are managing the pressures of school, Mr. Repak said. If students have more eyes on them, then people will notice changes in character, habits, or hygiene, or other signs that something might be wrong.
In Aurora, the university’s medical campus was beginning on Thursday to get “back to business as usual,” said Jacque Montgomery, a university spokeswoman. The increased checks on campus ID’s, for example, had been lifted.
But students and faculty were still shaken up and concerned about the shooting victims and their families, she said. And the week has been filled with stress from the media glare. The 21 faculty members and nine graduate students who are listed in an online syllabus as participants with Mr. Holmes in the spring-semester survey course have been bombarded with phone calls, e-mails, and Facebook messages. Reporters have gained access to unpublished cellphone numbers, knocked on office doors, and interrupted dinners at home.
And investigators found a letter Mr. Holmes sent to a psychologist at the university in which he talked about shooting people and included crude drawings of a gunman and his victims.
“The campus will never be the same,” said one of Mr. Holmes’s professors. But for now, he said, “people need to take a deep breath and let the investigation proceed as it should on its own time.”
