Remote learning
By 
So Tuesday morning I got back from class, intending to complete my opus on Fred Bonine, international man of mystery, when I suddenly came over all peckish — esurient as it were — so I curtailed my Bonining activities, intending to negotiate the purchase of some spicy tuna poke at the local Up With White People emporium.
But before doing so I checked my email, and discovered there was a “shelter in place” directive from the Boulder PD and the CU administration. Apparently, some desperado was holed up in his apartment, surrounded by cops, practically across the street from the law school.
The elementary school where friends of mine send their daughter had already been evacuated, and I thought for a moment of how incredibly disturbing it would be to learn that your child had been evacuated from her second-grade class because a madman in the immediate vicinity was raving about going on about shooting up a school. Then I remembered how hungry I was.
So at this point, I faced a dilemma: should I sally forth in search of oceanic comestibles, while risking that some freedom-loving citizen would exercise his Second Amendment rights before I could complete this transaction?
Here’s what was actually going on:
A former UCLA lecturer taken into custody Tuesday by Colorado police after allegedly sending campus members a video referencing a mass shooting had threatened to hunt down and kill a University of California professor last year and was subsequently barred from going near her, according to court documents.
Matthew Harris, who was let go by UCLA last year following widespread complaints about his behavior as a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy, emailed his mothertwice in January 2021 that he planned to shoot the professor with an MP5 submachine gun “for giving me schizophrenia,”the Los Angeles County Superior Court documents said. His mother warned the professor in April, sharing the emails that were forwarded to UCLA, according to court documents.
The UC system sought a workplace restraining order in May to bar Harris from going near the professor, sending her emails, leaving voicemails or entering any UCcampus. In the court filing, a UCLA attorney noted that Harris had “steadily escalated from reported incidents of conduct with students involving graphic materials of a sexual and violent nature which resulting in him being placed on investigatory leave … to now outright death threats to petitioner’s employee.”
In June, L.A. Superior Court Judge David Swift issued a three-year restraining order against Harris.
That’s sure to work.
Harris was taken into custody peacefully at 11:07 a.m. after a three-hour-long barricade at his apartment, Boulder police said. Officials said he’d written a manifesto that contained references to Boulder “in a university and schoolyard setting.”
“The level of violence we saw in the manifesto was obviously alarming,” said Boulder Police Chief Maris Herold. “It was very violent and it was very disturbing.” . . .
Sherrilyn Roush, philosophy department chair, sent an alert to department members at 3:27 p.m. Monday that Harris had begun contacting UCLA with threatening emails and YouTube videos and said campus police and behavioral specialists were “investigating with urgency.”
By 6:30 p.m., someone posted on Reddit a subsequent department alert recommending that professors hold classes remotely as the material included a video titled “UCLA Philosophy Mass Shooting” and an “800-page manifesto with specific threats toward some members of the department.” Several emails from philosophy department leaders and multiple instructors obtained by The Times on Monday night alerted students that in-person classes would not be held.
UCLA tweeted its first campus-wide message at 9:25 p.m. saying that UCLA police were aware of a “concerning email and posting” sent to some Bruins. Police were engaged with out-of-state law enforcement and would keep the community informed, the tweet said.
That created an instant backlash on Twitter. “What @UCLA and @UCPDLA are failing to inform students and staff of is that this “concerning email” is a major mass shooter threat at UCLA,” one person tweeted.
It was not until 11:57 p.m. that UCLA tweeted that all classes would be held remotely “out of an abundance of caution.” Campus police were “actively working with out-of-state & federal agencies,” the tweet said. At the time UCLA did not release information about the location of the person of interest.
A lot of pandemics out there these days.