When Professors Attack!

Something interesting happened in Athens this weekend; it was something that actually made national news. Professor George Zinkhan, "an endowed marketing professor at [UGA's] Terry College of Business," murdered his wife and two other people involved in a local community theatre. Of course, this is a very tragic incident for the town I've called home for almost a year and half, and I hope and pray that justice is served to Zinkhan, and my heart goes out to the families of the victims. However, this whole story seems a little weird. First, is the story I heard from my friend's brother's friend's cousin's dog's cousin's owner's brother-in-law's hamster about how he came into class on Friday, told the class there was a change in plans and there would no longer be a final, asked all of them to submit their final papers early, and told them their final grades would be given later that day. Weird. **UPDATE: This rumor actually seems to have some legs. Link** Second, look at this guy:

Anybody with that facial hair style (not just the goatee, but the goatee with wings, as far as I can tell) should raise all kinds of red flags as someone just a little off his rocker. Finally, before the website blocked his profile, his Rate My Professors page was hysterical. An example of one of the ratings I read yesterday, if I can remember it at all (in other words, not an exact quote):

"Dr. Zinkhan is a pretty good teacher. His tests aren't too bad, and he's generally helpful outside of class. One time, he murdered three people. Other than that, I would recommend this class to all of my friends."

Comedic gold. Even still, you can see that some of the pre-yesterday ratings include quotes such as "he demonstrated himself to be cold hearted and just plain nasty when I needed help. Stay away from this man," "creep," and "he is a little quirky." Now, I've been called "creep" more times than I can remember, and a little quirkiness could do us all good, but to me this just sounds like a recipe for disaster.

One time when I visited the site yesterday, there were probably thirty ratings that had been added that day. I imagine that before the website blocked his page, they were trying to remove new ratings as fast as possible in order to maintain any sort of professionalism on the site, and new ratings were pouring in by the bucketload. They've probably never had to do anything like this to their site before, which is why it took so long.

Needless to say, this is something that is quite out of the ordinary in a quaint college town like Athens. The aftereffects are still being felt all over town. The university will operate under a normal schedule this week, even though Zinkhan hasn't been caught yet. Hopefully, this whole thing will be over soon, Zinkhan will be thrown in prison for the rest of his life, and things will return to normal. That's the best we can hope for.