bludgeoned his adviser to death with a ball-peen hammer
Кстати, по ссылкам из последнего текста, воодушевляющие истории:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/science/27murd.html

Вдохновляет на работу над тезисом!

<...> Theodore Streleski, a Stanford mathematician. In 1978 he
bludgeoned his adviser, Karel deLeeuw, to death with a ball-peen
hammer after being told that, after 19 years of graduate school, he
wasn’t going to get his doctorate. Mr. Streleski received a sentence
of seven years based on a defense of diminished capacity, according to
newspaper accounts. He did not admit any remorse when he was freed,
but said he didn’t have any plans to kill again.

In 1989, Jens P. Hansen, a graduate student at the University of
Florida School of Medicine, went to the home of Arthur Kimura, his
professor of pathology, and shot him. Dr. Kimura was the chairman
of a committee that had just voted to terminate Mr. Hansen’s graduate
study, after seven years, with a master’s degree.

In 1992, just a year after a shooting at the University of Iowa in
which the gunman killed five people and himself, Frederick
M. Davidson, an engineering student at San Diego State, began the
defense of his master’s thesis by gunning down the three professors on
his committee. He is serving three life sentences.

But having a doctorate does not confer immunity from academic rage. In
1992 Valery Fabrikant, an engineering professor, went on a shooting
rampage at Concordia University in Montreal. He killed four of his
colleagues, whom he blamed for his failure to get tenure and for
trying to get him fired. Dr. Fabrikant is serving a life sentence and
doing research from his cell.

* * *

Про Фабриканта известная история. Кажется, он тот еще говнюк,
а остальные из списка какие-то фрики.