Tim Dunlop had already blogged this, but I just got the following email

“The Vice-Chancellor has asked for the following message to be drawn to the attention of all staff:

You may already have heard on the radio news of a fatal shooting incident at Monash University.

Two people have been shot dead and eight others injured in a shooting incident on the sixth floor of the Robert Menzies Building at Monash University earlier this morning. Two of the injured have been taken to the Alfred Hospital’s trauma unit.

A man has been arrested following the incident and the Homicide Squad is investigating.”

This kind of thing (not as bad as this) has happened at other universities. I don’t have anything much to say about it, but I feel that I should record it.

Update: This won’t be news for Australian readers, but I felt I should record it anyway. The gunman was stopped by the heroic action of an econometrics lecturer, Lee Gordon-Brown, who tackled him, with the assistance of three students, and was shot in the process. He’s currently in hospital. University lecturing is not normally a job that calls for heroism and I doubt that any of us could say for sure how we would react in such a situation, but Gordon-Brown is an inspiration to us all. There’s a full story here.