She killed them because even affirmative action wasn’t enough to get her tenure in a second tier university. After having enjoyed unearned applause all of her life she become homocidal when reality began to intrude.
Academics is absolutely full of people with huge egos. People with those types of egos have a hard time losing. That's in part why universities are not meritocracies. In order for meritocracy to work, people have to accept when others genuinely do better than them. This often doesn't happen in universities. When someone does better, the answer is to find a way around this, politically or otherwise. Academics is full of people whose mothers told them they were 'special', and they never matured enough to get passed the need to believe this about themselves. They must perpetuate this self image, at the expense of their own lives and happiness, or at the expense of those who stand in the way of their egos.