Spite Repaid with Spite: The Metaphysical Roots of the Academic Massacre at Brown and MIT

According to investigators, the perpetrator, Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente, and his victim, the MIT professor, Nuno Loureiro, had been student peers in a prestigious physics/engineering program at Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal’s premier engineering school, between 1995 and 2000. Federal authorities confirmed that they were both enrolled in the same program. But while Loureiro graduated in 2000 from the elite physics program, archived termination records issued by the school’s president indicated that Neves-Valente was dismissed from his position at the Lisbon-based university that same year.

While Loureiro joined the MIT faculty in 2016 and went on to a stellar career in physics, garnering honors and awards in both academia and beyond, Neves-Valente appears to have achieved nothing. In 2015, Loureiro received the American Physical Society’s Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics Award, and later received the National Science Foundation Career Award in 2017. In 2022, he became an American Physical Society Fellow and won the prestigious Presidential Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2025. At MIT, Loureiro won the Outstanding Professor Award in 2020, the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2022, and the Stanislaw Ulam Distinguished Scholar Award in 2023.

In contrast, after suffering a humiliating dismissal in 2000 from that same Instituto Superior Tecnico, Neves-Valente struggled to find an alternate route to complete his graduate degree before enrolling in a PhD program in physics at Brown University in the fall semester of 2000. Arriving in the United States in August 2000 on an F-1 student visa specifically to attend the graduate program, Neves-Valente enrolled exclusively in physics courses at Brown, but ended his Brown academic career abruptly when he took a leave of absence in April 2001. There is no information available on why he left the Brown graduate program, but it is clear that he officially withdrew from Brown on July 31, 2003, without receiving a degree. It appears that Neves-Valente left the United States in 2003 but returned to the United States in 2017 after being issued a “diversity immigrant visa” and was granted permanent legal residency that same year. While there is no information available on his work history since his return to the U.S. in 2017, news reports indicate that he had been living in Miami-Dade (near Aventura) and returned to New England a few months ago.

Envy often emerges in academic environments where status and achievement are highly visible and celebrated. Such envy is not just personal jealousy. Rather, envy can become a corrosive force that drives individuals to seek the destruction of those they perceive as having attained something that they should have attained. In academia, this dynamic can intensify, as constant comparison fosters resentment and a desire to diminish the object of envy by any means necessary. For the killer, the MIT professor’s achievements likely transcended mere professional success, becoming a diabolical mirror that reflected his own perceived failures. This perspective helps explain how the killer might have viewed the professor’s success as an unbearable reminder of his own shortcomings, leading to a violent response. (RELATED: Mamdani Markets Envy to Sell a Marxist Utopia)

Several years ago, public intellectual and writer Gore Vidal, known for his witty sayings, famously admitted that “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” While Vidal may have made the remark as a joke, the truth is that there are many people who feel a sense of envious resentment whenever a close acquaintance or a competitor accomplishes something extraordinary — something that they thought they should have accomplished. Joseph Epstein, author of the brief treatise Envy, would be unsurprised by Vidal’s openly expressed resentment. He suggested that American academics are the “most likely candidates” for existing in a state of resentment: “They feel themselves simultaneously greatly superior and vastly undervalued, above their countrymen, yet isolated from them and insufficiently rewarded and revered by them.”

As one who has spent the past three decades in academia, documenting the deadly consequences of academic envy in The Politics of Envy (Crisis Books), I tend to understand the resentment and toxic envy that some failed academics experience. Research on academic envy indicates that the successful career of a colleague or rival can inspire such envy, resentment, and fear that these spiteful individuals actually try to eliminate that person either by destroying their rival’s career — or worse. Philosopher Max Scheler, author of the seminal study Ressentiment, describes the powerlessness that emerges when one recognizes that he cannot change the circumstances he finds himself in but refuses to resign himself to them.

Like the sin of pride, the sin of envy is a narcissistic preoccupation with self. The truly envious are the truly prideful who believe that no one is more deserving of advantages and rewards than they. Echoing the ‘Invidia’ of Dante’s Purgatorio, the motivations of the killer appear to demonstrate how a soul consumed by the sight of another’s goodness can eventually seek only to destroy it. In some ways, envy is the worst of the deadly sins because it leads to so many of the others. The resentment that accompanies envy often erupts in anger and resentful rage, and it is inextricably intertwined with pride.

Envy derives from the Latin word Invidia, which means “non-sight.” This etymology suggests that envy arises from and creates a form of blindness or lack of perspective. In Anthony Esolen’s translation of Purgatorio, Dante Alighieri had the envious punished by having to wear penitential grey cloaks, their eyes sewn shut with iron wire because the truly envious are blind to the goodness, truth, and beauty around them. Dante warned that the envious are blind to reason and love, spending their days tormented by resentment toward those who possess that which they covet. It is an enforced blindness so that the once-envious souls can no longer look at others with envy and hatred. (RELATED: The Politics of Envy Always Ends With the Guillotine)

In the Book of Wisdom, we are told that it is through “the envy of the devil, death entered the world” (Wisdom 2:24). In Genesis, envy is portrayed as a destroyer of happiness and contentment — from the story of Eve’s envious desire to have the wisdom of God, to the first deadly sin of the murder of Abel by his brother. It was Satan’s envy of the love that God had for his new creation, and that Adam and Eve had for each other, that led him to destroy the innocence in the Garden — an envy that was predicted as Adam sadly admits: “that malicious foe, envying our happiness, and of his own despairing, seeks to work our woe and shame by sly assault.”

Milton’s Paradise Lost presents envy as the serpent in the garden. Consumed with envy toward the Son of God and His creation, Milton’s Satan experienced God’s love itself as envy. Envious of the awesome power of the Creator, the sight of the Garden and the happiness and love of God’s creation fills the devil with hateful envy — and a desire to destroy that creation. In his envious rage, Satan begins to believe that God created all of that in order to inspire envy.

It was Satan’s envy — his hatred for the good, the true, and the beautiful — that moved him to corrupt Adam and Eve’s love for God and for each other. We are often taught that it was Eve’s pride — her wish to be as wise as God — that was the original sin. Yet in Book 9 of Paradise Lost, Milton reminds us that it was Satan’s envy of “this new Favorite of Heaven, this Man of Clay, Son of despite, Whom us the more to spite his Maker rais’d from dust: spite then with spite is best repaid.” It was envy that set off a battle in which “spite then with spite is best repaid.”

Neves-Valente’s fixation on academia at Brown and MIT appears likely to have evolved into an unhealthy obsession, fueled by constant comparisons to those who had achieved — or in the case of the young students at Brown University, were achieving — what he could not. Each rejection and failure likely deepened his sense of inadequacy, eroding his self-worth and amplifying feelings of injustice. Instead of seeking constructive solutions, he spiraled into a mindset dominated by blame, targeting individuals and institutions he believed had conspired against him. This distorted worldview, rooted in envy, transformed ambition into bitterness and ultimately into rage. Over time, his inability to reconcile personal shortcomings with external success led to a psychological collapse, where violence appeared as the only means to reclaim control and assert significance.

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