text: Texas Professor Warns That Guns in Classrooms Could Dumb Down Provocative Lessons Lisa Moore teaches gay and lesbian studies at the University of Texas, where she is a founder of Gun-Free UT. "Shutting down dissent and free speech," she says, "is the opposite of what should happen on a college campus." 
   
   On Thursday, around the time a mass shooting was unfolding at a small community college in Oregon, Lisa Moore, an English professor at the University of Texas, was leading a protest against guns on campus. She’s one of the founders of Gun Free UT, a group that sprang up in response to a controversial campus-carry bill that narrowly passed in the state legislature in May. The measure permits the concealed carry of guns in dorms, classrooms, and buildings at state universities and community colleges, while leaving individual schools some latitude to keep parts of their properties firearm-free. The bill, which was signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbot at a shooting range, makes Texas the eighth state to allow firearms on campus. (In another 23 states, colleges and universities set rules for themselves, but aren’t compelled to allow campus carry.) 
   
   Shortly afterward, Gun Free UT — which consists of faculty, students, staff, parents, and alumni — put together a petition on change.org, with the hope of sparking a mass movement against the law. So far, nearly 2,500 people have signed the petition, and the group has acquired almost 1,000 Facebook followers. About 200 UT faculty members have pledged to refuse guns in their classrooms. UT chancellor William McCraven, a former Navy Seal, had earlier spoken out against the measure, saying, “I want to make sure that we make our campuses as safe as possible. And the addition of concealed weapons on campus just [doesn’t] seem like a good idea to me.” 
   
   Hundreds of people showed up at Thursday’s Gun Free UT rally to voice their opposition to the law, which won’t take effect until August 1, 2016. If nothing else, Moore and the others in Gun Free UT hope to influence how their university system applies the new statute and keep weapons out of classrooms, dorms, and offices. In Moore’s view, how Texas college leaders sort out those details could lead to a grave shift in how students learn and teachers educate. 
   
   Has a student ever brought a gun into one of your classes? 
   
   No, but I’ve had some experiences that made me very grateful students weren’t allowed to carry guns on campus. I teach gay and lesbian studies. When I first got here in the early ’90s, I had an office on the ground floor of the English building, and I had a lot of posters up advocating for gay rights. One day, someone broke into the office, burned my gay rights posters, and then wrote “depravity kills” all over the windows. It was scary enough for me to know someone was willing to commit a serious act of vandalism. Were it the case that someone could have brought a gun into my office, during office hours, I think I wouldn’t have been able to do my job. 
   
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   More recently, during the semester after the Virginia Tech shootings in 2008, I was teaching an LGBT literature class. Sometimes the class riles up students, and I had a student that semester who believed, among other things, that gay people were going to hell. After a while, I guess as a kind of protest, he started coming to class and lying on the floor. He also started posting things online about not doing the reading and said that he would stop other students from doing the reading. I got nervous and went to my supervisor, and it turned out this student had problems with mental illness and had, in the past, been taken out of other classes. Subsequently, he was removed from my class, and I wound up teaching the rest of the semester in an undisclosed location, with an armed guard stationed nearby. 
   
   How will allowing guns in class change things for your students? 
   
   The classroom is a safe space, and we need security there. We need to be able to provide an atmosphere in which young people can become uncomfortable with certain ideas, and we don’t want someone who will, when they’re uncomfortable, be able to shoot off a firearm. These students are at an age when they’re still not fully in control of their impulses, and they’re away from home for the first time. They’re very vulnerable. 
   
   Now what can I do to make the students feel safe? The legislature wrote into the law that if someone tries to prevent someone from a carrying a gun into the class, they could be fined $1,500 dollars a day. So I can’t put up a sign. I mean, I’m allowed to ask students not to bring cell phones into my class. How could that principle not apply to guns? 
   
   So going forward, what will you do if you have a disruptive student who happens to be carrying a gun? 
   
   I don’t know. I’ve heard faculty say, ‘I’ll just give everyone A’s from now on. I’m not going to risk pissing someone off if they’re going to be armed.’ Others have said they’ll only lecture — they won’t allow classroom discussion because they don’t want things to get heated. Basically, we have to look at ruling out anything — any subject matter — that might seem provocative. It’s very strange. Shutting down dissent and free speech is the opposite of what should happen on a college campus. Personally, I don’t think I would confront a student who was disruptive if he was armed. I’d rather say, ‘Class is dismissed.’ 
   
   It seems difficult to avoid provocative subject matter entirely in a lot of classes. 
   
   It scares me to think about it. I am accustomed to equipping my students with the skills to negotiate difficult issues. Another class I teach is early British literature — a lot of writing from 14th and 15th centuries, a lot of which is about religious controversies. Naturally, this brings up religious controversies in the present. I try to endow my students with the ability to talk openly about religious differences; it’s an important skill for an educated citizenry. In the past, I’ve had students flip desks and leave the room. Which is fine, because something can be learned from that. But that’s different than a student pulling a gun — no one learns anything in that situation. And maybe the student who flips the desk might refrain from doing it if he thinks his classmate is armed. In that sort of environment, I’m going to be much less willing to go into deep and controversial issues, which is a huge loss, since, later on in life, they’ll have to grapple with deep and controversial issues. I try to teach them how to have an honest conversation with someone whose views they find repugnant. In order to learn those skills, you have to feel safe. In my women’s studies classes we talk about feminism, abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, and birth control. As you know, these aren’t exactly light topics. 
   
   How many professors do you know of that support campus carry? 
   
   I don’t know of any. And I’m in touch, via social media, with hundreds and hundreds of professors. Everyone is against it. Even people who are in favor of the right to carry are against the legislation. It’s not even something the people of Texas want. I can’t tell you how many parents we’ve heard from. They say they wouldn’t have sent their children to UT if they’d known about the law. 
   
   Have students spoken to you about the law? 
   
   I’ve brought it up in all of my classes, and the students are scared, almost universally. One student said, ‘I’m gay, and I already feel like a target.’ He’d been sheltered growing up, and thinking about being in class with someone who is armed and might hate LGBT people really scares him and makes him wonder if he made a mistake coming to UT. 
   
   Have any faculty members considered resigning over the issue? 
   
   No, and I don’t think that would be very helpful, or practical. It’s not as if there are a ton of academic job openings, which forces us to face the law. But more importantly, I love my job. And unlike the gun lobby and arms industry, who together created this legislation, I have my students’ best interests at heart. 
   
   [Photo: Flickr] ||||| 
   
   
   
   I fear our senses will become dulled to horrific news like Thursday’s, when a gunman opened fire on an Oregon community college, killing nine and wounding 10. I fear we will forget, again and again. 
   
   Oregon is one of the seven states that now have provisions allowing the carrying of concealed weapons on public post-secondary campuses. 
   
   Although this latest shooting took place halfway across the country, it hit close to home here in Austin, Texas. 
   
   New ‘campus carry’ law 
   
   Earlier this year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed SB 11, also known as the “campus carry” law. The law provides that license holders may carry concealed handguns in university buildings and classrooms, extending the reach of a previous law that allowed concealed handguns on university grounds. The law goes into effect Aug. 1, 2016 for public colleges and universities and a year later for community colleges. 
   
   
   
   As a member of the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, I wonder if we are just supposed to forget and carry on, pretending this is not an issue, writing it off as another instance of “how things are here in Texas”? 
   
   I fear that, given the letter of the law and the limited exceptions that it allows, we will have to get used to guns inside our classrooms. 
   
   I fear that the fact of sharing a classroom with students “packing heat” will stop shocking us as it now does. 
   
   I fear I should not even be writing this, as many gun rights activists take reactions to the extreme when an opposing view is offered. 
   
   A problem for recruitment ||||| Proponents of Texas’s new campus carry gun law say it could help save lives in an active shooter scenario, since those with guns could theoretically intervene or defend themselves. But that rationale has lots of critics -- many of the them faculty members -- who say more guns won’t reduce violence and weapons have no place on college campuses. And the law itself has already led to one faculty casualty at the University of Texas at Austin, with the resignation of an actively teaching professor emeritus of economics who says being on a campus with untold numbers of firearms is simply not worth the risk. 
   
   “As much as I have loved the experience of teaching and introducing these students to economics at the university, I have decided not to continue,” Daniel S. Hamermesh, the Sue Killam Professor Emeritus, wrote in a letter to university administrators this week. “With a huge group of students my perception is that the risk that a disgruntled student might bring a gun into the classroom and start shooting at me has been substantially enhanced by the concealed-carry law.” 
   
   He added, “I cannot believe that I am the only potential or current faculty member who is aware of and disturbed by this heightened risk. … Anything that can be done to mitigate this risk should be implemented. Applying this law broadly will detract from both faculty well-being and from the national and international reputation of this university.” 
   
   After failed attempts in previous legislative sessions, Texas lawmakers passed Senate Bill 11 earlier this year, making it legal for licensed gun owners to carry concealed weapons into college and university buildings, including classrooms. The law takes effect next summer for public universities and in 2017 for community colleges. Seven other states have laws allowing handguns on campus. 
   
   Hamermesh, who’s taught at the university since 1993 and retired last year, was contracted to teach a large introductory economics class of about 500 students this semester and in each of the next two fall terms. He’s breaking his agreement to avoid teaching in Texas after guns become legal in his classroom. 
   
   Hamermesh said in an interview that, as a retiree, deciding to leave Texas is much easier that it is for other professors who are just starting or in the middle of their careers. But his decision and the factors that motivated it are real -- not just symbolic, he said. 
   
   “Partly because I have other alternatives and partly because I’m 72 and need the money not very much, it’s fairly easy for me to do this,” he said. “But with the number of kids I have in my class, the risk to me is greater than for people who have 30 kids in their class …. With campus carry the risk increased and I simply don’t wish to face that risk.” 
   
   Hamermesh has publicly advocated against campus carry before, so he said his decision wasn’t just motivated by the recent mass shooting at a community college in Oregon, a campus carry state, which killed nine and wounded nine. 
   
   But other faculty members in Texas have become more vocal since the Umpqua Community College shooting -- the third-most-deadly campus shooting ever, with the second-worst occurring at UT Austin in 1966 -- and another recent on-campus shooting involving two faculty members in Mississippi, another campus carry state. 
   
   Javier Auyero, the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Professor of Latin American Sociology at Austin, authored an op-ed arguing against campus carry this week that ran in Time, among other outlets. “Although this latest shooting took place halfway across the country, it hit close to home here in Austin,” Auyero wrote. “With campus carry, social, political or academic interactions will have the potential to explode in lethal violence. We knew that before the campus carry law passed, and we know it now.” 
   
   Auyero is member of the group UT Gun Free, which has held several anti-campus carry forums on campus in recent weeks and garnered nearly 4,600 signatures on an anti-campus carry petition. He referred questions on Hamermesh’s departure to the group’s organizers. Paloma Diaz, a scholarly programs director and faculty liaison with the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies on campus, said via email that Hamermesh’s decision “sends a strong message.” 
   
   Another member of UT Gun Free, Lisa Moore, a professor of English, also has spoken out against the campus carry law in the wake of the Oregon shooting. In an interview with The Trace, Moore explained how she thought the law would inhibit classroom discussions, especially those on more controversial topics, at the expense of academic freedom and student learning. 
   
   “I try to endow my students with the ability to talk openly about religious differences; it’s an important skill for an educated citizenry,” she said. “In the past, I’ve had students flip desks and leave the room. Which is fine, because something can be learned from that. But that’s different than a student pulling a gun -- no one learns anything in that situation. And maybe the student who flips the desk might refrain from doing it if he thinks his classmate is armed. In that sort of environment, I’m going to be much less willing to go into deep and controversial issues, which is a huge loss, since, later on in life, they’ll have to grapple with deep and controversial issues.” 
   
   David Smith-Soto, a senior lecturer of multimedia journalism at the University of Texas at El Paso, started protesting SB 11 earlier this year, when he put a “no guns” sign outside his classroom door. He made his message more public with an op-ed in The Huffington Post following the Mississippi shooting at Delta State University, just a day before the Umpqua shooting. 
   
   “It is not our job as university professors to engage in gun battles in our classrooms,” he wrote. “In a civil society of laws, we must depend on law enforcement to battle the gunmen. That is why I consider the campus carry law a betrayal by our elected officials. Instead of protecting us and contributing to the common good, they are putting us in mortal danger. While they revel in this little victory in their make-believe world of right-wing politics, we are left facing real guns in our lecture halls.” 
   
   Smith-Soto also criticized an aspect of the new law in which institutions are left to define which spaces on campus will allow guns and which won’t (blanket bans are prohibited), calling it proof that the law as a whole is “bogus.” 
   
   “Why should one part of the campus or one program at the university be selected to be gun-free?” he wrote. “Would that be because the presence of guns is disruptive, dangerous, threatening? Then that reasoning should apply to the entire campus. It implies that carrying a concealed gun on campus is so dangerous that some areas, perhaps programs such as child care and some laboratories, should be gun-free. Therefore, the entire university should be gun-free.” 
   
   In an interview, Smith-Soto said he still has his “no gun” sign up in his classroom, but that he’s moved it inside the door as not to foist the policy on other professors, since it could be illegal. 
   
   He said enforcing his policy could cost him his job, but that he’ll keep doing it. 
   
   “I intend to cancel the class if anybody comes in and [says] he or she has a gun, and I’ll continue to do that until there are no guns in my classroom,” he said. “If I have to keep canceling class they’ll have to fire me, I guess.” 
   
   Mary Aldridge, executive director of the Texas Faculty Association, which represents the interests of college faculty and support staff, said the vast majority of the group’s members opposed campus carry in a summer poll. And opposition has only grown louder in light of recent events, she said. 
   
   “Faculty on many of our campuses are actively involved in trying to mitigate the rules,” Aldridge said. “There are faculty I know who are looking for jobs elsewhere but for obvious reasons don't want to make this public until they find something.” 
   
   Gary Susswein, a spokesman for the UT Austin, said via email that the university, as required by the new law, is gathering input from faculty, staff and others about how to comply with the campus carry law while ensuring safety. He said the university understands the concerns Hamermesh and other faculty members have raised about their classroom safety, and asks “that the campus community continue to work with university leadership in developing policies for implementing this new state law.” 
   
   Susswein noted that the University of Texas System's chancellor, Adm. William McRaven, retired, shared his position on campus carry -- that it would make campuses less safe, not more -- with the legislature before it made it law. 
   
   Hamermesh said while the university might have done more to advocate against the legislation, he in no way blamed it for the new law. 
   
   “This is Texas,” he said. “These [legislators] will do anything they can to cater to the right-wingers.” 
   
   Asked if he thought other faculty members might follow suit and leave the state, Hamermesh guessed they wouldn’t. But he said recruiting top faculty members might be harder with the specter of guns in their classrooms. 
   
   “Faculty are a very risk-averse group, except when it comes to ideas,” he said. “This might scare away good people.”
target: – Starting next summer, licensed gun owners will be able to carry concealed weapons into buildings at public universities in Texas; in 2017, the same will be true at community colleges. And at least one professor is not happy about the prospect of guns in his classroom: He's resigning over the "campus carry" gun law passed earlier this year, Inside Higher Ed reports. "As much as I have loved the experience of teaching and introducing these students to economics at the university, I have decided not to continue," Daniel S. Hamermesh wrote in a letter to University of Texas at Austin administrators this week. "With a huge group of students my perception is that the risk that a disgruntled student might bring a gun into the classroom and start shooting at me has been substantially enhanced by the concealed-carry law." Hamermesh is a Sue Killam Professor Emeritus of economics at the university, and he continues in the letter that he "cannot believe that I am the only potential or current faculty member who is aware of and disturbed by this heightened risk." But, as Inside Higher Ed notes, supporters of the new law say it will make campuses safer, because those carrying guns could defend against an active shooter. Seven other states have similar "campus carry" laws, including Oregon, where a shooter recently killed nine people at a community college. Since that shooting, other Texas faculty members have voiced their opposition to the state's new gun law, including a UT El Paso lecturer who's been protesting the law (including with a "no guns" sign outside his classroom) and another UT Austin professor who gave an interview warning that the law could "shut down free speech" in classrooms. Yet another wrote a Time op-ed on the subject this week; that professor is a member of UT Gun Free, an organization that is circulating an anti-campus carry petition and has held several anti-campus carry forums.