A PowerPoint Slide Advises Professors to Alter Teaching to Pacify Armed Students

[SecularMotion]

A presentation at a faculty forum at the University of Houston that circulated Tuesday on Twitter has raised pressing questions about how professors will adapt to Texas’ controversial new campus-carry law.

A PowerPoint slide in the presentation, arranged by the president of the central campus’s Faculty Senate, Jonathan Snow, provides suggestions for faculty members to alter their behavior, among other things, when the law takes effect for all four-year public colleges in the state, on August 1.

Opponents of the law, which will allow people with concealed-handgun permits to carry their weapons into public-university buildings, seized on the image as proof that many professors will feel they need to change their curricula or tiptoe around emotionally volatile students for fear of attack.

In a statement, the university said the slide and presentation were not endorsed by the university. Houston has created a 15-member working group that is crafting an official policy, which is expected to be released in the next week.

http://chronicle.com/article/A-PowerPoint-Slide-Advises/235418

[lamp_shade]

1. This reads like something out of The Onion. I'm confused.

[rjsquirrel]

2. Fuck those "students"

If I lived in Texas (my home state of which I am deeply ashamed) I would insist the university arm me and train me like a cop before I'd teach there.

I'm a. UT alum and just wrote them out of my will.

[Igel]

3. You get hypothetical training for hypothetical students.

For your hypothetical job.

There. Done.

I'd also point out that this was at University of Houston, not any branch of the University of Texas system.

[rjsquirrel]

4. Yeah I know

UT already caved. I'm just using the occasion of UH going to the dark side to slam the Longhorns.

Faculty will leave both. Luckily I'm an old tenured prof in a sane place.

[sweetapogee]

5. Faculty will leave both

that is the plan. This is not an accident.

[friendly_iconoclast]

7. Only the delicate flowers. Those that can read history, and understand statistics will stay.

[rjsquirrel]

8. Yeah right

No, the best and brightest will be leaving.

[friendly_iconoclast]

11. They're not really "the best and brightest" if they can't interpret historical records

[friendly_iconoclast]

6. Yeah! Ride that moral panic for everything it's worth!

Last edited Sat Feb 27, 2016, 06:18 PM - Edit history (1)

Here's a question your sort has been dodging for five years, AFAIK.

Do *you* have an answer?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php/en.wikipedia.org/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=118x382537#382537

What *empirical* evidence do you have that legal CCW weapons at colleges are harmful?

And, yes, in this instance I am looking for confirmable media accounts.


P.S.: I'm going to set the over/under on the first appearance of an account of illegal gun carriage/use passed off as legal carriage/use at the twentieth post.

The pearl claspers seem to be fond of faith-promoting rumor,
and I expect an account of a 'legal' gun owner (who actually wasn't) doing something stupid and/or criminal to appear in short order.

Let's see how long that takes, shall we?

Then (as now), the subject attracted lots of shouting, handwaving, posturing, Colonism...

"Sergeant Colon had had a broad education. He'd been to the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands to Reason, and was now a post-graduate student at the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me."

Terry Pratchett, Jingo

...and little to no actual evidence

[rjsquirrel]

9. We haven't had them

for long enough to know.

We will see. I am glad I'm not a lab rat for this bullshit. I teach in a rational institution in a sane state.

Bunch of macho dick waving is all you have. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

[friendly_iconoclast]

10. The five years since I first posted that, and the decade-plus of legal college CCW elsewhere...

...before that weren't long enough to tell us whether it is dangerous?

You are either in the grip of, or helping to promulgate, a moral panic.
Which is it?