In the gun blogging business, some headlines jump right out at you. Like newsweek.com‘s post Will Guns on Campus Lead to Grade Inflation? The simple, indeed inescapable answer to that question is “no.” If you need more, “no it won’t.” And yet there it is: an article that cries out for fisking. (There’s a execrable pun there but I’ll demure.) “Texas college professors may soon face a dilemma between upholding professional ethics and protecting their lives,” Jessica Smartt Gullion [above] opines. And so it begins . . .

The Texas Legislature appears poised to approve a bill that would allow college students to carry firearms to class. Once the law, called “campus carry,” is passed, public universities in Texas will not be allowed to ban guns on their campuses, although private schools could enact their own prohibitions . . .

With this proposed law, a question coming up for many academics is whether they would be forced to give A grades to undeserving students, just so they can avoid being shot.

This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. [ED: Yes. Yes it is.] In my five years as a college professor, I have had experiences with a number of emotionally distressed students who resort to intimidation when they receive a lesser grade than what they feel they deserve.

You may want to note that Ms. Gullion is an assistant professor of sociology at the co-ed Texas Woman’s University. You can’t make this stuff up. Well, not like Professor Gullion makes up the intimidation of which she speaks. Or did she? Here’s her account of a threat which made her thank God (should she believe in one) that TWU’s campus is a gun-free zone.

One evening in a graduate course, after I handed back students’ papers, a young woman stood up and pointed at me. “This is unacceptable!” she screamed as her body shook in rage.

She moved toward the front of the class, waving her paper in my face, and screamed again, “Unacceptable!” After a heated exchange, she left the room and stood outside the door sobbing.

All this was over receiving a B on a completely low-stakes assignment.

What followed was even more startling. The following week, the student brought along a muscle-bound man to class. He watched me through the doorway window for the entire three hours of the class, with his arms folded across his chest.

And if this wasn’t enough, the young woman’s classmates avoided me on campus because, they said, they were afraid of getting caught in the crossfire should she decide to shoot me.

After that, every time she turned in a paper I cringed and prayed that it was good so that I wouldn’t have to give her anything less than an A.

Even if we accept this story as fact, Assistant Professor Gullion was not threatened with a firearm. The gun-related threat is presented as hearesay evidence. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I call bullshit. And even if it isn’t bullshit, there’s no indication that Assistant Professor Gullion or her students took any administrative or police action against the agitated student. Kinda like the James Holmes thing. But I digress . . .

Learning from this experience, I now give papers back only at the end of the class or just “forget” to bring them with me. I was lucky that the student didn’t have a gun in my classroom. Other professors have not been so lucky.

Last year, a student at Purdue shot his instructor in front of a classroom of students. In another incident, in 2009, a student at Northern Virginia Community College tried to shoot his math professor on campus. And in 2000 a graduate student at the University of Arkansas shot his English professor.

In each of these states, carrying handguns on campus was illegal at the time of the shooting, although a bill was introduced in Arkansas earlier this year to allow students to carry guns.

Is it me or did Assistant Professor Gullion undercut her own argument there in one fell swoop? As these educators were shot in gun-free zones, doesn’t that prove that gun-free zones are ineffective? Yup. As the sociologist herself acknowledges.

We know that some students will carry guns whether it is legal or not. One study found that close to 5 percent of undergraduates had a gun on campus and that almost 2 percent had been threatened with a firearm while at school. [Note: All of the study’s authors are affiliated with the notoriously anti-gun Harvard School of Public Health.]

We could talk about the possibility that allowing legal gun owners to carry legally on campus may have deterred these attacks, but why bother? The only rhetorical defense of her position left is that more professors would be shot if concealed or open carry was legal on campus. Needless to say, she goes there.

Allowing students to carry weapons to class strips off a layer of safety. Students are often emotional and can be volatile when it comes to their GPAs. Who would want to give a student a low grade and then get shot for it?

A suicidal sociologist? JK. Anyway, by her own admission, the “layer of safety” of which she speaks is an illusion. In the same way that the perceived threat of death by low grading is statistically insignificant and, therefore, equally fantastic. Which is why Assistant Professor Gullion’s anecdotal evidence of personal experience with grade intimidation sound so ridiculous.

An international student once cried in my office and begged me to change his F to an A, as without it his country would no longer pay for him to be in the U.S. I didn’t. He harassed me by posting threatening messages on Facebook.

So the question is, Will we soon see a new sort of grade inflation, with students earning a 4.0 GPA with their firepower rather than brainpower? And if so, what sort of future citizenry will we be building on our campuses?

Again, the answer is no, rendering the last question irrelevant, misleading and, well, delusional. As an examination of those universities that allow campus carry would indicate. Perhaps the Assistant Professor would like to research that? No, I thought not.

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61 COMMENTS

  1. For the love of Odin, Utah has has had campus carry for over 8 years.

    Has this been happening there? No.

    Opinion discarded. I award you no points and may god have mercy on your soul.

  2. Of course, everyone knows that someone who would otherwise have no problem committing premeditated murder over a graded assignment is terrified of the slap on the wrist they’ll receive from carrying into a no gun zone.

  3. Just stating the obvious, but what makes these “academics” think that if someone wants to shoot them, that a law preventing them from bringing a gun onto campus would stop them? Heck, lets even entertain for a minute that the “gun free zone” laws magically actually worked. Whats going to stop an angry and mentally disturbed student from following you from campus to your home to murder you?

    • Now, now there, is not very sporting to bring up real world situations and apply a logical analysis to their blogs. We also frown on shooting fish in barrels.

    • If simply writing a law or rule stops criminals, why do universities in most states have their own police forces? Why would we even need police at all?

  4. Point 1: To be fair, I’ve seen nuttiness first hand from university students. Maybe it’s the pressure? Maybe they are young and many are not emotionally mature yet? Anyway, the main thing I worried about was being falsely accused. This was at the height of the sexual harassment witch hunts, and holding office hours in public places like coffee shops was recommended for all male instructors. Still, I never saw or heard of any acts of more straightforward violence. Never.

    2. If you can’t get an A in a sociology class the honest way, there’s something wrong with you in the first place.

    3. re “…close to 5 percent of undergraduates had a gun on campus and that almost 2 percent had been threatened with a firearm while at school.” RF said it gently, but I’m not a high-profile blogger so I can be more direct: horseshit.

    • If the young lady just can’t stand it, then perhaps she should resign her position and get busy in the kitchen making sandwiches. Seriously. Lord knows I try not to be so sexist about it, but she just makes it impossible. Does she not realize that it’s babbling like this that actually gives credence to the pre-20th century concept of hysteria? I mean, but damn!

      One of these days I ought to audit one of them New Age psych or sociology classes, just for the opportunity to ‘discuss’ this sort of silliness with the good professor and see if he or she is one of the smart ones or as with Ms. Gullion, dumb and can’t help it. It might even be entertaining.

      Tom

      PS: left out one tidbit. I’ll include a B as well as an A. There are still some teachers out there worth studying under. Not many, but some.

    • I’ve taught as an adjunct professor at community colleges, discount-rate four-year schools, glorified trade schools, and an ABA-accredited law school. I’ve flunked students and endured the consequences. I’m not the strongest personality around, truth be told, but I never got as paranoid about it as the half-misnamed Professor. Her inability to rationally handle such reactions is just one reason why she probably has no business teaching at a real university (her article reals several others). But if she’s that scared–well, sociology is pretty much BS anyway, it will likely make absolutely no discernible difference in the real world if she gives ’em all A’s anyway.

  5. So Professor [not very]Smartt [very] Gullible acknowledges that 8 other states already allow campus carry. Did she think to look at their experience? She probably did, but decided not to as it almost certainly wouldn’t support her thesis. Once you can access the comments (it’s kind of tricky, for me), it is somewhat encouraging. All but one recognized the utter stupidity of the professor’s babbling.

  6. What kind of citizenry? The kind that will no have adequate job skills; be either not hired outright, or fired for failing to do their job. Soooo… not too much different than what we are seeing out of many college graduates now, anyway.

    College professors still think their grades to students mean something in real life. Their leaned knowledge and skills will define students in real life. Make every course in every college pass/fail, let the workplace sort them out, problem solved.

    • Agreed. I work for one of the larger software companies in the world, and one of my responsibilities is to conduct technical interviews. I ignore college achievements, for I found it the worst indicator of skill. Usually, the candidates with less than a bachelors degree out perform people with masters degrees. I get tons of candidates fresh out of college who cannot even do the most basic tasks of their given specialty. These professors are teaching outdated skills and theories that only matter to academia.

  7. Did she just admit she forced a student to lose a scholarship after he asked for her help? What a racist #%*^*. So much for cultural relativity… Where this kid came from a developing nation and probably had both linguistic and educational challenges he was facing. What she should have done was to force him to do enough extra work to make up for the mess and so he wouldn’t have to return to a life of abject poverty that Assitant Professor of Asshole studies has never dealt with.

    I taught at the college level for five years and always made time to help students who asked. And those that didn’t I flunked. There is a deep tyranny in academics amongst profs like this who really on emotional guilt tripping to get their way rather than sound logic and teaching methods.

    • Or maybe the kid should have tried a little harder to get a decent grade. An F in any class is complete lack of effort. The problem with this country is the handout mentality. Everyone gets a ribbon for playing. Bullshit you get the ribbon for busting ass and puting in work. Its created a quasi socialist America that is a far cry from what the founders wanted.

  8. Yep, that article is pretty good evidence of the dumbing down our nation’s institutions of higher learning.

  9. Ah, the educated elite moulding the impressionable minds of the young adults.

    It’s not that these delusional, illogical emotionally stunted, immature and irrational ….individuals have absolute power in teaching the next generation.

    But how did the parents of those impressionable young minds allow their children, with the huge amounts of thier hard earned money, come under the control of such illogical, delusional, emotionally stunted, and irrational ….. individuals?

  10. Wow if this is what we can expect from “educated” professors I would hazard to say her students already receive grade inflation… Heck I’m shocked that after a semester of listening to her drone on incoherently some of them don’t accidentaly run run over themselves while getting into their cars or haven’t forgotten how to keep breathing for long periods of time.

    Society pays these people money to “teach” and yet somehow we wonder why America is circling the drain.

  11. Really, she is a Sociology Professor ? She deserves and F for this article and she needs to sign up for a class in logic and common sense.

  12. A student can already right now this very moment terrorize and threaten a professor to give them a better grade. That has nothing at all to do with laws and everything to do with criminal and deviant mental behavior. This “professor” is an absolute embarrassment to all of academia and her degree should be revoked.

    • You have to wonder just what she thinks Mr. Muscle-bound could have done to her with just his bare hands, if it came to that…but I guess she’s one of those “you aren’t really dead unless you were shot with a gun” types.

  13. I guess since she is an assistant professor, she hasn’t been around long enough to know that students have been shooting, stabbing and using bows and arrows on professors for the last 20 years. In fact, a University Alabama assistant professor that failed to get tenure shot and killed several of her colleagues at a faculty meeting. She should look at incidents at San Diego State and Appalachian School of Law for examples. Plus, she needs to stick to the HPV stuff. If a student is going to shoot her, the law isn’t going to matter because they are already breaking the law.

  15. So what if campus carry causes grade inflation? Nothing will change.

    Even if every student gets straight As, the teachers will still be incapable of teaching, the students will still be incapable of obtaining a job or making a living, and the students’ debt will still be a burden for the entire lifespans of everyone currently enrolled in American universities.

    Here’s a better idea. Instead of sending youths to four year colleges to learn Sociology, Women’s Studies or other useless crap, send the same young people to technical schools to learn plumbing, electrical and other useful occupations. They’ll make plenty of money and won’t be paying off their student debt for the next hundred years.

    Most of all, they won’t be bullied by the extreme leftist, man-hating, white-hating, America-hating faculty and administration.

  17. Without a doubt in my mind the stupidest story I have read here at TTAG.
    Grades over, and or getting shot.
    My lord what will these fools come up with next??

  18. For the love of God how hard is it to realize that if the shooters she used as example had known they would have faced armed opposition would shuredly not have even attempted such an act?

  19. This worthless excuse for an assistant professor should be forced to refund the class tuition to every student who had the misfortune to be forced to endure one of her “classes”.

    What a load of horseshite.

    As others have said, someone with her limited functional intellect should be directed to the kitchen area and taught to do something useful, like making pies.

    God help us if our kids absorb ANY of what she spouts.

  20. So if this actually happened and she was really in fear, why didn’t she call the cops. She could have called at any point in the 3 hour class where muscle man was staring her down.

  23. And if this wasn’t enough, the young woman’s classmates avoided me on campus because, they said, they were afraid of getting caught in the crossfire should she decide to shoot me.

    But there’s currently a prohibition on campus carry, so how could she possibly shoot her professor? Or is the professor suggesting that crazy people who want to commit crimes will ignore the law and carry guns illegally?

  24. So, let’s see…how many logical/rhetorical fallacies has this educated idiot used in her article?

    Slippery slope — From the headline to the conclusion, this is a very steep and hysterically slippery slope: straight from guns to the ignominious death of all college education.
    Black-or-white — There is no choice: either colleges ban guns, or mayhem will result. (Never mind that on-campus carry has been legal in several states for years, with no adverse effects.)
    Anecdotal — She highlights two scary personal experiences, asserting that they prove her point when in truth, student-on-professor “gun violence” is vanishingly rare. And besides, even if she would give everyone an A out of pure fear, her fellow academics could very well have the backbone and academic integrity to, well, just keep doing their jobs.
    Cherrypicking — A couple of shooting incidents are highlighted in order to further obscure the truth that statistically, student-on-professor “gun violence” is vanishingly rare.

    I’m sure there are more, but I don’t have time. These are just the easy ones.

  25. Just can’t wrap my mind around anti’s. Because there’s danger, deny everyone the right to protect themselves.

  27. If only we could use stupidity to generate electricity, the energy crisis would be over forever.

    • Maybe we can bottle “STUPID” and and power space flight. We could achieve light speed and beyond.

      She has Smartt as part of her name. Is that like some guy named “Tiny” and before you meet him you now he is not really tiny at all?

      Just when you think it is safe to venture out into public, you wonder if she wears headphones with the repeating message , “Breathe In, Breathe out” all day long.

      And this is why the younger generation votes for idiots who also think Islands can capsize, and guns have heartbeats and brains.

  28. I hear that women will be allowed to report crimes at Texas campuses. Can you imagine what will happen to make professors who fail to give out the desired grades? Allegations of sexual harassment or assault can destroy career, even when they are clearly false. When all those women – 50% or the campus or more – have the ability to destroy lives with just one simple lie, professors will have to choose between a upholding there professional ethics or protecting their livelihoods.

  30. Gee, without the M16A1 rifle given to me free by the NRA, I would have never graduated from the 6th grade in 1969.

  31. crazy people are crazy, gun or no gun. if they want to hurt you, aint no law going to shield you from them

  32. Errr… I’d tell you I expected something other than a vacuous line of banal bull from a vapid “highly educated” leader of our illustrious educational system. Except that I spent much of my life growing up, & well into adulthood, in close proximity to institutes of higher learning. Color me surprised? Not in the least.

  33. I’m a 30 year old Junior, guess I’m just too immature, emotional, and inexperienced to carry a firearm on campus. Everywhere else is fine though. Makes sense.

  34. Because of course three shootings across the United States, over the course of 15 years, and all in gun free zones obviously means that the campuses will run red with blood if those over the age of 21 (including the staff) can lawfully possess the means to defend themselves….

  35. Wouldn’t the other students avoiding her be caught in the line of fire? It wouldn’t be cross fire unless she shot back, would it?

  36. That professor is an idiot. First, if someone threatens you, you call it in to the police. That police report can easily be used as a springboard for other actions like expulsion, restraining orders (against both girl and boyfriend), etc. Second, if your university is more concerned with the money they get from that girl’s tuition than protecting you, it’s time you found a different job. Third, if you’re that scared, wear a bullet proof vest and concealed carry.

    I don’t get people. They act as if it’s acceptable to live in fear of one’s life over some sort of imaginary social norm or right. It’s not, and that’s why we have laws, and why you can also arm yourself for protection.

    Fourth, how can the professor not connect the dots? Shootings are happening even in gun free zones: maybe she’d realize that gun free zones don’t keep the unarmed any safer. Maybe she’d carry a gun herself for protection and advocate that we be allowed to carry on campus. I guess not, though.

    My take on this: she’s going to die a hippie liberal democrat because she refuses to challenge her own beliefs (not on politics, but on guns). I would say that political views in many people can’t easily be changed, and this is an example of how and why.

    • Plus, if that professor in his/her educated brilliance, feels students might be a threat, then he/she should tool up and be prepared to take care of your own business, not try to restrict me, a thousand miles away, so that you can ignore your responsibility.

  37. I would like to ask her what this statement means. “Once the law, called “campus carry,” is passed, public universities in Texas will not be allowed to ban guns on their campuses, although private schools could enact their own prohibitions.”
    Is it possible all statutes are for the government and not for the private Man? Is that what she’s saying?

  39. She related 3 shootings in 15 years. What she did not relate was whether any of those shootings was legal. Because, I hate to be a traitor to the cause, here, but if shooting your professor, due to a bad grade, was legal in any of those cases, then I have to agree that some laws need to be changed. If those shootings were NOT legal, OTOH, then what are we talking about, here? That “make them more illegaler” idea?

  41. Had a similar thought process in a recent letter to the editor in our local paper. Just as brainless, though it did lack the fabricated threats. Ended on the usual ‘There oughta be a law!’ drivel. Apparently some people think concealed carriers operate on the porno mentality of “whippin’ it out” when they want to get something! Sheesh!
    Which brings to mind a much better comparison:

    [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Dvpi6t4PEI&w=560&h=315%5D

    Also has some similarities to certain leo scandals of late at least racially.

  42. All of the liberals’ arguments are based on “what if” scenarios.

    If one looks instead at the empirical record of colleges in the seven states that allow campus carry, one does not find ONE SINGLE INCIDENT of professors being threatened or intimidated, with firearms or without firearms.

    “What if” doesn’t get there. Liberals, in their projected paranoia, will never be able to get past that because of that paranoia.

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