Thursday, February 02, 2006
Professors worry about armed students
From the RoundTable blog
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I was in graduate school at the University of Iowa in the fall of 1991, attending a late afternoon meeting of a student group, when a campus police officer came into the room and told us to lock the doors and stay inside. It was Friday, Nov. 1. Elsewhere on campus, up the hill from the English and Philosophy building, a graduate student in physics had shot three professors and a researcher in his department, then crossed to the administration building and shot a student working as a temporary secretary and the assistant vice-president for academic affairs. Then he shot himself. Only the student survived; she is a quadriplegic.
Once, while I was an instructor at the University of Chicago, a distraught student came to see me late in the afternoon. He was a student from my previous quarter's humanities class; he had written a series of papers that had led to his final grade of C. He came to ask me, at the end of my office hours, to change his grade; as it was winter, it was getting dark. I declined, after showing him why the grade was warranted. He didn't give up.
He stayed in my office, trying to get me to read more of his work. I realized at a certain point that he wasn't going to leave willingly, that he sat between me and the door, that he was increasingly insistent, and that I didn't know what to do.
Fortunately, and completely unexpectedly, another student happened by and popped her head in my office to say hello. Her presence broke the spell, and I was able to usher out my troubled student. I was more than relieved. I now see that as a recent Ph.D., and as a woman, I was uncertain of my own authority in relation to this smart but disturbed male student.
Since then, I have learned to act more decisively so that situations do not get out of hand. In the back of my mind, however, I retain that initial fear in my meeting with the student in Chicago, when I didn't know what to do, felt helpless in my own office, and realized my own vulnerability in isolated encounters with disturbed students.
The graduate student at Iowa who killed four others before committing suicide was upset, apparently, because he had been passed over for a significant dissertation award. There's almost no way to protect ourselves from individuals who go over that edge of civility, who decide that revenge and self-annihilation are reasonable responses to the vagaries of life experience.
Surely after the Iowa killings and those in Montreal in December 1989, when a reclusive young man killed 14 female students at the Ecole Polytechnique while stating that he hated feminists, most of us are aware that universities are places distraught individuals can take out their frustrations by murdering others.
Yet while we must recognize the unpredictable dangers that surround us, it seems to me there is no reason to take away from colleges and universities the right to manage those dangers with regulations that prohibit firearms on campus. Most students, of course, are reasonable, even when they feel that they have received a lower grade than they deserve.
The issue of guns on campus is not about what most students would do, even if it would be impossible to guarantee that the few dangerous ones would be prohibited from possessing a gun. Rather, guns on campus have the strong potential to throw into disarray the important personal relationships -- among students, between teachers and students -- that are central to the educational enterprise. It is one thing to feel threatened when a disturbed student does not want to leave your office; it is quite another to worry whether the student has a weapon.
It has crossed my mind that if the legislature ever passes the law prohibiting colleges from banning guns from campus, which was killed by a House subcommittee this week, some of the faculty might feel it appropriate to refuse to meet individually with students. Each of us will have to search our own experience and find a personal level of comfort in our interactions with students if it comes to pass that they, and others, are allowed to carry guns on campus.
In my own case, I feel quite acutely that prohibiting Virginia's colleges from banning guns on campus would contribute to a diminishment of my academic freedom and a lessened sense of safety at my job and in my relationship with students, colleagues and other university personnel.
Bernice Hausman is an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech.
