The University of Colorado Chancellor is putting the kibosh on a movement of professors to refuse to teach classes if students are carrying. Glenn Reynolds, “I’m glad to see someone standing up to the hate. When will these professors learn that you don’t have to fear people just because they’re different?” Unfortunately, we still have a lot of folks stoking the culture of hate against gun owners who exercise and defend their rights.
11 thoughts on “Civil Rights Victory in Colorado”
Comments are closed.
Any students who do carry should make it a point to announce it at the beginning of class. Let’s see if the professor is willing to follow through on his threats and face the university’s promised sanctions.
No, that just creates weirdness.
The whole story is weird. He’s a physics professor, and he’s worried about quashing debate?
And also … he’s afraid that having an student with a concealed firearm (whom he apparently believes will murder in order to make his physics-related point) is dangerous, but angrily telling that student he’s cancelling the whole class because of him is not.
Well, in my very limited experience (one university) physicists tend to be pretty far to the left (as bad as a tenured physics professor tearing down posters announcing a talk by the head of SDI, which was rather uncomfortable for the head of that student group, who’s graduate thesis adviser was that professor). The development and use of the atomic bomb gave them both credibility and guilt, although anyone watching their antics during the SDI debate would have lost respect for the former. Hmmm, maybe that puts the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider in a different perspective (of course, it’s very amusing that that terrific blow to their field was done by Democrats unenthusiastic about a Republican project; there are many many examples like this in science that are a mirror of the What’s Wrong with Kansas thesis).
While the professor shouldn’t have much time to pontificate on politics while teaching, perhaps he’s worried that his usual snide comments against those to his right will be taken poorly? (I’m making assumptions here, but but middle tier schools like this one don’t attract the best or most professional talent, you’re frequently better off at the top or “bottom” tiers.)
Of course, the very action of carrying concealed is a declaration of independence, you might say, that sort of upsets the normal power balance between students and some not so nice sorts of professors.
Admittedly I have a skewed sampling, but the single physics professor I know is fairly consistently right-leaning. IIRC, he did his undergraduate at Yale, and his doctorate at MIT. He’s also Jewish.
In the conversations I have had with him, he has commented on the fact that in his experience professors who teach hard sciences (math, physics, chemistry, etc.) tend to be more politically diverse than those who teach soft sciences (psychology, sociology, etc.) and arts/humanities.
That’s true in my experience, with the in-between science of biology mostly left-leaning, one of many reasons I gravitated from a default of biology to a considered choice of chemistry. Depending on when he got his doctorate at MIT, ask him what the department’s political climate was like; my above reading is from 1980’s interactions with various members of it and very reliably sourced stories I heard from a few administrators I was close friends with.
Meanwhile, CU has announced a dorm policy for permit holders that requires them to store their firearms in a police locker room. Uh, completely illegal, after the drubbing CU took in the Colorado Supreme Court.
So don’t applaud too much.
The policy about storing in the Police Locker room is for non-permit holders.
However … while I understand the concept of keeping gun owners and non-gun owners in separate rooms, I’m not sure how they can ban CCW’ers from any building that doesn’t have metal detectors at every entrance. Possibly because all entrances are supposed to be locked and only residents allowed — I suspect that may work.
Don’t see at all how they can keep CCW’ers out of football games just because they paid for a ticket. No metal detectors there and it’s open to the public.
Overall, though, the CU policy is a big victory. Not surer we shouldn’t move on to places where the right is completely banned.
When I attended CU and lived in the dorms, BTW, it never occurred to us Colorado kids we couldn’t have guns in our room — since it was our home. Many of us did, though not for self defense; just for occasional target practice (blow off a little stress ats the range) or hunting.
As always, concealed means concealed….