Under the Gun

Drew Anthony Smith, Getty Images

Ellen Spiro knows that, starting in August, there’s no way she’ll be able to legally prevent a student with a concealed-handgun permit from showing up armed to her classes here at the University of Texas.

The prospect has her so unsettled that she’s told her colleagues she might move her first class, on August 24, across the street to a church, where guns are banned.

Colleagues have talked about relocating their classes to the football stadium, another venue that has been designated gun-free under Texas’ controversial campus-carry law.

“Everyone’s trying to figure out what we’ll do on the first day of class, but I’m not going to pretend the situation doesn’t exist,” said Ms. Spiro, a professor of radio, television, and film. Having armed students in her classes will make her feel less safe, “even if there’s a fictional mass murderer roaming the halls.”

Across the country, faculty members, staff members, and administrators are reacting to new gun laws with a mix of apprehension and acceptance. Eight states — Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin — now have laws allowing licensed gun owners to bring concealed weapons onto college campuses, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Great Colleges to Work For 2016

This special report examines several workplace issues where strong communication is key, including anxiety over “campus carry” laws that allow students in some states to bring guns to class and a growing faculty effort to seek new ways of demonstrating the value of scholarly work. Read more.

• After 4-Year Delay, Kansas Colleges Move to Carry Out Campus Gun Law
• With Campus Carry in Place, Some Texas Grad Students Make Bars Their Offices
• A Provocative Protest Pits Pro- and Anti-Gun Activists

Arkansas and Tennessee allow certain full-time faculty members, but not students, to carry weapons on campus. In many cases the laws, which were intended to allow people to defend themselves when gunfire erupts, were approved over the objections of college educators who think they make campuses even more dangerous.

An informal survey conducted by The Chronicle after last fall’s campus shootings at an Oregon community college and at Delta State University found that some readers were taking steps to protect themselves by planning escape routes, thinking twice about assigning low grades to troubled students, and in some cases, buying weapons themselves.

A faculty member at a busy inner-city college wrote that “for the first time in my career, I’m afraid of angry online students who come to campus with questions. And another first, for me: I want metal detectors.”

Another faculty member reported avoiding a colleague who had been acting in an erratic and combative manner. What if he snaps one day, “picks up a gun, and comes to our meeting to shoot us all for revenge?”

Nowhere has the topic been more divisive than at the University of Texas at Austin, where state legislation allowing licensed gun holders to carry weapons on most parts of campus will take effect on August 1. That’s 50 years to the day after a student climbed to the observation deck of an academic tower in the center of campus and shot 46 people, killing 14 of them.

Mass shootings, once considered exceedingly rare, now seem to occur with alarming regularity. But it’s the day-to-day interactions that take place on campuses, when nerves are frayed and mental-health issues untreated, that cause the most worry.

A group called Gun-Free UT has argued that the presence of guns will not only make students less comfortable discussing emotionally charged topics, but also could increase the risk that stressed and despondent students will commit suicide.

Ms. Spiro, who co-founded Gun-Free UT, plans to channel her energy into trying to get the state law repealed. If that doesn’t happen within five years, she’ll seriously consider leaving the university, she said.

Not everyone is bemoaning the new laws. Some say the number of licensed students, who typically have to be at least 21, is small, and besides, a handful of students came to class armed even before it was legal. And some campus employees welcome the chance to carry guns.

Banning guns from classrooms will no longer be legal under the new Texas law, but that won’t stop some professors from politely requesting that students leave their weapons at home. “I will certainly ask my students on Day 1 of the semester not to bring weapons in class because I will not feel safe and relaxed to teach as well as I want,” Daniela Bini Carter, a professor of Italian and comparative literature at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote in an email. Weapons and intellectual inquiry “are a contradiction in terms,” she believes.

She said she also won’t permit guns in her office. (The flagship campus’s policy gives professors discretion in their offices, but not in their classrooms.)

To highlight the dangerous effect that Texas’ campus-carry law could have on academic discourse, the Gun-Free UT group cited advice from the University of Houston’s Faculty Senate that professors tiptoe softly around sensitive topics. A few Houston professors told The Chronicle they had no intention of changing the way they teach, and found the suggestion troubling.

But Jonathan E. Snow, the Faculty Senate president who issued that advice, said his presentation was meant to show how the campus-carry law will restrict some faculty freedoms. “Some people found that shocking,” he said. “I certainly do, too.”

Faculty members could get in trouble if they post signs banning guns in their classrooms because those signs would violate the new state law, he pointed out.

Allowing guns in the classroom is “an absurd suggestion” that only heightens the likelihood that tragedy will occur, according to Lorena A. Barba, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at George Washington University. Guns aren’t allowed in college classrooms in the District of Columbia, where she works, but that wouldn’t necessarily deter someone intent on violence. Ms. Barba, who has taken self-defense training on her own, would like to see such training available to more people on campus, especially women. Her training made her feel more confident that she could withstand an attack, whether it’s an attempted rape or a shooting.

“If a madman has the element of surprise, full intent, and accurate aim, nothing can be done,” she wrote in an email. “But give me five seconds and close range, and my chances are good.”

In Georgia, opponents of guns on campus won a narrow victory in May, when Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican, vetoed legislation that would have allowed them.

Among those relieved by the decision was Ian Bogost, a professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech. In an essay in The Atlantic, he described how, shortly after he returned grades in a difficult class, some students anonymously posted threatening comments in an online discussion board. The discussion went something like this:

“Does he have kids?” one asked. “I’m going to steal them and blackmail him,” answered another.

“Had kids,” added a third.

“They’re the kind of comments you wouldn’t think twice about — just typical college students communing over a tough professor,” Mr. Bogost wrote. “Unless, that is, you also knew that those students might be permitted to carry concealed firearms on campus. Then their words might take on a different tenor, even if just hypothetically.”

Students, he said, are already “beset by unease,” having grown up in the shadow of 9/11, a global financial crisis, soaring tuition, and a tough job market. That apprehension is multiplied by the fear that the person sitting next to you might be armed.

Mia Carter, an associate professor of English at the Austin campus, said she planned to protest the new law “creatively, collaboratively, and vigorously.” The recent murder of a UCLA professor by one of his former graduate students hit home for her and many of her colleagues, who have faced problems with combative and mentally disturbed students.

She said that a student has threatened her in her office over grades, and that she has seen a male student threaten a female classmate who disagreed with him in class. She’s seen students shaken over a classmate’s suicide. Adding guns to this mix, she said, is “dangerous and destructive.”

The odds of encountering a shooter may be low, but some faculty members aren’t leaving anything to chance. One has taken an active-shooter-response course, keeps a crowbar handy for use as a weapon, and has identified which furniture can block the door or provide cover. Others carry mace in their purses, eat in their offices, and avoid cafeterias and other crowded areas. They meet students in public spaces instead of in their offices and frequently scan their surroundings for exits and escape routes.

Guns on Campus

See more recent articles from The Chronicle about guns and higher education.

• Campus Places Where Concealed-Carry Is Most Controversial
• Stop Worrying About Guns in the Classroom. They’re Here.
• How Fear Might Affect Grades
• The Killings at Umpqua

Tennessee’s campus-carry bill, also approved this spring, attracted widespread faculty opposition. The Faculty Senate at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville has warned that disagreements between colleagues could escalate to violence.

Guns will be banned from disciplinary and tenure meetings, but what happens if an annual evaluation turns negative? Should evaluators warn professors to lock their guns in their cars before showing up for the meeting?

Jack Parker, a semi-retired research professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Knoxville campus, says he carries a gun “pretty much all waking hours” and would do so on campus even if it weren’t legal.

People intent on harm don’t care if guns are legal or not, he wrote in an email, and those with permits tend to be responsible.

Creating gun-free zones “simply means that those illegally carrying weapons with nefarious intent may kill indiscriminately” with little fear that someone will shoot back until police arrive, said Mr. Parker, who taught for 25 years at Virginia Tech, the site of a mass shooting in 2007.

Despite such worries, many are determined not to let the specter of gun violence change the way they approach their work. In the aftermath of last year’s shootings, one faculty member wrote to The Chronicle:

“Every day I choose to focus on the good in the world above the pain, fear, and suffering. Every day, I continue to teach because despite all of these concerns I refuse to let the possibility of targeted violence control how I live my life.”