With Campus Carry in Place, Some Texas Grad Students Make Bars Their Offices

Texas’ campus-carry law has had well-publicized effects on the state’s public colleges: A handful of professors have resigned in protest, thousands of dollars have been spent on educational materials, and mobs of students have strapped dildos to their backpacks in protest.

But in the conversation about the effects of the law, one campus constituency has been largely overlooked: graduate students. At the University of Texas at Austin, that’s changed, as a small handful of graduate students have started holding office hours in a bar — admittedly, a softer kind of protest.

The controversial state law, which took effect on August 1, allows people with licenses to carry concealed handguns onto most portions of the state’s public-college campuses, including into classrooms. Universities, though, were given the latitude to designate some areas where guns were off-limits. At the University of Texas flagship, areas exempt from the campus-carry policy include single-occupancy offices — which the inhabitant can declare a “gun-free zone.”

But most of the university’s graduate students don’t have their own offices, so they don’t have a space on the campus to declare gun-free. Concealed weapons are not allowed at businesses, like bars, that make a majority of their income from alcohol consumed on-site.

At least one off-campus bar has opened its doors to graduate students seeking a gun-free space. “We support the community; we advocate for learning and safe environments,” said Lynn Cowles, the events coordinator at the Hole in the Wall bar, which has been hosting office hours.

Ms. Cowles, who was involved in an anti-campus-carry group, received her doctorate in English from the university in December and proposed over the summer that the bar “give graduate students a safe space” to hold their meetings with students. Three students have been holding office hours at Hole in the Wall this semester, she said, and three more plan to in the spring. And after a launch party for the space was held last week with support from the university’s Graduate Student Assembly, she anticipates more interest.

Richelle Crotty, a doctoral student in radio-television-film, has been holding office hours at Hole in the Wall this semester. “I do not want guns on my campus,” she said, “and if this is a soft way of me protesting that, I’m more than happy to do that.”

She cited other reasons for scheduling her office hours there, including the fact that she’s never had a designated campus place to hold them anyway.

A ‘Sensible Precaution’

The small effort extends beyond one bar. Mark Sheridan, a doctoral student in English, holds his office hours in the Cactus Cafe & Bar, an on-campus venue that is also exempt from concealed carry because more than 51 percent of its sales come from alcohol.

“I don’t think holding office hours in this place is some sort of magical prevention against any random violence,” he said. While many graduate students don’t “have the time or inclination to go to so much effort to find new spots” to hold office hours, he considers his choice of location a “small act of protest.” It’s a way, he said, that he and other students can “express our disgust with this law.”

Before the campus-carry policy went into effect, Mr. Sheridan held his office hours in an open-plan basement room along with many other graduate students in his department, he said. “Even in a room like that with other students,” he said, the situation “can at times get a bit tense.” On at least one occasion, a student became agitated with him during his office hours, he said, and after campus carry, it seemed “like a pretty sensible precaution” to move to the Cactus Cafe & Bar.

The university estimates that fewer than 1 percent of its students have concealed-handgun licenses and notes that a number of areas are off-limits to concealed carry. Those include certain laboratories, places where athletic events are happening, and the university’s Counseling and Mental Health Center.

“Throughout the process, the university heard from graduate students who voiced their concerns on this issue,” said Joey Williams, the university’s interim communications director, in an email. He added that “space was made available for anyone from the campus community — including graduate students, faculty, and staff — who wanted to hold meetings” in exclusion zones, and certain rooms in the Student Services Building can be reserved.

At a university that has more than 11,000 graduate students, a handful of them holding their office hours in a bar doesn’t amount to much of a movement. “I don’t want this to get sensationalized,” said Wills Brown, president of the Graduate Student Assembly, of graduate students’ apprehensions about the law. But he added that, among grad students, “the general feeling is frustration with the law itself,” though they’ve mostly resigned themselves to compliance.

The Hole in the Wall bar is hardly an academic setting — not a natural fit for students to meet with their instructors. At least in part, Ms. Cowles said, graduate students probably wouldn’t be working there if not for the law. “The space is available to people who do want to take an ideological stand against campus carry,” she said. “I don’t think people would be holding their office hours there if it weren’t for the 51-percent rule and if it weren’t for the outreach” from the bar.