COLUMN: USU should adapt Ute gun rule
This is a guest opinion about guns. Actually, it’s about whether Utah State ought to follow its sister university, the University of Utah’s example and adopt a “no guns on campus” policy. But first, I’d like to talk about my very favorite subject: teaching.
I love teaching here at Utah State. In fact, I love teaching even more than sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, which is the nickname of my favorite course, a folklore colloquium. In this course, my students and I revisit the 1960s when many young college students here in America and overseas questioned their nation’s politics, religions, lifestyles, sexual mores, “approved” music, literature, theater, movies and use of military power, especially in wars waged against “little far away countries.”
In our class, we focus on such topics as the drug culture, rock ‘n’ roll, the sexual revolution (straight and gay), woman’s lib (“bra burning”), civil rights, the anti-war movement, and the questioning of authority in general, especially old, rich, white, male, militaristic, authority figures.
Naturally, our classroom gets edgy with all these controversial subjects hitting the fan week after week. Tempers boil like “water for chocolate,” but we try to stay cool. And we know we’re in a safe place: Utah State University – an academic institution dedicated to free speech and the honorable exchange of ideas and opinions without fear. No big brothers or sisters here at Aggie U.
I love teaching another course here at Utah State, too, which gets my students’ tempers boiling almost as much. It’s called American Cultures in Film. By watching ethnic movies, we vicariously share the experiences of 10 different ethnic groups: Japanese, Mexicans, Italians, Indians, Blacks, Chinese, Brazilians, Greeks, Cubans, and Vietnamese. Often, the history of these “hyphenated Americans” reveals the darker side of our nation’s history. We uncover bigotry, hypocrisy, and the crass use of power by the dominant white, northern European majority.
Since the majority of students in this class comes from this white majority, you can cut the collective guilty with a finger nail. And when that happens, again it’s important for us to stay cool and hunker down in a nice, safe place. We often take a deep breath and say “the past is the past and besides it’s past and we, our generation, can do better.” And our classroom here at Utah State University is, thank heavens, still a safe place – or is it?
For me, it never is. I always worry that some day, some nut with a gun will decide NOT to stay cool and will start shooting. He or she will try to end one of our arguments with a bullet.
Are my worries unfounded? Look, I’m a child of the 1960s. I was a college student when John Kennedy was elected president and his murder was the first of a series of blows to my ’60s hope that we could change the world for the better. I marched on Washington Aug. 28, 1963 and heard Martin Luther King Jr. give his “I Have a Dream” speech and then remember sitting in a graduate folklore class in 1968 at the University of Pennsylvania shaking with grief along with my fellow students when we heard of his assassination. The same year, Bobby Kennedy was shot and soon after, Malcolm X. The worst blow was John Lennon, who only asked that we give peace a chance.
More relevant to my continuing fears of guns in schools is my first-hand experience with Columbine High School. In 1999, I was a consultant for the Littleton Historical Museum just outside Denver, Colorado. One of my jobs was to recommend ways the museum staff could interpret the thousands of artifacts associated with the Columbine massacre. These artifacts included more than 10,000 teddy bears sent from all over the world to the surviving students of Columbine. The teddy bears were supposed to comfort the survivors.
I don’t want the students of my folklore colloquium or American cultures in film courses to ever have to be comforted with teddy bears.
The University of Utah has had the courage to come up with a solution; no guns on campus. Their teachers and students can debate the darker side of American history and Utah’s response to sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll without fear.
Utah State University by not having a policy on guns does in fact have a policy. We allow guns, and the potential nuts with guns to roam freely on our hill. And thus we allow fear. So, that’s why I hope our President, Kermit L. Hall, will re-examine our “policy” and take the U of U’s course of action.
But, you ask, what about those student patriots here at Utah State who believe strongly in the Second Amendment and feel in their bones the need to carry firearms to defend our nation?
No problem. They only need to contact Sgt. Paul Klimack at the Utah Army National Guard. He is the Recruiting and Retention NCO here in Cache Valley. His “Militia” office is 590 S. 500 West, Logan, Utah 84321. He has all the guns any student patriot could ever wish for – and they are safely off campus.
Dr. Jay Anderson, a folklorist in the history department, wrote this column with a little help from his friends Carolyn Doyle and Jill Christiansen.