KS: Gun-Phobic Professor Leaves a University Because of Campus Carry

Image from fox4kc.com

An associate professor of history and American studies has taken a job at a university in a state that bans concealed carry in its classrooms.

Jacob S. Dorman has taken the occasion  to let us know that restoring the exercise of Second Amendment rights at public institutions is the reason that he has left Kansas University.

From Jacob S. Dorman's open letter:

In light of the state of Kansas’ apparent determination to allow the concealed carry of firearms in the classrooms of the University of Kansas, I am writing to tender my resignation effective two weeks from today as an associate professor of history and American studies at the university. I have accepted a job in a state that bans concealed carry in classrooms.

(snip)

 But Kansas will never secure the future that it deserves if it weakens its institutions of higher learning by driving off faculty members or applicants who feel as I do that there is no place for firearms in classrooms. Kansas can have great universities, or it can have concealed carry in classrooms, but it cannot have both.

(snip)

Recruiting the best trained professors necessarily means recruiting from coastal areas and progressive college towns where most people do not believe that randomly arming untrained students is a proper exercise of the Second Amendment’s protection of a well-regulated militia.

Professor Dorman has an opinion that guns do not belong in classrooms. It is a strongly held opinion, backed up by research provided by anti-Second Amendment groups such as the Trace, and in the anti-self defense medical journals. There are considerable numbers of research articles on the other side and in criminological journals, that reach the opposite conclusions.

It is fairly easy to find critiques of the research from both sides. I find the side that provides support for the utility of an armed population more convincing. But I am not Professor Dorman.

What I find particularly bizarre is the idea that Kansas will not be able to recruit able professors who are not afraid of an armed population. All of the evidence is exactly the opposite. College campuses are crammed with ideological leftists, exactly in the areas where Professor Dorman taught. In History, liberals outnumber conservatives in academia by 33.5 to 1.

Why are History departments are crammed with leftist intellectuals? It is, in part, because the departments have created courses that are intrinsically leftist. Courses on the histories of gender, race, and class have leftist assumptions built into their definitions.

There are multitudes of History majors with these assumptions clamoring for work in academia. You will not find many conservative historians in academia.  They have been defined out of the picture.

Maybe, just maybe, allowing a little bit of freedom on campus, a slice of actually doing more than paying lip service to the Second Amendment, will increase the possibility of selecting someone other than a doctrinaire leftist as a History professor.  Maybe a tiny bit of intellectual diversity in History will be allowed on the KU campus.

Perhaps we will see a course on slavery. A course which demonstrates how Christianity and Western Civilization expended vast sums of treasure and blood to eradicate the practice. That was a project no other civilization in history attempted.

The replacement of an ideological leftist with someone who may not be is, at least, a theoretical possibility.

©2017 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.

Link to Gun Watch