Photograph by Kevin Clifford
A New Caliber of Responsibility - Part 2
by Clarissa León
Photo GalleryAs told to the reporter by Stacy Gordon:
When Regent Stavros Anthony proposed professors become reserve police officers, I didn't think it was necessarily a horrible idea. But the problem I have with it is the amount of money for training when that's not part of a professor's job.
I think any professor here would love to have $4,000 for research grant money to pay a graduate student. But having that money instead spent on something that is only tangentially related to what it is we are supposed to be doing - that's my problem with it at this point.
I like to work from the assumption that people do their homework before they come up with these things so potentially Regent Stavros Anthony might have answers to these questions. But for some reason today, we seem to want to be absolutely and completely 100 percent safe everywhere we go and that's just never going to happen.
I understand there is a problem with mental health issues on campus. But these types of incidents are so few and far between. What happened at Virginia Tech was obviously horrible. It is a horrible event, but they are rare events. When you look at the number of universities there are in this country and the huge numbers of students there are, is it really worth it for the university to spend that kind of money on something that's rare to happen?
If we in the political science department even had one person going to do this training, that would be an additional four classes this year that wouldn't get taught. So the effect the program would have on the university is going to vary from department to department.
I think that in order for at least 30 professors to be trained and have this program work, you'd need at least someone, I'm assuming, in every building. But professors are out of their offices pretty regularly for committee meetings, classes and research or are off campus collecting data. How are we to guarantee that any trained professors are going to be available at any particular point in time?
As part of the campus safety subcommittee for the Committee on the Status of Women, I know we've been talking a lot about what are the best strategies if there's something going on. Do you stay in your classroom and lock the door?
Is it best to flee the scene? If you have a PA system, do you announce, "There's a shooter on campus"? What's going to happen? People are going to run crazy; people are going to get injured.
In the situation of an attacker on campus I wouldn't know what I'm supposed to do. The two doors to my office are fire doors so I would probably turn off the lights and get under my desk and just kind of hang out there. Clearly, if there were students running through the halls, I'd let them in.
But we have to have these discussions on what's good and what's bad, what's an option, what's not an option, and you'd think by now we would have had these discussions.
Doing things like lighting and campus escort services are actually dealing with the shooting situation and also dealing with something that I consider more realistic such as sexual assaults on campus, muggings. That's something that's going to happen on a regular basis on campus and those things on campus are going to deal with all those issues and not just a shooter that's going to happen once every 25 years.
In order to convince me on this program, they'd have to justify to me that they have done everything else and they still think this is the best option because I think this should be your last resort.
Stacy Gordon
Ph.D. in political science from the
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
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