A New Caliber of Responsibility - Part 3 - Your Requested Feed

A New Caliber of Responsibility - Part 3

by Clarissa León on 04 Sep 2007

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Regent Stavros Anthony's proposal for professors becoming reserve police officers seems like a great idea for a television drama. In this instance it's not a four-eyed reporter busting his buttons off to fly into the sky, but instead a lowly professor who smashes dry erase markers in his attacker's face. The intro music would fade as the professor writes a fat, red "F" on a paper titled "Crime."

"In my school, crime never makes the grade," the professor would beam, smug look intact.

Of course, this is overly exaggerated. But it does seem as if the media (myself included) want to view the proposal this way. Emily Richmond from the Las Vegas Sun sums up the proposal nicely. It's "faculty-turned-campus cops," she writes.

Teresa Pham from University of California, Davis's paper, the California Aggie, puts it simply, writing that Stavros's proposal would allow employees to carry guns. She explains the proposal a bit further but reading that right off the bat would cause some alarm and why shouldn't it? If any of my professors turned around, a pistol in plain view, I might throw my notes in the air from the stress.

But the proposal doesn't mean to just hand professors guns, as some might have heard. It's a proposal whose intention aims to better protect students by giving professors the option to become reserve police officers, and possibly get paid for doing so. University money, Stavros proposes, would help fuel the costs. Professors would be trained on how to use a gun and as a result, be allowed to carry a gun on campus.

They'd have all the rights of any reserve police officer with the added responsibilities of a professor. If all goes as planned, Stavros would have a professor's briefcase do double-duty as a blunt object.

But the solution to campus shootings seems too simple. Let's train professors to handle guns and attackers. As a result, the entire university should, theoretically, be safer because there are more officers on campus. But let's ignore the real problem that happened at all these shootings. In the case of Virginia Tech I don't think it was officers' delay time and it wasn't a lack of professors with guns.

The problem came from Seung-Hui Choi. What's being done about students such as Choi? Don't they deserve the money, attention and help?

Throughout all of this, it seems that the show will have to work on its script because right now this ending doesn't make any sense.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

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