Bill Leonard: Don’t shoot the teacher – Winston-Salem Journal

In 1838 Ralph Waldo Emerson, part Plato, part Ichabod Crane, attacked the corpse cold rationalism of conservative and liberal alike in his classic Harvard Divinity School address, declaring, as any good Transcendentalist would, that: Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

For Emerson, truth was discovered from deep within.

Not instruction, but provocation, lies at the heart of genuine education. From Socrates holding forth in the Athens marketplace to todays power-point-assisted-seminars, the classroom remains sacred space where opinions collide, interpretations vary, and learning prevails. When such intellectual provocation prevails, there is nothing like it.

Unless of course students and/or faculty are packing a piece, utilizing campus carry laws that usher guns into class, concealed in pockets, purses, or backpacks. When guns show up in school, provocation gains a whole new meaning. Learning is dangerous and transformative; it should never be life-threatening. After 42 years as professor, campus carry scares the Holy Socrates out of me.

When this century began, there were no laws permitting firearms on campus. As of 2017, eleven states offer such legal possibilities, including: Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Tennessee lets faculty, but not students, arm themselves. (Hopefully, faculty meetings are firearm free!)

Sixteen states ban concealed weapons on campus: California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina and Wyoming. (NC legislators are moving toward admitting 18 year-olds to concealed carry.) Twenty-two states leave the decision of on-campus weapons to the discretion of specific institutions.

Campus carry options were significantly impacted by the 2007 Virginia Tech Massacre when a student gunned down 32 students and wounded 17 in a horrendous killing spree. Many insisted that the gunman might have been stopped had students/faculty been armed. The shooting prompted schools to tighten lockdown policies, increase campus police, and expand use of electronic alert warnings.

American colleges/universities have long reflected the social realities of their national, regional cultures. Alcohol excesses and burgeoning opioid epidemics continue to wreak havoc, often with violent implications. Sexual abuses take heavy tolls on secular and church-related schools alike. Hostile ideologies and politics often foster physical danger at institutions left and right of center. Will concealed weapons save us or merely deepen the danger to life and limb? Is our society itself so ideologically segregated, and intellectual provocation so hazardous, that firearms are a necessary defense?

Advocates insist that the society is so violence-laden that citizens must arm themselves in every setting. Some suggest that increasing sexual violence is sufficient reason for females to take up arms. Others demand that Second Amendment rights be applied in every segment of society, colleges included. I fret over implied threats and symbolic implications. Should our syllabuses declare: Dont shoot! Youre all getting As?

What if campus carry is simply the most dangerous of an unceasing set of classroom distractions, including tweets, texts, Google, Wikipedia, and Face Book, diversions that thwart instruction and provocation, disengaging students from ideas that might form or re-form them? Whatever else the vulnerability of learning means perhaps it is this: try as we might to protect ourselves externally and internally, we can never insulate ourselves enough to escape the insolent idea, the banal diatribe, the suicidal bomber, or the AK47 sociopath.

For years, Ive thought (but never said aloud) that teaching means getting intellectually naked for the sake of ideas, and hoping that students gasp at the concepts, not the professors own conceptual weaknesses. Firearms that protect may become weapons that sidetrack from what learning must beour shared vulnerability to ideas and each other.

In Telling the Truth, the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, & Fairy Tale, Frederick Buechner tells about a high-school class that had gone better than usual the day they studied King Lear. Buechner concludes: The word out of the play strips them for a moment naked and strips their teacher with them and to that extent Shakespeare turns preacher because stripping us naked is part of what preaching is all about, the tragic part. In my academic and ministerial experience, provocation and spirituality are intricately related.

So dont come to my classes or lectures armed for anything but learning. Leave your guns outside, please. Go ahead, make my day.

Bill Leonard is Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history at Wake Forest University. Portions of this column were previously published by Baptist News Global.

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Bill Leonard: Don't shoot the teacher - Winston-Salem Journal