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Jacob S. Dorman has let the world know that extending the exercise of Second Amendment rights to public institutions in the Sunflower state is the reason that he has left his position as an Associate Professor at the University of Kansas. The good professor explains his reasoning in a letter printed in the Topeka Capital-Journal.

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)

…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.

It’s a strongly held opinion, backed 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 criminology journals that reach the opposite conclusions.

What I find particularly bizarre is the idea that Kansas won’t be able to recruit professors who aren’t afraid of an armed population. There is considerable evidence to the contrary. College campuses are chock full of ideological leftists, particularly in disciplines such as Professor Dorman’s specialty of History, liberals outnumber conservatives in academia by 33.5 to 1.

Why are History departments staffed with so many leftists? In part, it’s because the departments have created courses that are intrinsically leftist. Courses on the histories of gender, race, and class have leftward assumptions built into their definitions. And there’s no shortage of History majors with that bent clamoring for work in academia. You won’t find many conservative historians working in academia. They’ve 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 improve the possibility of selecting faculty other than doctrinaire leftists. A tiny bit of intellectual diversity would certainly improve the KU campus.

The replacement of a doctrinaire ideological leftist with someone who may not be is, at least, a theoretical possibility. One can only hope.

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

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101 COMMENTS

    • “Recruiting the best trained professors necessarily means recruiting from coastal areas and progressive college
      towns. . . ”

      This pretty much says it all. Over the years I encountered a number of “colleagues” like this, people who grew up and were educated on the progressive coasts but who couldn’t find a teaching job there. Taking a teaching job out in “flyover country” is, for them, a decided step-down and, over time, the resentment just builds and builds. They come to hate the state, hate the school that employ’s them. In particular, and most unfortunately, they also hate the students in their classes who they generally regard as being a bunch of ignorant Philistines. Tellingly, this guy is moving to another 2nd tier school, all the while being resentful that he isn’t good enough work at the 1st tier schools where the thinks he belongs. Good riddance, to him.

  1. I’m guessing, just guessing here, that in reality his diatribe boils down to “I’m a jerk and a coward. As such my cowardice leads me to fear that I will do something in my capacity as a jerk that might get me shot”.

        • The only seriously hardcore anti-gun professor I ever had ended up getting fired when it came to light that he sexually assaulted a couple female students.

          It is my anecdotal experience that hardcore antigunners often have a penchant for some form of violence, especially politically motivated violence. That leads me to suspect that their anti-gun stance is based on not wishing to get shot when they put their hands on someone or attack someone with a melee weapon for something like holding an opinion not in line with that of the anti.

          YMMV.

  2. Well, that’s one. Now let’s get the rest of them to follow suit.

    If Campus Carry accomplishes nothing other than to drive out hyperleftist anti’s, then it’s well worth it.

    • Don’t fool yourself. There are plenty of humanities PhDs who don’t March in lockstep with the anti gun group. It’s just that they need to keep a low profile to avoid ostracization. In truth, the academic world can be hideously intolerant of diverse thoughts, despite the rhetoric of ” inclusion” and ” diversity.”

      • Other than Hillsdale College (and awesome institution) please name these Universities. I have kids that are approaching that age. I think you are engaging in naïve wishful thinking.

        • Texas A&M University. The College Station, Texas campus welcomed campus carry when the legislature approved it last session. Next to Hillsdale and Liberty University, I can’t name a more conservative school.

        • Generally speaking, avoid most of the popular state universities in the mid-west and on the coasts. For a BA degree in liberal arts look at smaller private colleges and universities located in the southern and southwestern part of the US. Many of these schools have avoided the politization that infects many universities and actually have real academic communities, often made up of people from quite good schools who have escaped to a smaller school

          A good way to determine the quality of a school is to look at where the faculty comes from. If they have Ph.D.’s from on-line schools or places you’ve never heard of, stay away. On the other hand if they have degrees from respected universities the school is probably worth looking at. If you want to drill deeper, look at the research and publishing records of the faculty in the department your kid will study. What they are interested in will tell you a lot about what’s going to happen in their classes. If the faculty seems to be filled with social justice warriors, I’d advise you to stay away.

  3. Good luck in the job market. Hint: employers actually expect results and need to turn a profit. You need to see how you can do both.

    • Neither of those apply to acadamia where publishing utter swill is perfectly acceptable as long as you publish.

    • Oh, that job search…
      Ya might wanna shave that unibrow and the face scruff.
      You’ll look less like a terrorist.
      And, you’ll probably have to act less like a socialist.

  4. I don’t get it. Campus carry just passed here in Georgia and there is a professor in my department who is adamantly against it. Most of the arguments against it aren’t super coherent. The AJC published some nonsense about student suicide going up even though all residences on campuses would be exempted, meaning anyone who could be legally carrying on campus when the law goes into effect already has access to a gun in their homes at this very moment. Regardless, there are states in which campus carry is legal and there haven’t really been many problems. Even if you simply blindly accept their arguments that they will be less safe, we can confidently say that the size of that effect must be tiny or else we would have seen a bunch of incidents by now. Given that, how is it rational to flee the state? If he drives to his new job, I’d wager he’s putting himself at considerably more risk on the road…

    • It’s paranoia. They are scared of law abiding permitted fellow Americans. An actual intelligent logical person would be fearful of people that don’t follow laws and would bring a gun on campus either way. The lawful citizen that literally trains more often than most beat cops aren’t the people to worry about.

      • They are fearful other emotional adolescents unable to control their emotions will become armed and do harm just as theu know they themselves.would if armed.

        • Nailed it in one.

          Projecting, projecting, projecting.

          The vast majority of gun owners use them for defense, recreation, competition and hunting.

          Leftists use guns to murder people they’re mad at.

  5. This fuch head was already leaving for another job. Like all good Liberals, he had to take this opportunity to attempt furtherization of the Liberal Agenda. Fuch him. Another useless academic leftist.

  6. Probably aren’t enough Asians and short guys on the basketball team to suit this dingbat either. Good bye.

  7. “Kansas can have great universities, or it can have concealed carry in classrooms, but it cannot have both.”

    Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

    • The universities in Kansas(and the rest of the Union) became great WHILST firearms were unrestricted. If firearms do not once again become unrestricted, the greatness will melt away like a snowflake…

  8. The logic part of my brain thinks that a history professor, and American history to boot, would wholly understand the Second Amendment.

    • My thoughts exactly. I would think our founders would be disgusted that a history teacher of all people would not understand their message.

    • No longer. there is a now somewhat dated but still relevant book entitled “The Killing of History,” which posits, and then demonstrates, that the academic endeavor of professional (book worm) historians has largely been replaced by a bunch of sociologists who look at history as “process”, cherry-picking their evidence to support a particular sociological theory, not to report, as best as can be ascertained, what happened. History as philosophy and social engineering, not as history. I suspect this professor is of the same ilk.

      • I’m sorry that I don’t remember which university it was, except that it was one of the Ivy League. Anyway, about a month ago I saw a news story that the school in question changed the courses required for a bachelor’s degree in History – – and guess what you don’t have to have in order to get that piece of sheepskin… That’s right, NO history classes at all!

        I fear for the survival of our Republic.

        • Sends a chill up my spine when I think about the Reverand Jim Jones’ favorite quote.

    • You’re forgetting that he is a government employee working for the Department of Youth Indoctrination and Propaganda.

    • I always thought that history was relatively safe from this kind of crap, at least as far as a humanities discipline would go. Then I majored in history. My alma mater was pretty well-balanced though in that department. There were plenty of limbs pushing an agenda (including a Canadian that wished he was in the U.K. and very upset at being in NC). It was about how you’d expect though. Women in American History professor: liberal. African-American history professor: liberal. Any military history class: centrist or conservative.

    • Apparently he can’t even read. “The Second Amendment’s protection of a well-regulated militia,” he says. The 2A protects a right, not an institution. It is also clear what right it protects. “The right to keep and bear arms” makes it perfectly clear.

      (Though the 1A’s protection of the right of assembly and free association in conjunction with the 2A protects your right to form and participate in a militia, at least the organization and training aspects of a militia).

  9. Well maybe they will actually have a more well rounded education? It’s awful presumptuous of him, to look at himself as an all knowing scholar. He makes some big assumptions with none, absolutely zero factual evidence to back up his statments. His opinion isn’t grounded in any logic or facts and his understanding of the 2nd amendment actually goes against real justices that examine our constitution. He thinks he knows more than SCOTUS? That’s laughable. People think they are smarter than they are. That goes double for this idiot for lack of a better term.

    • It’s awful presumptuous of him, to look at himself as an all knowing scholar.
      — and —
      He thinks he knows more than SCOTUS?

      Why yes, that is exactly how Progressives see themselves. They are better than everyone else. They are above everyone else. That is why they categorically oppose any and every position of the “little people” … because the “little people” cannot possibly ever be right about anything.

      • What’s more, they despise us little simple-minded people for not recognizing their superior intellect and submitting to their grandiose plans to make us better people by force of government. It must have been hell for him being stuck in flyover country. Godspeed liberal twit!

  10. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. I live in Kansas, and while there has been some resistance to campus carry , Id say Kansas is one of the, if not the most, gun friendly states in the country. Consitutional carry for one, no laws that I’m aware of beyond the Federal ones. I see open carriers regularly and no one cares. I sell/buy/trade guns in gas station parking lots all the time, no one bats an eye. But I’m not up on the current college scene here, so I suppose there’s some refuge for the non 2A people there still.

  11. “Recruiting the best trained professors necessarily means recruiting from coastal areas and progressive college towns where most people do not believe” in America or its values. Such piss ant little places of satan’s playground need to take back all of their POS.

    There fixed (that infinitesimal portion of your F’d upness) ya.

    If you live in a Blue state you MAY be part of the problem. If you have a (D) after your name, are a liberal, progressive, globalist, communist or a rino, THE PROBLEM IS PART OF YOU, YOUR MOTHER OWES US AN ABORTION, and if we let you out of your POS (D) holes, it better only be so that you can catch enough Oxygen so that you find JESUS. And yes, that even includes yiddish professors.

  12. “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…”

    So you’re saying middle ‘merica professors and students are dumb and irresponsible? I bid you adieu.

    • Well he is against “untrained students”. Why doesn’t he insist that the university start and firearms training course and encourage the students to take it?

  13. Good.

    One less Left-Leaning Professor.

    It’s high time to have an outright POLITICAL CLEANSING of our Universities.

  14. Looks like this ” associate professor” was trawling for a better gig and used the passage of campus carry to make a political statement while he bolts to the safety and comfort of a socialist police State…..

  15. Oh, Hell…..
    Why not:

    “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 gays/blacks/conservatives/libertarians/disabled/Muslims in classrooms.

    Kansas can have great universities, or it can have gays/blacks/conservatives/libertarians/disabled/Muslims in classrooms, but it cannot have both.”

    See? This is how hateful this prick is.

  16. Ummm, what is he going to do about the rest of the state, where concealed carry is widely accepted?

    He might relocate to California or New York to get away from all those icky concealed handgun carriers.

  17. So I am guessing he.never once thought that maybe,just maybe a student had brought their gun in prior to this bill? Wonder what he would do.if he knew.laws don’t actually do anything.

  18. Per his bio, his own education is from UCLA and Stanford, with teaching specializations in religion, popular culture, African-American culture and history, urban culture, and “whiteness”

    I didn’t know that was an area of academic specialization. Unless you’re describing snowflakes…

    • “Whiteness” is the study of “white privilege”, positing that white people, as a result of the institutionalization of racism, are more successful than people of color, and that therefore there has to be reverse racism to reverse this “fact”. It further posits that white people should feel guilty about their privilege, and willingly turn over their “ill-gotten lucre” for the benefit of their victims. The most extreme version of “whiteness” (put forth by a Jewish professor at Harvard) is that white males should all kill themselves. (But not white wimmens.) [So far, he has not volunteered to off himself.] this is why people of color need “safe spaces” on college campuses where they can exclude (i.e. discriminate against) white people, but white people cannot have solely white places or clubs or organizations because that would be racist.

  19. For these people to be intellectually consistent they’d have to quite literally not go anywhere ever. He’ll go to the supermarket and be surrounded by carriers but he won’t go to campus because of carriers?

    He’s just a virtue signalling asshole looking for a payday.

  20. ‘…liberals outnumber conservatives in academia by 33.5 to 1.’

    And they’re taking the nation’s university system down the same way they took down the New York Times and CNN (not to mention Detroit, California etc.) The more liberal the media gets the less powerful they become to the point where nobody watches CNN or reads the New York Times anymore except a handful of their like minded cronies. In a couple of decades going to college will become widely considered a colossal waste of money (if it isn’t already) as the return on the investment is already questionable at best. An 18 year old today will be richer in 40 years if he becomes a plumber instead. Liberals ruin everything they touch.

    • Mechanics are charging around $100/hr, more if they work on German cars. I had to call Roto-Rooter the other day. $160/hr, or any fraction thereof. He was done in 30 minutes. I was thinking maybe I’d opted for the wrong profession.

  21. Buh Bye Jake and don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

    Edit: didn’t see your reply Ian, like minds I guess.

  22. Same argument made by Several Texas professors. After one year of conceal carry, not one incident of a student who is a CHL holder committing any acts of violence or intimidation. NOT ONE! But there have been two murders and a stabbing. In all the states and all the colleges that allow concealed carry, not one incident of intimidation or violence. You sir, are a gun-a-phone. Or more to the point a sissy!

    • I was about to say it hasn’t been a year. That time went by quick. (It hasn’t been a calendar year, but has been a school year).

  23. Snowflake lefties fleeing the college indoctrination centers is just another wonderful bonus feature of campus carry!

  24. “Recruiting the best trained professors necessarily means recruiting from coastal areas” Nothing like saying to all your fellow professors from the middle of the country that they are a bunch of backwards, ignorant, low IQ deplorables. Guessing that means the liberals ones also. what a jerkoff

  25. The most dangerous thing in America is an articulate black man with a gun. The second most dangerous thing in America is a GED or high school graduate with a gun. People with no college but armed to the teeth scares the hell out of the Left. You don’t need a college degree to become educated. With the internet and You Tube you can get an unfiltered education. That terrifies the Left. Students will not learn about their second amendment rights in a college class room. Or a lot of other things.

    I wonder if this college professor is a sex predator who just got scared off???

  26. Apparently, this professor needs a history lesson himself. First lesson, Hitler’s gift to America and the Nazi attack on academia. Second lesson, Alan Bloom’s Closing of America’s Mind, and specifically the chapters covering the 60’s hostage takings and attacks on professors. Professors that have tenior have protection from their employer to spew thought or crap. They definitely should have the same protection from the government and students and that requires a gun.

  27. 13 years and he’s still an associate professor? Hmmm. He has tenure, but isn’t a full professor and is a little behind schedule for that immeasurably (in academia) important promotion. I bet he got passed up for promotion and is just using the concealed carry issue as a face-saving excuse to leave and start fresh elsewhere.

    I looked over his C.V. and he does appear to have the requisite number of publications and other obligatory boxes checked. I bet he’s just a complete arrogant jerk around campus and he’s become a terminal associate prof, never to attain full prof status at U. of Kansas.

  28. Good… but I have a sneaky suspicion that there are other motives besides his apparent paranoia and he decided to cloak his decision in ideology instead.

  29. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

    The only downside is that some other college will probably hire him, and he’ll continue to play his slimy little part in the progressive infestation of American education. I’d be willing to bet he already has a tenured position lined up somewhere else. People don’t just throw away tenure like that.

  30. “Kansas can have great universities, or it can have concealed carry in classrooms, but it cannot have both.”

    You’d think a professor would recognize a False Choice fallacy when he speaks it.

  31. “Why are History departments staffed with so many leftists” – because that’s were you get paid to rewrite Western history. Duh.

  32. I find it a bit disingenuous, that being recently married to Dr. Elizabeth Villalobos, who was a lecturer at KU and not on a tenure track, he used this excuse, rather than saying he had a better opportunity at the University of Nevada-Reno where his spouse was offered and accepted full professorship a semester ago.

    • So I was right. He’s riding his wife’s coattails to a spousal accommodation position elsewhere, and this was just a little white lie. Empty grandstanding 101.

  33. By leaving, he’s done more to advance education than he has in the entire rest of his career.

  34. I am a Liberal Progressive that teaches through intimidation and bullying so therefore I know if you let my students carry a gun into my classroom some decent minded student is going to spare the world from any more of me .

  35. Just because they’re banned on campus in your future state, doesn’t mean they’re not in the classrooms and on campus anyway. That this idea escapes you IMO means your likely not much of a benefit to students anyway.

  36. And another snowflake melts away. Bye, bye and don’t let door hit ya where the good Lord split ya!

  37. Non-tenured professor resigned and took a job elsewhere? How is that news? It happens all the time. Oh, he picked the latest hot political argument as his excuse even though it is likely not the reason he is leaving, so suddenly, it is news.

  38. I totally support campus carry, open and/or concealed. This is a state law. It has nothing to do with the 2A. The 2A was written as a prohibition on the federal government BY the states, not against themselves. It is only through the magic fairly dust of 20th century readings of the 14th Amendment that the B of R has been “incorporated” against the states. Incorporation removes the prohibition against the federals and it makes them the arbiter or what the B of R means. So, where the 2A meant correctly, federal government you cannot legislate RKBA, we now have Scalia’s opinion that it is not an unlimited right. Well it was unlimited to the framers and ratifiers. State laws should be discussed in terms of the state and that state’s constitution. Sure, 2A has become a generic, but it falls into the trap of making the federals your “liberty referee,” which is dangerous. Given that unintended power, they turn rights into privileges, determining how much of a privilege you should have. Gun owners are notorious for supporting the incorporation doctrine but it is a false security. And as for that argument that Article Six makes the B of R the law of the land, the US is supreme only in the areas delegated to it and the RKBA was not one of them. They were prohibited from interfering. This is further supported by states like Massachusetts and CT having state sponsored churches into the 19th century, years after the 1A was ratified. Don’t be fooled. Actively pursue your rights, but your rights are stronger under the federalism of the founders and their original intent than there is in this modern textualism. All gun laws are not 2A centric, states have constitutions too. The correct decision for federal courts with regard to the 2A can be found in miller v texas, 1894, 26 years after the 14th Amendment came into being. If there was a magic of “substantive due process” and other pixie dust properties in the 14th, jurists would surely have discovered it in the following three decades.

    • The Second Amendment was considered a prohibition against state laws until at least 1820. The Supreme Court first ruled that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the States in 1833, as I recall.

      The First Amendment prohibition on establishing a Church explicitly applies to Congress, not the State legislatures. The Second Amendment is much more general. It simply states that the right “Shall not be infringed.” It does not say “Shall not be infringed by Congress.”

  39. “…as an associate professor of history and American studies at the university”

    If you were worth a $h!+ as a professor of AMERICAN STUDIES you might know what the Constitution is, fool. Get away from my kids!

  40. I heard on Straight Talk, on a Salina, KS radio station yesterday, that the real reason dorman quit was because he was twice denied tenure, most recently 5 days before his SJW anti second amendment rant. PLEASE, someone fact check this, as if this is the case, it needs to go out viral. I suspect that KU would assist in pushing this to national media, if indeed this is the case, as he really threw KU under the bus and then polished his resume on it’s corpse. Let me know, if you can confirm. I have sent emails to the Kansas board of regents and KU asking for clarification, but have not heard back. Feel free to let me know via email, what you find, [email protected]

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