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As reported yesterday, three professors at the University of Texas, Austin have filed suit against the state Attorney General, the President of the University of Texas at Austin, and the members of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas at Austin. Their goal: to invalidate the state’s new campus carry law.

The three plaintiffs are described in the suit:

4. Plaintiff Jennifer Lynn Glass is a resident of Austin, Texas, in Travis County, and is the Barbara Bush Professor of Liberal Arts, the University of Texas at Austin.

5. Plaintiff Lisa Moore is a resident of Austin, Texas, in Travis County, and will be the Archibald T. Hill Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, the University of Texas at Austin.

6. Plaintiff Mia Carter is a resident of Austin, Texas, in Travis County, and is a University Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin, and a University of Texas System Regents’ Outstanding Teacher.

The lawsuit consists of 18 pages of emotional diatribes, half truths, unsupported assumptions, contradictions and reversals of the plain meanings of words. Here are a few short excerpts to give you a flavor for the document.

33. Compelling professors at a public university to allow, without any limitation or restriction, students to carry concealed guns in their classrooms chills their First Amendment rights to academic freedom.

We must have missed the right to academic freedom in the test of the First Amendment. Exactly how free speech is chilled when the Texas law requires the pistols to be concealed is not explained. Illegally concealed pistols likely are and have been in classrooms already.

48. The Texas statutes and university policies that prohibit Plaintiffs from exercising their individual option to forbid handguns in their classrooms violate the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, as applied in Texas through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. These policies and procedures deprive Plaintiffs of their Second Amendment right to defend themselves and others in their classrooms from handgun violence by compelling them as public employees to passively acquiesce in the presence of loaded weaponry in their place of public employment without the individual possession and use of such weaponry in public being well-regulated. This infringement lacks any important justification and is imposed without any substantial link between the objectives of the policies and the means chosen to achieve them.

A right to violate others’ Second Amendment rights in public places. That is a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment by any measure. Positively Orwellian.

And then there’s this:

50. The Texas statutes and university policies that prohibit Plaintiffs from exercising their individual option to forbid handguns in their classrooms violates their rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. There is no rational basis for the division in the state’s policies between where concealed carry of handguns is permitted and where it may be prohibited.

The paragraph could be read as to logically require Texas law to allow concealed carry permit holders to carry everywhere. But that’s probably not what the plaintiffs are arguing.

Public employees at a public institution do not have a right to dictate the terms of their employment. Under this weird theory, professors could exclude anyone from the classroom that they choose to discriminate against. They could forbid students from wearing religious symbols; they could require students to enter only after an invitation by the professor each time they came to the classroom. Public university property is not private property. The argument here is bizarre.

These are only tiny portions of what is in the lawsuit. Of course, lawsuits can be filed for just about any reason by just about anyone who’s willing to pay to file them. This one seems designed to show the failure of a public university to properly vet its teaching staff.

©2016 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.
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61 COMMENTS

  1. With those degrees, the only job available is teaching.
    I like teachers very much – the best ones are the ones that also have a real job.

    • I don’t understand how college professors and admins at public universities refuse to believe that they are agents of the government. They want the benefits of a nice government salary and insurance without the burden of having to respect the constitutional imposed prohibitions on their whims. The 2nd amendment is a clarification of a positive right, and a prohibition on government agent’s actions respecting the right to keep and bear arms. College professors are agents of the government at public schools.

      The 14th amendment argument doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, because under the 14th amendment, due process and the 2nd amendment are applied to the states. In light of SCOTUS decisions affirming the right to keep AND BEAR arms, the 14th amendment argument makes little sense for her, and works in favor of her students.

  2. Wow. Based on those excerpts, I would surmise that they wrote this after consuming a substantial volume of wine…. or something.

    And at least one of these is an ENGLISH professor?

    • English is how many of these left activists wedge their way into imposing their crack pot courses into the legitimate curriculum at many schools. Psychology and Sociology are others. They get the degree and teaching credentials, then use those disciplines to launch their own leftist study courses that are unrelated to the actual degree they have. The schools tolerate it, and let them teach in virtually any subject with out the actual credentials as long as they add “women, gender, race” to the name of the class. In this way you can have a psychology degree, and teach in the history department by naming your class something like “Pacific Islander feminism in ancient rome.”

      • Using English class to push a political agenda is not new. 20 years ago, I attended an English class in Portland where you would read a story in a book, and then write a paper about it. The stories were all controversial topics related to leftist politics. I learned after the first few papers that if I wanted to pass the class I had to pretend I was a hardcore crunchy-granola eating Communist.

        • ” I learned after the first few papers that if I wanted to pass the class I had to pretend I was a hardcore crunchy-granola eating Communist.”

          Ah, the old appeasement strategem.

          Never give in to them. Make them own their shit.

          If a prof is giving you bad grades on an English paper due to differences of political opinion, fight it.

          Pretending to be one of them only strengthens their belief that they own the numbers.

          Also, they NEVER give up. Nothing is ever enough. Look into that…been a ton of youtube vids on the topic lately.

    • 18 pages of rhetoric? Yes, it’s an English professor’s Sunday afternoon in the flesh. They’ll probably be handing out copies of it at the end of class.

    • “These policies and procedures deprive Plaintiffs of their Second Amendment right to defend themselves and others in their classrooms from handgun violence by compelling them as public employees to passively acquiesce in the presence of loaded weaponry in their place of public employment without the individual possession and use of such weaponry in public being well-regulated.”

      A professor of English, indeed even those of us without such academic credentials, (I do hold an A. B. and M. A. in English Literature) should recognize the outrageous linguistic flaw in this claim.
      They claim deprivation of their 2nd Amendment right because they are forced to consent to guns in their classrooms ” without the individual possession and use of such weaponry in public being well-regulated.”
      That implies they think that the adjectival phrase — “well regulated” has a function and usage that is unique in all the English language.
      They consider that the phrase moves through space, from the “Militia clause” where it modifies the word “Militia”, into the operative clause where they claim it now modifies “individual possession and use of such weaponry”.
      Not only do they think they can re-use “well regulated” again by moving it through space, but they also wish to have that phrase time travel as well, over two centuries into the future, where it now has the modern connotations of “lots of government rules, regulations, and restrictions”.
      The usage of the phrase at the time the 2nd Amendment was written had no such connotations. The Oxford English Dictionary entry for the hyphenated form of “well regulated” shows it was used to express the concept of something that was “performing as expected”, or “properly functioning”.
      No one worth his salt with the title of Professor of English would subscribe to such a torture of the language. It would be worse than claiming that Hamlet was obese, since Gertrude describes him as “fat”. One cannot substitute the common modern meaning of the word, but must recognize the contemporaneous usage of “fat” as “sweaty”.

      • There’s no way this survives the scrutiny of the courts, they have held many times over that the 2nd amendment does not exist solely in the context of a militia, but that this particular clause is simply a justifications clause.

  3. guns on schools is touchy. yall might wanna look up what a few of our Founding Fathers thought about guns on campuses. so we are always saying that they knew best when they were writing it and we must adhere to its wording. does that still hold true when a few of them say that guns should never be on school grounds? or do we practice selective reasoning again and ignore that? no its not in writing that they didn’t want guns in schools but they made their opinion very clear.
    https://www.thetrace.org/2016/05/thomas-jefferson-founding-fathers-campus-carry/
    i think campus carry is good but im not so stupid to think that i could not be wrong.

    • This is not a new thing to bring up here. Do you know how old the students at the UV in 1824 were? If, no, you should research it a little.

      • …it says students shouldn’t have weapons — no mention of professors or others — or face minor reprimand (serious offenses resulted in expulsion or suspension, but having a firearm or other weapon faced a “minor” reprimand). Same minor punishment for alcohol, excessive noise (including the firing of guns btw), having or going to parties, etc.

    • You also might want to avoid the trace if you want to be able to have a rational fact based conversation.

    • “So we are always saying that they knew best when they were writing it and we must adhere to its wording.”

      First off, Jefferson did not write the Second Amendment. He did not write the Constitution. He didn’t even sign the Constitution or attend the Constitutional Convention. He was in France and goofing off throughout Europe at the time. (If you really want to get into it, he didn’t even write the entire Declaration of Independence and certainly was not the originator of all the ideas it expressed, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

      Second, U.Va. is a state institution. The federal constitution’s bill of rights did not apply to states then. So the 2A was irrelevant to this question.

      As to the general view of firearms on campus then, it was an institutional conduct violation equivalent to smoking or chewing tobacco on school grounds, i.e., a slap on the wrist, not a criminally prosecutable offense and certainly not a felony.

      The initial class consisted of teenagers as young as 16 and 17, what we’d consider high schoolers today, which is an invalid comparison to today’s universities.

      Regardless, the Second Amendment reads how it reads, as ratified. What one or two or ten thousand people who didn’t write it, didn’t vote on it, or even who voted against, believed, is immaterial. It’s the law of the land. Oh, and so is campus carry in Texas. Deal. With. It.

      • “STEM” today is not at all what it was even 20yr ago.

        “emotional diatribes, half truths, unsupported assumptions, contradictions and reversals of the plain meanings of words” You expected something other from 3 libtard chicks (ALL 3 BS humanities majors)?

        • And it’s going to get a lot worse and soon and the STEM to STEAM movement gains traction. Adding Art into the mix is just going to water down STEM programs with a bunch of touchy feely, unintellectual, unrigorous crap.

          Now, there’s nothing wrong with art and creativity, but that’s not what this is about. This is just a way to hijack STEM, elide hard science and technology with anything-goes subjectivity, and lend the latter the mantle of the former’s legitimacy.

  4. No hard science anywhere which eliminates any need or inclination for anything even remotely resembling rational, logical, critical, investigative thought.

  5. I loved “…deprive Plaintiffs of their Second Amendment right to defend themselves and others in their classrooms from handgun violence.”

    That’s exactly the thinking behind safe spaces – shutting down speech you find objectionable to protect your First Amendment rights. To hell with anyone else’s rights.

    Who’s paying for this nonsense litigation?

    • Motion to dismiss on the grounds that it is frivolous, fails to state a cause of action for which relief may be granted, and was filed maliciously without any intent that they would prevail upon the merits.

      Then ask for monetary sanctions in the amount of the defense’s legal fees.

  6. “by compelling them as public employees to passively acquiesce in the presence of loaded weaponry in their place of public employment without the individual possession and use of such weaponry in public being well-regulated.”

    Nice twist. A well regulated militia of the second amendment now converts to weaponry in public being well regulated infringing on their first amendment.

    What gun is on first base…I don’t know

  7. Its pretty cut and dry for me. Go to California they just implemented the laws these morons want

    • These individuals want to bring the peace and enlightenment of Cali to the unwashed, gun-toting barbarians of Texas.

  8. Motion to dismiss on the grounds that it is frivolous, fails to state a cause of action for which relief may be granted, and was filed maliciously without any intent that they would prevail upon the merits.

    Then ask for monetary sanctions in the amount of the defense’s legal fees.

    • The named professorship means that they have an endowment. Barbara and Archie donated a large sum to the university, that money earns interest that the faculty member can spend from each year. And they get to use the title to acknowledge the donor and to demonstrate that they have been recognized by the university by being picked to be the recipient of the award.

  9. LOL!!!

    Professor of Liberal Arts
    Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies
    Outstanding Teacher

    It’s just comical. Textbook liberationists. Freedom to these people is more government regulations mandating cultural homogenization, and equality for everyone in everything. They see everyone as a victim that needs liberating. “Freedom from” people. Not “Freedom to” people.

    • I’m confused how they can make an entire major out of “gender studies.”

      A PhD in “Gender studies?” Amazing. The dictionary definition of “gender” gave me all that needs to be known. How you can make such a vast program out of nothingness is nothing short of amazing.

      • That’s the great thing about BS. Who can evaluate or quality control that one steaming pile is “better” or adequate compared to another. Or put a price on a particular pile.

  10. Public Universities are public in name only, they already openly discriminate against Christianity, the 2nd Amendment, any speech or activity they deem politically incorrect, and yes, being white.

  11. It’s amusing how these supposedly intelligent professors are using the wrong definition of “well regulated”.

    • Social Justice Feelz gives them all the ‘standing’ they think they need.

      Rules of the Court System don’t apply to the Chosen…only to us peons that dare defy the self-proclaimed elite.

  12. “These policies and procedures deprive Plaintiffs of their Second Amendment right to defend themselves and others in their classrooms from handgun violence by compelling them as public employees to passively acquiesce in the presence of loaded weaponry in their place of public employment without the individual possession and use of such weaponry in public being well-regulated. ”

    I haven’t seen such a piece of circular nonsense in quite some time.

    1: You don’t have a second amendment right to defend yourself. It simply doesn’t say that. You have a natural right to defend yourself, and the second amendment says you shall not be deprived of the ability to do it with arms.

    2: You don’t have a second amendment right to defend yourself by making sure nobody around you has a gun. Just, no. That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.

    3: Where in the 2nd amendment does it say that weapons or the possession thereof shall be well-regulated? Where does it say the militia must be well-regulated? WTF does well-regulated have to do with your argument, at all, aside from you see the words and assign a meaning to them that is utterly incorrect?

    • Yeah, their argument basically boils down to “when the constitution says ‘The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” it really means “public officials, high and petty, shall have the power to prohibit the bearing of arms in their personal vicinity, at their sole discretion”. An easy mistake to make, right?

    • “Where does it say the militia must be well-regulated?”

      It doesn’t in the Second, but Art. ! Sec. 8 cl. 16 gives Congress the authority to work at making it so.

      Not that they would like it if Congress actually used that authority, as it would require them to undergo any training they would love to impose on gun owners, since they are as much a part of the militia as those gun-bearing students.. Imagine them being required to learn to behave in a well-regulated manner with guns!

  13. These institutions of higher re-education need to be defunded into the ground. To think that people with real jobs pay taxes so these soft headed loons can spout their rhetoric is atrocious. Public funding should only go to trade schools, and STEM. If you want a degree in pansexual dance theory, you pay for it your damn self. I suppose if young people learned to be self sufficient, productive citizens then the whole Obamunist gravy train would screech to a halt.

  14. It doesn’t surprise me at all that a Gender Studies professor would file a suit of this type and with such a broad scope of stupidity.

    1. Alleging infringement based on 2nd and 14th amendment has absolutely no legal basis whatsoever. The 2nd amendment is a positive right, it does not have negative language with regards to the rights of others. On the contrary, it is a prohibition on the government’s ability to infringe on the rights of the individual. More to the point, it doesn’t bestow the ability of one person to infringe on the rights of other to “keep and bear arms”.

    In this context, the gender studies professor is an agent of the government, and as a public employee, has not right to refuse others to carry in a peaceable manner.

    2. Based on the reasoning above, she has no legal standing whatsoever on 14th amendment grounds to prohibit the carry in her classroom, because she doesn’t have that right in the first place.

    Silly gender studies professors, major in something that encourages common sense next time.

    • Given how the courts have upheld restrictions on the religious expression of public employees, how can they even imagine they have so much as a toe to stand on, let alone a leg?

      No self-respecting attorney would accept money to argue this drivel.

  15. To quote the NA meeting from the movie “Half-Baked” ….

    “THIS IS SOME BULL$H~T !!!”

    This might be some of the most ridiculous legal “theory” that I have ever seen! I mean, really? Some people should be ASHAMED of themselves.

    Come on now, really?

    Some shameful $hit right here, boy. These mofos should be ashamed.

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