Campus gun law carries concern
Community colleges to follow rule while educating minors
Each time a security alert from Lone Star College lit up Cheryl Longa’s cellphone last spring, she felt a wave of anxiety, even though her daughter’s dual-credit classes are online only.
“We’re trying to avoid going on campus,” Longa said. “She’s only 16. That’s just another world.”
Longa’s daughter is among tens of thousands of dualcredit high school students who enroll in Texas community college classes each year to earn cheap credits and acclimate to campus life.
But the state’s campus carry law, which Texas community colleges must enact on Tuesday, reveals complications that emerge when the line between high school and college blurs. This fall, kids may sit in classes next to an adult student who’s legally carrying a concealed handgun — even as it is illegal in Texas to carry on grade-school property.
The law, Longa said, is just “another good reason” why she enrolled her homeschooled daughter online-only for dual-credit courses.
Universities last August began abiding by Senate Bill 11, the law that allows license holders to carry concealed handguns on college campuses, while two-year schools had until this year to determine how they would meet the state mandate. Could faculty make private offices gun-free? What about labs?
“(The number of minors in the student body) throws a very large and difficult variable into the mix.”
Darrell Lovell, political science professor at Lone Star
Community colleges also had to determine what to do in classrooms that primarily or exclusively serve minors, a growing demographic on these campuses as older adults can more easily find work in a recovering economy without an associate’s or certificate.
Lone Star College, whose campuses are largely north and west of Beltway 8, is a telling example of this demographic shift. In fall 2012, less than 10 percent of Lone Star’s student body was dual-credit students. By last fall, the number of dual-credit students had more than doubled to 13,089, representing close to 18 percent of the student body across the system. The proportion’s rise has outpaced that of Houston Community College.
“That throws a very large and difficult variable into the mix,” said Darrell Lovell, a political science professor at Lone Star who has begun analyzing the implementation of campus carry across the state. “How do you deal with facilities management, how do you deal with exclusionary zones, when you have 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds on campus? They don’t have their own cafeteria.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a five-page ruling in November that community colleges may not totally block handguns from campuses that enroll minors in a way that undermines the law.
Still, he acknowledged that the schools could establish “reasonable rules” and take student ages into account when they identify campus gun-free zones.
“Such rules could prohibit concealed handguns in specific classrooms and campus areas at times where there may be a congregation of minors, as well as specific rooms where child-care services are provided,” he wrote.
‘Not an exclusion zone’
Lone Star, which is one of the biggest community college systems in the state by enrollment, has interpreted that to block concealed handguns from areas of campus exclusively used by high school students. Aldine ISD, for example, has a campus in Lone Star’s Victory Center in Greater Inwood, and a charter school occupies rooms in the University Park campus in Cypress Crossing. But concealed handguns will be permitted in the lobbies, stairwells and common spaces of those buildings.
“When they come on our campus, they’re college students. That’s not an exclusion zone,” said Rand Key, Lone Star’s police commissioner and chief executive officer. “Because if we did that, that would be us trying to skirt around the spirit of the law. The Legislature wants guns to be allowed.”
Police Chief Paul Willingham said he did not expect enrollment to drop following the law’s implementation because all state colleges must allow handguns on campus.
Incidents called ‘rare’
Willingham said fouryear universities have seen “barely even a blip” after campus carry was implemented despite the protest that raged before the law’s implementation.
At least 20 Texas universities had no gun discharge incidents or reports of intimidation with a firearm in their first academic year under the law, according to a Houston Chronicle review of university records.
More than a dozen had at least one report, including aggravated robbery, an accidental discharge in a residence hall and disorderly conduct.
Willingham called these incidents “rare.” “It hasn’t really affected the general safety of the campuses.”
Still, some faculty have continued to protest. Three University of Texas at Austin professors, who argued the law had a chilling effect on their ability to speak freely, last week appealed a federal judge’s dismissal of their campus carry lawsuit to the Fifth Circuit. U.S. District Court Judge Lee Yeakel tossed the lawsuit in July, finding that the professors lacked standing by failing to prove an actual injury.
Studying law’s effects
And academics have begun to pore through interviews, crime data and implementation strategies, researching how campus carry has and has not changed university life.
Nathaniel Cradit, who recently earned his doctorate in higher, adult and lifelong education at Michigan State University, interviewed about a dozen professors at a Texas campus dubbed “Metropolitan University” for his dissertation.
At the campus, which he could not identify because of the study’s confidentiality, one professor avoided meeting with a “combative” student out of fear of personal safety.
Another moved office hours to a public space to avoid private conversations with a student who may be carrying. A third said she needed to be “a little more cautious” when she discussed Sigmund Freud and femininity in the classroom. He plans to survey faculty and staff widely after these results.
“It does seem pretty clear that this is influencing the academic conversation and the intellectual life of the university,” he said.
Some spaces gun-free
More than 1,200 people came to Lone Star’s open forums as a committee led by Key and Willingham developed a final policy on the law, the administrators said.
Willingham said he had to explain to attendees that “mixed” environments of high school and college students ”cannot be gun free.”
“We like our kids to be protected, and in public schools they can be,” said John Burghduff, a Lone Star math professor who’s been a vocal critic of campus carry. “We have a superb police department, but the fact of the matter is, their fellow students, their older students around them, are going to have the right to have a gun. Parents are really going to need to think about if they feel comfortable with their kids in that situation.”
Some parents of dualcredit students, to be sure, support campus carry and how colleges are implementing Paxton’s opinion.
“In this day and age, you’re a sitting duck if you don’t have some means,” said Cheri Weeks of Plantersville, whose daughter
attended Lone Star as a dual-credit student before matriculating at College of the Mainland in Texas City. “It only takes one person to be able to change the outcome of the event.”
Lone Star eventually identified more than 230 spaces on its campuses across the region — including cosmetology labs, testing centers and child care centers — that will be gun-free zones, which the law permits. About 60 others, like recital halls and theaters, will block guns at certain times.
‘Anything can happen’
Key explained the nature of these “exclusion zones” and the law itself at campus hearings.
“As we moved from campus to campus and forum to forum, the anxiety level of all this, you could just see it going down,” Key said. “They had a clearer understanding of what it meant to have a license to carry.”
During those forums, he couldn’t help but remember the campus shooting that wounded three people at the North Harris branch in 2013.
“If we were to have another event like that,” he said, ”we don’t want a lot of people pulling out their guns trying to help the police.”
Some of the law’s supporters, however, say that layer of personal safety is exactly why they want to carry.
Lisa Nguyen, 21, takes most of her Lone Star classes online, but she comes to the school’s North Harris campus to take exams at night. She said she may get her license after the law is implemented.
“Anything can happen,” she said, adding that visitors to campus do not need to identify themselves as outsiders. “It’s not like middle school or high school.”