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They're mocking you, Oakland University, and not gently.
Its offbeat reaction to the risk of campus shootings isn't just eyebrow-raising. It's "clearly bad," two academic writers say.
Their criticism is aimed at the suburban university's distribution of 2,500 hockey pucks to students and faculty members so they can have something heavy to throw at a gunman as a distraction.
"One wonders how bad grade inflation must be at Oakland for ideas like this to be considered as having merit. . . . One is hard-pressed to think of another strategy that would be much worse," Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan write in a commentary republished Tuesday by The Detroit News.
A century from now, when people consider the gun-control debates from this period of American history, this chapter will surely be one of the lowlights.
Davies is an economist at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and Harrigan teaches in the University of Arizona's Department of Political Economy and Moral Science. Their essay is from InsideSources, a news and opinion site launched in 2014.
They ridicule Oakland University for preferring pucks over legally owned firearms, which are banned from campus along with any "dangerous weapon:"
Tom Discenna, professor and president of the faculty union, noted that the pucks are "a reminder that you’re not powerless and you’re not helpless in the classroom." . . .
To ban guns and then arm the campus community with hockey pucks says that the university is more concerned about people feeling powerless and helpless than about their actually being powerless and helpless.
As for hockey pucks being useful, either they are dangerous weapons, in which case the university's own rules prohibit students and faculty from carrying them, or they aren't, in which case there's no point in distributing them.
A better approach is to acknowledge that college shootings are rare events, considerably more rare than hospital shootings, for example. If passing out hockey pucks as defensive weapons in hospitals sounds ridiculous, it should sound considerably more ridiculous in colleges and universities.