Stephen Mumford’s One-Man Boycott Of The University Of Texas
BY Herschel Smith
8 years, 8 months ago
At the beginning of this year, the University of Texas began permitting guns on its campus, including in the classroom. In response, I’m beginning a personal boycott. I will not accept invitations to speak at any university where guns are allowed in class – and I’d like others to join me.
I have in the past given talks in US cities where guns may be carried, and sometimes where murder rates are high. Many Americans say that they feel safer when carrying a gun. There is ample statistical evidence that they are not. Being in the vicinity of a gun immediately increases your chances of being shot. I’ve been willing to take that risk to visit the US, but once one crosses the threshold of a university campus, one should be in a place free of weapons and any threat of violence.
There are a number of reasons for this. Some of them are practical. I would not want to speak to an audience whose members may carry guns. Academic debate can become heated. A good lecturer challenges the audience, pushing people out of their comfort zones. The presence of guns would almost certainly change that dynamic. Suppose I get a stupid question, delivered in an arrogant or aggressive way. The thought that the questioner might be carrying a weapon might well affect how I respond. Perhaps I would just let it go. But then my academic integrity and freedom to give an honest reply has been compromised through fear.
Even if I’m not provocative, I am still not safe in a university with guns. For a variety of reasons, people are sometimes dangerously unstable. The threat of violence is hugely increased if handguns are available. And any such threat falls disproportionately on the most conspicuous person in the room: the lecturer speaking at the front of the class. If anything did go wrong in the mind of a gun-carrying audience member, I could well be in the line of fire, no matter how polite my talk.
These safety concerns might or might not be empirically well grounded. But the bigger reasons for my boycott are philosophical; I might even say metaphysical. Guns and universities simply should not mix.
The most important role of the university is as protector and nourisher of civilisation and culture. This is in direct opposition to the idea that physical violence solves anything …
Balderdash. Violence solves a lot of things. Violence overthrew the Third Reich when collegial debate would not have sufficed. Violence repels rapists and murderers, and without responding with violence in self defense, Christianity in Mesopotamia is now no more, with Christians on the run or perishing throughout the middle east and North Africa.
The writer is a professor of Metaphysics at the University of Nottingham, but rather than believe he would get a stupid question from a student, I’m inclined to believe based on this article that he might be the one who poses stupid propositions. And I’m not sure The University of Texas has lost much if Mr. Mumford cannot find it within himself to lecture there. After all, they could always get Paul Helm, Alvin Plantinga or Nicholas Wolsterstorff to perform a visiting lecturer series. It would probably be much better anyway.
But since we’re on this subject of metaphysics, and since Mr. Mumford has posed a number of problems associated with visiting the University of Texas, I have a little quiz for him. He has pointed the finger of blame at the gun (presumably he wouldn’t also point to the reliability of the crystalline structure in the metal of the knife in the case of poor Lee Rigby – or would he?). So what, Mr. Mumford, causes a person to pull the trigger? Why would you be in any more danger around someone with a gun that any other time? You may invoke the concept of immediate causes, secondary causes, or even launch into a discussion of evil, predestination, volition and theodicy if you feel froggy.
We’re waiting to grade the essay.
On March 7, 2016 at 4:32 am, t_reese said:
Me thinks Mumford should just keep mum!
On March 7, 2016 at 8:15 am, Danny Ray said:
The phrase “being in the immediate vicinity of a gun dramatically increases your chances of being shot” is the most stupid statement I have ever read in my life especially from an academic, it ties with being in the immediate vicinity of an automobile dramatically increases your chances of being run over
On March 7, 2016 at 10:34 am, Ammono Cruose said:
To Mr. Mumford: If you are so mentally weak that you cannot even be in a room where there is the potential for a concealed firearm, then how do you even dredge up the courage to leave your home everyday. You do realize that every single person that you meet each day may indeed be carrying a weapon, even in your precious Europe. Just because it is illegal to do it, doesn’t mean every third person you talk to each day isn’t doing it anyway….
On March 7, 2016 at 10:55 am, Ned Weatherby said:
Why anyone would want someone who can utter so many falsities in so short a communication to speak to college students is beyond me.
(FYI, that was sarc – seems that Mumford and his idiocy perfectly fits the caliber of the typical college speaker these days…)
On March 7, 2016 at 1:29 pm, Jack Crabb said:
Mumford is a logic-challenged, misinformed, effete pussy.
On March 7, 2016 at 2:12 pm, Archer said:
As a “professor” of metaphysics (scare-quotes explained below), I trust the concepts of justified true beliefs (JTBs), justified false beliefs (JFBs), unjustified true beliefs (UTBs), and unjustified false beliefs (UFBs) are well-known to Mr. Mumford. (Note: For those unfamiliar, the terms are pretty self-explanatory: a JTB, for example, is 1. factually true, 2. you believe it is true, and 3. you can justify it with evidence and/or logic.)
The trouble with his argument is that so much of his “logic” relies on UFBs and, to a lesser extent, JFBs. So many of his beliefs (I’m not going to question whether he really believes them) are factually false, whether he can justify them or not. His statement, “Being in the vicinity of a gun immediately increases your chances of being shot,” is an UFB: while superficially justifiable (if there is no gun in the vicinity, the probability of being shot falls to near zero), it fails to account for multiple other factors: the demeanor of the people carrying, the direction of the muzzle(s), the methods of carry and mechanical safeties involved, whether other “undocumented” guns can be brought into the vicinity, etc., which severely discredits its justification. It’s dramatically more credible to state that his “chances of being shot” are non-zero no matter what circumstances he perceives, but are generally near-zero anywhere in America not awash in criminal activity, the presence of legally-carried firearms notwithstanding.
And by his logic, being surrounded by a cadre of police officers “immediately increases [his] chances of being shot.” After all, they all carry sidearms.
That makes me question his credentials as a metaphysics “professor”; he can’t even discern the difference between a JTB and an UFB, which was explained to us — in detail — on day one of philosophy class. Thus the scare-quotes around the term.
On March 7, 2016 at 2:52 pm, Herschel Smith said:
It would be interesting to ascertain – from something he could write to us – what he holds as (what Plantinga would call) “properly foundational and basic,” or presuppositions or axioms upon which he constructs the balance of his noetic structure. Doubtless, he (like we all do) assigns positive truth value to propositions that are incoherent with the rest of his world view, and when those are pointed out to us, it is our duty to relinquish those propositions. In his case, he hasn’t given us nearly enough to tell much of anything, except as you point out above, the defeator argument for much of what he says can be found in his own case (said another way, much of what he says can be used to deny other things he apparently believes).