… is a phrase you often hear on faculty hiring committees. It typically refers to unusually attractive candidates who for various reasons emerge outside the normal vetting process (read here for details).
But now the already-hired faculty at gun-happy University of Texas Austin has become one big target of opportunity.
A pro-campus-carry group is considering paying students to help it file complaints against University of Texas at Austin professors who want to ban guns in their offices.
“[Students for Concealed Carry] is already working on a variety of plans to document incidents of wrongful exclusion on the UT-Austin campus,” the group’s southwest regional director, Antonia Okafor, said in a prepared statement Tuesday. “One of the proposals we’re considering is the offering of a cash prize to the student who documents the most verifiable cases of faculty or staff prohibiting licensed concealed carry in offices.”
It’s the student as bounty hunter and the professor as prey in the Lone Star state.
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UD suggests the following strategies for professors interested in bankrupting Students for Concealed Carry: Make yourself and cooperating colleagues sitting ducks, with large day-glo signs on your doors announcing NO ENTRY TO GUNS. Make sure there’s a security camera in the hallway outside your office (there probably is), and carry out, at your open door, a strip search on all students who wish to enter. Or brandish a fake airport security wand (show it to the camera) and go up and down their inseams.
A riskier but rewarding variant on this approach would be to find cooperating students who will visit your office packing heat. They will agree to share a portion of any winnings with the professor.