Questions:

What is the role of student protest in affecting change in the present political climate?

In your eyes, what impact has the Cocks Not Glocks protest made on the future of campus carry?

Mia’s response:

The Students Against Concealed Carry, Cocks Not Glocks activists, and independent student-activists that have voiced their concerns about SB 11, academic freedom, and public safety have been absolutely invaluable allies to the University’s faculty and staff–a vast majority of the campus community that vehemently opposed the law due to the harm that it would wreak on an open, dynamic, rigorously analytical, and challenging educational environment. Today, one of the keynote speakers for my Department’s distinguished annual TILTS (Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies) conference rescinded her agreement to come to the University of Texas (see attachments below, which we have been given permission to share). Another speaker, Dr. Harry Edwards refused to appear at the LBJ School Conference named for him (“A Letter to the University of Texas About campus Concealed Carry“). Scholars are refusing to come to U.T. in solidarity to its scholarly  community.

The student-activists have helped to call the country’s and world’s attention to our plight here; they have called attention to the battle for commonsense gun control measures on college campuses and in the United States. The plaintiffs, students and I have done interviews with The New York Times, The Telegraph (UK), Swiss National Broadcasting, BBC Radio, NPR, The Nation, Rolling Stone, The Daily Show, Inside Higher Education, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, just to name a few. The Cocks Not Glocks pranksters are brilliant political activists in a great tradition of American and European theatrical, excessive, and absurdist protest (from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, to Dada and the Theatre of the Absurd, to the Yippies, Act-UP, the Guerilla Girls, WAC/The Women’s Action Coalition, the performance artist Dread Scott). Several of the Cocks Not Glocks students are Arts and Theatre majors; they are media savvy, too, and they have an idealistic vision of education and society that they are willing to fight for. Continue reading Mia Carter’s Interview with Diane Sun of the Daily Texan →