The president of Utah State University on Wednesday defended his school’s handling of a violent threat against a planned talk by a feminist pop culture critic that led to its cancellation.
The USU president, Stan Albrecht, said in a letter to faculty and students that because of state law, the school could not prevent anyone from carrying concealed weapons into the talk on women and video games that feminist speaker Anita Sarkeesian was scheduled to have given last week.
Sarkeesian cancelled after an anonymous person threatened to enact a “Montreal Massacre style attack”, a reference to a 1989 attack in which a male gunman shot and killed 14 women, claiming he was “fighting feminism”.
Sarkeesian is best known for her web series “Tropes v Women in Video Games” and has become one of the targets of a campaign known as “GamerGate” which seeks to fight so-called corruption in the video games industry and the journalism about it, though it is more closely associated with people threatening feminist critics of video games. She had planned to go ahead with the event until she learned that guns would be allowed in the room where it was to be held.
After the cancellation, nearly 200 faculty and students signed a letter that said the school’s refusal to block guns on campus threatens free speech: “[W]e are concerned about the relatively short distance between silencing speakers and silencing faculty in their classrooms,” the letter said. “We fear that students may see the threat of violence or actual violence as a way to dictate what faculty say and do and that allowing guns on campus makes those threats extremely viable.”
Albrecht said in his letter on Wednesday that he is “deeply saddened” that Sarkeesian had to cancel her talk because she felt unsafe. Albrecht said that state law blocks universities from taking concealed weapons from permitted weapons holders. “While some have called for me to declare our campus gun free, that is not a decision for USU, but a decision for our state legislature and elected officials,” Albrecht wrote.
He also said that one of his more immediate concerns is a push by members of the state’s legislature to create an open carry law on school campuses.
“I hope that the events of this week, and the increased awareness of current state law and its impact on what we do as a university, will lead to a significantly increased involvement on the part of our faculty, staff, and students in the political process,” Albrecht said. “USU does not operate in isolation.”
