By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
A BGSU professor wants the requirement that faculty, staff, administrators, and some students go through ALICE training eliminated.
The online training in active shooter preparedness (ALICE stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate) is required every summer before fall classes start.
Timothy Messer-Kruse, a historian who teaches in the Ethnic Studies Department, said that unlike other of “the host” of required training programs this one is not evidence based.
“When you look under the covers,” he told Faculty Senate at the end of March, “it does not rise to the level of what many of us would consider to be a fact-based or evidence-base investigation or presentation of the subject matter.”
Messer-Kruse said that as with anything the university presents, it must balance the benefits and risks.
A growing body of evidence, he said, is connecting the related active shooter training many students experience before attending college to the growing mental health crisis among young people. It is hard to determine how much.
A 2021 study showed increased anxiety among those who undergo ALICE training.
While many factors play into the increase in depression, stress, anxiety, and even suicidal thoughts, he believes that active shooter training plays a part.
One reason, Messer-Kruse said, is that by exaggerating the risks mass school shooting incidents pose.
These incidents are tragic, but very rare. Since 1966, there have been nine mass shooter incidents on college campuses.
Only 1 percent of the 43,000 the annual gun deaths in America. Excluding mass shootings 91 students since 2013 have died of gunfire on campus, 10 percent of the total killed by gunfire.
The chance of dying in a school shooting is far lower, Messer-Kruse than dying from any number of other threats from car crashes to choking to bee stings.
In his resolution, Messer-Kruse also invokes Senate Bill 83, a controversial piece of legislation, he has opposed. Among the provisions is a restriction on teaching controversial topics. The ALICE training certainly could be banned under that provision of the legislation if it should pass.
The training implies this is the only solution to school shootings, he said. When gun regulation is another, more effective approach.
[RELATED: Higher ed overhaul bill stalled; fight expected to resume next year]
Faculty member Montana Miller objected to that article in the resolution.
While saying she agreed with the intent of the resolution, tying it in any way to bill which has not been passed by the legislature and which most faculty members opposed would bring them “down a dangerous path.”
Miller said she has done some research on this training. “I don’t think it’s effective, realistic or research based.”
Bringing in SB83 is “irrelevant,” she said.
Emily Gerome, president of the Undergraduate Student Government, said she has taken ALICE training for a job on campus. “I found mine very valuable.”
She questioned whether “if we don’t require ALICE, if it’s taken away, will we have some sort of gun violence or interference training or are we hoping to just take away this conversation altogether?”
Messer-Kruse’s resolution does leave open the possibility that ALICE training could be optional.
The senate tabled the resolution until the last meeting of the semester on April 23. Senators in the meantime are seeking the views of their colleagues.
