Rupert Fancpiants
Chronicle Staff Writer
Disclaimer: The following article is published as part of our annual satirical April Fool’s Day issue. Please don’t believe any of it, and please don’t sue us. Thanks.
Every six seconds in America, a cell phone goes off in class.
Students, teachers, administrators and lawmakers have hotly debated the right to bring cell phones into classrooms in recent years, a debate that one state senator hopes to settle with a controversial new bill.
“I hate them, I hate knowing that students can bring them into my class,” said a humanities professor on condition of anonymity. “Especially that obnoxious ‘Barbie Girl’ setting.”
“I wouldn’t feel safe if I didn’t have mine with me,” said Jack Squaddops, junior, communication. “Sure, some people know I carry, but I usually keep it on silent.”
A recent survey conducted by the Associated Students of the University of Utah found that 1.2 cell phones come on campus for every student enrolled.
Some say this represents a dangerous threat, not only that deadly cell phone radiation might kill us all, but that the presence of so many cell phones might limit academic freedom. Others say the right to carry a cell phone is protected under the First Amendment right to free speech.
One legislator, Sen. Michael Cavanaugh, R-Unincorporated Box Elder County, has taken up a crusade to keep cell phones legal and protect the right to carry.
“It’s a little difficult to say what our founding fathers would have thought about banning concealed cell phones,” Cavanaugh said. “But I’m sure they would have wanted Americans to have the right to carry them.”
If it hadn’t been for the pre-Revolutionary War Committees of Correspondence, the American insurrection against British rule would have died in its infancy, Cavanaugh pointed out.
“And think how much more effective those politically dissident communications would have been if they’d all had cell phones?” he said.
Although Cavanaugh is adamantly against cell phones, he would agree to a modified bill that allowed cell phones on campus if their owners obtained special permits. Some say even that is too generous.
“This bill is a dangerous mistake,” The Salt Lake Tribune said in an unsigned editorial. “Rather than adopting it, legislators should write a law clarifying that holders of concealed-carry permits be forbidden to bring phones into schools.”
Students Against Cell Phone Disturbances President Taunie Meadows said, “Parents, teachers and administrators who get into heated arguments are safer if no one has a cell phone, and for that reason alone, the law should forbid anyone other than a peace officer, or maybe a law student, from bringing one into a school.”
Who knows when a student will lose interest in a classroom discussion and start playing Snake? Or text-message a friend in a different class?” Meadows continued.
“It’s our academic freedom, and we need to protect it,” she said. “And some fanatic minority who needs it to feel cool isn’t going to dictate to me.”