Professor Churchill is deeply saddened.
Posted on 04/23/2007 6:21:16 AM PDT by Melissa 24
Professor Fired Over Va. Tech Discussion Monday, April 23, 2007 BOSTON — An adjunct professor was fired after leading a classroom discussion about the Virginia Tech shootings in which he pointed a marker at some students and said "pow." The five-minute demonstration at Emmanuel College on Wednesday, two days after a student killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus, included a discussion of gun control, whether to respond to violence with violence, and the public's "celebration of victimhood," said the professor, Nicholas Winset. During the demonstration, Winset pretended to shoot some students. Then one student pretended to shoot Winset to illustrate his point that the gunman might have been stopped had another student or faculty member been armed. "A classroom is supposed to be a place for academic exploration," Winset, who taught financial accounting, told the Boston Herald. He said administrators had asked the faculty to engage students on the issue. But on Friday, he got a letter saying he was fired and ordering him to stay off campus. Winset, 37, argued that the Catholic liberal arts school was stifling free discussion by firing him, and he said the move would have a "chilling effect" on open debate. He posted an 18-minute video on the online site YouTube defending his action. The college issued a statement saying: "Emmanuel College has clear standards of classroom and campus conduct, and does not in any way condone the use of discriminatory or obscene language." Student Junny Lee, 19, told The Boston Globe that most students didn't appear to find Winset's demonstration offensive. Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Wow. America, I hardly knew ye.
Professor Churchill is deeply saddened.
Ridiculous. Is there any climate in the USA more wussified than our colleges and universities?
Ridiculous. Is there any climate in the USA more wussified than our colleges and universities?
I know the phrase is overused, but if his firing isn't a classic hysterical liberal kneejerk reaction to what ought to be a perfectly normal discussion on current events then I don't know what is.
We have to take back AMERICA.
this is rediculous.
The time has clearly come when we need alternatives to most US colleges and universities.
How about civil service or military service for the patriotic, self-disciplined, or mature?
ping
The core of liberalism is not concern, not compassion, not reason, not goodwill— it’s self obsession. Case in point.
To defend oneself isn't following the liberal dogma.
Piss off a liberal, stay armed!
Perhaps in the future he'll stick with the topic he was hired for.
I strongly suspect that this is an example of academic political correctness run amok, but there is something about he report that suggests there may be more here than is being reported:
The college’s statement is a non-sequitur if the adjunct was fired for a colorfully illustrated discussion of the right to self-defense. There is nothing ‘discrimanatory’ or obscene in the the instructor’s language or behavior as reported. I would have expected the statement to have included instead some imbecility about the inappropriateness of ‘simulated weapons’ in a classroom discussion if the cause of his firing is as reported.
Of course, I admit that the offices which issue such statements, and worry themselves about ‘discrimanatory’ language, are not hotbeds of rational thought, so it may well be the case that the college’s statement simply is a non-sequitur.
Still, despite agreeing with the reported point the instructor was making, and seeing nothing at all wrong with the classroom method reported, I’d like a fuller report before forming an opinion of the justice or injustice of his dismissal.
a MARKER, as in a dry erase board marker????
In today’s climate actual crimes are nothing. Words are everything.
I dunno, in this case it might be just good old nonsectarian/nonideological academic moral cowardice.
The message from the liberals is clear that women are good and men are evil and that what men need is to be more like women or be punished.
I pick Ann Coulter.
OK, so now fake guns are illegal too? And even talking about guns? yegad.
It’s a pure ideological purge.
You mean alternate schools?
I think he was fired because he is PRO Second Amendment, he dared to discuss ‘the celebration of victimhood’ and suggested that if a student at VaTek had had a gun, the massacre would have ended sooner.
Business Professor was probably conservative. And clear thinking.
“Perhaps in the future he’ll stick with the topic he was hired for.”
Why?
“He said administrators had asked the faculty to engage students on the issue.”
Seems to me he was perfectly within his right to do so, since they asked.
It’s the thought that counts. The prof attempted to infect the students with ideological impurity.
Alternative places to encourage thought and learning instead of indoctrination zones where people are at risk and are pc’d to death.
I used to teach college English. This PC garbage was just getting well started when I left. I am glad I’m not there now.
Within hours of the Virginia Tech massacre, the New York Times had identified the problem:
"What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss."
According to the Canadian blogger Kate MacMillan, a caller to her local radio station went further and said she was teaching her children to "fear guns."
Overseas, meanwhile, the German network NTV was first to identify the perpetrator: To accompany their report on the shootings, they flashed up a picture of Charlton Heston touting his rifle at an NRA confab.
Yale's Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg reacted to the Virginia Tech murders with decisive action: She banned all stage weapons from plays performed on campus. After protests from the drama department, she modified her decisive action to "permit the use of obviously fake weapons" such as plastic swords.
But it's not just the danger of overly realistic plastic swords in college plays that we face today. In yet another of his not-ready-for-primetime speeches, Sen. Barack Obama, Illinois Democrat, started out deploring the violence of Virginia Tech as yet another example of the pervasive violence of our society -- the violence of Iraq, the violence of Darfur, the violence of... er, hang on, give him a minute. Ah, yes, outsourcing: "the violence of men and women who... suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job has moved to another country." And let's not forget the violence of radio hosts: "There's also another kind of violence, though, that we're going to have to think about. It's not necessarily physical violence, but violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways. Last week the big news, obviously, had to do with [Don] Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women who were role models for all of us, role models for my daughters."
I have had some mail in recent days from people who claimed I had insulted the dead of Virginia Tech. Obviously I regret I didn't show the exquisite taste and sensitivity of Mr. Obama and compare getting shot in the head to an Imus one-liner. Does he mean it? I doubt whether even he knows. When something savage and unexpected happens, it's easiest to retreat to our tropes and bugbears or, in the senator's case, a speech on the previous week's "big news."
Perhaps I'm guilty of the same. But then Yale University, one of the most prestigious institutes of learning on the planet, announces it's no longer safe to expose twentysomething men and women to "Henry V" unless you cry "God for Harry, England and St. George," while brandishing a bright pink and purple plastic sword from the local kindergarten. Except, of course, that the local kindergarten long since banned plastic swords under its own "zero tolerance" policy.
I think we have a problem in our culture not with "realistic weapons" but with being realistic about reality. After all, we already "fear guns," at least in the hands of NRA members. Otherwise, why would we ban them from so many areas of life? Virginia Tech, remember, was a "gun-free zone," formally and proudly designated as such by the college administration. Yet the killer kept his guns and ammo on the campus. It was a "gun-free zone" except for those belonging to the guy who wanted to kill everybody. Had the Second Amendment not been in effect repealed by VT, someone might have been able to do as two students did five years ago at the Appalachian Law School: When a would-be mass murderer showed up, they rushed for their vehicles, grabbed their guns and pinned him down until the cops arrived.
But you can't do that at Virginia Tech. Instead the administration has created a "Gun-Free School Zone." Or, to be more accurate, they have created a sign that says "Gun-Free School Zone." And, like a loopy medieval sultan, they thought that simply declaring it to be so would make it so.
The "gun-free zone" turned out to be a fraud -- not just because there were at least two guns on the campus last Monday, but in the more important sense that the college was promoting to its students a profoundly deluded view of the world.
I live in Northern New England, which has a very low crime rate, in part because it has a high rate of gun ownership. We do have the occasional murder, however. A few years back, a couple of alienated loser teens from a small Vermont town decided they were going to kill somebody, steal his ATM cards, and go to Australia. So they went to a remote house in the woods a couple of towns away, knocked on the door, and said their car had broken down. The guy thought their story smelled funny so he picked up his Glock and told 'em to get lost. So they concocted a better story, and pretended to be students doing an environmental survey. Unfortunately, the next old coot in the woods was sick of environmentalists and chased 'em away.
More at:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/msteyn.htm
It could have been worse. He might have used a chicken leg.
WND Exclusive VIRGINIA TECH MASSACRE
Death toll limited before campus gun ban
5 years ago, shooter subdued by armed students
Posted: April 22, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
A deeply troubled and disgruntled foreign student runs afoul of college authorities.
He comes to the Virginia campus armed and starts shooting in one building.
But, unlike the massacre at Virginia Tech last week, the damage was contained in this incident that occurred five years ago, before the state legislature banned guns on college campuses.
(Story continues below)...........
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55326
That’s the way I read it... I think this was just a way to fire a conservative professor.
“It could have been worse. He might have used a chicken leg.”
He could have used his finger. Ban the finger. We need finger control.
Oh dear, think about the self esteem of those poor children he pretended to shoot!
All he had to do to keep his job was to show pictures of unicorns, rainbows, and fluffy bunnies and tell the students that Bush is evil. Tenure-track guaranteed.
Adjunct professors are hired course-by-course. Even lecturer is a better position than adjunct. Adjunct professors are usually people bored by their real job.
“[The fired teacher] said administrators had asked the faculty to engage students on the issue.”
What, exactly, do you suppose they provided by way of guidance or guidelines for this ‘engagement’? “No finger pointing allowed”?
Nope. I have said it before and I will say it again. College students are the dumbest people on the planet. This is in no small part due to their professors.
“Winset, who taught financial accounting, told the Boston Herald. He said administrators had asked the faculty to engage students on the issue.”
OK, on the other thread/article, absolutely no info was given about his “profession” or class.
If admin pushed for discussion, he may have been OK.
However, as “financial accounting”, I don’t see the relevency to campus shootings or even contemporary issues.
So I’m up and down on this firing. More detail and maybe I could come to a better conclusion. It’s looking hairy right now.
Our universities are creating and sending forth a generation of panty-waists.
You can say that again. (oh you did. NM)
Bill Bennett has been talking about getting together a conservative online university. I’m in a book club that I’ve enjoyed and I’ve been thinking lately how nice it would be to take online classes with a group of others taking the same one at the same time. A group kind of like my book club. You get input from a qualified professor, and get “class” discussion with others.
That is a cool idea!
Posting problems!
What this Professor is saying, if one other student had a gun it could have prevented a lot of deaths. But defense is against liberal law and therefore he got fired.
Just curious; If one student did have a gun and took out wacko boy before he killed his second victim, would that student have been suspended or expelled for carrying a concealed weapon onto campus?
You cannot let fear stop you from speaking the truth.
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