If that happened during one of my lectures, you can be sure that professor would be fired. Its insensitive and way too soon to be doing things like that. I dont care if it was in a joking manner, it seemed as though (from the article) he was making light of the situation at VT.
RocketsDWM wrote:If that happened during one of my lectures, you can be sure that professor would be fired. Its insensitive and way too soon to be doing things like that. I dont care if it was in a joking manner, it seemed as though (from the article) he was making light of the situation at VT.
Then you didn't read the article:
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.
That's making light of the situation? Seriously?
Yes doctor, I am sick. Sick of those who are spineless. Sick of those who feel self-entitled. Sick of those who are hypocrites. Yes doctor, an army is forming. Yes doctor, there will be a war. Yes doctor, there will be blood.....
Wow, this wasn't even mean-spirited or anything... He definitely didn't deserve to lose his job, a warning would do just fine here... but to get fired? Unbelievable.
"Oh, that Lankford and McGee, the trio of 'em. They're a one-man wrecking crew."
This is a good conversation and all, but again I think we're being victimized by a partial story. There's WAY more to this than we're reading here in these few paragraphs.
Either this guy has had problems before, the administration is just out to get him, a student has a vendetta and made a big stink or something along those lines - something else had to happen here. My profs went off topic all the time. It's not a crime, especially if it's a constructive discussion.
There's more to this story, so I'd just caution everyone to not get too upset over this topic quite yet.
Half Massed wrote: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.
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."
[/quote]
I don't get the whole "celebration of victimhood" line. That sounds like something that could be taken as slandering the victims, which just 2 days after the incident, is certainly in bad taste. I'm not saying that it was meant to be taken that way, but just the way that it was written up in this article, I think it could be understood in that way.
And as far as the reason that he was fired, it seems more like a speech issue rather than the actual action of "firing" the marker. I don't know if it goes back to the victim comment from earlier in the story or not, but I think it would be nice to see more about this whole thing. I think that the timing, more than anything else, is probably what was the most damaging here.
Also, this reminds me a bit about something that my Dad mentioned the day after the shootings, about a student being arrested, after stating during a discussion in a class that he could kind of relate to the shooter and his reasons for doing it. I can understand that the day after the shootings, this was not a smart comment to make, nor a sensitive one, but it still doesn't seem to make it an arrestable offense. If the professor had opened the floor up to any and all comments, I definitely think that the students rights were violated. It's not like he was just spouting off on his own about it. All in all, both of the incidents seem like poor timing, over-reactiveness and a serious lack of judgment on everybody's part.
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by teddy ballgame » Mon Apr 23, 2007 6:59 pm 
