Professor Axed For VT Stunt: Re-Enacted Tragedy To Tout Pro-Gun Perspective By Casey Ross Boston Herald Reporter Saturday, April 21, 2007 - Updated: 12:00 AM EST
Nicholas Winset was fired yesterday from his position as an adjunct professor at Emmanuel College, shown in the background. (Staff photo by John Wilcox)
An Emmanuel College professor has been fired after re-enacting the Virginia Tech massacre in his classroom in order to air a pro-gun viewpoint that offended students at the Catholic liberal arts school, the professor charged yesterday.
Nicholas Winset said he was terminated and permanently barred from campus following a Wednesday lecture in which he dramatized the massacre to show that deranged gunman Cho Seung-Hui could have been stopped if another student had been carrying a gun.
“If there were more guns in society, the response time to the (rampage) might have been much faster,” said Winset, an adjunct professor of financial accounting. “Someone might have been able to do something to stop it.”
In an interview yesterday, Winset also decried media coverage of the massacre, saying, “Just because everyone is portraying this as the national tragedy of the year doesn’t mean it is. More people died of AIDS today” than in the massacre, he said.
Administrators at the college apparently did not appreciate Winset’s classroom message. They quickly fired him via a one-page letter delivered by courier yesterday.
“You are hereby directed not to enter the College campus or any College owned property at any time for any reason,” the letter states. “Also enclosed . . .is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts form, How to File for Unemployment Insurance Benefits.”
A spokeswoman for Emmanuel College, Molly Honan, would not give the college’s rationale for firing Winset. She said the school’s policy is not to comment on personnel issues.
Winset, 37, of Newton called the college’s decision to fire him “pathetic,” and said it will have a “chilling effect” on professors’ willingness to engage in open discussions about controversial issues.
“A classroom is supposed to be a place for academic exploration,” he said. “It’s just gotten so politically correct. It’s sad that we have come to this point.”
Winset said he gave students a disclaimer before he started his Virginia Tech re-enactment, which involved him pointing a Magic Marker at students and saying, “Pow.” He then had another student shoot him with an imaginary gun to make the point that Cho could have been stopped by another student with a firearm.
Winset said the skit was meant to be a somewhat tenuous segue into an assignment asking students to examine whether the massacre has had an impact on the financial markets, which have remained healthy in tragedy’s aftermath. He said he wanted students to see that intense media focus on a story does not always mean it has the same relevance to the markets or to society in general.”