An untenured professor in Boston, apparently directed by college administrators to “engage” students about the massacre at Virginia Tech, did exactly that. As he relates the story, he “opened the discussion by summarizing nonviolent philosophies before holding up a marker and asking the class to acknowledge that it was not a weapon.” Â Nicholas Winset went on to re-enact part of the shooting, using his marker to ‘shoot’ people.
The result? He got fired. I’ll be the first one to say that Emmanuel College can fire whomever it wants to. In the same breath, I’ll say that any college that stifles non-conforming and/or controversial ideas is, in fact, not a college at all.