Yeetle Box - Winset, Go!

Professor Nicholas Winset was fired from his job at Emmanual College, a Catholic college in Boston, after leading his class in a discussion about the shootings at Virginia Tech.

Professor Winset, professor of Financial Accounting, pretended to shoot some students during the discussion at Emmanuel College. One student then pretended to shoot Winset to show that the gunman could have been stopped if someone else had been armed - a long-standing module within the Financial Accounting field.

"The way this works," said Winset, "is that I point my finger at a random student and shout 'RAT-A-TAT-TAT'! He points his finger at me and shouts 'BLAM! BLAM!' I fall to the floor. Very dramatic. Gets the point across that if more people, not fewer people, carried guns, the Virginia Tech tragedy would have been averted...and PRONTO!"

Winset says the school is stifling free speech by dismissing him. 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.

Professor Winset also manages and AIDS awareness class where he and another student perform coitus, after which they pretend to be HIV positive. The rest of the class points their fingers and screams 'POW!'.

"It's a good way to raise awareness."

Winset said his skits are meant to be a 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.”

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 - even in spite of the obvious.

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.”

One student tolds the Boston Globe that most of her classmates didn't seem to find Winset's demonstration offensive. "I mean, what's the big deal? Financial accounting is boring."