Emmanuel College last week urged all professors to talk to students about the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech. One adjunct who did so for about 10 minutes — but not in the way Emmanuel envisioned — was promptly fired and barred from the campus.
Nicholas Winset and his supporters see his dismissal as a violation of academic freedom and an example of the way colleges may overreact to a nationally traumatic event. Winset also says that key details about his class discussion provide context that has been lacking in some initial reports on the incident. He has posted a detailed discussion of the class that got him fired ...
From a blog posting in response (note that quotes were not made in specific response to this particular controversy):
"What in the Hell is going on Emmanuel College. Civility? ... CIVILITY??? ... on a college campus? About that Guido Calabresi, former Dean of the Yale Law School, once said, “It was tasteless, even disgusting, but that’s beside the point. Free expression is more important than civility in a university.”
And in “The Community of Scholars,” my old friend Paul Goodman said, “It is my thesis that the agent of this clinch is administration and the administrative mentality among teachers and even the students. It is the genius of administration to enforce a false harmony in situations that should be rife with conflict.
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