has now graduated from high school to university, the San Francisco Chronicle reports:
The quiet freshman from Seattle who sat in the back row had submitted a disturbing short story, a fictitious first-person account of a young serial killer. The story was so rife with gruesome details about sexual torture, dismemberment and bloodlust that the teacher [Jan Richman] panicked, wondering what to do now that she had already handed out copies to her class to take home and read.
“I’ve read a lot of student stories where they’re trying to emulate some shock genre,” Richman said last week. “This was different. It was full of sex and violence, incest, pedophilia. There was no story, no character development — just hacking up bodies.”
Still, she said, “he was definitely bright, and I thought there were parts of the story that were well written.” In addition, it was not the first serial-killer story she had read in her six semesters on the faculty at the Academy of Art University (formerly College) in San Francisco: “It was not even the first story that had somebody slicing off someone’s nipples.”
Nevertheless, she went to her department coordinator looking for advice. Should she confront the student before the next class? . . .
News of the story shot up the administrative ladder, from Eileen Everett, chairman of the liberal arts department, to Vice President Sue Rowley and to President Elisa Stephens, granddaughter of the school’s founder. By the time Richman’s weekly class was set to reconvene, the university’s director of security had called in the San Francisco Police Department’s homicide division.
After a brief interrogation in his dormitory, the student, who did not respond to The Chronicle’s requests for comment, was put on a plane and sent home to his family. The next day, according to Richman, the young man’s parents called the university, alleging that their son had been encouraged to write about violence after reading a short story assigned in Richman’s Narrative Storytelling class. . . .
The story was “Girl With Curious Hair,” the title piece of a 1988 collection by David Foster Wallace, author of “Infinite Jest,” one of the most widely acclaimed novel of the 1990s. “Girl With Curious Hair” features a character called Sick Puppy, a yuppie who hangs out with a crowd of punk rockers for cheap thrills. One of the young women lets him extinguish matches on her skin.
Richman assigned the story, she said last week, as an example of “an unsympathetic narrator, a guy who is sadistic and sexist.” But the story was not part of the class’s authorized textbook, and fellow instructors say administration officials were angry that Richman had not offered the information sooner. . . .
In a series of meetings, Richman said, administrators warned her about her attitude. Despite her consistently high evaluations from students, the administrators suggested that she solicit character references from her colleagues. . . .
[The administration then] sent an e-mail informing Richman that Rowley would not rehire her for the new semester. . . .
I sympathize with administrators’ concerns about the risk of violence, aimed both at students and at administrators and teachers. But a lot of literature has violent and disturbing themes (perhaps because a lot of life has violent and disturbing themes). Are university students and professors really supposed to entirely avoid it, on pain of expulsion and firing?
Thanks to Shawn Chapman for the pointer.
UPDATE: Reader Alan Aronson points to this item from the story:
[Disaffected instructor Alan] Kaufman said one of his students had recently been asked to leave the school when she submitted a paper alluding to suicide threats. Like Richman, the instructor approached his superiors for advice on possible counseling services, only to see the student swiftly expelled.
A funny way to help students (if this account is accurate).
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