The art school where I work is kicking out students and teachers over "explicit" works of fiction

I was about to say. Ripcord time.

Literary masturbation on top of everything else!

I'm glad someone said that! I read the descriptions in the article and yawned mightily.

Hey!

I think that this story sums up the whole place. It is definitely geared towards preparing people for the business end of art. A great place to be if you want to draw backgrounds for Pixar or shoot industrials for MTV or Nokia. But a lot of people have a different idea of what an art school should be, and they rightly look elsewhere. Hence the large number of green-haired substance-abusing teenage pornographers from Peoria at the AAU.

I actually heard one of the teachers complain early on in the semester that his class had a few "anti-establishment" types that he would have to "straighten out".

(x-post hell yeah)

Slipknot went back to school?

I am just going to assume that no one actually read this post the first time.

I'm glad someone said that! I read the descriptions in the article and yawned mightily.

Yup yup. That thing with the blood just sounds insufferably pretentious. That the author is described as "waifish" only confirms that I would hate being in that class.

Oh, it was.

The other stuff, about the violent story and the Girl With Curious Hair, is reprehensible. (Slagging off on "Girl With Curious Hair" if you haven't read it just because it's DFW is also pretty silly: It's a pretty good disturbing story.)

And what any of this has to do with the First Amendment is unclear -- is this a state school?

But yeah, it prob. still sucks.

sometimes when i read these things i have this nagging suspicion that the students involved might have done something a bit worse than what we're reading and that the administration won't come forward with that information for privacy or moral reasons. but i suppose i only suspect that because i'd really like to not have to accept that an art school is ejecting students for "controversial" projects.

http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20040412/capt.fxp10204122059.brewers_giants_fxp102.jpg

What next: GAY MARRIAGES!?!?!?!?!?!

At least, this teacher had a conscience. Here was I, thinking freedom of speech was still a given. It might be easier for your (soon ex-) school to change curriculum, than to dodge this level of attention, Adam. This carries "the only bad publicity is no publicity" idea to extremes.

Even if we (the public) don't know who "Mara" is, tis fairly easy to find out. Who's to say this still won't bite her a big chunk, down the line?

I went to a college with a much more prestigious writing programme and I'm sure a story like that, submitted there, would barely raise an eyebrow. One would also have to workshop the story in class with one's fellow writers after submitting it to the teacher. Peer review is an essential part of the writing workshop and if you make a story known to the class about this type of subject matter, your peers will put you through the ringer. That's quite enough punishment.

My line of reasoning - and I'm someone who reads a lot of Dennis Cooper, whose books are about IRL people he has crushes on taking it up the shitter - is that writing stories is one appropriate way for humans to elucidate emotions and impulses they cannot act on (see also "Going to Jail" chapter in John Waters' Crackpot). Writing it down usually insures you won't act on it.

I hope Mara and her parents find a VERY good lawyer and take the administration to the fucking cleaners. She was right to refuse to sign papers that could never stand up in court in the first place.

If a student handed me work like this I would feel that I had to report it so as to get the student any support that she might need and also, not less importantly, to make sure that my concerns are made public and that I could be adequately protected if things escalated.

Now, if the person I reported it too decided that the School's best defence included getting the student to sign something and the student refused to do it, then I guess I would be in a position where I didn't want the student to be kicked off her course for this. This would not imply that I supported what the student had done at all.

Is this really a censorship issue? That seems like a cheap way of making this into a story.

I am also speaking as a former employee of the PEN Center (my first job) and the wherefores for positing this as a censorship issue really do outweigh everything else. To allow university administrators to draw up coercive 'behaviour agreements' which dictate what students may or may not write as part of a fiction workshop which they have paid $20k for is more inappropriate than anything a student could present to any class, and if the administration gets away with it in this instance, what's to stop them from applying the rule to people who are writing something contentious, or something which might be critical of the administration? Not a lot.

You also forget that the post-Columbine atmosphere in certain quarters of US education frankly demonises students who are slightly 'different' - you merely have to scowl and wear black in some schools in the US to get slung into the principal's or counselor's office where they force psych tests and the like on students who may just have answered back the once in a class where the teacher does not like them.

There could, then, be an argument for seeing this not as a censorship issue but a workplace issue.

I don't know if it is one or the other. But I don't think anybody else on ilx knows either. I wanted to bring it up as a possibility.

I still have to say, even if I was working in an American University in a post-Columbine atmosphere, I would still be very worried about this sort of content in the work of one of my students and I would want to report it to my line manager and my union representative in order to make sure I wasn't put in a vulnerable position that could lose me my job.

That doesn't mean I don't care about the student, it means I would want our relationship to remain a professional one.

Because a lot of the stuff I personally write as fiction is definitely taken from life/history, I've made that pretty clear to anyone I'm close to, but I'm protective enough of myself that certain parameters exist. If this story was, as I perceive, written for a class assignment, it would be perfectly reasonable to workshop it and allow the students to discuss the ramifications of things which could be construed as 'non-fiction'. Hers would obviously not have been the only story to seem like autobiography in the class, whatever the scope of assignment, so she would not be singled out.

xpost

Or Remember this place of education is a workplace, so the first impulse should be to ensure a good, safe, working environment.

Obviously, all else being equal, education comes first. But sometimes things go awry and you can't put education above everything in the teaching environment. When individuals make it impossible or uncomfortable to teach a lesson, you can't just put teaching first. This is not just selfishness - other students in the class might well suffer from the inappropriate behaviour of a single student.

(Once again, let me say, I'm not for one minute suggesting that this is indeed the case here. It's just a possibility that I don't want to rule out without consideration.)