Discussion Periods Now Awkwardly Silent

Maud informs us of a creative writing teacher losing her job at San Francisco's Academy of Art University for assigning a David Foster Wallace story to her students without permission from the mucketymucks in administration. Seems one freshman turned in a story "so rife with gruesome details about sexual torture, dismemberment and bloodlust" that she asked her higher-ups for advice. They told her to make the class read the opening chapters of The Lovely Bones to see how violent imagery can be "presented in the service of literature." Then things got weird.

University officials got so squicked by the story that they forwarded the matter to their security director, who called in SFPD to interrogate the kid, who eventually was expelled. Then his parents claimed he wouldn't have written the story if he hadn't been inspired by "The Girl With Curious Hair," from Wallace's short story collection of the same name. And the university fired the writing instructor because she had gone off the approved syllabus to assign that story to her students. (And she can't sue because nobody will actually come out and say that's why they did it; since they won't cite a grounds for dismissal, she can't argue she was fired inappropriately.)

It's just astonishing to me that a college, an art school at that, is running around acting like a junior high school. Wallace himself had the best comment when contacted by the San Francisco Chronicle reporter:

"If this college is taking it upon itself to protect kids, there are going to be a whole lot more books other than mine that they would not want them reading.''