Solitude and the Fortresses of Youth

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: "Earlier this month my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle, reported that a college student had been expelled from art school here for submitting a story 'rife with gruesome details about sexual torture, dismemberment and bloodlust' to his creative writing class. The instructor, a poet named Jan Richman, subsequently found herself out of a job. The university chose not to explain its failure to renew Ms. Richman's contract, but she intimated that she was being punished for having set the tone for the class by assigning a well-regarded if disturbing short story by the MacArthur-winning novelist David Foster Wallace, 'Girl with Curious Hair.' Ms. Richman had been troubled enough by the student's work to report it to her superiors in the first place, in spite of the fact that it was not, according to the Chronicle, 'the first serial-killer story she had read in her six semesters on the faculty at the Academy of Art University.'

When we censor the art of teenagers, however disturbing, we deny their humanity in the name of preserving their innocence."