{"id":3811,"date":"2012-02-11T21:35:32","date_gmt":"2012-02-12T04:35:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3811"},"modified":"2012-02-11T21:35:32","modified_gmt":"2012-02-12T04:35:32","slug":"thought-crime-in-the-writing-classroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3811","title":{"rendered":"Thought Crime in the Writing Classroom"},"content":{"rendered":"

I taught writing for twenty years. I heard some shocking stuff\u2014especially in the “Creative Nonfiction” class, which occasionally produced some, shall we say, highly confessional<\/em> material.<\/p>\n

And there was one outright psycho student who, lucky for me, fixated on a different professor as the cause of all her problems\u2014not to mention accusing him in her writing (for me) of being a Satanic serial killer\u2014and showed up at his house one night at 2 a.m. with a large knife.<\/p>\n

I even had freewriting assignments that might have resembled “a place for a writer to try out ideas and record impressions and observations,” [containing] “freewriting\/brainstorming” and “creative entries.”<\/a><\/p>\n

But no one ever used his or her journal to discuss his or her sexual attraction for me (sigh).<\/p>\n

If a student had done so, I would never have described the writing as “unlawful.” Immature or inappropriate maybe, but not something that would get a student kicked out of not just my class, but all<\/em> his on-campus classes.<\/p>\n

But Pamela Mitzelfeld, who teaches English 380, “Advanced Writing,” at a school in Michigan, felt she had to swing the big PC hammer on student Joseph Corlett.<\/a><\/p>\n

Oakland University near Detroit has suspended a student for three semesters, barred him from campus, and demanded he undergo “sensitivity” counseling because he wrote in a class assignment that he found his instructors attractive. While the course specifically permitted students to write creatively about any topic, the university bizarrely chose to classify his writing as “unlawful individual activities.” Joseph Corlett came to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To call the university’s decision to suspend Corlett for three semesters for his thought crime a “wild overreaction” is putting it mildly. I hope that FIRE roasts them.<\/p>\n

The philosopher Hypatia faced a similar problem with unwanted sexual attraction, the story goes, and dealt with it much more directly<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I taught writing for twenty years. I heard some shocking stuff\u2014especially in the “Creative Nonfiction” class, which occasionally produced some, shall we say, highly confessional material. And there was one outright psycho student who, lucky for me, fixated on a different professor as the cause of all her problems\u2014not to mention accusing him in her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[137,12],"class_list":["post-3811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academia","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-Zt","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4364,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4364","url_meta":{"origin":3811,"position":0},"title":"British University Lecturer Faces Wrath of Choronzon","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 22, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Joanne Bedford, who teaches creative writing at The Open University in the UK, has a simple writing technique:' \u2022 Select \u2022 Copy \u2022 Paste Then you change a few words. Evidently that is the part that requires university-level instruction, since her students certainly arrive knowing the first part. It's one\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7807,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7807","url_meta":{"origin":3811,"position":1},"title":"Gallery of Saints and Muses","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 12, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Last October, I posted about my Byzantine-style icon of the Emperor Julian the Philosopher, which now hangs in my study, and the artist who created it, Sasha Chaitow. She is working on new series \u2014 saints, muses, angels \u2014 and posted a short video about her creative process and the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"art\"","block_context":{"text":"art","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=art"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2574,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2574","url_meta":{"origin":3811,"position":2},"title":"The 4C’s: Still Lost in Theory-Land","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 22, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"When I started teaching college writing classes (here meaning mainly rhetoric and composition) in the early 1990s,\u00a0 I attended the national Conference on College Composition and Communication at least three times at university (i.e. taxpayer) expense. One of them produced an early Letter from Hardscrabble Creek piece back when it\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":936,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=936","url_meta":{"origin":3811,"position":3},"title":"The Dream and the Job","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 8, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"In the dream last night I was at some kind of Protestant Christian youth camp, headed by the stereotypical big, extroverted, 30-something youth minister.A teenaged girl was supposed to be baptized, but the minister had to leave suddenly, so he asked me to baptize her. His request presented two problems:1.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"teaching\"","block_context":{"text":"teaching","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=teaching"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":165,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=165","url_meta":{"origin":3811,"position":4},"title":"When I hear the word\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 18, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"When I hear the word 'transgressive,' I cock my Browning* University Diaries has a great entry (18 April) on a tempest in a creative-writing teapot at San Francisco's Academy of Art University. What caught my attention was her reference to Paul Fussell's book Class. Although he later claimed, perhaps disingenously,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1339,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1339","url_meta":{"origin":3811,"position":5},"title":"When I hear the word\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 18, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"When I hear the word 'transgressive,' I cock my Browning* University Diaries has a great entry (18 April) on a tempest in a creative-writing teapot at San Francisco's Academy of Art University. What caught my attention was her reference to Paul Fussell's book Class. Although he later claimed, perhaps disingenously,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3811"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3814,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3811\/revisions\/3814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}