The recent expulsion of a creative writing student at the University's College at Wise underscores the efforts of students and professors to pursue their creative work while negotiating the fine line between freedom of expression and protection of community members' safety.
Steven Daniel Barber, a 23-year-old former student at Wise, was expelled from the school last week after a story he wrote for a creative writing class alarmed fellow classmates and his professor, and three guns were found in his car in violation of Wise policy.
Barber's story was written in the first person, he said, and portrayed a narrator who, concerned for his own safety after the massacre at Virginia Tech, slept with a gun under his pillow and contemplated killing his professor and committing suicide.
Barber said the project, assigned by Wise Asst. English Prof. Christopher Scalia, required only that the students' papers span 9 to 15 pages in length, and maintained that his piece was purely fictional and not at all reflective of his personality.
"I wanted to [write about] something that was culturally relevant," Barber said. "I wanted to get inside the head of one of these crazy guys that people now think that I am. The intent was to show people how crazy and dark it can be, not to tell anybody that's me or scare anybody like that."
Barber said the name of the professor the narrator contemplates killing in the story, "Mr. Christopher," was in no way connected to his own professor's name.
"I got along well with Professor Scalia [and] the other students in my class," Barber said.
Barber insisted that the narrator in no way resembles himself and emphasized that his goal in including such topics as suicide and murder was to touch upon topical concerns of students.
Barber wrote the story because "it was relevant, that's what students are thinking about," he said, adding that he did not mean to time the story with the upcoming anniversary of the Tech shootings. "I wasn't even thinking about [the anniversary] ... just students, and what are students concerned about? They're concerned about school shootings. Whether it's a guy going out to murder someone, what just happened at UNC-Chapel Hill, or something like Tech."
University Assoc. Creative Writing Prof. Lisa Russ Spaar stated in an e-mail that she has responded to students' pieces of creative writing in an effort to ensure their own wellbeing.
"In my 28 years of university-level teaching, I have encountered student writers whose work suggested to me that they might be in need of counselling for depression or substance abuse," Spaar stated. "In three of these cases, I spoke with students openly about my concerns. Two of these students sought and received counseling and one did not."
Spaar added that during her tenure as director of the creative writing program at the University, she assisted colleagues who dealt with situations similar to the recent case at Wise.
"I twice assisted graduate student teaching assistants who felt personally threatened by undergraduate student work -- both situations arose in fiction classes and were similar to the situation at Wise, in which a student story contained details about a professor's life, with violent consequences [in the story]," Spaar stated. "In both cases, the U.Va. Dean of Students office and the deans in the College of Arts & Sciences office worked immediately and effectively with everyone involved to confront and allay the worries of the TAs and the students."
Spaar explained that in one case, police and the student's parents became involved, and the case was resolved "without incident, repercussion, or expulsion."
Barber said he did not consider potential problems with his story until a campus police officer pulled him aside after class soon after he submitted the assignment and asked if he had written the story. Barber said the officer told him, "Yeah, you've upset a lot of people."
Barber submitted his assignment Feb. 28 and the next day found himself in a mental health treatment facility, where he was held for 72 hours.
Barber said he understood issuing a mandate for mental health treatment in the case of someone like Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter responsible for the massacre at Virginia Tech who reportedly wrote disturbing pieces in writing classes during his time at the university. Yet Barber said his piece was not enough to justify a mandated 72-hour hold for psychiatric observation as the immediate recourse in his case.
"If the only factor is some piece of fiction, then try to at least resolve things at the lowest level, send me an e-mail, have me go by your office and talk about it," Barber said.
Yet according to University Law Prof. Richard Bonnie, students are not protected from prosecution simply because the grounds for legal action are founded on a creative writing assignment.
"Clearly, students' writings, even in a classroom setting, not necessarily a public forum, are protected by the First Amendment," Bonnie said, adding, "There are limits, even under the First Amendment for what students might say -- the most pertinent one now is threats."
Additionally, the separate question of treating a potential issue with mental health intervention merits consideration of all forms of behavior, Bonnie said.
"Obviously, the normal process of evaluating a person who might be mentally ill is going to include and should include all aspects of their behavior, including what they might be writing in papers, in letters, what they might be saying to roommates and others," he said.
The question of whether deliberate or veiled threats in a creative writing piece could alone serve as grounds for interrogation or legal action would depend on the evidence of a particular case, Bonnie said.
In the wake of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, the University has addressed the possibility that course assignments may foreshadow issues of safety, Spaar stated.
"The University has made efforts to make all professors in all departments more aware of how to spot students who may be in crisis and help them if the situation seems dire," Spaar explained, adding that the intimate workshop setting of the creative writing department facilitates detection of potential problems.
University English Lecturer Jeb Livingood, who teaches freshman composition and literary editing courses within the English department, agreed that the Tech shooting affected the University's creative writing department.
"After Virginia Tech, we put out guidelines making people more aware, to trust our instincts, if something seemed strange to us or seemed threatening ... we needed to get other people in the administration and Student Health involved," Livingood said.
Spaar said there is no department-wide policy regulating or restricting what students write about in their poetry, stories and novels, and both she and Livingood highlighted the need for freedom of expression for a craft dependent on intellectual liberty.
"I don't think I want to be the guy who says certain topics are out of bounds for fiction," Livingood said. "I'm a fiction writer, [and] I can't imagine telling students, 'You cannot have a weapon in a story, you cannot deal with suicide.'"
Virginia Tech Asst. English Prof. Erika Meitner said she asks students to comply with her "four Ds" rule, which prohibits writers from focusing on death, dementia, drugs and dreams in their work. Meitner said this policy is based on pure pedagogy, to ensure students do not take "the easy way out in plot lines," and is not meant to limit students' creativity.
Meitner emphasized that people should recognize fictional violence is quite different from real-world violence.
"For most people who teach, I think we recognize that there's a difference between violent writing and strange, troubling or violent behavior," she said.
It seems that as college students and faculty struggle to draw the fine line between freedom of expression and a responsibility to ensure safety, the burden falls on professors to determine which pieces constitute threats or declarations of intent to commit unlawful acts.
"My personal opinion is that it would be wrong to put blanket restrictions on what students can imagine or explore in creative writing classes," Spaar said, adding that any student or faculty members who feel personally threatened should get help.
While Barber expressed frustration over his expulsion and the revocation of his gun permit, he said he supports a person's right to report anything that appears threatening.
"I don't mind what [Prof. Scalia] did," Barber said. "I'm not upset, never wanted to threaten anybody. If I read something where I felt threatened, I would go and tell [someone] too."
Scalia declined to comment on the case and declined to release his course syllabus.
While Barber said he plans to take legal action to redeem his gun permit and fight the legality of Wise's policy, which does not allow firearms on campus, he also said he would write an entirely different story if he could rewrite history: "I would have written a short story about sunshine and rainbows, not about anything else"
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