You may have read about the student who was expelled from San Francisco's Academy of Art University after he wrote a violent story about a serial killer for a class assignment. You may recall, too, that the student's teacher was fired for the apparently reprehensible acts of assigning a racy story to her class (David Foster Wallace's "Girl With Curious Hair") and for bringing the student's disturbing story to the attention of school administrators. Writers from all walks of literature (Salmon Rushdie, Stephen King, Dave Eggers, and even the great Lemony Snicket himself) spoke out against the school's obviously misplaced desire to maintain a "safe" environment by expelling students for edgy work, pointing out the obvious--that a story about violence is not itself an act of violence--and the equally obvious, that art necessarily takes risks, that artists in training must learn to handle difficult and even offensive material, and that it is the particular responsibility of a university dedicated to the arts to ensure that student artistic expression is not chilled. The articles linked above are extremely rich in their detailed portrayal of a college administration run punitively and protectively amok, and are well worth a quick perusal.

In today's New York Times, Michael Chabon (author of Wonder Boys, which is perhaps better known in its Michael Douglas movie incarnation, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), takes up the San Francisco case in order to offer some trenchant reflections on the philosophical kinship between the Bill of Rights and the teenaged imagination. Noting that in this case, no criminal charges were brought against the unfortunate author of the story, Chabon observes that

In this regard, the San Francisco case differs from other incidents in California, and around the country, in which students, unlucky enough to have as literary precursor the Columbine mass-murderer Dylan Klebold, have found themselves expelled, even prosecuted and convicted on criminal charges, because of the violence depicted in their stories and poems. The threat posed by these prosecutions to civil liberties, to the First Amendment rights of our young people, is grave enough. But as a writer, a parent and a former teenager, I see the workings of something more iniquitous: not merely the denial of teenagers' rights in the name of their own protection, but the denial of their humanity in the name of preserving their innocence.

It is in the nature of a teenager to want to destroy. The destructive impulse is universal among children of all ages, rises to a peak of vividness, ingenuity and fascination in adolescence, and thereafter never entirely goes away. Violence and hatred, and the fear of our own inability to control them in ourselves, are a fundamental part of our birthright, along with altruism, creativity, tenderness, pity and love. It therefore requires an immense act of hypocrisy to stigmatize our young adults and teenagers as agents of deviance and disorder. It requires a policy of dishonesty about and blindness to our own histories, as a species, as a nation, and as individuals who were troubled as teenagers, and who will always be troubled, by the same dark impulses. It also requires that favorite tool of the hypocritical, dishonest and fearful: the suppression of constitutional rights.

We justly celebrate the ideals enshrined in the Bill of Rights, but it is also a profoundly disillusioned document, in the best sense of that adjective. It stipulates all the worst impulses of humanity: toward repression, brutality, intolerance and fear. It couples an unbridled faith in the individual human being, redeemed time and again by his or her singular capacity for tenderness, pity and all the rest, with a profound disenchantment about groups of human beings acting as governments, court systems, armies, state religions and bureaucracies, unchecked by the sting of individual conscience and only belatedly if ever capable of anything resembling redemption.

In this light the Bill of Rights can be read as a classic expression of the teenage spirit: a powerful imagination reacting to a history of overwhelming institutional repression, hypocrisy, chicanery and weakness. It is a document written by men who, like teenagers, knew their enemy intimately, and saw in themselves all the potential they possessed to one day become him. We tend to view idealism and cynicism as opposites, when in fact neither possesses any merit or power unless tempered by, fused with, the other. The Bill of Rights is the fruit of that kind of fusion; so is the teenage imagination.

Chabon is one of my favorite writers of fiction, and I do appreciate his sentiment here, but his enchantment with the supposed fierce nobility of youth is grating to me. The idea of teenagers as keen and perceptive judges of human nature, and instinctively attuned to the hypocricies of their elders, is a fantasy often indulged in by people who are themselves committed to perpetual adolescence.

That said, it is nice to see Chabon's golden pen at work in the defense of liberty.

Fifteen years ago Allen Bloom said essentially the same thing: human beings are driven by their passions, and it is the role of literature to harness these innate emotions and guide them toward the beautiful and the heroic. Otherwise we end up with a society unable to recognize beauty and heroism, and eventually one that cannot discern between good and evil.

Clearly our constant censorship in the name of being "fair" or "nice" has resulted in each incoming freshman class (and society in general) being unable to learn with any amount of depth or true understanding of their own higher faculties.

Locally, a graduate student was asked to take down her exhibit in an art school. Other students took theirs down too, in protest. The art was depictions of nude women wearing artificial phalluses. The gallery where this artwork was hung is open to the public; this school offers classes to children, who must pass through the gallery. But it seems that the board is upset that the girl was asked to remove her work, and tbere will be an investigation.

One of the other graduate students opined that people who objected to this girl's work being displayed in such a way were "homophobic" and that this is exactly the sort of thing that the artist, a lesbian, has endured all her life. My private thought was that if the definition of "homophobic" is disapproving of this kind of thing, then mark me down as one. One suspects that "How to Win Friends and Influence People" never made it onto either of these girls' reading lists.

As to violent stories written by teenagers, if Klebold and Harris had been expelled for their previous expressions, then the massacre might have been averted.

"May his words be heard in the administrative groves of academe." Unless blue is your color, I wouldn't recommend holding your breath on this one.

"As to violent stories written by teenagers, if Klebold and Harris had been expelled for their previous expressions, then the massacre might have been averted." How exactly would this have prevented anything? If the two psychopaths had been expelled, thay would have only been given another grievance to fuel their delusions - another reason to go shoot the place up (it seems clear that their parents had abdicated any role in reigning them in, I see no reason to assume that expulsion would have shaken them from their reverie of denial).

"Homophobic" is such a strange term. I gather that its users intend to convey that the homophobic person is prejudiced. The word literally means "fear of homosexuality." Why, exactly, would fear of homosexuality be the right term to connote prejudice? Beats me.

Nude women wearing artificial phalluses is a common theme of pornography. You can purchase or rent a video showing same in any store in any city. Don't know much about this incident, but I'm willing to bet the artist intended to create anger and indignation. Why be surprised when she succeeded? The intent was undoubtedly to offend. Also, wouldn't at all be surprise if the weeping about the artist's poor victim status was the hoped for script from the get go.

Something a little phony about the whole incident, isn't there?

Well, since it's still alright, nay derigeur, to hate Bush, I guess we remain free.

For a long time I've thought that there is something altogether fishy about Rushdie, and now you've confirmed it, smoked him out so to speak. Well done !

Chabon's comment about an "unbridled faith in the individual human being" coupled with "a profound disenchantment about groups of human beings acting as governments, court systems, armies, state religions and bureaucracies" reminded me of these lines by the brilliant soldier/writer Ralph Peters:

"Man loves, men hate. While individual men and women can sustain feelings of love over a lifetime toward a parent or through decades toward a spouse, no significant group in human history has sustained an emotion that could honestly be characerized as love. Groups hate. And they hate well...Love is an introspective emotion, while hate is easily extroverted..."

"...not merely the denial of teenagers' rights in the name of their own protection, but the denial of their humanity in the name of preserving their innocence.

It is in the nature of a teenager to want to destroy."

Say what? This guy writes well and makes some good points, but the above is no more than dogma, if he means "humanity" involves a necessary tendency of teenagers "to want to destroy", then claiming the Bill of Rights was written by essential teenagers in view of their own perceived tendencies, or potentials, in that direction.

Teenagers who want to destroy are the vast minority in my experience, except for those who want to destroy themselves, or make the gesture, which is common.

I thought Chabon was going to define "humanity" as the ability to deal effectively and rather easily with macabre presentations put forth by others, which are plentiful in the form of real actions within society, fictions not being very troublesome at all, not that the "humanity" of teenagers would lead them to be somewhat in league with tendencies toward destruction.

The author seems to be carried away with form vs substance, IMHO, although the erasing of rights involved in the case is certainly obnoxious, and an example of the macabre, to an extent, but from within people who I believe have no idea they even have fears or tendencies toward evil.
They certainly seem refractory to any such awareness, in my experience, short of someone giving them a good beating, which might be what is about to happen in Iraq.
It's some adults who seem to tend more toward destruction, which the adult Framers recognized, as does Chabon, in the end.

If I kill anybody, it's going to be because they deserve it [Ha Ha].

As to violent stories written by teenagers, if Klebold and Harris had been expelled for their previous expressions, then the massacre might have been averted.

Yes, there's nothing that would have calmed down a pair of insane, violent, murderous, armed-to-the-teeth teenagers more than expelling them from high school.

Whoops, forgot my other point:

. . . pointing out the obvious--that a story about violence is not itself an act of violence . . .

You know that, and I know that, but this is not exactly an article of faith among the liberal left. Indeed, exactly the opposite is held to be true, as so many of your previous posts have made clear.

Well, not expelling them certainly was effective, wasn't it?

Phil, I would add that unfortunately such a notion is not specific to only the left. Anti-sexuality campaigns from the religious "right" are as well predicated on an inability to distinguish speech from actions, fiction from fact, as well as a desire to paternalistically protect people from their own natures.

Sshh, if we just stop talking about sex it'll go away.

Nels, I couldn't agree with you more. It seems that many or all who think they have a monopoply on truth or virtue seek to suppress the speech of those who do not have access to that truth be they of the socio-political left or socio-political right. A question to Erin et al.:

Can an analogy be drawn between attacks on speech in academia (from the political campus political "PC"-elite on the left) that tend to dominate on campus and attacks on speech on the airwaves, particularly at those admittedy crude and offensive shock-jocks, (from the political "moral"-elite on the right) in current government circles?

Is David Horowitz's arguably offensive [to some] speech on racial matters, or Mamet's campus production of Oleanna more or less worthy of protection in our minds than Howard Stern's arguably offensive and crude [to some] speech on sexual matters?

Ivan