English Department Examines Tragedy

Harvard creative writing teachers this week continued to grapple with the implications of the shootings at Virginia Tech—which were perpetrated by an English major whose disturbed mind first became known to university officials through the creative writing classroom.

For English professors and administrators here, this part of last week’s tragic story has brought a time of reflection. But they insisted that the repercussions of the massacre will not alter how they teach, nor lead them to instate formal rules on how to deal with students who submit particularly violent work.

“I think, in fact, it would not be helpful to have some kind of formulaic checklist that one would look for,” English department chair James T. Engell said, “because, as I’ve said, every case is unique.”

Bret Anthony Johnston, the department’s director of creative writing, said he was afraid of institutional rules altering his students’ creativity.

“Am I going to ban violence from stories?” Johnston asked, “Absolutely not. What if I’m discouraging the next Shakespeare? Fiction, I believe comes down to empathy and conflict, and I can’t ban conflict.”

Still, if no change in policy occurs, the department has seen a change in perspective, according to Engell.

“It is a terrible thing to have an incident like this but that it caused reflection is almost undoubtedly a good thing.”

He cautioned that it is difficult to determine when to bring concerns about a student to officials.

“How do you make that judgment? That’s a hard question.”

‘NOT A RED FLAG’

Several professors said the events have raised a new level of consciousness within the department.

“I’ve had four conversations in the last week with professors that I wouldn’t have necessarily had,” said Inga Peterson, the undergraduate program administrator in the department.

The undergraduate gunman Seung-Hui Cho’s former classmates have said that his writing was unimaginably gruesome. Two of his plays, “Richard McBeef” and “Mr. Brownstone,” have circulated the Internet. The stories are punctuated with tales of pedophilia, murder, and attacks on teachers.

“The young man’s writing seems to be pretty clearly not art,” Johnston said, “He wasn’t trying to create art. I think that is why Lucinda Roy, who is his teacher at Virginia...reached out.”

But the content of the story, professors said, should not immediately raise concern.

“Violence itself is not a red flag,” Johnston said. “I have students who are writing brilliantly and very deftly about violence.”

A CLOSE RELATIONSHIP

The intensity and closeness of the creative writing experience—in which undergraduates meet with professors at length throughout the semester—made this event all the more surprising, Johnston said.

At Harvard, students must apply for spots in creative writing classes.

“We get to know these students extremely, extremely well,” Johnston said. “This is in some ways why something like what happened at Virginia is so unsettling and disturbing because we do know these students so well. We can’t imagine something like this happening to them nor can we imagine them being part of something like this.”

“It is hard to imagine,” Engell said, “but one, in fact, can imagine it if you see evidence for it.”

Johnston said that in the close environment of Harvard’s creative writing experience, signs would likely not to unnoticed.

“You’re not in a creative writing classroom very long before you can start to recognize who is working in some kind of way differently than what we expect of them,” Johnston said.

Peterson said that the process of making that judgment is complicated by a professor’s need to protect the rights of his student.

“There’s sort of this boundary between when it is affecting a student and when it is affecting a community of students,” Peterson, who served as assistant dean of student services at the University of Chicago, said.

Mallory R. Hellman ’08, one of Johnston’s students, said her most recent story involved a protagonist who “gets stabbed with a meatfork.”

She described the creative writing program at Harvard as “very liberating.”

“I really don’t think that Harvard is the kind of institution, or really any college [is], that would take drastic measures because of the content of someone’s work,” Hellman said.

—Staff writer Samuel P. Jacobs can be reached at jacobs@fas.harvard.edu.