State of the Profession: Dread Risk in San Francisco

By Martin D. Snyder

Avoiding risks has its own costs, as Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development demonstrated earlier this year. "People tend to fear dread risks, that is, low-probability, high-consequence events, such as the terrorist attack," Gigerenzer wrote in the April issue of Psychological Science. He discovered that, after the tragedies of September 11, 2001, deaths from car accidents in the United States increased noticeably. Americans avoided the dread risk of flying by driving some of the unflown miles. As a consequence, more people died in traffic accidents than would have been expected.

Like the September 11 attacks, the massacre at Columbine High School five years ago continues to grip the American psyche and especially to haunt edgy school administrators. Student writers and artists whose works have been deemed too violent have been expelled from school, prosecuted, and sometimes convicted on criminal charges. Such occurrences have mostly been restricted to secondary schools, but late last year, the Academy of Art University in San Francisco joined the "dread-risk" club.

Poet Jan Richman, author of the award-winning 1995 collection, Because the Brain Can Be Talked Into Anything, had served as a contingent faculty member at the university for six semesters. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, her trouble began when a student in her creative writing class submitted a story "rife with gruesome details about sexual torture, dismemberment, and bloodlust." Although students had submitted violent stories to Richman before, this one disturbed her, and she decided to talk it over with her department coordinator.

News of the story traveled up the chain of command all the way to the president's office. The instructor, her student, and his story became the focus of intense scrutiny. One might have expected Richman to be commended for her concern and the student possibly to be referred to the school's counseling center. Instead, the student was expelled, the university's head of security called in the San Francisco Police Department, and Richman, despite consistently high teaching evaluations, found herself with-out a job. The administration avoided the dread risk of another Columbine, but there was a substantial price to be paid—preeminently by the student and the instructor, but also by all those who believe in academic freedom and the right of free expression.

The student paid the ultimate academic price, expulsion. A potentially talented writer, the student was denied the guidance he deserved. He may well have needed psychological counseling, but it was not provided. As a police inspector told the San Francisco Chronicle: "The bottom line is, the school does not have a psychologist on staff to be able to review something like this." (The Academy of Art is the largest private art institution in the country with an enrollment of 7,200 students.)

And, of course, the student's right to free expression was trampled on. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon noted in the New York Times that preserving the innocence of students by denying their humanity "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."

Richman, too, paid dearly for the ad-ministration's dread-risk avoidance. Like other contingent faculty throughout the country, she was extremely vulnerable. Contracted to do academic "piecework" one semester at a time, Richman was afforded no due process and had no protection of her academic freedom. She was just a "knowledge vendor" whose contract might not be renewed whenever it suited the administration. One faculty member, referring to the school's actions, told the San Francisco Chronicle, "It's a marketing issue for them."

The legacy of the Richman affair for the faculty has been fear, uncertainty, and a sense of outrage. A decided chill has settled on the writing program. A second student has been expelled allegedly for submitting a paper alluding to suicide threats. Faculty member Alan Kaufman has characterized the policies of the university as "repressive and shocking." A controversial campus forum on free speech, a public demonstration in down-town San Francisco, and angry letters of protest from the likes of Stephen King and Salman Rushdie have gained embarrassing headlines for the university. All have raised serious questions about the climate for academic freedom at an institution reputedly dedicated to creativity. The university may have avoided a dread risk in the Richman affair, but it has paid dearly for its now tarnished reputation.

Martin Snyder is AAUP director of planning and development.

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