These days we seem to be losing the distinctions between fact and fiction, between reality and fantasy, between fantasy and fiction. The strange mix of hedonism and puritanism, of anything-goes morality combined with fierce political correctness, that our culture has spawned is now tossing up some very odd, even pathological patterns of behavior.

Consider the poor sap in some midwestern state–Ohio, was it?–who liked to write little stories about grown men having sexual relations with pre-pubescent children. He wrote those stories, sick as they may have been, purely for his own amusement. He did not attempt to get them published. He did not share them with his fellow pedophiles. He did not post them on a web site. He simply stored them on his own computer; and when that computer somehow fell into someone else’s hands (those of a repair technician, perhaps?) and the nature of his fictional fantasies was discovered, this guy was arrested and put on trial and sentenced to prison for something like seven years, though a higher court eventually threw the verdict out.

We all have our opinions about the merits of letting grown men have sexual relations with pre-pubescent children, and very few of us are in favor of such stuff. Most of us think that it’s wrong to inveigle kids into such activities and that it is proper for the people we term "child molesters" to pay a legal price for such molestations. But the stories that that guy in Ohio, or wherever it was, was making up, did no actual harm to actual children. Whatever took place in them was wholly imaginary and received no public circulation. They were fantasies–sick fantasies, sure, but fantasies even so. Instead of keeping them within his own skull, where most of us keep our fantasies, sick and otherwise, this fellow confided them to his computer. Once they were discovered there–do closet pedophiles have no right to privacy?–he was hauled off to the hoosegow. George Orwell had a term for that sort of offense: thoughtcrime. But only in the world of Big Brother, so I thought, was thoughtcrime an offense punished by imprisonment. Not so, apparently, in the oh-so-sensitive modern United States.

Then there have been instances here and there around the country of students who whiled away the idle hours in their classrooms by drawing pictures of their teachers being menaced by knives or revolvers, and being suspended or even expelled for indulging in such ugly daydreams. There have been cases of students turning in stories as class assignments that dealt with Columbine-style school massacres, and being suspended or expelled for those, as though an attempt to comprehend the mind of mass murderers by recreating their vile deeds in fictional form was somehow tantamount to planning one’s own Columbine shootout.

And now we have the case of Jan Richman, a writing instructor at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University, who asked her students to read a story called "The Girl With Curious Hair," by the widely acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace, in order to study the way the handling of an unsympathetic narrator is managed–Wallace’s protagonist is a nasty violence-inclined yuppie who calls himself Sick Puppy–before tackling such a character in their own fiction.

One member of the class, a young man from Seattle, proceeded to turn in a story called "A Complete Loss of Hope," a wild and gory thing filled with the sort of gratuitously repulsive stuff that, alas, we see in the newspapers every day: incest, pedophilia, sexual torture, dismemberment. Ms. Richman found the story very disturbing. So would I; so would you. It’s no surprise that fiction about disturbing things can often be quite disturbing itself, especially in the hands of a beginner who doesn’t quite know when to stop ladling out the blood and gore.

Well, San Francisco is the nation’s capital of political correctness. Although you don’t have to be politically correct to find pedophilia repugnant and torture nauseating, Ms. Richman was troubled enough by the content of the story to consult her departmental chairman about it. Did she feel that in some way writing about such things might be a prelude to doing such things? She hasn’t said. The chairman looked the story over and suggested simply that its young author read the first chapter of Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones to see how similarly grisly material could be dealt with in fiction in a less repellent way, one that would have greater literary effect. That should have been where it ended: a useful lesson that often it can be more effective for a writer to handle over-the-top material in a less-than-over-the-top fashion.

Alas, it didn’t end there. Word of the incident traveled upward at the Academy of Art University to the chairman of the liberal arts department, to the vice president of the university, and then to its president. Jan Richman was hauled before an administrative committee to explain why she had encouraged her pupils to indulge in such horrendous fictionalizing. Although the students had nothing but good words about her in the inquiry that followed, she was told to solicit character references from her fellow instructors as well. "Am I on trial?" she asked. "I need character witnesses now?"

Next the hapless young writer’s story was turned over to the San Francisco Police Department. There it went first to the SFPD’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, whose function is unknown to me. The Behavioral Sciences people tossed it to the Homicide Department, which sent a detective around to the dormitory to interview the unfortunate student about his taste for violence. "This was never an open homicide case," Homicide Inspector Holly Pera said. "We have no evidence that it was anything other than a story." Well, yes. But the next day the student was expelled and put on a plane to Seattle. And when Jan Richman returned from her Christmas break soon afterward, she discovered that she had lost her teaching job. No reason was given: she worked on a semester-by-semester basis, and the university had simply chosen not to rehire her for the new semester.

In the free-speech uproar that predictably followed in traditionally liberal San Francisco, the university stuck to its guns. It refused to explain Richman’s dismissal, claiming a policy of prohibiting comment on "personnel matters." A spokesman added that the university believed in encouraging creativity, "but when there is a questionable or disturbing issue, we contact the proper authorities."

Some of the expelled student’s classmates noted that he had often brought violent materials to class–Japanese animation stuff, particularly–and had shown a fondness for slasher movies and such grim fiction as Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho. But no one thought that that in itself was grounds for expulsion. "He seemed like a normal kid with a normal life," said one student –a comment that I can’t help find a little troublesome, considering my own non-fondness for slasher movies and the like. If those now are normal tastes, God help us all. But bad taste is not of itself illegal, so far as I know. As for the dismissed instructor, "She has totally been treated unfairly," another student said. "She was awesome, one of the best teachers I’ve had in the school."

The writer Alan Kaufman, a fellow member of the faculty who had read the condemned story, found it well written and told with power and originality. "You get a kid who did what that kid did, you should praise him to the skies. Instead they called the police on him." And David Foster Wallace, whose own short story had been the class assignment that started all the trouble, and who is himself a professor of creative writing at Pomona College in Southern California, called the incident "a combination of moral spasms and legal terror," expressing his astonishment that the story, however disagreeable its content, could have brought such punishment to its author and even to the instructor in whose class it was written.

Not everyone agrees. Some students thought that the proper response to the story would have been to send the author off for "counseling"–as though writing about such things was a sign of regrettable mental imbalance. And the university itself has appeared to fall back on a belief that it has a responsibility to "protect" its students, even against the free play of the imagination, something that one might think an art school would want to encourage.

Mark you, I’m a squeamish sort of guy whose own fiction is discernibly free of extreme violence and who keeps his distance from books and movies that go in for flamboyantly gory effects. But that’s a matter of personal preference–a private aversion that I would never want to see used as the foundation for public censorship.

And censorship is what this San Francisco episode, and all the other nice-nelly attacks on kids who like to write nasty stories, is all about. Those tremulous folks who decree the suspensions and expulsions might well be big fans of Quentin Tarantino and Stephen King themselves, but they want to clamp down on the free play of the imagination in the schools they run, I suspect, out of fear that some sort of legal liability will get attached to them if they don’t. That sort of thinking leads ultimately to the kind of totalitarian measures that Stalin’s commissars of culture imposed on writers and even painters and composers whose work seemed to embody unhealthy and unconstructive ideas. A lot of those people wound up in Siberian prison camps, which certainly did teach others of their kind to keep their unhealthy and unconstructive ideas to themselves. When young people are taught similarly that what they think can land them in trouble, they will quickly conclude that thinking is a pastime too dangerous to indulge in. Is that, I wonder, the lesson that our schools ought to be teaching?

The distinction between fiction and reality is not one that should lightly be discarded. The little boy who points a finger at another student and cries "Bang!" is not actually shooting him. The student who writes a story about disemboweling the little girl next door is not actually disemboweling her. The writer who tells a story about evil elder gods biding their time in a citadel beneath the sea while planning their attack on our civilization is not actually bringing down upon us the onslaught of Cthulhu and his nasty companions.

There are real dangers all around, ranging from the troubled kids in trenchcoats down the block who dream of mowing down their classmates with AK-47s, and may someday do it, to the bearded minions of al-Qaeda, hidden in remote caves, who are planning their next terrorist scheme even as I write this. We need all the help we can get to defend ourselves against perils such as these. But calling in the Homicide Department to protect us against youthful writers with excessively feverish imaginations achieves nothing at all to make us safer. It simply brings us a little closer to the fiercely constricted world of George Orwell’s Big Brother.