Creative writing courses and murder: I don't like Mondays

In the third week of the first semester he attacked the staff member, threw him against a wall and continually punched him in the face. Only then were the police called and only then did we find out that he had been stalking women around Melbourne and had been making obscene phone calls to female students. He was expelled and we never saw him again.

As I was the leader of the creative writing programs, students and staff would come to me if they had personal problems. I would help where I could but I was not a psychologist. Yet I had to act on every complaint that was made. As anyone in a leadership role knows, you need to keep your wits about you regarding the nature of some of the complaints. Some were motivated by malice - by both staff and students.

One female staff member complained 14 times about a Serbian film writing student, Karl, who was a loner and who liked the Gladiator and Sparticus “sand and sandal” genre. The teacher had been reading about the genocide and rapes in Bosnia and believed she was a potential victim. The student was occasionally verbally abusive and disruptive in class but none of the other students complained. In the end the teacher refused to teach him.

What the teacher didn't know was that Karl had had a breakdown while escaping Serbia and had left his parents behind. He was living in a boarding house with the Sisters of Mercy.

When I talked to him at the boarding house he said that he was seeing a psychiatrist and that he was having nightmares about his family being killed. I moved him to another class where the teacher was more experienced and would discuss with him at length the construction of “sand and sandal” genre.

Should he have been reprimanded or expelled? Certainly not. In my experience, many creative writing teachers - unless they were also high school teachers - have no training in recognising mental illness. They take their cues from what they perceive as the student's strange or aberrant behaviour and how the other students react around him or her.

There are four times more professional writing programs in Australia than there are courses aimed at studying Australian writing. Notions of “creativity” are highly attractive to students as they offer not only avenues of self expression but an opportunity to exorcise “inner demons”.

While it's too early to tell what Cho Seung-Hui's inner demons were, there are hints. The Chicago Tribune newspaper and ABC News reported that Cho had left behind a note in his dormitory in which he railed against "rich kids". You caused me to do this," he wrote in a long note that railed against "debauchery" and "deceitful charlatans".

Apart from the fact that creative writing teachers are not trained to recognise potentially psychotic outbreaks, they also deal with material, which, by its very nature, may be highly violent, sadistic or erotic. In the majority of cases, students channel these feelings into a coherent form and recognise them as for what they are. I'd say that more than 50 per cent of the productive output of young creative writers tends to be autobiographical.

Some of the descriptions of rape and assault were so detailed and quotes from police reports appeared so verbatim, that I believed that the events in the story really happened. Whether or not the writing was good was another matter.

One of the problems that is not much discussed behind university staff doors is the fact that creative writing can, in some individuals, unleash the demons that they have fought with counselling and medication, to allay or resolve.

The cognitive behavioural therapists tell us that “re-living” the memory of an event serves to heighten the anger and or depression. So in these cases, creative writing is not therapy but a mechanism which feeds the writers fear and delusion. Add to this the fact that about one in 10 creative writing students has suffered or continues to suffer from depression or some form of mental illness.

I had no faith in the established checks and balances to ensure that a mentally ill student was properly looked after by the university authorities. I had no faith in the university solicitors that they would act for staff against a violent student. Yet these were the early warning mechanisms that should have alerted authorities at Virginia Tech. They failed me and my staff and they may have also failed the staff in America.

As with most crimes, it was not the police who stopped the shooter from claiming more lives. Law enforcement activities and a police presence are obviously important factors in deterring crime, but they do not deter all crimes and they almost never stop crimes as they're happening.  As the tragedy at Monash university showed, the task of stopping crimes during their commission inevitably falls to private citizens - to students and teachers.