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Discusses common-sense and immediate measures (and attendant difficulties) to deal with ethical issues raised by students’ personal writing. Advocates giving more attention to the increasing complexities of teachers’ roles; to the complicated and thoroughly nontraditional lives led by most students; to the increasingly personal interaction that takes place with students; and to issues of trust and ethical responsibilities.

couple of years ago, very early in semester, one of my first-semester composition students wrote a personal narrative in which he confessed to murder. In Life on City Streets he described receiving instructions over phone and then proceeding to kill a nameless victim in cold blood. The paper disturbingly lacked remorse; student explained to me later that it was intended to show what he had had to do to survive on streets. It was way short of assigned length and very poorly written. Of course I had questions about authenticity of narrative. Also, I confess that in first, dismaying, how-do-Irespond-to-this moments after I read this paper, thought crossed my mind-as indeed it may be crossing your minds right now-that it is perfectly possible to go through an entire career without having to confront a paper such as this ... Some weeks later, when I shared this paper at a professional meeting with colleagues across my district, almost all of them thought that narrative was real, not fiction, though personally I have doubts to this day. Some advised various approaches one could take to get at the truth, while at least a couple pointed out that as an officer of college I was obligated to turn whole matter over to deans and to police. But, leaving aside that I had never thought of myself in quite that way, there was really not enough evidence to take such a step. Instead, I asked student to see me in conference, and when he finally kept his appointment, we discussed paper in more detail. He repeated several times that murder had really happened, and we negotiated a revision which would expand narrative, clarify thesis, define some terms, and provide indispensable details of context. Then we set up another conference where he would bring in a draft of revision. But, although he completed one other assignment in course, student continued to attend class only rarely, never came to a second

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ere is seldom mentioned but universally known fact of our profession, bluntly stated: the vast majority of our undergraduate students do not love or appreciate literature as we do. Indeed, the value of studying literature, the rewards of reading, are not immediately apparent to surprisingly large number of students, despite vaguely conceived (and externally imposed) notion that reading serious literature is somehow essential to becoming a wellrounded person. So we shake our heads in dismay, share our war stories in faculty lounges, rejoice in our occasional successes, and generally bemoan these students' lack of interest, spotty education, and limited life experiences; the sorry state of basic literacy in recent years; the dismal and misguided teaching conducted in high schools; and, eventually, the anti-intellectual strain in American culture itself, exacerbated by television, Danielle Steel, and Stephen King. Embedded in all this are unstated inklings that our entire enterprise may be suspect or indefensibly elitist. And it was ever so. Gerald Graff's Professing Literature: An Institutional History is replete with accounts of MLA addresses from the turn of the century onwards which express concern over students' indifference to literary studies and to the latest professional trends in literary theory. Even the decades-long debates over scholarship vs. criticism chronicled by Graff on occasion find it necessary to deal, somewhat reluctantly, with pedagogy and classroom applications. Not often enough, it has always seemed to me. This and other sweeping generalizations that follow, along with some radical observations-and few suggestions-are intended to refocus attention on what I take to be the principal function of college literature teachers, their primary raison d'etre: teaching undergraduates.

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