Last semester Fern Kupfer was my instructor for “English 305: Creative Writing Non-fiction” for two hours, until I dropped the course. She picked up a book and waived it in front of us. It was about nuclear bombs. Another book she dug out of her sack was devoted to the “thoughts” of a raving psychotic in a mental hospital. She then quoted a graphic description of airline passengers vomiting black blood, taken from a science-fiction book about a fictional outbreak of Ebola virus in the United States. She stated that all these books were examples of creative non-fiction.

She stated that there was no definition for creative non-fiction. “I can’t give you a definition for creative non-fiction,” she said, “but I know it when I see it.”

I asked her why she had chosen “depravity, weapons of mass destruction, psychotic ravings, sickness, and death” for examples of creative non-fiction. “Do you have any happy books?” I asked.

Fern Kupfer laughed as if the question were absurd, and sneered that happy books were “boring.” Instead of answering my question, she immediately called on another student. A girl with a pierced nose who was wearing a pair of gigantic overalls waived her hands in the air expressively. “The voyeur’s fascination with depravity is truly American … just look at the National Enquirer!”

“It gives us a pleasant sense of satisfaction, doesn’t it,” chirped Fern Kupfer, “to read accounts of other people’s depravity and suffering. It makes us feel less miserable about our own fucked-up lives.

“You have to be a gossip to be a good writer,” said Kupfer.

Fern Kupfer went upstairs to her office, looking for “happy books,” and returned with a book that was in her words “incredibly boring. Nothing happened in it” and a book consisting of a sexual pervert’s compilation of “every sexual experience he had with himself and others in his entire life.”

The last thing I remember before walking out of the class (besides nausea) was a conversation between Fern Kupfer and this student. They were discussing an avant-garde book he had just read. The book was about excrement.

University officials have expressed surprise that Iowa State is no longer among the “top 100 educational buys.” To those of you who have asked why Iowa State’s enrollment and freshmen-retention rates have declined steadily: You have just read the answer to your question. Take a look at it.

As Ayn Rand made brilliantly clear in her seminal philosophic masterwork “Atlas Shrugged,” creative writing is a form of art. As such, its purpose is to be an expression of values that are beneficial to human life. These values include happiness, success, health and rationality, to name several. Their opposites — failure, misery, suffering, sickness, perversion and death — are valueless or zeros. In fact, if failure and death (the zero) were the norm, the human race would not survive. To hold up the zero as an ideal is evil. To hold up perversion, suffering, and death as “creative writing” is to destroy creative writing.

I appeal to the university to clean up its act in the humanities. To those officials who say they cannot do this, I would ask: How much farther are you going to allow this injustice to go?

Shirley J. Keller

President

Objectivists at ISU