However, some things couldn't reasonably be anticipated.
Yes, I know that teachers need to anticipate consequences in advance. Yes, I know that teachers need to anticipate that students will look for loopholes. And yes, I know that an attractive female teacher needs to recognize that young male students may be “thinking with the wrong head,” so to speak.
But I still think that a student writing paper on this topic is so far out of the range of predictable responses that the teacher can be excused for not anticipating this as a possibility. For this to come from an older male student who is married and in his late 50s is even worse.
I do think that cases like this should serve as a warning to teachers about the dangers of open-ended “write about anything” assignments.
I don’t agree that things can’t be reasonably anticipated.
The teacher is supposedly a professional and trained on how to come up with assignments. It is their job to come up with well written assignment descriptions and be responsible for the assignments they come up with.
Once the students get the assignment it is their responsibility to perform the assignment. If the assignment involves creativity, it is the student’s task to be as creative as they possibly can.
The teacher is totally on the hook for setting up a situation that the teacher created in which she gives an assignment involving creativity in writing and a student responded with a creatively written response but something which just happens to offend the unwritten, unspoken sensibilities of the teacher. This is wrong. It is as wrong as, for example, condemning Mark Twain for including uncensored slave vernacular in Huckleberry Finn. Twain was castigated at the time for doing that and to he has continued to be castigated for doing that up through modern times.
Teacher responsibility includes blocking off the limits of an assignment in advance if she does not want the students going in a particular direction. As a professional, it is up to her to forecast and provide for the side effects of her own doing. She should not rely on the courts to help correct her mistakes.
Finally it is a writing assignment. Written words do not leap off a page and rape or pillage people. We have brains that distinguish between what someone writes or says, and what someone does.
This woman is simply in the wrong profession. If she is a prude, she should be in a convent praying for her continued eternal chastisty, not a university where freedom of thought and expression should be the first priority.
The courts prefer not to get involved in 1st amendment issues in the university out of laziness. I would not infer that the teacher is correct just because a lower court judge was too lazy and dishonest to honor case law. In the arts, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. A prudish teacher getting offended due to her own carelessness does not constitute sufficient reason to override existing case law.
Standard disclaimer, I am not a lawyer but on occasion I have watched Perry Mason on TV.