Westword
When Keifer Johnson headed back to school after last year’s summer break, he had reason to believe that the truly awesome part of his college experience was still to come. He was a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Western State Colorado University in Gunnison, a Kerouac-spouting English major and a rising star on WSCU’s highly regarded track team. He planned to train and run like hell, read stacks of books, write poetry and have fun.
The first clue that his life on campus was about to undergo a profound change came in a terse e-mail from an English professor. The note said that he would no longer be allowed to serve as a teaching assistant for a freshman writing course, a course for which he’d been a TA the previous semester. The professor urged him to contact Gary Pierson, the university’s dean of students, if he had any questions about the decision.
Baffled, Johnson made an appointment and went to see Pierson. The dean told him that he was in possession of a letter that Johnson had sent to a girl who’d been in that writing class. Pierson wouldn’t let him see the letter, but he let Johnson know that he found its content to be inappropriate and even disturbing.
Come home prepared, I will devour you…. Expect pain. Expect pleasure. Expect both; they slide hand in hand too easily. Welcome to the jungle, baby. There will be fun and games.
Johnson acknowledged that he knew the girl. They had flirted a bit over the course of the semester, then hooked up during finals week. The relationship had quickly caught fire, the two of them engaging in some bondage-themed role-playing patterned after E.L. James’s best-selling S&M romance, Fifty Shades of Grey. Johnson had written the eleven-page letter, a graphic and purplish work in the Jamesian mode, for his lover to read while she was in rehab in another state in June, trying to get clear of her drug and alcohol problems.
I sink my jaw frenzied, wolfing your essence, as I begin to tighten and pound away the calamity of you, the impossibility of you. I destroy myself into you, as I howl your name, as I rupture release profoundly deep within you. I explode myself into you, as we scrape transcendence, as your desperate failing body floods over me. Breathless, I look into you, into the essence [of] you…. The beauty of violence. Holding you there, unmoving, silence shackling the air, I gaze into you, you into me.
Johnson had broken up with the girl — known here simply as Emily — at the end of July. Now, barely three weeks later, here was Pierson, questioning him at length about the letter and the relationship. Johnson did his best to explain that the savage sex play described in the letter was pure fantasy, but he wondered why the dean was so interested in a freshman pas de deux that had played out over the summer, far away from campus.
“His questions were strictly about my relationship with her and my personal sex life,” Johnson says. “It was definitely a condemning tone. I said, ‘While this relationship may seem unsettling to you, it was entirely consensual.’ I was frank and forthcoming. I had no reason not to be. I thought I would explain myself and that would be the end of it.”
But the meeting with the dean was only the beginning of Johnson’s journey through Western State’s complicated process of investigating possible sexual misconduct involving its students — a process that Johnson found infuriating and humiliating, as well as panic-inducing. A few days later he was summoned to the office of Chris Luekenga, the associate vice-president for student affairs, to respond to charges that he had violated policies outlined in the student handbook.
Two of the infractions — accidentally pulling out Emily’s meal card instead of his own in a campus cafeteria, and a “breaking and entering” charge for slipping through an open window into a dorm with other students to check out who was occupying the rooms they’d had the previous semester — were relatively minor. The third, however, was more ambiguous. Johnson was being accused of “inappropriate behavior” toward another student, apparently based on the letter he’d written Emily.
Once again, Johnson fielded questions about his relationship with the girl and the wilder passages of his letter. Luekenga told him that he’d received a complaint from an “outside party” about Johnson’s conduct but refused to provide more specifics. “He said, ‘Tell me why you should stay here as a Western State student,'” Johnson recalls.
The meeting turned into a disciplinary hearing, with Johnson found guilty on all counts. He was suspended from the track team for several days while Luekenga pondered what other sanctions to impose. A letter from Luekenga outlined his punishment: 48 hours of community service, a letter of apology to the dining-hall staff for the meal-card incident, and four hours of “counseling sessions that will address your decision-making skills and thought processes.” Johnson was also placed on “judicial probation,” which meant that he could be suspended from school if he committed any additional infractions.
Johnson didn’t entirely agree with the finding; he didn’t see anything wrong with the letter to Emily, and he would later learn that there was nothing in the student handbook prohibiting possession of another student’s meal card. But he had screwed up by going into the dorm without permission and figured he would just take his medicine. …