Until this fall, Sam Kashner, a poet and novelist, taught off and on for 10 years at William and Mary along with his wife, Nancy Schoenberger, a tenured English professor.

It was there, Mr. Kashner writes in "The Professor of Desire," that he fell into "a moral mosh pit" populated by seductive students. One of them showed up for a conference wearing a leather jacket draped over a transparent negligee. Several of them devoted their writing assignments to detailed accounts of their sex lives.

Temptation was everywhere, Mr. Kashner writes, and eventually he succumbed. He had an affair with a student. "It was thrilling and loathsome at the same time," he writes. "The air had become heavy with sex and all its sorrows."

Sorrows is right. After the student's husband found out she was having an affair with her professor, the article says, he hanged himself and left behind a note blaming Mr. Kashner.

"Every summer next year's bumper crop of freshmen comes through the college -- most of them accompanied by their parents," the article says. "I wonder if they have any idea that in a few short months their sons and daughters will be sexual libertines?"

Mr. Kashner won't be there to see them. He stopped teaching at William and Mary last spring and is devoting himself full time to his creative writing.

Creative writing is what Mr. Kashner does best, some of his former colleagues argue, and point to the G.Q. article as an example. Terry L. Meyers, the chairman of the English department, said he called Mr. Kashner after he learned about the article and asked him point blank if he had ever had an affair with one of his students, if he had ever had an affair with any William and Mary student, and whether he had ever violated the college's policy forbidding sexual relations between professors and students over whom they have authority.

Mr. Meyers said that Mr. Kashner answered No to all three questions. "That knocked the legs out from under that piece of writing as anything other than fiction," Mr. Meyers said.

Mr. Kashner insists that Mr. Meyers misunderstood him and that the only thing he denied was having an affair with one of his own students. He never said he never had an affair with any student on campus, Mr. Kashner maintained in an interview.

In fact, the story is largely true, Mr. Kashner said. Names were changed, some characters were conflated, but the basic outline of events happened as he reported it, he said.

People at William and Mary find that hard to believe. The student newspaper, Flat Hat, slammed Mr. Kashner in an editorial, accusing him of dragging the college's good name "through the mud" and generalizing "his own outrageous experiences as the defining examples of what life is like here."

"Everyone is very depressed by it," Mr. Meyers noted. "It paints our women students as highly eroticized and our faculty, through implication, as highly eroticized. It doesn't capture the mood here. It seems unfair."

What seems unfair to Mr. Kashner is the reaction to the piece. "I am stunned by the vehemence of the spin and the response to this story," he said. "I would have thought that my former colleagues were sophisticated enough to recognize the satiric elements of the story and to see it as a very dark morality tale. It winds up being a weird valentine to marriage and to fealty."

His colleagues, he noted, unfortunately read it otherwise.

"Do these things happen here at William and Mary? Absolutely," Mr. Kashner added. "And not just in the English department. Do they happen on campuses across the country? Absolutely. I'm not filing a class-action suit against all professors and certainly not against all of William and Mary. It's one man's indictment of himself and his own confused, inappropriate response to the erotic imagination of his students."

The reason the college has reacted so strongly, Mr. Kashner insisted, is because he hit a nerve. He adds: "Some of my biggest detractors are those who could ill afford to point the bony finger of indignation."