When the October issue of GQ magazine arrived at the College of William & Mary last month, students and faculty caught a glimpse of what can happen when a professor isn’t interested in fleeing temptation. In Williamsburg, the sleepy town that encompasses the campus, the issue sold out within 48 hours of hitting the newsstands — apparently, even in the post-Clinton era, sex scandals still sell.

The ‘Burg (as the town is affectionately nicknamed by its residents) is a quiet place — despite its status as one of the top tourist draws in the nation (for its authentic year-round reenactment of life in colonial times), the city is quite comfortable in its role as a peaceful southern college town. W&M isn’t a very rowdy place, either: the gorgeous campus is full of history and tranquil beauty, the administration avoids controversy, and the student body studies on Friday nights.

Then came the GQ article, with its juicy sex scandal, and the college community was thrown into uproar. "Professor Confesses In GQ" was the headline in the student newspaper, The Flat Hat, which splashed the article across its front page in oversized tabloid type.

The GQ article is entitled "The Professor of Desire;" it’s author is Sam Kashner, an adjunct professor at the school and a former Writer-in-Residence. It’s a graphic, lurid tale, relating Kashner’s various sexual (and non-sexual) exploits with a number of female students at the college over the years. In one specific relationship that Kashner focuses on, his affair with the student led the woman’s husband into depression and eventual suicide.

The essay’s headlined as "First Person," and has a note on the first page that reads "All names have been changed except that of my wife." In the text, Kashner describes the college as a "moral mosh pit," where lusty female students prey on weak and susceptible professors, luring them siren-like into a net of desire. The tiny coffee shops of Colonial Williamsburg are the hunting grounds for these harpies, who Kashner typifies as "Virginia girls" who came to the school "loaded for bear … they knew how to cut out a deer’s heart and gut a fish." It’s a disgusting, egotistical romp, full of detailed descriptions of after-hours visits from scantily clad female students who can’t help but be drawn to Kashner’s "sensitive, man of the world" aura — and the quest for an easy A+.

For anyone who has a rudimentary knowledge of William & Mary, or its student body, this article is obviously pure, unadulterated bunk. At best, the article is poorly written fiction — at worst, it’s the ludicrous hack work of a man willing to lie extensively about both his students and his employers.

For starters, Kashner’s views on the student body here are completely ridiculous. It’s true that most female students here are in-state, from Virginia — but they hail from the preppie suburbs of Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia (here, they’re called the "NOVA Brats"), not the rural areas of southern Virginia, the sticks or the redneck backwaters of the Blue Ridge mountains. That’s where I’m from. I should know. Pickup trucks are few and far between on campus, and most students here could no more gut a fish or rip apart a deer with their bare hands than they could miss the next sale at Banana Republic, or fix their car without using a cell phone to call Daddy.

I’m a sophomore at the college, and actually had a class with Kashner this semester (his wife, English Professor Nancy Schoenberger, took over after the article came out), which serves to make his own characterizations of himself in the article even more laughable. The Kashner of GQ worries about "who will protect" him from the next crop of blonde, sex-crazed freshmen girls; frankly, I don’t think he has anything to worry about. While Kashner describes himself in the article as a suave, handsome, "Tommy Lee Jones type," in reality he’s a short, balding man, with limp black hair and a penchant for dark turtlenecks and corduroy.

The reactions to the article on campus have ranged from skeptical laughter to harsh indignation; the student body and most of the campus women’s groups are yelling for Kashner’s head, but there are complicating factors that may affect his future at the school. Kashner is one of the school’s most well-known and successful published authors: you’ve probably heard of his bestseller, Sinatraland, or his book on Superman George Reeves, written with Schoenberger, which was the basis for an E! True Hollywood Story.

Administration officials and the head of the English Department admit privately that the College is reluctant to sever its ties with Kashner — and they already have a ready-to-use loophole. The official College guideline for student-faculty relationships doesn’t technically forbid affairs with students, so Kashner didn’t violate a specific college policy. Badmouthing the school and its female student body is bad, but not fireable, so it looks like Kashner’s piece will earn him a mere slap on the wrist. It’s likely he’ll be back teaching classes again in the spring.

There’s also some disagreement about whether or not the story in GQ is actually true, and not some form of bungled academic satire. While Kashner has stated publicly that the story is "all true … a tell-all, a confessional for me," Schoenberger has a slightly looser perception of the article.

"Everything’s true, but there are also elements of dark humor," Schoenberger told a class of students in the wake of the Flat Hat story. "My husband’s an artist, like I am, and we enjoy experimenting and stretching the boundaries between truth and fiction."

The answer appears to be this: the GQ article is true, but not everything that happens in the story actually happened to Kashner. Much of it is decade-old gossip garnered from the halls of the English department, and some facets are derived from stories circulated at other Virginia schools (Kashner’s opening anecdote, for instance, which tells of a female student who slept with all the male professors in one department, is actually an urban legend from the University of Virginia).

And while some have laughed off Kashner’s claims of victimhood in all of this, that tale may actually have some weight to it. Apparently, early drafts of the story actually didn’t mention the College by name, and the piece had a more fictional feel to it. Kashner claims he succumbed to pressure from GQ magazine, who had the author insert W&M’s name and make the piece more factual in nature in order to escape the "Fiction" label.

Of course, in the end, Kashner is going to have to answer for that decision to go along with GQ’s wishes. He’s badmouthed the College and its female students, all in order to gain attention in a nationally read forum. Kashner’s real fall, it appears, wasn’t caused by the forbidden fruit of the physical, but a much more intangible temptation: fame.