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Monday, August 13, 2007
Romance in the Ivory Tower Romance in the Ivory Tower: The Rights and Liberty of Conscience will appear this fall; its author, Paul Abramson, should expect it to create a bit of a fuss. People get het up about sex in general, and professor/student sex seems to generate particular anxiety. Abramson argues that universities, many of which now have explicit rules against these affairs, should let the matter alone. I agree. Sexual harassment should be taken seriously, but the consequences of consensual relationships have no place in university legal systems. As Abramson says in an interview, "It is basically love gone awry that universities are afraid will turn into civil litigation. Therefore, universities will cut out love completely with these policies in order to protect themselves." He also points out that people on campus will continue to have sexual affairs, however stringent the language against them might be: People make foolish sexual choices. ... To me that's testament to the power of love and sex. Sexuality is an enormously powerful motive, and people are going to make foolish choices because of the power, but we don't preclude it. We give freedom of speech despite the rubbish and crap that people air because it's so essential to our survival to protect the freedom of speech. It's essential to our pursuit of happiness and well-being to protect sexual rights, knowing full well people are going to make foolish choices. As to power differentials: We allow male or female to join the Army or Marines and fight in Iraq at 18. If that 18 year old can make that decision about giving life for their country, that 18 year old can make a decision about who they're going to have romance with. Here's a recent newspaper article which acknowledges what everyone knows - faculty/student affairs go on. The scary new language forces them underground. A popular University of Charleston administrator and teacher, who says he was fired last month for having sex with students, claims student-teacher relationships are common practice and he was singled out because he criticized the school. Sure, the professor could be exaggerating the degree of faculty/student sexual activity out of self-interest. But I think it's reasonable to assume that there's a respectable amount of it on most campuses. People get offended when you say so, though; they don't like to think about what UD's blogpal Mary Beard once wrote on the subject. In an earlier post, UD described what Beard said, and how people responded: Feminists the world over are sexually harassing Professor Mary Beard, who waxed nostalgic in her blog "for that, now outlawed, erotic dimension to (adult) pedagogy. ...It is naive to think that the powerful set of power relations in student- tutor relationships can be de-eroticised. You can police it, but you cannot deny history about this.” A number of these writers are touching on an aspect of pedagogy that William Deresiewicz considers in greater detail: The relationship between professors and students can indeed be intensely intimate, as our culture nervously suspects, but its intimacy, when it occurs, is an intimacy of the mind. I would even go so far as to say that in many cases it is an intimacy of the soul. And so the professor-student relationship, at its best, raises two problems for the American imagination: it begins in the intellect, that suspect faculty, and it involves a form of love that is neither erotic nor familial, the only two forms our culture understands. Eros in the true sense is at the heart of the pedagogical relationship, but the professor isn’t the one who falls in love. All of this is fine; but I'd want to add that some students and professors will want to go beyond brain sex. This may be, as Abramson suggests, very foolish. But not in all cases, as in those long-married couples (John Kenneth and Kitty Galbraith, for instance), who met when one was an instructor and the other his or her student. |