This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

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.

... Student-teacher relationships at UC "happened before and will happen again," he said. "It's unfortunate. It shouldn't happen, but it happens all the time."

... A provision in the employee manual "strictly prohibits any type of amorous relationships" between students and staff, he said.

"Under no circumstances does this university tolerate any relationships" between faculty and students, [a spokesperson] said.




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.”

Fay Weldon, in a terribly written piece, defends Beard. She shares a memory of her own:


Had I thought I had any hope of seducing [a professor to whom I was attracted], or even known how to set about it, I would have done my damnedest, in the hope of sopping up knowledge, wisdom, understanding and integrity, all the things students were hungry for, in that foreign country, once upon a time, long ago.


She was clearly never attracted to a prose stylist.

Christina Nehring is one of the best writers on the subject:



Teacher-student chemistry is what fires much of the best work that goes on in universities, even today... It need not be reckless. It need not be realized. It need not even be articulated or mutual. … In most cases, it would be counterproductive for it to emerge, itself, into the limelight. That said, it occasionally does. And when it does, it must not be criminalized.



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.

Love is a flame, and the good teacher raises in students a burning desire for his or her approval and attention, his or her voice and presence, that is erotic in its urgency and intensity. The professor ignites these feelings just by standing in front of a classroom talking about Shakespeare or anthropology or physics, but the fruits of the mind are that sweet, and intellect has the power to call forth new forces in the soul.

Students will sometimes mistake this earthquake for sexual attraction, and the foolish or inexperienced or cynical instructor will exploit that confusion for his or her own gratification. But the great majority of professors understand that the art of teaching consists not only of arousing desire but of redirecting it toward its proper object, from the teacher to the thing taught. Teaching, Yeats said, is lighting a fire, not filling a bucket, and this is how it gets lit. The professor becomes the student’s muse, the figure to whom the labors of the semester — the studying, the speaking in class, the writing — are consecrated. The alert student understands this. In talking to one of my teaching assistants about these matters, I asked her if she’d ever had a crush on an instructor when she was in college. Yes, she said, a young graduate student. “And did you want to have sex with him?” I asked. “No,” she said, “I wanted to have brain sex with him.”

...Teaching, as Neil Postman says, is a subversive activity — all the more so today, when children are marinated in cultural messages from the moment they’re born. It no longer takes any training to learn to bow to your city’s gods (sex or children, money or nation). But it often takes a teacher to help you question those gods. The teacher’s job, in Keats’s terms, is to point you through the vale of soul-making. We’re born once, into nature and into the culture that quickly becomes a second nature. But then, if we’re granted such grace, we’re born again. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his mortal soul?

This is the kind of sex professors are having with their students behind closed doors: brain sex.

... What attracts professors to students, then, is not their bodies but their souls. Young people are still curious about ideas, still believe in them — in their importance, their redemptive power. Socrates says in the Symposium that the hardest thing about being ignorant is that you’re content with yourself, but for many kids when they get to college, this is not yet true. They recognize themselves as incomplete, and they recognize, if only intuitively, that completion comes through eros. So they seek out professors with whom to have relationships, and we seek them out in turn. Teaching, finally, is about relationships.


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.