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Tuesday, October 02, 2007
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Professor/Student Affairs and the New Gentility In today's New York Times, David Brooks complains about "the new gentility, the rules laid down by the health experts, childcare experts, guidance counselors, safety advisers, admissions officers, virtuecrats and employers to regulate the lives of the young. ... If Sal Paradise [Jack Kerouac's loose-living hero in On the Road] were alive today, he’d be a product of the new rules. He’d be a grad student with an interest in power yoga, on the road to the M.L.A. convention ..." This sense of cultural tightening, of what the journal Salmagundi a few years back called the New Puritanism, is still much-talked about today, especially in the context of sexually repressive university campuses, where, for instance, it's now against the rules at many schools for students to have affairs with their professors, even if their professors are graduate teaching assistants. A recent book protesting this rule, Romance in the Ivory Tower, has generated a lot of outrage, and it's not even out yet (release date, October 31, 2007). UD's skeptical of cultural generalization -- has Brooks read Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons? -- and she wonders whether a certain cranky gentility out and about in the country doesn't have as much to do with the fact that, with the exception of stalwarts like Norman Mailer, many of our established novelists, documentarians, and essayists, though by no means reducible to virtuecrats, have gotten old and bitter (Wolfe, Philip Roth, Joseph Epstein). In any case, UD thinks it's time for specific experience and reflection upon it to take the place of theorizing and sermonizing on the subject of these affairs. Enough of feminists on the left, moral majoritarians on the right, and litigation-phobic administrators in the middle talking about these affairs when they haven't -- most of them -- she presumes -- actually had them. When she was an undergrad, UD had three. Who you gonna believe? The first thing to note about UD's repeated exposure to evil older men on campus is that she seems to have survived. No, let's take that a step further. She seems to have thrived. And part of the reason she has thrived is because of those very nasties. The second thing to note, before we jump to the prurient details, is that UD's experience is not universal, and she's certain some undergraduate women back in her day, and today, emerge scathed from these things. She offers her testimony not because her experience is univerally generalizable, but because it's no doubt somewhat representative. In all three cases, UD was the aggressor. Each professor was... well, a professor: a befuddled, shambling, well-meaning, cerebral character caring far more for historiography, literary theory, and... who was the third? UD loses track... Oh yeah: Latin American history than dashing about after women. UD had to do most of the work. She didn't mind. She was always conceiving intellectual/sensual passions for her teachers. Some of these passions were bizarre in the extreme. When she was a senior at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland, UD was eerily intense about Miss Baker, her obese, ancient, Rapid Learner English instructor. As a sophomore at Northwestern University, UD fell in love with Erich Heller, a gay professor in his sixties who disliked women. So how can UD be even modestly representative? She's just weird. Well, but eventually UD managed to point her passion in the direction of more appropriate objects... And after all, even if those initial crushes were off the grid, what underlay them wasn't eccentric: It was something like what David Brooks talks about when talking, today, about Jack Kerouac -- a supercharged, youthful energy for it all: intellectual clarity, sensual delight, adventure, freedom. The desire was for a living synthesis of these things, these things embodied in a particular mind and body. The only thing slightly strange here was the intellectual bit. UD always panted after intellectual energy, and was extraordinarily attracted to people who seemed to possess it. For a male-on-male version of this, see Saul Bellow's novel, Ravelstein, in which the main character explains that his attraction to Ravelstein is in large part about his long-established attraction to people who have evolved a coherent and powerful world view. For a real-life version of it, see Susan Sontag's adoration of her University of Chicago instructor, Philip Rieff, whom she married a week after meeting (she was seventeen years old). For exactly not what I'm talking about, see Dorothea Brooke's idiotic attraction to dessicated Mr. Casaubon in George Eliot's novel, Middlemarch. UD learned a lot from all of the professors with whom she dallied. She learned a good deal about their specializations, to be sure, and this was valuable; she learned tons of other things in long freewheeling conversation with them. But what she really came to understand -- what she was, rather selfishly, in pursuit of -- was the nature and indeed the strength of her own peculiar personality. She came to understand what Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors describes as the "small sublime indifferences and independences" that constituted her individuality: a rebelliousness, a deep curiosity about the way powerful minds work, and, to be sure, a tendency toward paganism... Outlaw these campus affairs and today's headstrong types will still have them. The act of outlawing them probably makes them more attractive. |