Tag Archives: Pasadena City College

The kids are all right: on awareness, sex-positivity, and political activism

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Academics are famous for their tendency to see the wrong more clearly than they see the right. Trained as we are in graduate school seminars to be critics, encouraged to elevate suspicion to the cardinal virtue, we’re often much more articulate in explaining the problems than in proposing workable solutions. And we often tend to forget to celebrate what’s right and what’s good.

After my flurry of recent posts on sexualization, my friend Elyse wrote me and suggested, tactfully, that while I had made a pretty good case for the negative impact contemporary culture is having on young women, I ought to focus as well on what’s exciting and good. Last Wednesday’s post on webcams and privacy was inspired by a query from a student about what changes I’d witnessed in my years of teaching. And it certainly isn’t the only major change I’ve seen.

So, three bits of good news about college students from my perspective.

1. Now in my eighteenth year of community college teaching, I’m excited by the way in which my students in recent years have embraced the Internet to become much more savvy about feminism and gender justice. In my introductory women’s studies course, I still get plenty of students who have no idea what feminism is or why it matters. It was always so. But each semester, the number of young people who enroll already possessed of a feminist foundation grows. Some already read Jessica Valenti and Courtney Martin years ago, or have been visiting feminist websites — famous and obscure — since ninth grade. When I started teaching, radical notions about women’s equality were confined to college campuses and specialty bookstores; they were largely inaccessible to, say, the daughters of immigrants going to high school in the San Gabriel Valley. Now, thanks to the ‘net, those ideas are widely disseminated, often presented in ways that click with a multi-cultural and economically challenged population of young women. By the time they hit my classroom, many of my newest students already have been given a thorough primer in gender justice. That’s a novel and exciting development, and it bodes well.

2. My students today are much more comfortable talking about sexuality than were students just fifteen years ago. In class discussions as well as in their journals, the young women I’m working with are far more willing to talk about issues like masturbation, birth control, enthusiastic consent, and exploring same-sex attraction than were the students I taught when I first came to PCC. (To be fair, I’m a much better teacher today than I was then, and a much safer presence. But I hear similar things from feminist colleagues who’ve been at this gig as long as I have, so I don’t think this new openness has much to do with my particular personality or teaching style.) For example, as recently as a decade ago, I very rarely had female students argue passionately in defense of pornography. When they did take that stance, they invariably took it on First Amendment grounds; today’s students, many of whom have explored visual erotica since the onset of puberty if not before, tend to take a much more positive view of the liberating potential of cybersexuality.

“Sex-positivity” among young women isn’t just an over-hyped media creation, it’s a real and growing trend in the lives of this particular generation of college students. This is the flip side to the Paris Paradox, the equally real problem of being “sexy” but not “sexual”. This is a generation of young women who’ve been able to buy vibrators online from sites like Babeland, and a generation that’s used the same Internet to get the truth about sex education concealed from them by noxious and stultifying abstinence-only campaigns. (Scarleteen is the indispensable source for detailed and authentically empowering information.) This generation of girls grew up more bombarded than ever with confusing messages about what it means to be a young woman — but they also grew up with more tools to decide the question for themselves than any generation before them. I’m excited for them, and excited for what they’ll do in the world. And I’m very excited to meet their younger siblings.

3. There’s been a huge upswing in political activism. I spent my adolescence as a lonely progressive in the early Reagan Era, surrounded by high school classmates who saw apathy as a virtue. The situation was not much better when I started at PCC, in the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Between 1995 and 2006, I served as an advisor to no fewer than six different feminist-themed clubs. Time and again, I tried to interest my students in gender justice activism. Time and again, a club would get started by a few wonderful young people — and then the club would collapse as soon as those leaders graduated. There was no sustained interest in having a presence on campus dedicated to exploring issues around sexuality, feminism, reproductive rights and so forth. But in 2007, with the help of Feminist Majority, we got another club — the seventh since I’ve been here — up and running. And for three years now, it’s thrived.

The club was active in the 2008 election, and when the inevitable hangover came, I worried that many young people would lose interest in feminist work. Instead, I saw the club grow in 2009, galvanized in particular by the assassination of George Tiller and by the campaign to end the disaster of abstinence-only education. In talking with feminist organizers from groups like Planned Parenthood and Feminist Majority, I discovered that our happy experience at PCC was being replicated across the country. We’ve seen a renaissance of feminist political activism on college campuses, a rebirth heavily assisted by social networking. (I have no idea how we’d put a Feminist Club meeting together on this campus without Facebook.) The confluence of these new social networking technologies with a more anxious and politicized era has given birth to a new generation of young women activists. The issues are largely the same as when I started teaching: economic justice, body image, violence prevention, reproductive freedom, the right to pleasure. But the percentage of students involved in the struggle has risen exponentially, and the tools they use to connect to fellow activists are astonishingly effective. There is much reason to hope, and much reason to rejoice.

Sex, Rape, and Enthusiastic Consent: audio file up

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At the invitation of my very own Pasadena City College Feminist Club, I gave a talk today at noon on “enthusiastic consent,” focusing on the problems with the “yes means yes” message, people-pleasing, and the “consent spectrum.” My student Dan Mekpong taped the presentation and has put the audio file online. The link is here. We had about sixty people show up, which was nice, and there were some good questions at the end.

I am available to give similar talks to high school and college settings, and have given this presentation everywhere from Fuller Seminary to Brown University to a number of different high schools.

Some of what I talked about is in this old post.

Clothing, class, and the community college

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From July 2006.

This post about the “tell your boyfriend I said thanks” t-shirt briefly diverted onto a subject of dress and class.  I wrote:

To generalize enormously, the less privileged the background, the more intense the sense of competition among young women.  Far too many young ones grow up with a sense that their sexual desirability is a more marketable commodity than their intellectual accomplishments; this is all the more likely to be true in families where there isn’t a history of women going to college.  (If you don’t believe me, visit any American community college on a hot day — and then visit an elite university in the same weather.  You’ll see more mini-skirts and heels in five minutes at Pasadena City College than you will in five hours at Berkeley or Stanford.  That’s anecdotal, sure, but don’t take my word for it — try it yourself.)  The bottom line: class and sexual competitiveness among women are, to say the least, not unrelated!

Glendenb’s comment was so good I wanted to repost part of it:

I think the difference was between people who saw education as a right and those who saw it a privilege. Among the students at the cc, they dressed in their best (which for some was heels and mini skirt) to show that they deserved the privilege but also to combat a social dis-ease; they were aware that they were moving across a social dividing line and were attempting to prove they belonged. Students who were first in their family to attend college were straddling a social dividing line – breaking from a set of values that weren’t comfortable with the extreme casualness around sexuality, but not yet fully embracing a set of values in which sexuality was (far too often) separated from emotion.

Students at my undergraduate college perceived education as their right – the hedonism, brazen sexuality, deliberate crossing of behavioral barriers that were not crossed in their upper-middle class families were seen as part and parcel of the college experience – the icing on the cake. They didn’t have to prove they belonged at college to anyone, least of all themselves. At the community college, many students were trying to prove to themselves that they deserved to be there. What to my eye was sexualized behavior, was really a more carefully studied mimicking of what was perceived as appropriate collegiate behavior. Clothing choices were made that would help students feel brash, or strong, or confident in ways that students from the upper middle class didn’t feel they needed.

The bold emphasis is mine.  To use the Anglicism to which my passport entitles me, that’s "spot on".

I note this phenomenon is not merely confined to women.  Many first-generation male students, particularly but not exclusively East Asian (PCC is over 33% Asian), are ostentatiously fond of labels, particularly those that they associate with the "establishment."  Every year, even on hot summer days, my classes will be filled with remarkably neat young men in pressed khakis wearing Ralph Lauren, Lacoste, A&F, or even — oh, flashbacks to ’80s preppydom! — Brooks Brothers polo shirts.  The labels are always conspicuous.  Reading Glendenb’s comments, it occurs to me that these young upwardly mobile fellows are indeed mimicking what they imagine to be the appropriate attire of the privileged.  (Only later will some of them transfer to Cal, Stanford, and Georgetown and discover that the real privileged tend to be far more unkempt.) 

The names of many young men — particularly young Chinese from Hong Kong — are often rather touchingly quaint.  This summer, I have — these are first names, mind you — a "Fitzgerald"; a "Woodrow"; three "Benedicts" (my middle name); two "Henrys"; one "Maxwell"; and, my favorite, one "Colfax."   It sounds like a parody of the membership roster of my grandfather’s fraternity, circa 1926!  And at the risk of sounding horribly classist, it strikes me as a rather naive attempt to deliberately appropriate WASP cache.   Imagine all of these parents, newly immigrated, working long hours to clothe young "Winston Wilberforce Chan" in what television has led them to believe is the outfit of success: polo shirts and chinos with shiny penny loafers.   From the perspective of someone who grew up in WASP country-club culture, this sincere attempt at imitation strikes me as, at the least, oddly misplaced!

But as Glendenb points out, those of us who have "made it" and have an easy sense of entitlement ought not to be too quick to judge those who are eager to ascend the social ladder our ancestors climbed for us.  This morning, I’m wearing a pair of slightly distressed women’s jeans and one very bright multi-colored paisley cowboy shirt.  I’ve got a Paul Frank watch on (with Julius the Monkey in Mariachi garb.)  The affect is no doubt garish, and probably — outside of major urban centers — decidedly effeminate.  But I’ve got tenure, and I’ve got the security to know that my authority in no way hinges on whatever get-up I get myself in to.  I can afford to dress for comfort and to honor my own admittedly odd fashion sense.  Even when I was younger, as an undergrad or a grad student, I slouched around Berkeley and Westwood in old concert t-shirts and ripped 501s.    Like most of my compatriots, my certainty that I "belonged" gave me the freedom to be slovenly.  It wasn’t "affected working-class chic"; it was laziness, and a laziness reinforced by the certainty that such sloppiness would not be an obstacle to acceptance in a milieu that was, after all, mine by birthright.

In thirteen years of community college teaching, I’ve learned to be a hell of a lot less judgmental of my students.   I’m not offended, aroused, angered, or distracted by anything my students do or don’t wear — though from time to time, I’ll confess I’m still amused (a reaction I keep to myself as much as possible).  Glendenb’s point is well-taken: what students wear tends to reflect not only their personal style, but also their perception of what college is, and their own ease with being here.  I do well — we all do well — to remember that as we comment on the remarkable diversity of choices our students make each morning as they dress themselves.

“You are so far from hot”: the tiresome fall-out from my Ratemyprofessors “award”

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It’s been nearly two years since I “won” the honor (however dubious) of being named “America’s Hottest Professor” by the Ratemyprofessors website.

Over the weekend, an anonymous comment ended up in my moderation queue for this blog:

You are so far from hot. You rated yourself over and over again to win that award. Your (sic) ugly and vain and a poser.

I get comments like that every few weeks now, though in the days after I won the 2008 award from RMP, they were much more frequent. My actual ratemyprofessors page was spammed with all sorts of vileness, though whoever moderates that site did take down most of the cruelest and most scurrilous postings.

I was happy when I won the “award” not because I genuinely believed myself to be the most physically attractive college professor in the States — I doubt that’s true even within my own department. But I was excited about the possibility of leveraging whatever small degree of notoriety came with the announcement to drive traffic here to this blog and to gain a larger audience for my writing and speaking engagements. Not being very wise about this sort of thing, I operated with the “all publicity is good publicity” mindset, and though I would much rather have been named “best teacher”, I figured this little bit of recognition could only help.

My friend Jane, a PR professional, reminds me that that little saying about publicity is frequently untrue. Interviewers and media outlets have not come knocking as a result of my being named hottest prof. Though I’ve been fortunate enough to start work on other projects, and to collaborate on a forthcoming book (about which more will come, promise) none of those opportunities were linked to the Ratemyprofessors distinction.

On the other hand, my ego has taken one heck of a battering. Sometimes, it’s seemed a bit like some sort of sadistic high school prank: set the dorky kid up for something for which he’s manifestly not qualified, and then rip him ruthlessly. I generally stay away from the Ratemyprofessors site itself, as I don’t trust the authenticity of what’s written there. But the emails and anonymous comments, even when they are quickly deleted, do take their toll. I remember being an awkward, unattractive teenager. Frankly, the continued reaction to the Ratemyprofessors brings back unpleasant thirty year-old memories of being teased. (It’s worth noting that there’s male privilege involved here. Were I a female professor who had won, and my “victory” was considered equally undeserved, I suspect the comments would have been even ruder and more vociferous.)

In the grand scheme of things, this is not a source of great pain in my life. I have a wife and daughter who mean the world to me, a job I love, a community of friends and students and colleagues whose support is an indispensable joy. Their gentle ribbing is affectionate and welcome. My looks mean less to me than my health; my worries around my body these days are less about my appeal to others and more about staying fit under a breakneck schedule. But I’d be lying if I said that the steady flow of nasty reminders of just how undeserved the 2008 award was didn’t take just a little bit of a toll. While winning the “hottest professor of 2008″ title wasn’t quite the same as being handed a poisoned chalice, the taste of that “victory” has proved decidedly bittersweet.

Beginning again: updated

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The fall semester begins today at Pasadena City College. If you look back through my archives, you’ll see that I usually have a “first day of school” post up on the last Monday in August. This year shall be no exception.

It’s a cooler-than-seasonably normal day here in the San Gabriel Valley; though summer has three weeks left to run, autumn is in the air. It’s a remarkable change from the first day of classes last year, when we were in (literally) blazing heat as the smoke from the Station Fire saturated our campus. Last year, it looked like hell outside — today, things look genuinely lovely. But fine weather belies the general mood of gloom that is pervasive, perhaps more among faculty and staff than among students. California still doesn’t have a budget, our class offerings are woefully inadequate, and the reality is that a great many students who want courses will be unable to get them. If that has been the case before, it is all the more so now.

My mother tells me that my formal education began forty-one autumns ago, in September 1969. I was two when I first went to Santa Barbara’s long-vanished Humpty Dumpty Nursery School. Since that year of Woodstock and moon landings and the amazing Mets, I’ve been in school every fall without fail. I went from nursery school to graduate school without a break, and began teaching full-time at the community college while still finishing Ph.D. work at UCLA. I’m in my fifth decade in the educational system, which astounds me. And I’m beginning my eighteenth year as a professor at PCC; soon, my youngest students will have been born after I started teaching here.

In August 2004, I wrote about still having butterflies in my stomach the first time I met a class. Six years later, things remain very much the same in my innards. I wrote then of the reasons for my nervousness:

The obvious question is this one: why, after all this time, do I still get so nervous about the first day of school? It’s not stagefright — public speaking has never been a fear of mine. It’s not new material, at least not this year — all four courses I am teaching this fall are courses I have taught in the past. It’s not fear that my students won’t like me — though I do struggle with vanity, it’s not at the root of my jumpiness this morning. All three of these might be small factors at different times, but the core reason for this almost-pleasant state of anxiety is more basic: I still believe that I have the best job in the whole dang world, and I can’t believe they pay me to do it.

Even after all these years of full-time teaching (the last six with tenure), I still expect someone to show up, and with an apologetic and yet officious tone, tell me “We’re sorry, Hugo, we made a mistake hiring you. There was this terrible mix-up, you see; we intended to get someone else.” Though I can assure my readers that I did not lie or stretch the truth when I applied for this job, somehow after all this time I still suspect that I “got away with something” when I was hired to teach here.

I’ve talked about this with my parents and other colleagues who teach. My father (who taught philosophy for forty years at Alberta and UCSB) calls this feeling “the suspicion of one’s own fraudulence”. That phrase seems to sum things up nicely. Whenever I share these feelings, I note that it is often my most talented colleagues, students, and friends who say “Really? That’s how I feel too!” (One of the worst teachers I ever worked with, now thankfully retired, claimed never to feel this way.) I wonder if there isn’t some connection between periodic bouts of self-doubt and the drive to prove one’s self. Actually, that’s silly — I don’t wonder that at all, I know it with total certainty!

My office is a cheerful mess, I’m caffeinated and bepinked and readier than ever to begin the grand journey again.

UPDATE: Both in person in the hallways, and on my Facebook page, former and soon-to-be-current students have wished me “good luck” today. This isn’t new; I’m wished good luck each time a new semester begins. It might seem odd to wish it to the tenured professor; I’m not applying for anything, I’m not being evaluated this semester, and I’m not trying to get into a class. But I’m wished luck nonetheless.

I like to think it’s more than just a pleasantry offered when someone begins something new (or in my case, resumes an old and familiar task.) I like to think that it’s because even the very young recognize that there is an element of chance and mystery in teaching; some classes sizzle with chemistry while others, as we all acknowledge, are duds. Perhaps they are wishing me great students, or wishing me success in avoiding spilling on myself or teaching with my fly unzipped. Or perhaps they know that anything really can happen in the classroom, from the marvelous to the heartbreaking, and they are wishing me luck and grace and strength to cope with whatever comes, and to be as present and effective as I can be for all whom I will call my students.

In loco parentis? On breaking up fights, teaching, and the sacred hallway

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For the first time in years, I helped break up a fistfight on campus today. Just before noon, I heard a commotion and screams in the hall outside my office; I emerged to find two young men on the ground, with other students frantically trying to stop them from pummeling each other. I ran over to help, and a number of us managed to separate the two combatants. Three of us grabbed the one who seemed most like the aggressor, and pulled him down the hall until he broke free of our grasp and stormed off. For several seconds I found myself holding on to an incredibly wiry arm with both hands. I would never have been able to restrain him by myself, but others came to help.

The other participant in the fight was more clearly bloodied, and a colleague and I hustled him into our division office for his protection until the police could arrive. He was eventually taken to the campus health center, and I headed off to class after giving an interview to police. I don’t know yet if the other young man has been found, or if charges will be filed.

I do know that my right shoulder is a bit sore. It was already giving me trouble, and I may have made it worse today by wrenching it during the fight.

I’m certainly not heroic. But I am a teacher. And though I might not wade into a fight between young men taller than I and half my age out on the street, I will when it’s taking place in my hallway. I know this is a college, and that nearly all of my students are legal adults. But I feel fiercely protective of those students, and fiercely protective of this building, which ought to be a place of emotional refuge as well as intellectual inquiry. Those boys were beating each other (and injuring others) in that place I am called to help make safe. To not get involved would have been morally irresponsible.

Had the fight taken place on the street, I would have called the police and kept my distance. But not here. I’ve given seventeen years of my life to this campus, to this office, to that hallway. I have no intention of risking that life. I’m a father, after all, to a daughter who needs me alive and well. I never forget that. But I am also in a very real sense in loco parentis for many others, and I will risk at least a bump and a strained shoulder (or, heaven forfend, a lawsuit) in defense of those others — and the sacred safety of the hallway.

Dr. Tiller week and the arrival of Justice For All

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They’re back. One week shy of the first anniversary of the murder of Dr. George Tiller by a pro-life activist, the anti-choice outfit known as Justice For All has returned to the Pasadena City College campus, bringing with them their colossal graphic images purporting to show aborted fetuses. JFA, staffed mostly by earnest young students from Christian colleges, spent three days on campus last year. Many of my students were traumatized; on a campus where there are thousands of women who will have chosen abortion, the displays are cruel and misleading.

I urge folks to engage with the protesters only if they feel they must. I’m much more concerned with the emotional well-being of my students, particularly those who have undergone abortions themselves. I make my office available to them for conversation, and ask them to reach out to others, particularly in our strong and growing campus feminist community.

For those who do wish to argue with the pro-lifers, I always recommend asking them the famous question: “How much jail time should a woman do for having an abortion?” I recommend that they videotape the answer they receive. If they get the standard right-wing dodge that says “We don’t support jailing women who have abortions, because we think that they are victims too; we only want to go after doctors”, I suggest my students point out that that stance infantilizes women, calling into question their fitness to parent in the first place.

I am told Justice For All will be on campus for four days this week. In honor of Dr. Tiller, in honor of my own recent birthday and in honor of my wife and daughter and women everywhere, I’m giving $43 to pro-choice organizations for each day that the JFA display disfigures our campus.

Today’s $43.00 goes to the National Network of Abortion Funds.
Tomorrow’s $43.00 will go to Medical Students for Choice.
Wednesday’s $43.00 will go to Planned Parenthood.
Thursday’s $43.00 will go to Advocates for Youth.

I invite my current and former students in particular — and all others — to join me in this campaign for reproductive justice. Other worthy organizations besides those four named above include the National Abortion Federation, Feminist Majority, and Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice.

Like the great Dr. Tiller, I am a father, a husband, a feminist, and I trust women. My contribution to justice has been far less than his, but I want my name associated with his, and ask that those who would curse his name do the same with mine. And I ask that those who support and trust women, who believe that their wives and mothers and sisters and daughters deserve choices and sovereignty, join me in giving this week in his honor.

Here’s my post from last year, written the day Dr. Tiller was shot: ”When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die”: of a doctor, an usher, and the answerer of a call.

“I can’t trust your praise”: the unintended fallout of professor-student affairs

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I spoke too soon. I feel compelled to write another post on the teacher-student dating thing, in response to this question below yesterday’s post, from “Pounding Sand”. PS asks:


Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds as if this question is being couched in the understanding that the professor is both older than the student, and male. There’s also the implication that all other students in the hypothetical class are aware of the affair between student and professor.

So if the affair is a discreet one, and no one else is privvy to the situation, wouldn’t that mitigate the perception of other students that the affair is effecting their interests? In the case of age equivalence is ther any room to consider the relative experiences of the lovers. In other words, the relationship between a thirty eight year old female student and a thirty year old, or thirty eight year old male professor, perhaps draws a somewhat different picture of ‘imbalance’ than the relationship between a forty year old male professor and his twenty year old female student, or an older female professor and younger male student. Put another way, who’s zooming who?

I’m not advocating either/or, but I’m interested in the both the perceived inequality vs the actual.

During what — for lack of a better term — I call my “acting out years” (from 1995-1998, when I was having affairs with students), I dated one woman who was older than me. I was 29; she was 32.

“Claire” was a returning student, coming back to college more than a dozen years after dropping out. She was very bright, but like many of those who return to college after years away from academia, anxious about her abilities. Her story was a familiar one: she’d been a clever but underachieving high school student, more interested in social activities than intellectual ones. Claire had gone off to a Cal State campus for one year, and partied her way onto academic probation and into eventual dismissal. She had married at twenty, had a baby, and stayed home with her daughter for several years. By the time she came to Pasadena City College, she had been divorced for two years and her daughter was in fifth grade.

In her thirties, much to her surprise, Claire had discovered she loved learning: she loved books, writing, ideas. What had bored her to tears at 17 fascinated her at 32. Her passion was matched by her ability. (It is not always so.) She earned top grades on every test she took and every paper she wrote. And she was funny; lovely; she sat in the front row. Our affair started during the second semester Claire was my student, in early spring of 1997.

Claire and I were discreet. Of course, she wasn’t the only person (or, for that matter, the only student) I was dating. Neither of us wanted a serious relationship. None of her classmates knew; even as word spread across campus of my reckless and sordid indiscretions with others, no one discovered what was happening with Claire.

Claire eventually transferred to a nearby liberal arts college renowned for recruiting promising non-traditional students; I wrote her a glowing letter of recommendation. And it was when I handed her a copy of the letter of recommendation that I realized yet another damaging aspect of teacher-student affairs, something that goes to the heart of the question Pounding Sand poses.

Claire looked at the letter and smiled. Her smile faded, though, and I asked her what was wrong. I’d praised her exceptional abilities (particularly her writing skills) to the heavens; I’d meant every word I’d written. Claire said: “I wish I could believe that all of this was true.”

“Of course it’s true!”, I exclaimed.

“Is it? Don’t you feel as if you have to say these things after everything that’s happened? How can I know that you mean this?”

I was horrified, and, I confess, indignant. “Christ, Claire, you earned your A in the classroom. I can’t believe you’d doubt that. I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true.”

Claire remarked, calmly but with an edge in her voice, something to the effect that a professor who was so cavalier about sleeping with his students could hardly be self-righteous when his integrity was questioned. I could tell she wanted to believe that the words I’d written about her intellectual promise were true. I knew damn well that they were true. If I’d never come within ten feet of her, her dazzling, witty prose; her work ethic; and her insights would have earned her the highest grade in the course. In my mind, our sexual relationship had nothing to do with her academic ability, save that that unusual ability was one of many things that had made her exceptionally attractive to me.

Claire transferred, graduated, remarried, and moved away. She ended up in law school, and is now an attorney. I made amends to her in 2001. Our conversation was civil but brisk. She told me that while she had enjoyed my classes, and not been unhappy with our relationship outside of class, she was angry that our affair had made it impossible for her to turn to me as a mentor. Claire hadn’t seen me as a “younger man” (we were less than three years apart, after all), but as her professor. I had something she wanted, and what she had wanted most was intellectual validation. I gave her that, but it came wrapped up in a sexual relationship. As a result, she had had a very difficult and painful time trying to decide whether her As were earned, and whether my consistently laudatory feedback was truly deserved.

A woman who had grown up being told she was “pretty” but “not very bright”, Claire was a late bloomer as a scholar. And by having a sexual relationship with her, I robbed her of the chance to bask in the uncompromised praise she had so indisputably earned. At her four year school, Claire had found other mentors with whom she didn’t have affairs; she had come to trust that her talents were genuine. She hadn’t been able to get that from me. Whatever fleeting pleasure she had derived from our affair had left a lingering hurt in the form of self-doubt. And the fact that she was three years my senior in no way mitigated my responsibility for causing her that hurt.

It’s been a dozen years since I slept with a student who was in my classes. And of all the people whom I hurt by my selfish, narcissistic behavior during my acting out years, Claire was one of those the memory of whom has haunted me the longest. The amends I made to her may have been sufficient; it was the best I could offer. But she is one of those who has spurred me not only to change my life, and change it radically, but to be such a public and vehement advocate for banning “consensual” sexual relationships between profs and students.

So, PS, when it comes to the ethics of teachers dating students, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what the ages of the parties involved are. When the person with whom you are getting naked is also the person evaluating your work and your intellectual ability, the potential for crippling self-doubt will always be there.

Not putting the skeleton back in the closet: a quick note and some links on professor-student sexual relationships

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Richard Jeffrey Newman (whose poetry I recommend to all) has been blogging at Alas for a while now, and last week offered this piece on student-professor sexual relationships. It’s not much of Newman and a lot of extended excerpts from this a Tony Judt post at the New York Review’s blog site. The comments are interesting. (True confession: I only found the post when I checked the stats on my own blog, and found a number of hits to this post of mine, linked by Amp in the thread. Let me offer this post as well for the discussion, as well as the entire “student crushes” category archive here.

The subject of my past came up again recently. Two of my students were in my office on Monday. One of them, a regular reader of this blog, remarked that based on what she heard from her classmates, I still had a reputation as a professor who had slept with his students. The other student remarked that he had heard much the same thing. Both were quick to say that their classmates generally seemed to know that this behavior was in the past, but that some had their “suspicions” that I might still be up to no good, as it were. We all laughed together, and I gently assured the students that what I had once been I was no longer.

I certainly don’t advertise that I was wont to sleep with my students, but I don’t hide it from it either, for the reasons I’ve made clear time and time again. Sexual and romantic relationships between professors and students currently under their supervision are invariably unethical, regardless of the age of either the student or the professor. Relationships between professors and their former students need to be entered into with caution, particularly if the student involved is likely to be in need of a letter of recommendation or is still on the campus. And my general caution about age-disparate love affairs applies here as well. As I have said and will continue to say, for a three-year period in the mid-to-late 1990s, until I got sober in the summer of 1998, I had a series of unethical relationships with students. I deeply regret my behavior. As part of my amends to those whom I hurt, I helped write the campus consensual relations policy . And I have continued to speak out on this issue.

It has been a dozen years since I last crossed that line I ought not to have crossed. In that time, I’ve worked damn hard on good boundaries. And I’ve been a public and forceful (and, unfortunately, insufficiently humble) advocate for safe, non-sexual mentoring. I have little sympathy for those who continue to defend the indefensible exploitation of the teacher-student relationship. I was wrong, deeply so, when I slept with my students. And though it might seem wise to not mention these Clinton-era transgressions of mine again, I think there is value in pointing out the deeply problematic nature of these relationships to new generations of faculty and students, even at the risk of my own mild embarrassment.

One more link to a post I’ve written: A follow-up on student crushes — what not to do

Yves Magloe, 1967-2010

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I returned to campus this week and to the very sad news of the death of Yves Magloe, my colleague in the English department. Yves was a local cause celebré in 2006, when he was briefly fired by the Pasadena City College administration after a nervous breakdown. I blogged about it here and here, and was privileged to play a small part in the campaign for his reinstatement. That campaign received national coverage in the mental health and higher education communities.

Yves and I hadn’t met before his dismissal, battle with the board, and eventual rehiring. We did have a few nice chats after his return, and spoke of what it was like to serve as a faculty member while battling mental illness. Yves and I were, to the best of my knowledge, the only two full-time faculty members at the college to have spoken publicly about our struggles. And now Yves is gone, due to causes that I am told were related to his battle against his illness. I know few other details. There is a simple memorial to him here.

I note that both Yves and I were born in May of 1967, two days apart and on opposite sides of the world. Our paths led both of us to Pasadena City College; our battles against our inner demons both became known to our campus community. And Yves didn’t make it.

I grieve his loss.