Tag Archives: Sexual relationships between professors and students

“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.

The magic of trust: of consent, power, BDSM and professor-student sex

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Not quite ready to let go of the professor-student sexual relationship discussion. Below yesterday’s post, Clarisse writes:

I’m curious to know if you see any connections between the argument you’re making now, and the arguments against BDSM/kink.

Clarisse, who writes a great deal about BDSM at her own blog, asks if I can make a case against teacher-student relationships that doesn’t privilege a disapproving majority against the desires of a minority. She’s concerned — as others such as the famous Jane Gallop were concerned — that policies which ban sexual relationships between consenting adults do a kind of violence to individual freedom. Given the history of these sorts of power-imbalanced campus relationships, I’m more sympathetic to hearing this argument made by women than by men. (I fisked Barry Dank, a leading defender of teacher-student sex, here.)

It’s worth noting that other professions ban sexual relationships between practitioners and those who seek their help. Attorneys are not allowed to have sex with their clients; psychologists and doctors aren’t permitted to have sexual relationships with their current — and in some cases, their former — patients. Few would argue that it abrogates human freedom to suggest that therapists should lose their licenses if they fuck their patients, even if those patients are well above the age of consent. Of course, we recognize the special vulnerability of someone who seeks therapy, or someone who turns to an attorney. It’s not clear that we see college students as equally vulnerable. I think a good case can be made that in terms of their professors, they generally are.

(A parenthetical aside. As someone who has made teaching his life’s calling, I bristle at the idea that my profession ought to be seen as less influential than that of medicine or law. By permitting professors and students to engage in consensual amorous relations, while disbarring barristers and solicitors who do the same with their clients, we send the signal that we who teach have less significance than those who litigate, or negotiate contracts. No offense to my lawyer friends, but I find that implication offensive!)

To get to the specifics of Clarisse’s question. At the very heart of BDSM, at the core of “kink”, is one thing: trust. One of the things I’ve heard, over and over again, from men and women who practice BDSM in one form or another, is that it is within that particular subculture that they finally found safe and reliable boundaries. Even people who don’t practice kink know the phrase “safe word”, a term that has made its way into our shared lexicon. Because BDSM deals openly with issues of power, domination, submission, and control, the reliance on clear and unmistakable boundaries is at the very heart of that world’s practices. There’s no question that many folks who come out of backgrounds of abuse — and some who never endured violation — have found redemption, healing, and catharsis in practicing BDSM. And to a woman and a man, they all seem to agree that trust is the sine qua non of the lifestyle.

I’ve long maintained that there’s a great deal we in the “vanilla” (non-fetish) world can learn from our brothers and sisters who practice BDSM responsibly. I honor the commitment of the kinky folk to developing rules and rituals that protect each participant’s dignity and sense of self. And I honor there sense that trust is something that needs to be made explicit in our words as well as something that needs to be lived out in our most intimate actions.

And of course, the common thread between the teacher-student relationship, BDSM, and psychotherapy is the preciousness of trust. In the classroom, in a psychiatrist’s office, and in a bedroom filled with the tools of kink, we see asymmetrical power relationships at their healthiest. Students need to be able to trust their professors, particularly in fields like my own (gender studies). Patients need to be able to trust their therapists. And a submissive needs to be able to trust a dominant partner — and vice versa. Violations of trust in any of these arenas can be devastating. Continue reading →

“I don’t want your amends”: of consensual relationships, happy memories, collective harm and Montblanc pens

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I wrote last Thursday about professor-student relationships, a topic I’ve turned to quite a few times. I had been inspired by this post at Alas and the subsequent comments.

As I often do, I posted a link to my own post on my Facebook page. A very small discussion then broke out on FB, and one of my friends, Carlotta, wrote about her own very positive memory of a sexual relationship with an older professor of hers:

Help me out with the unethical part though… honestly, for me my relationship provided me with an oasis of sexual comfort amid a desert of sterile academia. I remember mine with affection and (sincere) gratitude.

I’ve heard some stories like Carlotta’s. Heck, I had one in my own past. One of the last students with whom I had a sexual relationship, back in 1997-98, was a remarkable young woman, Marie. Marie and I were lovers for a brief period both while she was my student and immediately afterwards. She later transferred back east as a women’s studies major, a major she selected after taking my History 25B course the semester our affair began.

Not long after our relationship ended, I got a birthday card from — of all people — Marie’s mother. The note was attached to a box, and in the box was a fine MontBlanc fountain pen. Marie’s mother, who knew about our recently-concluded affair, wrote that she was grateful for my influence in her daughter’s life, and that as far as she could see, her daughter had changed for the better as a result. Though she admitted that she had had some concerns about her daughter’s involvement with a professor, Marie’s mom said that she could see that nothing but good had come as a consequence. She wanted me to have the pen as a token of appreciation. I still have it. (I need new ink cartridges for it.)

A few years later, sober and filled with repentance for my earlier behavior, I spoke to Marie and attempted to make amends to her for having “abused my power” with her. Marie was exasperated. “Bullshit, Hugo”, she said. “I was a legal adult too, and I’m not sorry that it happened. I had happy memories of it, and it pisses me off that now that you’re a ‘reformed man’, you’re trying to make it sound like it was unhealthy. It wasn’t. I liked what we did, I’m not sorry.” We’ve only touched base a few times since that conversation eight or nine years ago. What I do know is that Marie now lives in New York where she’s finishing a doctoral dissertation, and that now — well into her thirties — she remains adamant that she has nothing but fond memories of her relationship with me. I’m certainly not going to try and continue to convince her she shouldn’t. Continue reading →

Asking out Dr. “desperately hot”: a note on students pursuing former professors

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One of my former students has now transferred on to a large university elsewhere in the state. A 22 year-old junior, she took a class this past quarter with what she describes as a “desperately hot” 30 year-old assistant professor. He’s in his first year teaching the best of all possible subjects (history), and according to my former student, he’s said to be “single and straight and very available.”

My former student has read my various postings on student crushes and on older men, younger women relationships. She shot me a message on Facebook this week, asking me whether I thought it would be appropriate for her to ask out “Dr. Desperately Hot” now that the term is over. She’s quite clear that this isn’t just an intellectual crush — she’s interested on, as she puts it “every level.”

Assuming she’s not likely to be his student again, I wrote her a short note telling her, in essence, “Go for it.” An eight year age-gap is not insignificant, but it’s not an insurmountable one. (I admit I would have responded differently had her Dr. DH been 40 instead of 30.) I’m familiar with the campus on which she studies and he teaches; the university policy in place, like that at Pasadena City College, prohibits professors from dating their current students, but says nothing about dating former students who continue to be enrolled in other instructors’ classes.

I got a follow-up note:

Cool. So, another question: how do I ask him out??? Do I suggest coffee, trying to make it seem like I just might want a friendship? Or do I just flirt with him (more than I have been!!) to see if he takes the inititaive?

I pointed out to her that students frequently invite me to coffee. The nice thing about coffee is that it can have multiple meanings; it can be a wonderfully casual “first date”, or it can be an extension of normal office hours, complete with refreshment. I’m a great believer in having coffee with students, knowing that the chance to chat with a professor one-on-one in an informal environment was one I always treasured when I was an undergraduate. It’s a situation that can be, and indeed should generally be entirely non-sexual, uncharged and unfraught with romantic implications. But it’s relatively easy for even a young adult to inject some gentle flirtation into a coffee date — and my former student can try that with Dr. DH and see how he responds.

I warned her, half teasingly, that she might be very disappointed. Many of us who are masterful and charismatic in the classroom are stunningly not so when we are out of “our element”. While there’s nothing inherently unethical about a 22 year-old dating her 30 year–old former professor, the chances are pretty damn high that she’s got him on some sort of a pedestal. Up until this point, theirs has been a one-sided relationship; he lectures to a large classroom, she sits and gazes at him. She projects more on to him than he has to her, even if he has “noticed” her in a way that goes beyond the purely professional. The chances of disillusionment on her part are near 100%, though I’ve seen more than one relationship survive that process.

Because we’re friends, I felt comfortable challenging my former student to check her motives. Some students pursue professors for the same reason some young women seek out older men; they look for a yardstick by which to measure their own attractiveness. Dating (or, depending on the milieu, merely having sex with) a popular professor who is widely acknowledged to be “desperately hot” might be simply a way to boost the ego, or to boost status in the eyes of peers who share an attraction to this desirable instructor. Even if he is older and presumably wiser, it’s at best unkind and at worst deceptively manipulative to pursue a relationship of any duration merely for the sake of bragging about it (even if that bragging is confined to one or two very close friends.)

I’ve said a time or nine that older men, younger women relationships are problematic — but not always strictly inadvisable — for many reasons. I’ve pointed out too that most student crushes on professors are less about the desirability of the instructor and more about how that professor makes the student feel about himself (or herself), about ideas, about possibilities for life and the world. But all of this doesn’t mean I don’t think a mature young student can’t ask out a relatively young, eminently single, hot assistant professor. Something interesting will happen no matter what the final outcome.

More on the erotics of teaching: a response to William Deresiewicz

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Several people (three counts as several in my book) sent me links this past week to this William Deresiewicz article in the American Scholar: Love On Campus. It’s an interesting and lengthy rumination about the ubiquity of the “lecherous English professor type” in popular film and literature; it’s also an examination of the role of sexuality in teaching.
It’s a subject in which I have some considerable interest.

Much of Deresiewicz says is, I think, fairly accurate:

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.”

I like the Yeats quote, which I confess I didn’t know before. And his anecdote about his teaching assistant matches what I remember hearing about student crushes from my friend Tiffany back when I was an undergraduate (something I wrote about here.) If we’re doing our job, we are lighting fires — and when and if student arousal appears to be directed our way, we redirect it towards the subject and away from ourselves. Deresiewicz overlooks, however, the possibility that student attraction towards their best professors is less about the subject (or the professor himself), but rather about the student’s sense of their own potential to which their teacher is helping them to awaken. It’s a small but not insignificant distinction.

I also appreciate immensely this Yale professor’s acknowledgement that good teaching often flourishes in the less prestigious corners of academe (such as two-year colleges like my own):

In fact, kids who have had fewer educational advantages before they get to college are often more eager to learn and more ready to have their deepest convictions overturned than their more fortunate peers. And it is often away from the elite schools — where a single-minded focus on research plus a talent for bureaucratic maneuvering are the necessary tickets to success — that true teaching most flourishes.

He’ll get an “amen” from me there. Yet despite considerable agreement with good Professor Deresiewicz, I found myself troubled by other aspects of his piece. This bit about consensual relationships policies left me spluttering:

Professors are the surrogate parents that parents hand their children over to, and the raising and casting out of the specter of the sexually predatory academic may be a way of purging the anxiety that transaction evokes. But long before the baby boomers’ offspring started to reach college, the feminist campaign against sexual harassment — most effective in academia, the institution most responsive to feminist concerns — had turned universities into the most anxiously self-patrolled workplace in American society, especially when it comes to relations between professors and undergraduates.

“The specter of the sexually predatory academic”? Specters generally are unreal phantasms that we fear irrationally. There is nothing spectral about predatory instructors (overwhelmingly male) who seduce (or in their distorted justifications, allow themselves to be seduced) by much younger (overwhelmingly female) students. The stereotype of the professor who crosses sexual boundaries he ought not to cross is hardly a figment of the literary or cinematic imagination. Sexual affairs between students and teachers that involve at best a colossal power imbalance and at worse deeply destructive exploitation are all too real, and Deresiewicz’s dismissal of that reality is disingenuous. Referring to “specters” invites us to think that those who pursue lecherous professors are on “witch hunts”. And yet witchcraft isn’t a real threat, and most accused at Salem and elsewhere were not real practitioners of the dark arts. The transgressions of amorous academics are all too real, and it’s a serious error to pretend otherwise. In his eagerness to insist that good teaching has an erotic element, which I think it does, Deresiwicz downplays the reality that many professors have a hard time distinguishing between “lighting an intellectual fire” and foolish, irresponsible seduction.

But with that significant quibble aside, it’s really a fine meditation on teaching and eros. And his penultimate paragraph elicited from me an enthusiastic “Hell, yes!”

Teaching, finally, is about relationships. It is mentorship, not instruction. Socrates also says that the bond between teacher and student lasts a lifetime, even when the two are no longer together. And so it is. Student succeeds student, and I know that even the ones I’m closest to now will soon become names in my address book and then just distant memories. But the feelings we have for the teachers or students who have meant the most to us, like those we have for long-lost friends, never go away. They are part of us, and the briefest thought revives them, and we know that in some heaven we will all meet again.

Bold emphasis mine.

All the more reason why we “Casanovas of the classroom” ought not to fear the regulations that seek to protect our students from the advances of our colleagues, whether those advances be fervently wished for or not.

Reprint: “Incredibly Hot” — the Michael Gee case

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I’m on hiatus — at least from substantive blogging — until August 28.  Until then, I’m reprinting favorite posts from 2004 and 2005.

I’ve followed with interest the case of Michael Gee, the non-tenured journalism professor fired from his teaching job at Boston University after posting on an internet blog site that one of his students was "incredibly hot."  A verbatim quote from Professor Gee on a public blog:

Of my six students, one (the smartest, wouldn’t you know it?) is incredibly hot. If you’ve ever been to Israel, she’s got the sloe eyes and bitchin’ bod of the true Sabra. It was all I could do to remember the other five students. I sense danger, Will Robinson.

I mean, there’s so much wrong there, where do we start?  And who still uses "bitchin’" anymore?  Didn’t that go out with the first Reagan Administration?  (I should probably just google it, but aren’t Sabras native-born Israelis, or am I confusing the term with something else?)

Gee was promptly fired (he had no tenure protection).   As one who normally defends even the most indefensible of academics (such as Jacques Pluss), I have no problem with Gee’s dismissal.  I can only imagine how the "bitchin’ bod Sabra" felt when she heard about it; the five other students whom Gee could barely remember can’t have been too happy about it either.

In the classroom, I am scrupulous about treating all of my students the same, regardless of gender or perceived attractiveness.  It’s much easier to do now than when I was first teaching, and frankly, it’s a lot easier to do now that I am fully and completely in love with one woman!   What makes Gee’s remarks indefensible is that he managed, in an instant, to make the classroom an unsafe place for every single student — both the woman whom he called "incredibly hot" and the other students whom he admitted to neglecting.  At least Jacques Pluss, the Nazi from Fairleigh Dickinson, kept his feelings about his actual students to himself!

Do I have favorites as a teacher?  I suppose from time to time, I do.  There’s always going to be a special student, male or female, young or old, who shows such enthusiasm and such promise that I can’t help but want to give him or her extra attention or encouragement.  These are the guys and gals who come to my office hours over and over again to argue, debate, and talk about life.  I mentor a few of them, I’m honored to say.  I suppose other students might notice that some of their classmates visit me more often than others, and as a result, may end up with more of my attention.  But these "favorites" are not selected because of their looks.  Indeed, one of my most important jobs is to make it clear to any student who comes to see me that my interest in him or her is purely professional. 

The lovely and the homely of both sexes have crosses to bear.  The former often fear that the attention they get is merely superficial; the latter fear being ignored altogether.   As teachers, our job is always, always, to look past the surface of our students.   Sexiness can be a distraction, but it’s completely unacceptable for those of us who teach to allow desirability to influence our attention, our grading, or our willingness to offer help to those who need it.

Several years ago, I had two students who were regular visitors to my office.  I’ll call them "Jack" and "Jill".  Jack was in my ancient history class.  He was an older fellow (mid-forties), usually unkempt.  He was a heavy smoker and infrequent bather.  When he came into my office to talk, he brought with him an odor of cigarettes and dirty clothes; sometimes, the awful stale stench of alcohol seemed to seep through his pores.  Jack was a bright man — very thoughtful (if argumentative). I liked him very much, but I confess that his odor was a distraction.  My office-mate at the time would leave whenever Jack came in, and finally asked me to meet with Jack outside, at the little coffee stand near our building.  Was it easy to work with Jack?  Not always.  His body odor was a test for me, but it was a test I overcame.  It wasn’t my place to comment on his grooming — it was my place to do what the rest of the world probably didn’t do, which was to pay close attention to him despite his truly unpleasant scent.  I’m happy to say he transferred to Cal State LA, and still keeps in touch.

Jill was the opposite, of course.  She was in my women’s history class.  She was young, quite attractive, and she tended to wear much more revealing clothes than her classmates.  She also came to my office regularly, as she was doing a scholar’s option research paper.   I don’t think she was flirtatious, but she was likely aware of the impact her body had on those around her.  Our conversations were always academic in nature, but at times, frankly, I found her a challenge in much the same way as Jack had been.   Both Jack and Jill had bodies that demanded attention!  With both Jack and Jill, my challenge was to be a thoughtful, attentive, loving mentor who saw them as human beings first and foremost. Jill’s exposed flesh and Jack’s stench both grabbed attention,and at times, in remarkably similar ways, I had to force myself to stay absolutely focused on what each was saying.   As with Jack, I had to give Jill what I imagine she didn’t often get from men: completely non-sexual attention.  I’m not in the business of telling young women how to dress, or telling older men to bathe. Good teaching means dealing professionally and compassionately with the sexy and the malodorous alike! 

Michael Gee didn’t see his "Incredibly hot" student as a person.   He could not do what we who are privileged to work as teachers must do , which is teach without being distracted by either the beauty or repulsiveness of student bodies.   And even when we are challenged by the "Jacks" and "Jills" and "bitchin’ bod Sabras" of the world, for heaven’s sakes, we ought to keep it to ourselves!

Originally published July 20, 2005

Follow up on Bloom, Wolf, and the responsibility to be safe

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The post right below on Naomi Wolf, Harold Bloom, and sexual harassment drew an interesting response from my good friend John in New Zealand. I’m pulling what he said up out of the comments (forgive me John, but blog etiquette allows the publication of any public correspondence!). Referring to the details of the 1983 encounter between Wolf and Bloom (details are in the linked story below), John wrote:

Sorry, but when she (Wolf) cooks a candle-lit dinner with alcohol for a professor, and invites him (Bloom) to discuss poetry on the couch, don’t you think that’s rather a mixed signal? From what I gather, he put his hand on her thigh, she jumped up and vomited (!) (How about just “No!”), and he did the gentlemanly thing and left immediately, with apologies. Where is the problem here? It’s not the ancient Professor Bloom, in my opinion.

Of course it’s a mixed signal. Young female college students send mixed signals to male professors all the time. Whether they are at Yale or a community college, young women come to academic environments already painfully aware of the power (or lack thereof) attached to their sexuality. Everywhere around them (in the media and among their peers) they are reminded that for young women, sexuality is the best tool in their arsenal. They are so consistently disempowered in every other respect, that it is little wonder that many of them do “use” their sexuality to get the attention and validation that they (like all young people) want so badly. Many of them do get crushes on their profs too, but often those crushes are less about a real attraction to the one particular man, and more about the romanticization of their own hopes and dreams for themselves. Other times, it is simply a manifestation of the truth that for many women, power and knowledge are themselves deeply sexually attractive.

Those of us who teach have a moral obligation to recognize all of those factors. While legal adults, students in their late teens and even early twenties are still far more vulnerable than they will be in later years. College professors must remember that that vulnerability and that uncertainty is always there, even in students who appear outwardly mature, confident, and sexually aggressive. A good professor respects his students’ strengths and weaknesses, and he understands the erotic nature of the pedagogical transaction. Equipped with that understanding and respect, he doesn’t exploit his students’ vulnerabilities. Wolf may well have come on to Bloom (she certainly did send a mixed signal), but that is beside the point: Harold Bloom, if the story is true, blew it. I think he blew it because he was not capable of doing what he was morally called to do, which was to respect and protect his student from the consequences of her own mixed signals!

The professoriate is not merely an academic vocation, it is a moral calling. The reward of tenure brings with it unparalleled benefits and job security, but it also carries a heavy ethical burden. Slowly but surely I have come to embrace that burden, even as I recognize that my ability to live up to that weighty responsibility has more to do with God’s grace than with my own will. And I have come to see my students of both genders as deserving of intellectual stimulation, but also — despite their legal and physical adulthood — of my care, my nurturing, and my protection. Before anything else, in the end, I have the obligation to be intellectually provocative and emotionally safe.

Off to the noon meeting of Campus Crusade!

UPDATE THREE HOURS LATER: You know, one of the perils of the instant post is that there is no time for revision. This whole post reeks of self-righteousness. I’m really not as humorless as this entry reads… I mean, I believe everything I said and all, but sometimes I need to say to myself: Hugo, my brutha, you need to chill out.