The problem with discussing the subject of professor-student relationships in any kind of public context is that if you are a professor or student or have any proximity to either, it's hard to keep yourself out of it. Just as blogging about fashion is really blogging about the size of your butt, blogging about student-professor relationships can easily be misconstrued as blogging about your student-professor relationships. This is the kind of ambiguously referential talk that might cause one's professors or students to say, "Hmmm..." in a somewhat different tone than the detached scholarly interest one might be hoping to elicit. One way to dismiss such insinuations is to come straight out against professor-student relationships, indicating that at least you would not personally consider involving yourself in one with anyone who might take your purely academic musings on this question too much to heart. But if you're not against it, whatcha gonna do? You're almost asking to be sucked into your own hypotheticals. So allow me now to disclaim any history of personal involvement in any kind of teacher-student relationship. Never have, never wanted to, probably never will. Nonetheless.
Phoebe thinks that the crux of the "prof-crush" is that, like the puppy love for much older men that young girls might develop, its object is basically unattainable. I disagree. Yes, when you're 10 and you have a crush on your 22-year-old camp counselor, that's not going anywhere, and if it did go somewhere, it would be deeply creepy and also possibly a felony.
But when you're 22, though the age gap between parties may be the same, you have nonetheless passed beyond the realm of statutory rape. And although in most cases, the object of your prof-crushes will probably still be unattainable because he is otherwise committed--to a spouse, or to the opposite gender, or to avoiding relationships with students in general or you in particular--sometimes that won't be the case. And in those instances where it's not, it's important to see the distinction between the schoolgirl and the woman in college or graduate school. Margaret Soltan, who reports attaining the supposedly unattainable not once, but three times, also believes that although such affairs clearly can end badly, there is nothing inherently evil about them (scroll down to 10/02/07; the permalink doesn't work).
Nor is Phoebe right to suggest that the primary impulse of women who pursue their professors is to be taught about sex. When you think of the kind of woman who is forward enough to get from the fourth row of a lecture hall into her professor's bed, the image of the timid virgin is not exactly what comes to mind (though I suppose she could play-act that role en route). I recall discussing a classmate/TA affair once with one of my roommates and wondering how the classmate ever got from deriving functions with the TA to not wearing any pants. What exactly were the steps involved there? This does not seem like something likely to be undertaken by the wide-eyed girl off the farm. (Indeed, the girl in question--not wide-eyed in the least.) And why should we cynically assume that there is no wisdom aside from an enhanced familiarity with sexual mechanics to be derived from such relationships?
My favorite essay of last summer, Deresiewicz's Eros on Campus, argues that the dynamic of these desires is informed by a Greek sort of eros. In fact, this was how one of my professors analogized Platonic eros when I studied the Phaedrus: think of the lover as a middle-aged professor who has wisdom but lacks the experience of the beautiful, and the beloved is the grad student who possesses the beautiful but seeks wisdom. The union of lover and beloved is then the most natural and perfect kind of love. (Don't worry; I'm pretty sure no one took my professor's analogy as a personal invitation.)
Deresiewicz goes on to deny that this eros, when properly understood, has a sexual component, but Plato is pretty clear that it does, and I agree with Phoebe that attempts to disentangle mind and body here are doomed. There is no sense in denying that such desires are not exactly chaste, even if they're not primarily sexual. Of course, Phaedrus doesn't exactly articulate the concern that professors of the future might actually be seedy old lechers rather than beacons of virtue and founts of wisdom, so we're left to rely on our own judgment in deciding that question. But the main thing is that a graduate or even a college student can have the capacity for such judgment.
And if Plato is right and all philosophy is imbued with some degree of eros, then academic life is likely to be formed out of intense relationships all around, and they won't be limited to this particular "prof-crush" or that one, but also to classmates and peers and others passing through. Very few of these relationships can or should be consummated sexually, but the eros surrounding them injects them with an ambiguity and intensity that makes life interesting and urgent. Studying is exciting; eros is part of that excitement. What better or more innocuous way to discover these pleasures than through an unrequitted prof-crush? Even if there's a lot of meat available in the frat house next door, I don't see the advantage of settling for it just because it's there and its pants are already off when you walk in.
Monday, May 12, 2008
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5 comments:
Same disclaimer goes for me to. Never have, never wanted to, and so on.
As for the rest, I'm not sure we disagree so much here. Sure, the first crush and the prof-crush are different in all sorts of ways, but the fundamental thing they have in common is (assuming this is *your* prof and not just someone whose job happens to be that of professor while yours happens to be that of student) that both feel totally real yet neither should be consummated. My point is that we have no way of explaining crushes that are real but should not lead to sex, whether for legal or ethical reasons. If it can't be consummated, we feel like we have to explain it away. In the case of the childhood crush, it's puppy love, and in the case of the unavailable prof, it's something to do with the ancient Greeks, and thus more intellectual and important than normal sexual interest. What we should be able to do is say, interest can be sexual without sex being an acceptable result.
What I meant by the young woman wanting to learn about sex from the older man (or, more, the older man wanting to teach this) was that traditionally, one would assume the man knows more, at any age, but especially if older. Today, not so much, which is why student-prof relations are now so unusual. Student-TA, depending on the respective ages, is still against presumably all university policy, like student-prof, but involves quite a different age dynamic. College students and TAs are often the same age. Which more often leads to challenges asserting authority in the classroom than it does to torrid affairs, but that's another question entirely.
I'm generally with Phoebe here: a fantasy life is fine, but it ain't reality and shouldn't be confused with it. It's a healthy thing to have a crush on someone you think has character, wisdom, or energy (or some combination). It least, it's a heck of a lot better than having a crush on a psychopath. But that's a far cry from going to bed with your fantasies.
The fact that some of these fantasies occur in a college environment don't change the basic equation. There's eroticism in a lot of life in general, but we generally don't go around with all sorts of angst about not jumping into bed with the cute retail clerk/customer, the driver who tapped your bumper, the construction work you see on the roof, etc. Why do people feel the need to use one's fantasy life in academe as a justification for screwing (up) in reality? While Margaret Soltan's collegiate affairs may have ended without long-lasting harm, on the whole they're poor ideas for the individuals involved and definitely for the institution when they cross power boundaries.
The better defense of such relationships is the analogy with Southwest Airlines, which tolerates and prides itself on healthy relationships among fellow employees, reasoning that relationships can expand employees' knowledge about the company's operations. But the analogy breaks down as soon as one partner in the relationship leaves campus, and as far as I'm aware, Southwest STILL doesn't allow supervisory authority to remain when people are in relationships.
Yikes... "At least" and "The fact... doesn't."
Phoebe: Well, I do think they can be consummated sometimes, and that this shouldn't necessarily be illicit, as it is in fact not in most universities, except in the case where the student is enrolled in the professor's course at the time (solution: wait a few weeks). I also think there isn't anything wrong with the unconsummated crush, which I take to be the argument of your essay (we should focus on our more attainable and equally satisfactory peers).
However, I do agree that one of the benefits of such crushes is that they open people to thinking about love and friendship in more complex ways than the "coming out" culture you describe, in which there are either friends (who are nice and whatever) or lovers (who are love, lust, sex, and everything else all in one), but nothing really in between. This could also apply to "girl-crushes" though, which are at least as widely misinterpreted as prof-crushes, possibly because of this too-strict friendship/sex binary. But I think that this isn't "explained away" by Greek eros, but rather actually explained and endorsed by it (and eros isn't just Greek, but it was helpfully described by Plato).
Finally, I'm not actually sure whether the instances of prof-student affairs have diminished over time, or how we'd even determine the numbers. It's not exactly something the parties involved tend to broadcast very publicly, except in rare cases where it ends in marriage, lawsuit, or where the parties involved are Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger.
Sherman Dorn: But the point is that there isn't a lot of eroticism in life in general, since eros grows out of inequalities in beauty and wisdom, which doesn't really describe the passing lust one might feel for a hot retail clerk. No one develops philosophical longings for the construction worker on her roof. I can see how professor-student affairs could end badly if the student is a poor judge of character, or the professor is a malevolent scoundrel. But one never really hears about such affairs unless they end badly, which is generally how they make their way into the public spotlight (unless they end in marriage, which is also an occasional outcome), so how do you conclude that are bad ideas generally?
/delurking
We -- if we're lucky, I guess -- don't generally suffer pangs of angst about "not jumping into bed with" all the different folks you mentioned, including instructors or students. But (playing Devil's advocate here) it's a fair bit of distance from that observation to the conclusion that we oughtn't pursue an, um, involvement with one of those people if we choose to and the other person seems interested.
I'm also confused about the basic terms of the discussion. I know that my idiolect is peculiar, but to me, the phrase (and related concept) "having a crush" have no normative implications. So, I'm puzzled by the idea that we can't "explain" crushes that "shouldn't lead to sex". I call those things by the same name that I use to refer to crushes that should/could/might/mightn't lead to sex: "crushes".
Someone who (in my opinion) has also mined this territory very insightfully and fruitfully is Hugo Schwyzer, at hugoschwyzer.net.
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