Hugo Schwyzer

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.