Hugo Schwyzer

Summer posting is still slow. Here’s a reprint from June, 2007.

I’ve written a few times about student crushes and their meaning, starting with this post that still gets loads and loads of hits from search engines. My basic thesis:

There’s an old axiom in pop psychology: we don’t just get crushes on people whom we want, we get crushes on people whom we want to be like! Students don’t get crushes on me because they want to go to bed with me or be my girlfriend or boyfriend; they get crushes on me because I’ve got a quality that they want to bring out in themselves. They’re externalizing all of their hopes for themselves. And rather than encourage the crush to feed my ego, my job is to turn the focus back on to the student, encouraging him or her to take their new-found curiosity or enthusiasm or passion and use it, run with it, indulge it, let it take them places!

One thing I’ve really started to notice in the last two or three years is an interesting, satisfying shift in the way that some of these crushes seem to play out. Something shifted in my relationships with my students right around the time I became old enough to be their father. The crushes that students got on me — and the way they made those crushes known — were qualitatively different when I was 30 than they are today at 40.

Leaving me out of it, I know that some student crushes on their teachers are explicitly sexual. But most really aren’t, even if they appear externally to be motivated by physical desire. Young people, you see, have a good vocabulary for sex. Romantic longing and sexual fantasy are part of the discourse of most college students. But we don’t have the same vocabulary for wanting a mentor, or even a father-figure. When a 20 year-old college student says of her professor, “I think he’s hot”, her friends may or may not agree — but they understand her frame of reference. They’ll likely take what she says at face value.

But what if that same gal told her friends “I really want him as a mentor”? It’s likely she’d be teased; “Yeah right, you want him as a mentor! Puhleeze! Can’t you be honest about it?” We live in a culture that insists on eroticizing our desire to be guided and cared for to such a degree that it is assumed that anyone who insists that his or her longing to be nurtured isn’t sexual at its core is, well, lying. As a result, we don’t have a way to let young people ask to be mentored, guided, even loved in a safe, non-sexual and yet intimate way.

Talking about sexual desire also sounds so much more adult than talking about a desire for a father figure. We live in a culture where many young people see lust as evidence of maturity. Saying about your teacher: “I want to do him” makes you sound grown up, aggressive, sophisticated, a “together woman.” Saying about that same person, “I want to spend time with him, he’s kind of like a Dad to me” may seem — to peers if not to the young woman saying it — like evidence of immaturity. “What, you’re still not over your father issues?” Too often, I think the vocabulary of erotic desire masks something else, something more tender and raw.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that some female students will flirt with me early on in visits to my office hours. It’s not particularly flattering, and it’s not evidence of my desirability. What I’m convinced it is is simple: so many of these young women, particularly first-generation college students, have been taught by their parents (or by bitter experience) that “men just want one thing.” If they want guidance and mentoring, if they want to be noticed for their ideas, they figure they have to get a male professor’s attention first by using their sexuality. They sometimes don’t trust their own inner worth enough to assume that they could get that attention without being flirtatious, and often they don’t believe that men — even older men in positions of authority — will really give them as much validation if they don’t wear certain kinds of clothing and behave in a certain way. Once a relationship is established that feels safe and entirely non-threatening, I notice the tendency to flirt usually goes away.

I’m opening myself up to several charges here: narcissism, for one, for assuming that so many folks do get crushes on me (regardless of the meaning of those crushes). Two, I’m being presumptuous about what young people, particularly young women, “really” want from me. I make no secret of my longing to be a father (seven chinchillas, an active avocation for youth ministry); maybe I’m just projecting my own need to be a Daddy onto my students. I’ve got a colleague who just assumes that all of his female students “want” him sexually; he preens like a rooster (though he’s old enough to retire with full benefits) and talks graphically and embarrassingly about his students’ dress. His ego needs tell him that legions of women thirty-five years his junior long to go to bed with him; is it not possible that my ego needs lie to me as well, telling me that a great many of these young people think of me as, if not a father figure exactly, at least a mentor? Perhaps I flatter myself as badly as my lecherous colleague.

But even if I do exaggerate the case, I think the “daddy crush” is more real than we know.