Archive for the 'Student crushes and professor-student relationships' Category

Flirtation, adultery, student-teacher boundaries — again!

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 29, 2010
in Infidelity, Older Men & Younger Women and Student crushes and professor-student relationships
. 14 Comments

I get a fair number of emails from college students, almost always young women, who found this blog after having googled the phrase “student crushes”. I reposted the piece that I did on Tuesday after receiving two such emails at the beginning of the week, both from women who had crushes on older, married, male professors.

Let’s review: professors should not date students who are enrolled in their classes, for some excellent reasons. We shouldn’t suborn adultery for some equally important reasons, as I wrote in January ‘09 in a post called Helping Him Become What He Pledged Not to Be.

And while I don’t have a problem with professors dating their former students (though the ideal would be that a student would be sufficiently “former” as to have left the campus entirely), I do have a very serious problem with decentralizing the relationship status of the parties in this discussion. I think we can have a serious discussion about whether or not professor-student romantic relationships are invariably unethical and a bad idea. I take that negative position, but know that others — in good faith and at times with very thoughtful reasons — can take the opposite one. But I don’t think that it’s possible to make a compelling case in defense of adultery. While it is possible to critique monogamy as an institution, it isn’t ethically viable to defend dishonesty. And at its heart, the sinfulness of cheating is not in the sex, but in the lie it creates. As I wrote fifteen months ago:

One of the great tragedies of infidelity lies not in what it does to others but what it teaches us about ourselves — that we are fundamentally untrustworthy. And it is hard to be happy while living with the dissonance between one’s language and one’s life.

So let me be clear. I’m happy to chat with folks — in “real life” or through this blog, email, social media and so forth — about the ethical and human issues surrounding this topic in which I am deeply invested. What I’m not interested in doing is co-signing any behavior that dishonors another person’s monogamous commitment. Relationships can end, of course, and romantic statuses can shift. But when we’re dealing with people who have pledged fidelity to others, we have an obligation to do all that we can to help them honor that commitment. Honoring the commitment to fidelity can include breaking up prior to sleeping with someone else. But it cannot include idle flirtation, emotional affairs, or outright seduction.

Older married men who flirt with younger women do so, generally, for ego validation. The longing to know that one still has “it” can be overwhelming, particularly for a fellow who hasn’t really dealt with his own fears about ageing and mortality. But whether he is a politician or a plumber, he needs to grasp that young women — heck, women of any age — are not yardsticks with which to measure the sexual appeal he longs to know has not diminished. When the greying Romeo is a married professor flirting with his own students, that behavior moves from being unfortunate and unwise to reckless and irresponsible.

And that’s a message that apparently needs frequent repeating.

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

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 24, 2010
in Favorite Posts 2010, Pasadena City College, Student crushes and professor-student relationships and Teaching
. 56 Comments

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

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 23, 2010
in BDSM, Emotional and Sexual Boundaries and Student crushes and professor-student relationships
. 31 Comments

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

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

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 22, 2010
in Sexual ethics and transformation, Student crushes and professor-student relationships, Teaching and Youth
. 20 Comments

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

“Would you like to have dinner with me?”: a note on a new sci-fi anthology, and how one might best ask out one’s single professor

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 29, 2009
in Links, Student crushes and professor-student relationships and Teaching
. 19 Comments

No time for a longer post, but my reader Sumana sends me a note about a new free, online fantasy/sci-fi anthology which she has co-edited: ThoughtCrime Experiments. She suggested I take a look at one story, Jump Space, by Mary Anne Mohanraj. It features one scene in which a student asks out a teacher, and Sumana noted that it featured a particularly fine example of an ethical way for that to be done. Here’s an excerpt:

“I was wondering…” Sarita looked up then, her eyes meeting his for the first time in the conversation — the first time that semester. “…would you like to have dinner with me?”

Joshua drew in a quick breath, his face flushing. Her eyes were astonishingly dark brown, almost black. Dark like the empty spaces between the stars; the vertigo was dizzying. Before he could answer with the obligatory no, a response Joshua was surprised to find he did not want to give, Sarita had gone on, speaking quickly, her eyes locked on his.

“You’ve graded everything except the final exam, and I’ve gotten straight A’s. I’m going to get an A on that too, and I know you have to have a second-grader on the final anyway, so even if you wanted to give me a better grade than I deserve, you can’t, so it wouldn’t be a breach of ethics to go out with me. I would have waited to ask you until the semester was over, but I checked the flight records and you’re scheduled to leave Pyroxina the day after finals, so if I waited it would be too late. So I had to ask now.”

I’m not a sci-fi fan, but agree wholeheartedly with Sumana that yes, this short vignette does offer one particularly good example of one right way for a student to approach a teacher. My views on the general inadvisability of older men/younger women relationships aside (this story suggests that Joshua is only a handful of years older than his student, in any case), I’ve never opposed students asking out their (single) teachers at the end of a semester. It’s better to wait a bit longer than Sarita does in this story, and it’s best for both to be sure that the student isn’t likely to re-enroll in a future course with that particular professor. And of course, if the professor has been actively mentoring the student (in office hours, or in a student club of some sort), then a romantic relationship (even once the grades are turned in) is much more transgressive and problematic. Good mentoring often continues past the period when a student is in a class (I have former students who still contact me for advice, or letters of rec, on a regular basis); if a student feels inclined to ask out his or her professor or TA, it needs to be clear that there is no “planned return to asymmetry” in the future. And good mentoring can be friendly and warm, but is almost always “definitionally” asymmetrical.

I do get emails from folks wondering about the ethics of asking out their teachers. While I take a fairly strong stance these days against professors ever asking out their students (even former ones), I do think that the reverse situation is less prone to potential exploitation. The student needs to be reasonably sure that the professor is single; the student needs to wait until the semester is over (or at least to the point that Sarita waits). And in general, I’m much less troubled by a 21 year-old student asking out her 28 year-old single instructor than by that same student asking out her 38, or 48, or 58 year-old professor. (Those instances are of course rarer, but not unheard of.)

In any case, enjoy the ThoughtCrime collection!

Being passionately interested without arousing interest: more on crushes, flirtation, and safety

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 08, 2008
in Flirting, Mentoring, Student crushes and professor-student relationships, Youth and Youth ministry
. 12 Comments

It’s one of those very hectic mornings.

I’m tired of discussing Sarah Palin and the merits of the other various candidates for president. (I might feel rejuvenated within 48 hours — it’s entirely plausible I’ll be right back to bloggin’ about politics again soon).

The BBC reports a study this morning: Declaring Love Boosts Sex Appeal.

Telling someone you fancy ‘I really like you’ could make him or her find you more attractive, research suggests.

Making eye contact and smiling have a similar effect, says Aberdeen University psychologist Dr Ben Jones.

His study, involving 230 men and women, found such social cues - which signal how much others fancy you - play a crucial role in attraction.

In other words, people are apparently much more likely to be attracted to you if they think that you find them attractive. I’m no psychologist, but it seems to make good sense. We all have our inner narcissist, after all — many of us will naturally be drawn to people whom we think see in us what we long desperately to be seen.

I’m thinking about this in terms of my own work as a youth worker, college professor, and mentor. One of the things it took me a long time to learn was how closely connected flirting behavior and straightforward active listening are in our culture. I suppose it’s a lesson that every therapist learns early on — clients often fall in love with their shrinks because they are so overwhelmed by the experience of having someone listening so attentively and with such evident interest. In our culture, one of the simplest ways to flirt and signal sexual interest is to listen attentively, making eye contact and offering encouraging cues (like little nods or smiles). Good mentoring and youth work involves using similar techniques.

Students get crushes on me less often than they used to, thanks to two things: one, I’m getting older, and two, I’m much more conscientious these days about carefully distinguishing between sexual intent on the one hand and enthusiastic interest in their lives and work on the other. I also work hard to make sure that the “safe, married, even vaguely asexual” vibe gets projected hard. Continue reading ‘Being passionately interested without arousing interest: more on crushes, flirtation, and safety’

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

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 12, 2008
in Older Men & Younger Women, Student crushes and professor-student relationships and Teaching
. 10 Comments

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.

“How do you desexualize that?”: on the erotics of teaching, and learning to affirm and redirect

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 09, 2008
in Favorite Posts 2008, Sexual ethics and transformation, Student crushes and professor-student relationships and Teaching
. 5 Comments

A reader named Anna kindly sends me a link to this story that ran in the Times (UK) Higher Education Supplement last month: Sex and the university. It deals with an old and familiar subject, that of teacher-student affairs at the post-secondary level.

The British, it seems, are slower than we Americans to embrace ethical codes that forbid consensual amorous relationships between professors and their current students. While most American two and four-year colleges started adopting such policies in the early 1990s, universities in the United Kingdom have met more resistance to such restrictions (and, apparently, less interest in the policies in the first place).

In the UK, attitudes towards relationships in academe are changing rather more slowly. In 2005, figures revealed after a Freedom of Information Act request by Times Higher Education showed that 50 out of 102 institutions had no policy requiring staff to declare sexual or other relationships with students that might give rise to a conflict of interest. Of those that did, few appeared to apply them: just 17 universities had any current records on file.

In the same year, 18 per cent of respondents to a poll conducted by the Teacher Support Network said that they had had a sexual relationship with a student. Despite this, only 73 relationships were officially recorded and just five of these were defined as sexual or romantic. Many respondents, 62 per cent, said they did not know whether or not their university had a protocol on such matters.

That nearly one in five faculty members in Britain admits to having had a sexual relationship with a student doesn’t surprise. I don’t know of any comprehensive study of faculty behavior at North American campuses, but would imagine that the numbers would be very similar. Purely anecdotally, based on gossip as much as self-reporting, I’d guess that somewhere around 10-20% of my colleagues have engaged in such a relationship. (And as I’ve admitted many times, I had a series of such relationships, all of which ceased ten years ago this month.)

I’ve written about consensual relationships policies here, here, and here, among other places. Part of my own redemptive work was to chair a committee to write a policy for Pasadena City College on consensual relationships, a policy that was not in place during the years in which I was conducting a series of these affairs.

But the point I want to make today is less about such policies, and more about the erotics of teaching. Of all the quotations in the THE piece, this one from the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard struck home:

In some ways we have to accept that there is an erotic dimension to pedagogy. If you take a traditional Oxbridge-style tutorial system, that’s one thing that students love and it’s some of the most interesting teaching when you really get to know someone. That doesn’t mean it’s about feeling someone up, but it is passionate. The difficulty is that that’s a terribly sexy experience; two people sitting together really talking through how Latin love poetry works. How do you desexualise that?

I haven’t done anything with Latin love poetry since auditing a seminar on Catullus in late 1990, but I get what Beard’s talking about. Obviously, a community college doesn’t have the English tutorial style of instruction. But what we do have at PCC is a faculty dedicated to student mentoring. I am certainly not the only instructor whose office hours are frequented by bright young people eager to meet with me one-on-one. And though I don’t teach Ovid, I do teach several courses that touch on various aspects of human sexuality and gender. I’m passionate about these subjects, and the students of both sexes who can be bothered to come to my office hours to work through the material with me are, generally equally passionate. And we all know that there are few things more charged with sexual potential than a shared interest, perhaps particularly one that is discussed behind closed doors. (And yes, I always keep my office door shut — as it opens out onto a hallway so loud that even if it is merely ajar, I can’t hear myself think.) Continue reading ‘“How do you desexualize that?”: on the erotics of teaching, and learning to affirm and redirect’

“The rights of desire”: a professor-student romance makes the local news

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 25, 2008
in Marriage, Older Men & Younger Women, Sexual ethics and transformation, Student crushes and professor-student relationships and Teaching
. 13 Comments

This story popped up on my radar screen today: Professor, ex-student tie the knot.

Muata Kamdibe and Crystal Domingues aren’t looking for anyone’s stamp of approval - not from their resistant families, curious colleagues, or a gossip-prone public.

For two months, the couple managed to keep their romance a secret from everyone, knowing the kinds of whispers and judgments their 18-year age difference would spawn - as well as the fact that Kamdibe, 36, a Rio Hondo College professor, first met Domingues, 18, when she was a student in his class last fall.

But it all publicly tumbled out two weeks ago, when Domingues was reported missing by her family, then tracked down by a private detective Feb. 7 to Kamdibe’s home in Irvine.

Well, that’s one way to start off with the in-laws. Continue reading ‘“The rights of desire”: a professor-student romance makes the local news’

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

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 16, 2007
in Pasadena City College, Student crushes and professor-student relationships and Teaching
. 5 Comments

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.

Another in the student crushes series: the “daddy crush” and the need for a mentor

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 19, 2007
in Favorite posts 2007, Student crushes and professor-student relationships, Teaching and Youth
. 20 Comments

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.

Restraining the ego and leaving doors unopened: a note about crushes, flirtation, and the “desire to know”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 10, 2007
in Favorite posts 2007, Flirting, Relationships, Sexual ethics and transformation and Student crushes and professor-student relationships
. 18 Comments

Below this post on student crushes, a reader named “P” describes her crush on one of her (married) professors. I’ll quote a section that has me thinking this morning:

I was interested in your advice not to talk about it with the professor. I had been considering doing so, although not now because there are still letters of recommendation for grad school to be written and I most certainly want to maintain a level of appropriateness until his defined role as a professor is done.

On the one hand your advice makes sense because he can’t really help me work through a crush of which he is the object. That’s not my goal though. My concern is that a large part of the reason I still think about him now is a curiosity as to whether he feels the same way…

Bold emphasis is mine.

I’m going to step beyond P’s specific issue with her professor, and reflect for a moment on the extraordinary desire so many of us have “to know”. P seems less interested in actually having an affair with her married prof than she is in finding out if her feelings for him are reciprocated. If you read through the comments below that post — and indeed through the comments on all the student crush posts — it seems clear that for many folks with crushes on their teachers, this curiosity to know whether or not the object of their desire feels something in return can be overwhelming.

I can’t think of a more tempting — and more disastrous — reason to begin any love affair than “curiosity.” When I was younger, I cloaked neediness and compulsiveness in the language of intellectual (or at least romantic) curiosity. Time and again, I pursued someone because I was desperately curious to know certain things: Could I “have” them? Did they “want” me as I “wanted” them? What would it be like to “be” (however briefly) with someone “like that”? Firmly committed to the lie that “experience is always the best teacher”, I attempted to justify some fairly unjustifiable behavior with the explanation that I had “an insatiable desire to know.” (This is a particularly common trait, I know, among academics — many of whom are notorious for petty affairs and infidelities. We exalt the pursuit of knowledge above all other virtues, and periodically find it all too easy to confuse the gratifying of our own ego with the acquisition of genuine understanding.)

I posted in February about flirtation. I wrote:

Flirtation, particularly when we are married or in committed relationship, brings us dangerously close to one of the most pernicious sins of all. No, I don’t mean adultery. I mean the sin of using another human being to soothe our own anxiety, to feed our ravenous ego. Sending out “mixed messages” that arouse interest, deliberately fishing about to see if we can get a little “stroking” — this is toxic, manipulative, adolescent.

This connects to the kind of curiosity to which P seems to refer. Our ego longs to know if we are wanted. Our ego promises us “I won’t take things too far; just let me find out!” The ego has a way of making its demands seem alternately reasonable and irresistable. It tells us that there’s no harm, surely, in taking steps to “know once and for all” whether that cute, taken teacher or student or colleague has an interest. Surely there’s no way any normal person ought to be expected to resist the temptation to “open the door, just a crack” in order to find out whether or not he or she is the object of another’s desire. “I don’t want to do anything”, the ego protests, “I just wanna know!”

I came to this realization later than many, but I’ve become convinced that wisdom and happiness in no small way correlate with a willingness to leave some doors closed, certain opportunities unpursued. One tool I use these days to measure my own spiritual growth is my own willingness to live contentedly with what I don’t know. Not only do I not need to know if a student has a crush on me or not, I’m called to make certain I take no steps in order to “find out.” (Like a lot of people’s, my ego, unrestrained, had all the subtlety of an untrained Great Dane; left unleashed, it would pant and slobber and race after promising scents that suggested the delicious gratification it craved. It knocked a lot of things over, periodically knocked people down, and left a big wet mess.)

Committing to “leaving doors unopened” is a spiritual and psychological discipline. Like any discipline, it gets easier with practice and the passage of time. When I was younger, I thought wisdom would come as the natural result of the relentless pursuit of every possible new experience. I believed that in love (or at least its physical aspect), any door unopened was a “crime against eros”. I didn’t see my behavior as compulsive, needy, and childish — I honestly thought it vaguely heroic. That was my sad foolishness, but it was a foolishness that hurt many others as well as myself. And it’s a foolishness I see alive and well in many of my students and, more troublingly, in my peers.

I have no right to judge those younger than myself who are only doing what I was doing at their same age. But I am wary of the lie that bitter experience is the only way to learn. Jesus told doubting Thomas, Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. I’ll take the huge liberty of rephrasing it: Because of all the doors you recklessly opened, you have become wise; blessed are those who have become wise while leaving the doors closed.

Student Crushes #3: “affirming and redirecting” and some other thoughts

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 07, 2007
in Pasadena City College, Student crushes and professor-student relationships and Teaching
. 26 Comments

It’s been nearly a year since I put up my two posts about student crushes. My stats tell me that next to queries about older men, younger women (my archive on that is here), nothing brings me more hits than the subject of unrequited student longing for their professors.

The two posts I’ve written on that subject said most of what I wanted to say at the time. But both posts continue to get comments, both here and at my old blog. Lots of students write in for advice. (I note, checking IP addresses, that a disproportionate number of those commenting are from the UK. Is there something about the lecturer-student relationship that seems more enticing in England than here? I’ll have to ask my brother.) Most of the question are of the general “what do I do?” sort.

This comment at my old blog is typical. Some excerpts:

I’ve been on the edge of my seat for my (married) geology professor for about two months now. I’m feeling sad that this quarter is almost over because I fear the anxiety of not being able to see him anymore. I’m so glad that I found this blog because I was starting to feel very deviant and out of the norm… i’m not even thinking about my grade, i could fail that class and still want him. i’m going crazy and i thought about just telling him how i feel, or just teasing the shit out of him. i don’t know what to do. it takes so much for me to snap back into reality and know that it’s wrong for many reasons…want him to know that I want him without having to say anything. I don’t even care if I get turned down. I just want him to know that he’s wanted.

Ten days ago, “Heartbroken” wrote:

I seriously have a problem about this whole issue…Now I’m in the middle of a crush on one lecturer, and me being the class representative, I’ve had a lot of contact with him. It’s really painful to see him everyday, and I really want to talk to him about it to make it easier to deal with. Exams are over, so there won’t be a problem with him giving me any more grades. Is it unfair of me to talk to him about this? He is married, and I am aware that i might have this crush because he’s just such a brilliant character… I really don’t know what to do, any advice will be considered.

Bold emphases are mine.

And last month, a random student wrote:

How do you know if a student has a crush on you? Im just wondering cos i’ve had the biggest crush on my teacher for months now, and I really dont want him to know…

I stand by the theory of student crushes I offered a year ago: that we tend to fall for people who embody qualities we want in ourselves. Students fall for their professors and teachers not because we are, in and of ourselves, unbearably desirable; they fall for us because we expose them to new ideas and possibilities. They love the way we make them feel, and they understandably confuse an attraction to what we do for them with an attraction to us as individuals. I’m honestly convinced that covers the vast majority of “common crushes”.

The questions above revolve around two main issues we haven’t touched on before: can professors tell when students have crushes on them? And should students, like “Heartbroken”, talk to their objects of their infatuation about the crush itself, either to see if it’s reciprocated or to get some sort of help in working through their feelings?

I can’t speak for all my colleagues around the globe, but I can say that this professor doesn’t expend a lot of energy wondering if a particular student has a crush on him or not. I know full well that an outer appearance of excitement and attentiveness can mean many things! It can be a calculated act designed to send a message that the student is listening, whether that’s true or not. (And word to my students: don’t nod appreciatively every time I make eye contact with you. It often looks forced. Once in a while is fine, but every time, it seems, well, a bit fake.) The attentiveness can mean — indeed, I always hope it means — a genuine interest in and excitement about the subject. And it can mean an excitement about the subject mixed with an attraction to the professor/teacher/lecturer himself or herself. I’ve been at this gig for just about fifteen years, and I’ll be darned if I can tell easily what’s going on inside a student’s head. In a world where so many young people have been trained to flatter, it’s difficult if not impossible to assess motive merely from a student’s smiles and body language.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I think most of my students are frauds! Far from it. I just don’t spend a great deal of time wondering what it is that my students think about me. By definition, good teachers are more concerned with what the student is learning than with whether or not their student likes ‘em or not. And on those occasions when a crush does become obvious, I always remember, as I wrote last year, that it’s not about me: it’s about an experience the student is having as a result of encountering the material I’m presenting. Even if they think it’s about me rather than the class, in the end, it’s usually about their own excited response to the material.

Bottom line is this: I don’t think most of us can tell what our students are thinking. It’s not that we don’t care, it’s that we lack the ability to discern among many different possible reasons for excitement and interest. And the wise among us know that we don’t need to know. Our students aren’t here to feed our egos.

As for telling the professor about a crush of which he may or may not already be aware, I tend to think that’s generally a bad idea. (I said “generally”, not “always”.) Obviously, for a whole host of academic reasons, it’s a bad idea to broach the topic while you’re a student in his class. I note that the two professors who are the objects of student crushes in the quoted sections above are both married. Confessing a strong attraction to a married person is, I think, just about always a fundamentally selfish thing to do. Whether or not their marriage is on a firm foundation, basic decency compels us to respect the commitments that those around us have made. That applies universally. (At the risk of going off on a tangent, let me make it clear that I really dislike it when people say to each other things like “Oh, if I were single…” or “If only you weren’t married…” Just saying the words is an act of hostility towards a married person and their spouse. It’s not an excuse to protest “But I would never act on it!” Fidelity is about what we say as well as what we do, and expressing strong sexual or romantic attraction to someone who’s “taken” is low-grade adultery!)

Sometimes students tell their professors about their crushes in the apparently sincere hope that the prof will help them “work through” their feelings. This has happened to me a time or three, though less often now than in the past. While some students clearly are hoping to spark a romantic relationship, others tend to see their teacher as a resource with whom they can “process” their feelings. Of course, it’s hard if not impossible to work through a crush with the object of the crush. It sounds good in theory, but in practice, it’s nigh on impossible.

I learned to be very respectful of those students who confessed crushes to me. I don’t belittle them or tease them or berate them. At the same time, I am very good about not encouraging the crush. And that often means affirming the student’s very real and intense feelings, and then gently redirecting that student towards a counselor or a therapist (we have plenty right here on campus.) The “affirm and redirect” strategy is by far the best approach a teacher can take when faced with a love-struck student.

One of the things I’ve really come to understand about teaching: it’s a one-way street. I am here to lecture, to challenge, to provoke, to nurture, to push. I love what I do, and I love my students very much. I am committed to them, devoted to them, even when I have far less time to offer them individually than I would like. And I know that they have a wide variety of responses to me, ranging from complete apathy to outright adoration, from moderate enthusiasm to genuine hostility, from vague dislike to erotic infatuation. I can know that because I teach hundreds and hundreds every year, and the chances are damn good that some are gonna love me, some are gonna hate me, and the great majority won’t have any strong feelings at all. But in the end, my teaching isn’t conditional on my students’ feelings about me. When I was younger and more insecure, I did worry about what my students thought about me as a person, about whether they thought I was “cool”; my teaching suffered as a result. Blessedly, age and experience and transformation has changed all that.

I love that my work is a “one-way street”. Because I get my needs met elsewhere, I don’t need to bring my neediness into the office, into the classroom. I am here for my students, they are not here for me; my sense of self is grounded in my relationship with Christ, in my amazing marriage, in my family and friends and my sense that I am climbing a mountain God wants me to climb.

Reprint: “Incredibly Hot” — the Michael Gee case

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 24, 2006
in Student crushes and professor-student relationships
. Closed

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

A follow up on student crushes: what NOT to do

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 08, 2006
in Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Sexuality, Student crushes and professor-student relationships and Teaching
. 25 Comments

I continue to get lots of hits from people looking for information about "teacher crushes."  This March 24 post has become my second most popular post ever, trailing only the vaguely related series of posts I wrote last year on older men, younger women relationships. (One, Two, Three).

In both recent comments and e-mails, I’ve been asked to expand further on the subject of how teachers and professors ought to respond when they realize they are the object of various kinds of crushes.  (Jazz posts a troubling personal anecdote here).  In the original post, I wrote:

If we take advantage of student crushes… we make a huge mistake.  We assume that the real interest was in us rather than in how we were able to make our students feel and how we were able to make them think.   The best way to think about student crushes is to take them as a sign that you’re probably doing your job pretty damn well.

I realize I may need to be more specific.

I will say without shame that validation is one of the many reasons why I love teaching.  Yes, I love my subjects (women’s history, the rise of the West, what have you).  Yes, I believe I am serving Clio by introducing as many students as I can to her mysteries, her charms, and her joys.  But while I believe passionately in what I’m doing, I’m also aware that my own ego does get involved.  I do want my students to think I’m compelling and interesting; I want them to learn, but I also want them to enjoy learning, and to enjoy learning from me.  Part of me sees teaching as service — and another part of me teaches for validation and affirmation.  I’m careful not to pander to get the latter, but when it comes my way in various forms, I won’t deny that I feel pretty good!

But it’s one thing to feel proud and pleased when a student tells you (after you’ve turned in the grades) how much they enjoyed your class.  It’s another thing to consciously encourage the kind of crushes that I wrote about in my previous post on the subject.  While some crushes are indeed sexual or romantic in nature, most are, as I wrote before more about the student than the teacher: 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.

So obviously, we who teach make a disastrous mistake when we confuse a student’s infatuation with us as their professors with their longing for us as actual human beings.  As I told my friend and colleague "Darrren", students don’t get crushes on the real "Darren" — they get crushes on "Professor Smith", who is this exalted being they’ve placed on a pedestal.  If Darren acts to encourage a student crush, or allows it to become expressed in action, he is likely to find (among other things) that his own fall from the pedestal will be swift and brutal!

For most of us (let’s hope) our students don’t see us when we’re sick, whiny, tired.   Like actors on a stage, we (presumably) perform at our best most of the time, concealing the reality of our frailties and our inadequacies from those whom we are teaching. For many of us in academia who were "geeks" and "nerds" in our own younger years, the sense of power and satisfaction we can derive from holding a class spellbound is tremendous — and very, very seductive.  And as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong in deriving real pleasure from teaching well and knowing you’re admired and heard.

But there is no greater sin in our profession than to use an individual student’s crush in order to gain validation outside the classroom.  Given that we’ve established that some crushes tend to be more sexual and others more intellectual, it’s understandable that some profs may feel a tremendous curiosity about what exactly it is that a student who appears to be "crushing" really wants.  Time and again, I’ve seen professors make the dangerous mistake of subtly encouraging a crush — not because they intend to have an actual affair with a student, but because they are hungry for more and more validation.  They may hope to entice the student into sharing more about his or her feelings, all for the satisfaction of feeling more powerful and desirable.

Students don’t seem to get crushes on me as often as they used to.  Some of this is because I am older, and some of it is no doubt due to the reality that my boundaries are much better than they were a decade ago.  When I was a novice teacher, I did consciously encourage student crushes because they felt so damned good!  I loved the little notes and the "googly" eyes I would get — and I found myself enjoying the attention way too much.  It was several years into my career before I became aware of just how manipulative and unprofessional I was being; I am happy to say that I have radically changed how I interact with students.

As I wrote about in my original post, I’ve mentored a couple of younger or newer male colleagues here at PCC and elsewhere.  Now that I’ve got over a dozen years of full-time teaching under my belt, I feel as if I’ve had a healthy amount of experience on which to draw. I made a lot of mistakes in my early years in this profession, and have learned from them.  I’d like to be able to find a way — perhaps through published articles or workshops — to reach more folks in my position.  As with the older men, younger women issue, the subject of student crushes strikes a nearly universal nerve; I’m amazed at how many folks have shared their stories with me since I put up that original post.  And I’m concerned that far too many of us who teach are wholly unprepared when we find ourselves the object of these crushes, and whether intentionally or not, may do very real damage when we respond in the wrong way.