Archive for the 'Teaching' Category

Not putting the skeleton back in the closet: a quick note and some links on professor-student sexual relationships

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 17, 2010
in Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 0 Comments

Richard Jeffrey Newman (whose poetry I recommend to all) has been blogging at Alas for a while now, and last week offered this piece on student-professor sexual relationships. It’s not much of Newman and a lot of extended excerpts from this a Tony Judt post at the New York Review’s blog site. The comments are interesting. (True confession: I only found the post when I checked the stats on my own blog, and found a number of hits to this post of mine, linked by Amp in the thread. Let me offer this post as well for the discussion, as well as the entire “student crushes” category archive here.

The subject of my past came up again recently. Two of my students were in my office on Monday. One of them, a regular reader of this blog, remarked that based on what she heard from her classmates, I still had a reputation as a professor who had slept with his students. The other student remarked that he had heard much the same thing. Both were quick to say that their classmates generally seemed to know that this behavior was in the past, but that some had their “suspicions” that I might still be up to no good, as it were. We all laughed together, and I gently assured the students that what I had once been I was no longer.

I certainly don’t advertise that I was wont to sleep with my students, but I don’t hide it from it either, for the reasons I’ve made clear time and time again. Sexual and romantic relationships between professors and students currently under their supervision are invariably unethical, regardless of the age of either the student or the professor. Relationships between professors and their former students need to be entered into with caution, particularly if the student involved is likely to be in need of a letter of recommendation or is still on the campus. And my general caution about age-disparate love affairs applies here as well. As I have said and will continue to say, for a three-year period in the mid-to-late 1990s, until I got sober in the summer of 1998, I had a series of unethical relationships with students. I deeply regret my behavior. As part of my amends to those whom I hurt, I helped write the campus consensual relations policy . And I have continued to speak out on this issue.

It has been a dozen years since I last crossed that line I ought not to have crossed. In that time, I’ve worked damn hard on good boundaries. And I’ve been a public and forceful (and, unfortunately, insufficiently humble) advocate for safe, non-sexual mentoring. I have little sympathy for those who continue to defend the indefensible exploitation of the teacher-student relationship. I was wrong, deeply so, when I slept with my students. And though it might seem wise to not mention these Clinton-era transgressions of mine again, I think there is value in pointing out the deeply problematic nature of these relationships to new generations of faculty and students, even at the risk of my own mild embarrassment.

One more link to a post I’ve written: A follow-up on student crushes — what not to do

The slut-shaming of Amanda Knox: an old and ugly Italian pattern plays out again

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 04, 2009
in Sexuality, Teaching and Traveling
. 52 Comments

As a busy afternoon has faded into a quieter evening, I’ve been unable to get thoughts of the Amanda Knox conviction out of my mind. For those not in the loop, Knox is a 22 year-old American woman who was found guilty today by an Italian court of murdering her British housemate while both were students doing a year abroad in Perugia. Knox and her Italian boyfriend were convicted on what the vast majority of American observers considered to be circumstantial evidence, with no convincing evidence of a motive, and after another man unconnected to Knox and her fella had already been convicted of the crime. The murder of the young English woman, Meredith Kercher, took place in 2007, and the story has been given sensational coverage throughout the European media, particularly in Italy and the UK. The allegations — never proved to the satisfaction of most — that Knox and her beau had killed Kercher as part of a bizarre sexual ritual were captivating; the prettiness of the young women involved and the luridness of the story spun by the prosecution generated tremendous global interest.

In the fall of 2000, I taught a semester abroad in Florence. I traveled with one other teacher and 45 Pasadena City College students, two-thirds of whom were female. The vast majority of Americans who study abroad are women, for a variety of reasons, and our trip was no exception. We warned our students about the attitudes that many Italians have towards young American women; we advised them about the different “street environment” they could expect to find in Florence. But even I, who had traveled extensively in Italy before going as a professor, was stunned by the attitudes we encountered. The reputation of American “girls” as sexually undiscriminating, freed for the first time from the watchful eyes of parents and at least most of their peers, was nearly universal. And while it is certainly true that for the young and not-so-young, travel is almost invariably an aphrodisiac and a notorious compromiser of inhibitions, the beliefs about American women students were grounded far more in myth and media than in reality.

Still, some of the young women on our trip did have flings with the locals; a few did find Italian boyfriends, as Amanda Knox did. There were some heartbreaks and some scares. I half-jokingly told my students, in one of our pre-trip meetings, that I had only three rules for them: No jails, no hospitals, and no unintended pregnancies. We had a couple of students picked up by the cops (and then released, for smoking marijuana with local lads), we had one tragic incident that left one of our guys paralyzed for life from the waist down. It was an eventful trip. But though there was a lot of drinking and quite a few short-term affairs, for the most part our students emerged unscathed. And whatever they were doing, they treated Florence and the rest of the country with respect and the kind of wide-eyed wonder so natural among youngsters from the New World making their first serious visit to the heart of the Old.

I hated the contempt for our students that I so often heard from some in Florence and elsewhere. Though it was often tinged with anti-Americanism (and this while Clinton was still in the White House), it was directed almost exclusively towards our female students — particularly the ones who were perceived as more attractive, or who wore more revealing clothing. The prosecutor in the Amanda Knox devoted extensive time to discussing the defendant’s sex life and her occasionally flamboyant dress, even her taste in (or lack of) underwear. Her diary, replete with the personal details one would expect in a private journal, has been read repeatedly in court. The vulgar British tabloids labeled her “Foxy Knoxy” and “No Knicks Knox”; it was a world-class exercise in cruelty and slut-shaming. Apparently, to the amazement of even Italian legal experts (familiar with the guilty-until-proven innocent style of jurisprudence in that country) the paper-thin case, built more on animosity towards sexually adventurous American girls than actual evidence, worked today. Knox and her boyfriend face a quarter-century in prison, but have a chance to have that reduced on appeal.

Before, during, and after I taught in Florence I never believed that Yanks abroad ought to be above the law. A dual citizen myself, I have no patience for the “ugly American” code of conduct. (I will note, having mentioned my British passport, that tourists from the UK were often far more poorly behaved on Italian beaches and in Italian nightclubs than were students from the States.) At the same time, I have no patience with reflexive anti-Americanism of the sort that many of my students, no matter how polite, ran into all too frequently. And as a feminist professor, I was and am particularly disgusted by the mix of prudish censoriousness towards and predatory fascination with the sex lives of young women from America who come to Italy to study.

When I look at the face of Amanda Knox, I see someone who looks a great deal like many of the students I taught. When I hear the details of her private life discussed with both salacious enthrallment and affected repugnance, I think of the experiences of so many of my students who went abroad with me. When I hear the twisted, groundless narrative that the prosecution offered, something along the lines of “American girl is sexually curious and open about it and she smoked pot: therefore it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to stabbing one’s prudish roommate to death”, I’m enraged and indignant. What happened to Amanda Knox — and I am nearly as convinced of her innocence as her parents — could have happened to a dozen young women I knew and taught in Italy.

Make no mistake, I grieve the loss of Meredith Kercher and the horrible way she died. But I have little doubt that if Knox had been a little less pretty, a little less sexual, and a little less American, she’d never have spent a day in prison for her roommate’s murder. On her behalf, and on behalf of others like her, I am very angry tonight.

“The Fountainhead”, Muggledom, and a road to feminism: why I both loathe and appreciate Ayn Rand

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 17, 2009
in Books, Feminist Pedagogy, Teaching and Youth
. 24 Comments

In my reprint of a post about young conservative students, I made a crack about Ayn Rand. Since Rand has been the subject of a pair of recent biographies, and has been much discussed on the right as a kind of ideological mother figure of the so-called Tea Party Insurrection against the Obama Administration, I think it’s time to say a bit more about her work.

I discovered Ayn Rand at 16. A friend of mine finished “The Fountainhead”, and came to me one morning before class: “This book has changed my life, Hugo, and it will change yours. Read it!” I liked and respected Lisa, and accepted the thick and battered paperback she proffered. I took it home, and showed my mother, a philosophy professor. She took one look at the book, grimaced, and then said “Darling, I won’t say anything. Make up your own mind.”

It wasn’t until I read “American Psycho”, many years later, that I had a comparable experience of near-instant loathing of a text, an author, a prose style, and a worldview. I was a young lefty at 16, struggling through John Rawls and Herbert Marcuse. My favorite novel that year was Steinbeck’s “In Dubious Battle” one of the most polemical works that the great local writer (I grew up on the Monterey Peninsula) wrote. Rand was ideologically and stylistically abhorrent to me at 16, and though it’s been years since I’ve picked up any of her work (I finished “Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” through sheer acts of will in my youth), my general feeling of disdain on every imaginable ground remains.

But I’ve met many young people, more often women than men, who — like my friend Lisa in high school — find great inspiration in Ayn Rand. Generally, there’s a specific type of teen who falls in love with either “The Fountainhead” or “Atlas Shrugged”. She’s usually very bright, raised to one degree or another with the “pleasing woman discourse” (what I call “the Martha Complex.“) She often finds her classes dull and her teachers pedestrian. She suspects she’s destined for something extraordinary, that she’s somehow different from everyone else — but unlike the immensely talented dancer or athlete or actor, she doesn’t have one specific skill that stands out as a ticket to stardom. She vacillates between feelings of intense superiority — and feelings of equally intense guilt for the way in which she looks down on so many of those around her.

She picks up Rand, and suddenly it all makes sense. She is superior, one of the elect. She isn’t what a far more interesting and talented writer would call a “Muggle”. She has an exalted destiny, just as she had suspected. Rand inspires her; telling her that it’s time to throw off the chains of obligation and guilt which have left her confined and miserable. In an odd way, Rand — who would be exceedingly difficult to classify as a feminist — is often a gateway into feminism for some young women. It’s through reading Rand that not-insignificant percentages of young women begin to think seriously about what they want for themselves rather than what others want for them. Young women who have the false impression that feminism is about collective victimization find temporary inspiration in “The Fountainhead” — and in due course, when they encounter real sexism in the real world, they reluctantly concede that perhaps those nasty old feminists had a point after all. I’ve met a hell of a lot of strong young progressive feminists in their twenties and early thirties who were enchanted by Randian philosophy in their teens.

So yes, I think an infatuation with Ayn Rand is developmentally appropriate for adolescents. She flatters and inspires the bright and the isolated and the uncertain; she’s useful for helping some young people, girls in particular, break the deadly people-pleasing habit. So if reading “Atlas” or “Fountainhead” is what it takes to inspire the lonely, the introverted, and the insecure — then may the God that she rejected bestow blessings upon that poor unhappy soul that was Ayn Rand.

This post has been altered from the way it originally appeared earlier today, ill-considered references to comic books, Star Trek, and New Kids on the Block were deleted.

“Why is everyone hugging here?” More on hugs, teaching, and boundaries

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 16, 2009
in Affection, Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Pasadena City College, Physical affection and Teaching
. 9 Comments

We’ve recently hired a number of wonderful new faculty members in my department, and we’re excited to have them. (All the more so because with the state budget cuts, it may be eons before we make any additional hires.) One new professor, who has had some teaching experience elsewhere, asked me yesterday: “I’ve noticed that quite a few students here want to hug me. Is that normal at PCC? It hasn’t been at the other places where I’ve taught.” I smiled and told her that yes, it was something I’d noticed early on in my own career here: students at community colleges (or at least this one) tend to have much greater expectations of being “nurtured”, which can include hugs, than do students at four-year institutions. It’s more common for students to hug their female professors, and most of those seeking hugs are women. And while it’s far from being a universal practice, my new colleague is not the first professor to point out that students here are, as a group, more affectionate than at many other other academic institutions.

My new colleague, who is untenured, wanted some tips on how to handle the “hugging thing.” I assured her that there were no rules against hugging students, though common sense and a respect for boundaries suggests that it is best to wait for the student to initiate a friendly embrace. I reminded her of what I know she already knows, that — particularly for the untenured — perception matters as well as intent, and that it is helpful to remain aware of how one’s physical actions might be perceived by witnesses. Students are, as we all know, very attentive to the mannerisms, quirks, and personas of their professors. While fear of arousing suspicion shouldn’t cause us to be defensive or distant, we need to balance the responsibility to connect with our students with an awareness of how that connection (particularly when it includes a physical gesture like a hug) might be perceived.

This is all the more true in gender studies, the field in which I (and my new colleague) work. We’re not just teaching a subject, we’re leading classes that touch (sorry) on issues of sexuality, boundaries, power. We stir up strong emotions; we invite our students to consider their private lives and how their attitudes towards some fairly intimate subjects are shaped by history and culture. As I’ve written before in my student crushes archive, some students are prone to confusing excitement about the subject with excitement towards the professor who’s teaching the class.

None of this means we shouldn’t hug our students. Though I never foist hugs on the unwilling, and I am attentive to good boundaries, I am resolute in my commitment to practice physical affection as part of my mentoring and teaching. I do it because we live in a world where far too many men in positions of authority are fundamentally unsafe. Far too many adult men, including professors, are sexually predatory. Touch from them is unsafe and violating. Other men live in a not entirely unreasonable fear of having their actions misinterpreted. Anxious not to be labelled as harassers, they maintain scrupulous boundaries with their students and subordinates. That’s obviously preferable to groping lechery, but it sends the message that men are cold, remote, distant, and unavailable. It reinforces the message that touch can’t be safe.

I certainly don’t hug all my students. I don’t just hug women, or just men. I recognize that personality and cultural expectations about affection differ; foisting unwanted affection on someone for whom I am responsible would be profoundly unethical and violating. At the same time, if I didn’t embrace with exuberant non-sexual enthusiasm those students who would like to be hugged, I fall short of another mark. Touch can violate, but touch can heal. Touch can be unsafe, touch can be more affirming than a thousand verbal reassurances. We cannot allow our fears about touching blind us to the good, as well as the harm, that it can do. Just as gender studies, as an academic discipline, has broken down the convention that said that sexuality was not suitable for intellectual analysis, so too some of us may be called to dismantle the convention that says that touch has no place in teaching.

Five years ago, in another post, I wrote:

I have come to believe that the key thing that those of us who work with young people need to do is commit ourselves to being deliberately counter-cultural when it comes to touch. This doesn’t mean ignoring the power of sexuality. It means not allowing our fear of sexuality to hold us back from reaching out to those who need it. We have to find non-exploitative ways to hold each other — and hold each other across lines of sex, age, and status.

I repeated something like that to my colleague in our conversation yesterday. And, with the reminder that discernment and intuition are vital here, I stand by that advice publicly. I don’t expect hugs from everyone: I don’t hug everyone. But with the commitment to be “safe” foremost in my mind, and with deep reverence for tremendous variety in other people’s personal boundaries and comfort levels, I’m as committed as ever to an affectionate hug, a reassuring squeeze of the hand, or other good and right forms of affirming touch.

Lot’s daughters, and ours: on sexualization, feminism, and the absence of agency

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 15, 2009
in Desire and objectification, Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Teaching
. 43 Comments

For the first time in three years, I’m teaching my humanities course on “The Dysfunctional Family and the Western Tradition.” (More about that course here.) We use the work of John Bradshaw as a tool with which to interpret four great masterpieces: the book of Genesis; Euripides’ “Medea”, Ibsen’s “Doll’s House”, and Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” I’ve been teaching the course periodically for over a decade, and it’s one of my favorite classes to offer.

Yesterday, we talked about Genesis 19; the famous story of the destruction of Sodom — and of Lot and his daughters. Since the last time I taught the course, I’ve read Robert Polhemus’ dazzling (if occasionally exasperating) Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women’s Quest for Authority. Polhemus’ book covers not only the story of how the incestuous relationship between these young women and their father has been interpreted within the Abrahamic traditions for millenia, but he touches on some of the ways in which non-incestuous older men/younger women relationships in popular lore mirror the Lot story. (The book is already dated, focusing as it does near the end heavily on the Hillary-Bill-Monica triangle that was so fascinating in the late ’90s; the biblical parallels are there, but to my students who were barely into elementary school at the time, the story doesn’t resonate.) In any case, I recommend Lot’s Daughters with enthusiasm.

The outline of the story ought to be familiar: Lot, Abraham’s relative, offers hospitality to two angels who come to his hometown of Sodom. A crowd of locals besieges Lot’s house, demanding the opportunity to rape the (male) angels. Lot tries to calm the crowd by offering his two virgin daughters instead, but the crowd isn’t interested; Lot ends up being pulled back inside the house. The city is soon destroyed by God, with only Lot and his family permitted to escape; Lot’s wife (the women, of course, are unnamed) makes the fatal mistake of looking back at her burning hometown — and is turned into a pillar of salt. Lot and his daughters end up taking refuge in a cave, where the girls decide to get their father drunk and have sex with him so that he can father their children. The eldest daughter conceives a son who will be the first of the Moabites, the people from whom the great figure Ruth comes. Since Ruth is an ancestor of David, and David an ancestor of Jesus, Christ himself is (if we accept Matthew’s lineage) a descendent of a line begun in father-daughter incest.

We all have a question, reading this story: why do the daughters do it? From a feminist standpoint, it’s a perverse twisting of the reality of incestuous abuse; the literature on the subject reveals that parent-child incest is, in reality, always initiated by the former. The victims are turned into the victimizers, and the male authority figure is absolved (through his drunkenness) of responsibility. Read literally, it’s infuriating in its familiarity; heck, it even fits in as an early example of the “myth of male weakness” against which we’ve so often railed on this blog. Lot gets to pass on his line, and he gets to do so with young, nubile women rather than with his barren wife. (Salt, strewn in fields, destroys fertility — you don’t need to be a graduate student in English to figure out that turning a pillar of salt is a metaphor for the undesirability and absent fecundity of ageing women.) Lot gets to start this blessed line –one that will include Ruth, David, and Jesus — through a sexual act for which he was not responsible. In Genesis 9, Noah curses his son Ham for catching his father drunk and naked and exposing the secret; ten chapters later, Lot remains silent when his daughters get him drunk and naked. (Polhemus has a fascinating section in which he details the ways in which centuries of Christian and Jewish theologians devised ways to absolve Lot of what ought to have been a profound sin).

But here’s the angle Polhemus doesn’t touch on, and one we did explore yesterday in class. The first we learn of Lot’s daughters is when their father offers them up to be raped by a mob. Lot wants to use the sexuality of his own children as a bargaining chip in order to protect the men who are his guests. Read in modern terms, Lot is doing what older men (sometimes fathers, often not) continue to do to adolescent girls: reduce their worth down to one thing. Their value lies solely in their desirability, in their imagined purity, in their youthful fuckability. Scripture doesn’t tell us what the girls thought when they heard their father offer them up to the crowd, but it’s not hard to see the impact on their lives. From a feminist and a family systems standpoint, we can’t understand why the girls seduce their father until we understand the impact of his earlier betrayal upon them.. Continue reading ‘Lot’s daughters, and ours: on sexualization, feminism, and the absence of agency’

Both saint and sinner: against teaching only half the story

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 24, 2009
in Feminist Pedagogy, Historiography, Race and Teaching
. 1 Comment

Last week, Renee (of Womanist Musings) put up a guest post at Feministe that has elicited a huge response: Thomas Jefferson, the Face of a Rapist. Below an image of our third president, she writes:

Americans look at Thomas Jefferson and see the one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence, a statesman, a former president and one of the founding fathers,’ however; when I look at him, I see the face of a rapist.

Renee makes the compelling case that Jefferson’s well-documented sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, a black slave who was perhaps fifteen when their “affair” began , constituted rape because of Hemings’ age and her complete inability to provide meaningful consent. Consent, Renee argues, can only be given when the right to say “no” exists equally alongside the right to say “yes”. That makes good sense, but it also makes it difficult to argue that any woman — slave or free, white or black — in eighteenth-century America could consent. A husband’s right of access to his wife’s body was as inviolate as a slaveowner’s right to the labor of his slaves. That doesn’t mean that wealthy white women suffered to the same degree that black slave women did, of course, but it does render our modern notion of enthusiastic consent radically anachronistic. And reminding ourselves of this historical truth gives us all the more reason to celebrate the achievements of the feminist movement, which has fought for more than a century and a half to give women of all races sovereignty over their bodies and the right to say “no” as well as “yes.”

As a feminist historian, however, I want to deal with another aspect of Renee’s post. Renee rejects the defense, offered regularly during discussions of the transgressions of the late and great, that they were men (or women) “of their time” and that we “shouldn’t judge” past behavior by modern standards. There’s a lot to be said for that forgiving attitude towards the past. After all, who among us wouldn’t be enraged by the sexism of our great-grandparents? Forget Jefferson; think of one’s own elderly relatives. Few among us don’t have older folks in the family who hold abhorrent views on a variety of topics, and in many instances, those relatives have matched their actions to their views. To judge everyone by a contemporary standard of what is ethical would make inter-generational community far more difficult.

On the other hand, refusing to condemn the injustices of the past is to minimise, or at least erase, the suffering of very real victims. We can’t know Sally Hemings’ mind — but we make a huge mistake when we adopt the dominant narrative of her life, assuming that in the absence of obvious evidence of abuse that she was Jefferson’s happily consenting paramour. When the story is told, her lack of agency ought to be a focus, and it is not beyond the bounds of thoughtful history to ask what light this grossly disparate relationship sheds on our understanding of the third president. Feminist narrative ought to center women’s lives, and feminist historians rightly insist that Jefferson’s relationships with women form part of the story of his remarkable life. That doesn’t mean devaluing his achievements; it doesn’t mean feminists should picket the Jefferson Memorial or stage protests at Monticello. But it does mean asking hard questions about race and sex and power, it does mean exposing the notion of a “consensual affair” between a wealthy white man and his adolescent female slave as problematic if not risible.

Above all, we ought to chart a course between hagiography and demonization. It’s too simple-minded — albeit immensely tempting — to turn the figures of the past into saints or devils. Jefferson was a great man — and yes, he was a rapist. Martin Luther King, Jr., was the pivotal figure in the civil rights movement and a man who inspired hundreds of millions; he was also a chronic womanizer. Margaret Sanger fought her entire life so that women could have that precious right to birth control, but she repeatedly flirted with racist eugenics. Depending on one’s politics, the temptation is to center one’s focus solely on a partial aspect of a historical figure. When we do this, we make the critical mistake of seeing history as a story of “either/or” rather than “both/and.”

Like everyone reading this post, I have inflicted hurt. The story of my life, like the story of your life, surely contains within it episodes of great kindnesses and incidents of genuine wickedness. (For many of us, the greatest wickednesses we do are rooted in obtuse indifference rather than malice.) A skillful historian could, using only the facts, make virtually any one of us paragons of virtue — or exemplars of cruelty. When it comes to the dead, we cannot allow a respect for their accomplishments to blind us to their shortcomings; by the same token, we cannot allow the magnitude of those shortcomings to erase the legacy of the good that they did. As Thomas Merton’s old axion puts it, “God writes straight with crooked lines.” There is straight and crooked in each of us, and good history tells the story of both.

Of wise WASPs and wise Latinas: some thoughts on Sotomayor

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 10, 2009
in Class, Ethnicity and Teaching
. 9 Comments

I’ve been meaning to write about Sonia Sotomayor for weeks now, and have received two requests to do so.

As virtually everyone paying attention to the news knows, Sotomayor has been nominated by the president to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the retirerement of Justice David Souter. The confirmation process is revving up. And Judge Sotomayor is taking particular criticism for her oft-repeated remark that a “wise Latina” would often reach a better conclusion than “a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” The right has cried “racism”, and the National Review has lampooned Sotomayor’s Latina wisdom with a particularly unfortunate and bizarre cover.

There are nine judges on the US Supreme Court for a reason. (That number fluctuated a bit in the early years of the Republic.) One rather obvious, if unstated, rationale for having nine is that it is just about the right number to ensure that vigorous debate can take place amongst the justices. The presumption is that debate is necessary because no single judge, no matter how erudite and insightful, can arrive at the best conclusion on his or her own. The right outcome is arrived at communally, through dialogue and argument. And each justice brings to that argument his or her law clerks, his or her legal training, his or her philosophical orientation — and his or her life experience. The greater the diversity of life experience and perspective among the nine, therefore, the greater the chance that the most just outcomes will be reached.

I live and teach and work as a white man. A very particular kind of white man, too. My father was a European war refugee, my mother from an archetypally WASPy American family with roots on this continent stretching back to the mid-17th century. (I’ve written about those roots here and here). My skin color, my family history, my education, and my class shaped my world view; they helped make me who I am. So too did my own life experiences. I’ve been formed by privilege, yes — but I’ve also struggled with addiction and been hospitalized against my will many times. I’ve tasted a very particular kind of despair. I’m a more compassionate man as a result. One could say that — and on some issues I would say — that “a wise sober alcoholic with years of recovery” has a better perspective on some issues than someone who hasn’t had to walk down that particular road. And if there’s a court case dealing with issues of addiction, it might be helpful to have a recovering addict in the conversation. Continue reading ‘Of wise WASPs and wise Latinas: some thoughts on Sotomayor’

“I Have No Idea Where I Got That”: the perils of being a workaholic ENFP generalist

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 26, 2009
in Academia and Teaching
. 4 Comments

As my students know, I don’t lecture from notes. When I’m teaching a new class, or one I haven’t taught in a while, I’ll show up with a few specific facts or dates scribbled on the back of an envelope, but nothing more. When I first started giving lectures as a TA (lecturing as a TA was very common at UCLA) in 1991, I wrote out my lectures in longhand; that quickly proved both tedious and unnecessary. By the time I came to Pasadena City College two years later, I wrote out bullet points for myself on lined yellow paper, but not complete sentences; the last time I used those legal pads to prompt myself was perhaps 1995.

I continue to “read in my field”, as it were. I’m a medievalist by formal training, but don’t teach my subject here at the community college level. Here, I’m a generalist, offering lectures on Hammurabi and Homer, the reign of Charles II, Puritan notions of the erotic, the First World War, the rise of the gay rights movement in 1950s Los Angeles and the theme of dysfunctional families in western literature. It would not be entirely uncharitable to describe my interests as running a mile wide and an inch deep; teaching survey courses in umpteen different subjects is much more appealing to me than taking one or two areas and exploring them in painstaking detail. And so my reading lists are eclectic as I struggle to stay somewhat current in so many different fascinating fields. The ever-growing horde of books unread might be depressing if I allowed myself time to reflect upon all that I still do not know! Continue reading ‘“I Have No Idea Where I Got That”: the perils of being a workaholic ENFP generalist’

“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 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!

The confidence to knock on my door: a note about race, sex, perceived attractiveness, and mentoring

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 05, 2009
in Mentoring, Pasadena City College, Race and Teaching
. 9 Comments

Though I didn’t respond at the time, I’ve been mulling a comment made by Leslee below this post . I had written on Tuesday about daughters and the not-surprising fact that most of my mentees at the college are women (the high school youth groupers are more evenly divided by sex.) Leslee, who worked in my office for a colleague a few years ago, and knows me well, wrote:

I think the issue, Hugo, is that girls are more likely to seek out male mentors than boys are. And having worked in your office for your officemate, I’ve noticed that your mentees are disproportionately white and pretty. That doesn’t mean that you only choose white girls and pretty girls to mentor. But young women who feel confident about their looks, if not much else, are more likely to seek out a male mentor like you because they are more certain of getting some kind of attention.

As discomfiting as it is to read those words, there’s enough truth in them to deserve a response.

I bend over backwards to avoid, as much as is humanly possible, playing favorites. I do everything I can not to let a student’s appearance, or race, or even (as in this 2007 post about mentoring) bad body odor interfere with my attentiveness to him or her. As I’ve written before, when working with young people (or even with colleagues) I remember the prayer I was taught many years ago:

“God, show me this person not as I see them but as you see them. Help me to be for them what I am called by you to be. Remove from me my fears and my selfish desires, and show me how to love them as you love them”.

And that works, and works better and better as I get older and more experienced as a professor, a youth leader, and a mentor to teens and young adults. But that previous post was about the importance of having really excellent boundaries, and it didn’t address Leslee’s point, which was that certain kinds of students, particularly those who perceive themselves as attractive or entitled by class and race, are more likely to be bold about seeking me out as a mentor. Continue reading ‘The confidence to knock on my door: a note about race, sex, perceived attractiveness, and mentoring’

Seeing Milk, teaching Milk, celebrating Milk

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 18, 2008
in GLBTQ, Movies and Teaching
. 11 Comments

Yesterday afternoon, I gave my last exam of the year; my History 24F (Introduction to Lesbian and Gay American History) class drew the lucky (or unlucky) slot of being my “final final”. After the test was done, I went with those students who were able to join us for an early evening showing of “Milk” at a nearby theater. They’ve been a particularly wonderful group this term, and I wanted to take in this important film as a class. (Thanks are due to Laemmle theaters, for selling me discount group tickets, and to Stephanie and Taylor, two of my students who work there.)

If I hadn’t wanted to see it for the first time with my GLBTQ class, I would surely have gone to see “Milk” as soon as I could have; I waited impatiently for last night, knowing that it would be so much better to take it in in the company of so many young people whom I love and admire. I was not disappointed.

Much has already been written about the film, and about Sean Penn’s magnificent portrayal of Harvey Milk. The supporting cast — especially Emile Hirsch, Alison Pill, and James Brolin — is superb, with nearly every actor bearing an uncanny resemblance to his or her real-life counterpart. And though I had shuddered when I heard that Gus Van Sant was directing this film, as I normally don’t enjoy his style, I loved this movie. Just as another director I don’t like much, Spike Lee, was able to get out of his own way and produce the brilliant and near-perfect “X”, so too Van Sant never gave us the sense that we were supposed to sit back and watch his genius at work. He gave us a wonderful, deeply moving, timely and immensely inspiring film.

Let me say, of course, that everyone who has not seen “The Times of Harvey Milk”, the 1984 Oscar-winning documentary about Harvey, ought to see that. Van Sant clearly drew inspiration from that film (and some archival footage as well), and it helped strengthen the picture. I’ve shown “The Times of Harvey Milk” to many classes over the years, and could probably recite most of the film by heart. (Now that I think about it, there are perhaps no other films ever made — documentary or otherwise — I’ve seen as often!)

Like a great many people, I feel as if I have a personal stake in the story of Harvey Milk. I was eleven years old, and in the sixth grade at Carmel Middle School, when he and George Moscone were assassinated. I had heard of Moscone; my family, living on the Monterey Peninsula, had many connections to what all my life we have called simply “the City.” I only vaguely knew who Harvey was; I was an unusually politically aware eleven year-old, however, and had done some precinct walking against Proposition 6. (As the movie shows, Prop. 6 was the measure that was defeated in November 1978 that would have banned gays and lesbians from serving as teachers). Harvey had led the fight against Prop 6, and as a result, I knew his name, but somehow hadn’t grasped that he was a San Francisco Supervisor. Continue reading ‘Seeing Milk, teaching Milk, celebrating Milk’

Your loyal blogger…

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 04, 2008
in Academia, Pasadena City College, Ratemyprofessors, Teaching and Vanity
. 6 Comments

… has had his dubious recent distinction publicized in this piece in the Pasadena City College paper. And of course, I hate the picture they took of me.

I have been teased all day at school by colleagues and students alike. Part of me loves it, and part of me feels humiliated, and part of me wonders in what particular way I am supposed to parlay this trivial but interesting distinction into something useful. It’s the sort of thing that one probably doesn’t want in one’s obituary, so I’ll simply have to accomplish enough to ensure that there’s no room to stick this “triumph” in there. But I’m not so embarrassed that I won’t note it here, and enjoy the fleeting notoriety.

After “in loco parentis”: some disjointed thoughts on student mentoring and sex education

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 01, 2008
in Academia, Sexual ethics and transformation, Teaching, Youth and Youth ministry
. 8 Comments

It’s always dangerous to write about books one hasn’t read. Still, I find that I learn a lot from book reviews. For as long as I can remember, my mother has subscribed to the New York Review of Books. Since I started graduate school nearly twenty years ago, she’s given me a gift subscription every year. I can’t say I finish every article, but I read it loyally. Like Ms. Magazine and the Economist, the New York Review is one of those staples of my youth upon which I rely still as an adult. And I learn a great deal from reading reviews about books I will never actually pick up.

I don’t read the very conservative Touchstone very often; run by what seem to be an ecumenical bunch of right-wing C.S. Lewis aficionados, most of what appears in its pages are less eloquent versions of the sort of screeds I prefer to read in First Things. (I mean, I’m not a reactionary, but if I’m going to spend time exposing my eyeballs to 14th century ideas, I might as well make sure those ideas are well-written). Still, I managed to come across this book review recently: Ploy Meets Girl, by Nathaniel Peters.

Reviewing three new jeremiads about the “hook-up culture” on American college campuses, Peters takes the predictable tactic of lamenting the ways in which feminist bogeywomen (the omnipresent forces of darkness in contemporary social conservative discourse) have misled young coeds about the proper understanding of sexuality. But to be fair, his review offers more than the usual wails about youthful promiscuity. Rather, Peters looks at the ways in which colleges do — and don’t — provide mentoring and sexual education to students.

Though even the average secular adult would argue that sex should be about more than just the physical experience, colleges and their students focus only on sexual performance. Universities with no creedal convictions feel ill-equipped to help students address metaphysical questions like the meaning of sex. They can answer only the physical questions, and those end up being the only ones discussed.

At my freshman orientation at Swarthmore College five years ago, we were told about the Sexual Health Counselors, peers who advertised the ability to help with sex toys, contraception, or intriguing permutations of positions and partners. But the college offered no help to those who might ask deeper questions, or even to those who wondered what to do the next morning with the person beside them.

That’s not entirely fair. I’m nearly two decades older than Mr. Peters; I came of age sexually in the Reagan years, when the media predicted a full-blown heterosexual AIDS epidemic. But in those conservative times known as the mid-1980s, I worked as a sexuality educator at Berkeley. Yes, we taught folks how to use condoms, and we even “demonstrated” the not-always ridiculous dental dam. We talked about masturbation and STDs and gave little primers on what was then known as HTLV-III (the forerunner, by name, to HIV). But we also talked about values, and about relationships, and about feelings. We faciltated discussions in dorms and sororities and co-ops about faith, ideals, and romantic longing.

I remember helping to lead a panel discussion (back in 1988 or so) on the question “Why Have Sex?” It was a strange title, and it drew a good-sized audience. The premise of the talk was that too many discussions about sex talked about why folks shouldn’t have it (at least until marriage), or about how to have it properly — but no one was talking about the perfectly reasonable question of why one ought to do it in the first place. The easy answer, of course, was “it feels good.” But that raises the question — what feels good? Is it arousal? Is it anticipation? Is it emotional closeness? Is it orgasmic release? What one person likes best about sex isn’t always what the person they’re being sexual with likes best. Continue reading ‘After “in loco parentis”: some disjointed thoughts on student mentoring and sex education’

One more Prop 8 post-mortem

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 06, 2008
in GLBTQ and Teaching
. 20 Comments

In my Gay and Lesbian American History class, we spent an hour yesterday sorting through the mixed emotions in the aftermath of the election. I chose not to lecture, and turned the first half of the class into an open forum for venting and discussion about the passage of Proposition 8 and the new ban on same-sex marriage here in California. In the second half of the course, I offered a series of reasons for why the results came the way they did, based on analyses of the two campaigns and upon the exit polling data.

I had wondered if some in the class — the majority of whom identify as non-heterosexual or non-cis-gendered — would be very sad. There was sadness, to be sure, but also anger and enthusiasm. One young woman, just 18 and in the process of coming out to her family as a lesbian, said “More than ever, today like I feel like I’m part of a movement that really has to fight.” Many students said that they had simply assumed that Prop 8 would be defeated; indeed, several admitted that they had been more anxious about Barack Obama than about same-sex marriage. One said “This is California; we always do the right thing here. I was worried the rest of the nation was racist and wouldn’t vote for a black man. And it turns out Obama wins easily and Californians are bigots!” There was some nodding when that remark was made.

I know a few of my students, several of whom are budding or even seasoned activists in the gay community, had done some phone-banking against Prop 8. But I know that in general, they spent far more time working for the Democratic Party and Barack Obama. Only one student had given money to the “No on 8″ fight; seven reported having made small donations to he who is now our president-elect. It isn’t the fault of the Obama campaign that they ran such a marvelous grassroots operation that inspired the young — but inadvertently, they may have “sucked a lot of the air” out of the room, leaving fewer resources than usual to fight for gay and lesbian rights here in California. I know a great many young progressives who traveled this past weekend to Nevada to work at GOTV (get out the vote) for Barack Obama; at the same time, the Mormons and other large church organizations brought outsiders in to California to do precinct walking against gay marriage. Progressive energies were not all where they might have been. Continue reading ‘One more Prop 8 post-mortem’

A long post about Western Civilization, story telling, my mother, Robinson Jeffers, and rejecting narratives of exceptionalism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 20, 2008
in Academia, Memories, Teaching and Western Civilization
. 15 Comments

In this post last week, I suggested that I was going to take a couple of months away from blogging about animal rights and veganism. I asked for suggestions as to what I ought to blog about, and my former student Paul threw in “Western Civilization.” (I just threw back the famous, and perhaps apocryphal, Gandhi crack about it being a very good idea.)

Each semester, I teach six classes, and offer four different subjects. Every term, without fail, I offer women’s studies and a second Humanities or Gender/Sexuality history course. I also teach my Ancient Western Civilization and Modern Europe courses. These latter two are my “bread-and-butter” offerings, and between the two segments of Western Civ, I have far more students in these intro level classes than I do in my two (slightly more advanced) Gender Studies courses. But I don’t blog very much about teaching Western Civ.

I grew up familiar with the traditional narrative of Western Civilization. My mother taught philosophy, humanities, and religious studies at Monterey Peninsula College until her retirement in 2003. For nearly thirty years, she was a key component of MPC’s legendary Gentrain program. Gentrain (General Education Train of Courses) was and is an interdisciplinary program in Western Civilization, from its Mesopotamian origins down more or less to the present day. My mother started teaching in the Gentrain program in the mid-1970s, when I was about eight years old. And like so many teaching parents, she gave her children the same lectures she gave to her students. On long car trips (in our 1975 Ford Pinto), my mother would regale my younger brother and me with stories she had learned from her colleagues in the program as well as her own material. I don’t know what other kids heard on their car rides, but we heard lectures about Socrates, Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, and even Abelard and Heloise. (The last of these became my favorite of my mother’s lectures. For better or for worse, I have a heavy dose of Peter Abelard in my soul.)

My father and mother were both professors; they had met in the graduate program in philosophy at Berkeley in 1962. My father thought very deeply; his lifetime work was on the philosophy of language, and he wrote papers (and one well-received book) on Kant, Wittgenstein, and nearly impenetrable topics like “Sentience and Apperception.” My mother, a Gemini like her firstborn son, was and is a generalist — she liked great sweeping narratives. Though she wrote a fine dissertation to get her Ph.D (on Hobbes), she loved teaching intro classes in Western Civ more than anything else. And she passed that love on to me.

Of course, we never had any sense growing up that there was something superior about Western Civilization. Unlike many of the reactionary voices one finds in academia today, my mother never suggested that 5th century BC Athens or 15th century Florence or 18th century Paris were somehow more important than their counterparts outside of Europe. I never got lectures from her on medieval Mali or the Han dynasty, but she made clear that was because the West was her area of expertise. For my mother, bless her liberal heart, familiarity did not breed delusions of superiority. And it was from that tolerant but focused perspective that I narrowed in on European history in my leisure reading as a boy. Continue reading ‘A long post about Western Civilization, story telling, my mother, Robinson Jeffers, and rejecting narratives of exceptionalism’