Henry Gonshak
English
Montana Tech-UM
I remember a moment back in the mid-80s when I was a graduate teaching assistant. Several of my fellow grad students and I were standing around a hall of the English department engaging in the usual t.a. banter: bemoaning the illiteracy of our composition students, fretting about our upcoming doctoral exams, debating the pros and cons of applying for food stamps. Out-of-the-blue one of our number remarked, "You know, teaching is a sexy business." I distinctly recall the embarrassed hush that fell over the group. Then someone changed the subject, back to comp students and food stamps.
Is teaching a "sexy business?" If so, what might be the dangers (and possibly also the advantages) of a buried Eros in the classroom? If some profs are, in fact, bedding their students (or vice versa), should this alarm anyone concerned about higher education? Although I'm a professor myself (blissfully married, I might add) let me throw caution to the wind and confess that I find these questions fascinating. Moreover, I consider them relevant to a broad range of important pedagogical and academic issues. Thus, I opened the essay collection, The Erotics of Instructions, with high hopes. The wry black and white photo on the cover--showing an innocently grinning female college student who looks straight out of Dobey Gillis, with bobbed hair and a class ring on her finger, a pair of textbooks clutched to her firmly brassiered bosom--certainly enhanced my optimism. However, though the anthology had its moments, I ultimately found it quite disappointing.
The biggest mistake made by many of the book's contributors (most of whom are professors) is their shared decision to focus primarily on how "the erotics of instruction" has been portrayed through the ages in literature and film, rather than turning to their own experiences, and those of their colleagues, in the classroom. True, this emphasis does reveal that the sexual side of teaching has been an extended theme in both high and low Western culture--a tradition stretching from the dialogues of Plato to Dead Poets' Society. Still, by largely eschewing their own first-hand experiences, the authors miss a real opportunity. One can't help wondering if the contributors (all-too-aware of the sexually charged culture in which we live, a bizarre blend of censoriousness and sensationalism) fled from the perils and vulnerabilities of autobiography in order to withdraw into the safer, but more sterile, terrain of literary analysis.
For example, Vanessa D. Dickerson's essay opens promisingly: "Teaching at a small, private, predominantly white, conservative liberal arts college in the South, I have found without fail each year among student evaluations of my courses strong objections to the discussion of...sexuality in my classes.... I [wondered] whether these students would have been so...resistant to my connection of the sexual with the intellectual...had I not been a female and a black female at that" (52-53). However, Dickerson immediately drops her own story to turn, for the bulk of the essay, to a competent if mundane exegesis of that much-discussed Henry James' novella, The Turn of the Screw. In two other literary essays-Deborah Morse's "Educating Louis: Teaching the Victorian Father in Trollope's He Knew He Was Right" and Abby Werlock's "With Man There Is a Difference: The Rejection of Female Mentoring in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls"--the authors have expanded the definition of "instruction" to encompass (in the authors' shared feminist perspective) the often misguided tutelage men give women in marriage and romance. As a result of this broadening of the term "instruction," the reader is distanced still further from the contemporary classroom.
Nonetheless, for all its flaws, The Erotics of Instruction does provide some nuggets of insight regarding sexuality and pedagogy. Several contributors who do find teaching a "sexy business" explain this phenomenon in terms of Freudian analysis--i.e., that the professor subconsciously represents a surrogate parent to the student, and that the relationship is therefore Oedipal in nature. However, the two authors who employ Freud, Regina Barreca and James Kincaid, reach opposed conclusions. Barreca argues that "getting the professor is like getting Dad, but without anything overtly...disgusting," while Kincaid insists that professor/student relations have been traditionally discouraged because they unconsciously invoke the "incest taboo" (10 & 86).
Some essayists also offer perceptive explanations as to why affairs between teachers and students tend to involve a male professor and a female student, rather than the other way around. In "Contraband Appetites: Wit, Rage and Romance in the Classroom," Barreca vividly labels the kind of bright yet unhappy female student she herself was in college a "Cinderella intellectual," yearning for that male-professor-as-handsome-prince "who would see what was hidden and special and glorious in us, who would love us for our smart selves...who would...choose us from among all our peers for attention" (2). Barreca locates the male prof's customary allure in his "magical quality of being both distant and available at the same time" (3). However, as her reference to "distance" implies, Barreca believes that swooning over a prof "is dangerous if it ever plays itself out as more than a fantasy" (10). Since the young female student has probably "confus[ed]...loving the profession [with] loving the professor," crushing demystification is almost assured "once you see [your prof] in his socks and shorts stepping into your bathroom to brush his teeth" (2 & 10). Given this underlying dynamic, several contributors advise that professors, rather than seducing students who have crushes on them, subtly encourage their charges to sublimate their desires into a love of learning. In "Hayley, Roz, and Me," Rebecca Pope quotes academic Elaine Marks, writing in the MLA Newsletter: "I am convinced that desire is the central force in teaching, a force that can be dangerous if it is not recognized and controlled but without which the language and literature classroom is a dry and boring place" (47).
A few essayists consider the question of why female prof/male student romances have rarely met with the same degree of societal approval accorded the inverse relationship. In "The Intimacies of Instruction," John Glavin explains this enigma by invoking Western culture's traditional fear and condemnation of female sexuality. As a result, Glavin maintains, our society's image of the "acceptable" female instructor usually has been the aging, virginal spinster, safely devoid of even a trace of eroticism. In contrast, a woman teacher who dallies with a male student--or simply insists on presenting herself as a sexual being--has often been branded a dangerous femme-fatale. At least in literature, Glavin says, these pedagogic seductresses usually end up severely punished (the case, to cite a famous example Glavin discusses, in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). As a result of these societal taboos, argues Mary Ann Caws in "Instructive Energies," many female professors opt to play for their students the role not of lover but of mother--becoming, in Caws' words, "the Angel in the Academy" (74). By endlessly nurturing their charges, Caws claims, women profs often burn out, while simultaneously repressing any non-maternal aspects of their personalities, usually at the expense of their own intellectual ambitions, especially regarding scholarship.
In closing, let me note my regret that almost none of the anthology's contributors explore how the "erotics of instruction" is reflected (or, more precisely, rejected) in many current campus policies on sexual harassment, date rape and professor/student dating. Only one essay dares to skate on this exceedingly thin ice (though, again, via the distanced medium of literary analysis), Monica Katz's "Truth or Consequences: Mamet's Oleanna in the Real World," and it, alas, is the worst contribution to the collection. In the process of shredding Mamet's drama, Katz (affiliated with the Barnard College Center for Research on Women) insists that "sexual harassment is...a...(prevalent) male behavior toward women," and that "in the actual world of campus life, over half its population live with real sexual harassment every day" (162 & 165). How much evidence does Katz offer to support these sweeping assertions? None. Ironically, her strident male-bashing inadvertently supports Oleanna's admittedly didactic (if still powerfully dramatized) theme: i.e., that many academic feminists have grossly exaggerated the real problems of campus sexual harassment and date rape in order to wage a politically-motivated witch-hunt against men.
As for administrative policies prohibiting professor/student romance, such bans strike me, frankly, as a dreadful idea (unless the student is actually in the professor's class at the time of the relationship). In an article in The New Yorker, "The Trouble With Sex," Jeffrey Tobbin relates the dire consequences Yale's prohibition had for a once promising young math professor, Jay Jorgenson. While discussing her academic problems with a dean, a Yale undergrad revealed that she'd had an affair with Jorgenson. Although she acknowledged that the relationship was consensual, the university launched a sexual harassment investigation, which concluded by sternly reprimanding the professor. Prior to Yale's censure, Jorgenson had been offered a tenure-track position at Ohio State, but afterwards the offer was withdrawn. Despite his best efforts, Jorgenson hasn't been able to find a job since. "As far as I am concerned," he told Tobbin, "my academic career is over" (The New Yorker 9 February 1998: 54).
The usual argument made to justify such policies is that there is an inherent power imbalance in relationships between professors and students (especially when the professors are male and the students female) and that, therefore, such relationships are intrinsically exploitive. But in what romantic relationship (or any relationship, for that matter) isn't there a power imbalance? Moreover, this imbalance is usually not static but in flux, a point wonderfully exemplified by a Fay Weldon short-story, "Ind. Aff.," discussed in Barreca's essay, about a male professor who leaves his wife for a young female student. The prof certainly seems to be running the show, until one evening, when the couple are dining in a posh restaurant, and the woman notices a handsome waiter her own age, whereupon she finds herself wondering, "What [am] I doing with this man with thinning hair?" (9). Weldon's story suggests that in a romance between a distinguished older male professor and a pretty young female student, the professor may have authority, but the student has youth and nubility, qualities which grant her considerable power in the relationship.
I agree with the contributors to The Erotics of Instruction that sleeping with students is usually a bad idea, that the relationship often collapses once the pair slink from the classroom to the boudoir. But I also believe that in a free society--as opposed to a totalitarian dystopia--consenting adults, as long as they're not bothering anyone else, must be allowed to make themselves miserable.