I <3 My Teacher

In the final year of my undergraduate degree, I took a class that changed my life. It was a second-year political philosophy course that dealt with Supreme Court rulings and public education policy. I had never thought about such things before. The professor, a doctor of philosophy who had been teaching for nearly 35 years, sparked spirited debates among his students on questions of civil liberties. He also lit a fire in me.

I admired this teacher greatly. I wanted to sound intelligent in front of him. I tackled every assignment with excitement. He influenced my work at the student newspaper. I emailed him to ask about ethical questions I encountered. I cooked him dinner once. He inspired some of the best writing and thinking I did as an undergrad and indirectly persuaded me to pursue a career as a writer.

Was I attracted to him in the same way I was to Peter? In both cases, I sought the approval of an older teacher-figure. Because he was four decades older than me and married, a sexual relationship never occurred to me, but I was intensely drawn to him.

When I think about the teachers who influenced me most during my education, three others come to mind. From all I sought approval and produced better work for them than I would have for another professor. I also developed intimate, but not sexual, relationships with them that persist in some form to this day. Another commonality: they were all men. A psychoanalyst might suggest that I pursued attention from older men in positions of authority to fill the emotional hole left by my father, who was absent during most of my childhood, but I think something else was going on. I think the spark of attraction between a student and teacher can be a useful pedagogical tool.

Cristina Nehring, author of A Vindication of Love, points to historical examples of great work coming from student-teacher romance in a 2001 essay in Harper’s. The letters of intellectual passion between the 12th-century student Heloise and her teacher Abelard make up one of the most moving bodies of medieval literature. The sculptures of Auguste Rodin and his student/lover/muse Camille Claudel. Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Nehring, an American essayist and critic based in Paris, describes the role romantic attraction to her professors played in her own education. “At the beginnings of quarters I shopped around for teachers to have crushes on, and it was a sad term, a long term, when I found none,” she writes. “I fanned the flame of minor lights—knowing full well that if I could not generate at least a little heat my mind would freeze.” For her, crushes on teachers were powerful and productive.

Not all productive student-teacher romances are like the fiery, reckless love affair of Heloise and Abelard, according to Nehring. More often they are a quiet crush or a “shy and repressed passion” that inflames the interest of a student. “Academic eros works from behind the scenes,” she writes. “It ensures that the work in the classroom is charged, ambitious and vigorous.” She decries how strict sexual harassment policies create a culture of fear on campuses. “For the university campus on which the erotic impulse between teachers and students is criminalized is the campus on which pedagogical enterprise is deflated,” she writes. “It is the campus on which pedagogy is gutted and gored.”

I am grateful to have been an undergraduate student in an institution where relationships between students and faculty were not stunted by paranoia, where the possibility of student-faculty romance existed. It was a place where you could have a beer with your professor, where teaching continued outside of the classroom. The atmosphere of tolerance, free of the culture of fear Nehring describes, permitted the type of intimate relationships that inspired in me excitement for my subject and an enduring enthusiasm for learning. As Peter recently told me, “The opportunity for creativity is in the venue.”

Perhaps it was the lack of pedagogical fire between Peter and I that contributed to the end of our love affair. After a few late nights listening to Art Pepper records, we did not have much more to share, musically or intellectually. I remember going to an art gallery with him late in the summer. While we were having a drink afterwards, I was at a loss for things to say about what we had seen. Our conversation no longer flowed with ease. When we parted that day, I stood alone in front of the gallery for a moment, knowing our relationship had ended, and felt the familiar ache of heartbreak set in—an ache no more damaging, and no less, than that of any other failed love affair.