I <3 My Teacher

He was a handsome thirtysomething post-secondary teacher and a musician. I was an undergraduate music student some 10 years his junior, enchanted by his charm and impressed with his musical success. I had never taken one of his classes. But when we bumped into each other in the tight-knit music department where I was working toward a bachelor’s degree, even his most casual acknowledgment caused my heart to pound. During that spring semester, after long hours practising jazz phrases, I regularly dragged my girlfriends to a bar where he performed. His playing was confident and fluid. As I listened, the other patrons and musicians dissolved from the room; he seemed to be performing only for me. I imagined that our eyes, full of lust, were locked as he made perfect, seductive music. My crush was complete.

The gaze I felt upon me as I danced in the crowd of club-goers was not only in my imagination. He had first noticed me the previous summer at a party, after I’d just returned from backpacking in Thailand, tanned and overflowing with stories about elephants and Buddhist monks. Toward the end of the academic year, I showed up alone at one of his gigs and hung around afterwards chatting with the other musicians as they cleared the stage. He offered me a ride home, then invited me for a drink the next evening. And thus our romance began.

That the teacher of my affections—whom I will call Peter for this article—was a faculty member at my school did not discourage me from acting on my attraction. I did not feel that my adoration was being taken advantage of. I considered myself an adult capable of making judgments about my love life. Never did it occur to me that I might be a victim of sexual harassment. Yet now, years later, I realize that in the eyes of administrators and harassment advisers at many universities, my experience would be exactly that—the exploitation of a young female student and an abuse of the trust put in professors.

Student-teacher love has been around since Socrates, but the general consensus now is that teaching must be platonic to be respectable. So should my university have protected me from a relationship that was exploitative by definition? Or, as some scholars argue, does prohibiting the erotic from entering the classroom actually make pedagogy worse?

Bernard is a cheap, arrogant English professor and failed novelist who neglects his more successful writer wife, scoffs at “philistines” and has sex with his vivacious student Lili. His character in the movie The Squid and the Whale is the archetype of the pop culture professor: snobbish, bitter and middle-aged, seething with unrealized ambition and kicking against the dullness of suburban life, he preys on students to get the recognition he no longer commands from peers or family.

Why has this stereotype found such a secure place in the popular imagination? William Deresiewicz, a former English professor at Yale University, considers the question in The American Scholar in a controversial 2007 paper called “Love on campus.” He writes that the concept of “universities as dens of vice, where creepy middle-aged men lie in wait for nubile young women,” arose as women became increasingly visible on campus—first when co-ed colleges became common, then as women asserted their sexuality in the 1960s. The feminist crusade against sexual harassment in the 1980s made universities especially sensitive to faculty conduct since they were among the public institutions most responsive to feminism.