Sex and the Single Professor IV; or, All Things Considered

Astute WordPressers may realize, based on the formatting of this post, that I have typed this in Microsoft Word and pasted it hither.  That should let you all know the high degree of seriousness with which I approach today’s subject.

With such sobriety in mind, let me begin with a shocking proposition:  sometimes English professors have sex.  Perhaps they do not do so with the same frequency or ethical bankruptcy that they exhibit in the movies–I’m talking to you, Kinnear–but they have sex nonetheless.  If they did not, we would all be forced to entertain the notion that they have a secret pipeline to surprisingly affordable black market children.  I would rather not walk down that dark corridor of inquiry.

Are you shocked and appalled, dear Reader?  I hope so, for I have another scandalous revelation in store:  sometimes I have sex, too.  After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Today I’m wading into peculiar territory, partly because I hinted to Ramblin’ Gal down in the comments column a few days ago that I’d give it a try, partly because I promised I would when last I wrote, and partly because (searches for academic job market tidbits aside) no other subject seems to bring readers to my ramblings with such consistency.  The topmost keywords in my Search Terms queue, in fact, include “sex,” “professor,” and “single” in one arrangement or another.  There’s apparently a fascination with the subject, and I think a response of some kind is in order.  I’m probably not the guy who ought to give it, but that’s never stopped me before.

More importantly, I’m going to brace the subject because I’m reluctant to do so.  One of my ambitions this year is to shake off some of the characteristic cowardice that troubles my writing.  I’m not wily in the ways of first-person confession quite yet, but I think it might be bracing to attempt a subject that naturally verges on both personal practice as well as more general professional/ethical issues.  What I lack in wisdom I must make up for with gumption, so today I give myself license to be licentious.

Okey dokey?  Here we go.

To prepare for the post I Googled a few comparable keywords myself to see what might turn up.  There are more than a few formal treatments of the subject (I planned to throw out some links for your consideration, but my on-access scanners are catching more pop-ups and spyware than I care to inflict upon you), though the avid searcher might notice that such articles and essays are overwhelmingly outnumbered by message board questions and confessions.  I’m encouraged by that proliferation of informal discourse, if only because it suggests that students and profs alike have support and sympathy at their disposal.  While there are perhaps some respondents who ought not be dispensing advice (on anything, ever), the regularity with which the subject is sublimated, secreted, or suppressed makes such exchanges indispensable.  Faced with such a supercharged situation, to whom would you turn?  If your answer is “this jaunty blog,” then I’m afraid hell has come to Frogtown.

Speaking ex cathedra, I’ll go on record saying that certain expressions of professorial sexuality are unquestionably wrong.  There are unscrupulous profs who will abuse their provisional power to leverage sex, and there are also those who view the student body as a buffet, with each semester introducing a new course of nubiles and/or viriles they might sample.  I’m invariably opposed to any kind of interaction that treats students as less than human, and approaching them as chattel or cattle represents a disgusting abrogation of the professorial trust.

Alas, such specimens of malfeasance are appallingly common.  When you’ve drifted through as many institutional contexts as I have, you’ll discover that professional ethics sometimes fall by the wayside.  I know of at least three cases in which students were pressured to trade sex for grades, and in one of those cases the influence was all but transparent.  (Lest you think me a horrid person for failing to address these injustices, I should note here that I’m being purposely evasive about circumstances and consequences for reasons I cannot readily explain.)  I know of a prof who essentially stalked a student for an entire semester, which is creepy in a variety of ways.  Even more unnervingly, at one of my scholarly stops I learned of a coffee shop renowned for facilitating professor-student hook-ups.  I was more than a little bewigginsed when I learned of its existence from a peer, heard the pattern of interaction that occurs at said shop described in the course of classroom discussion, and heard the reputation of the place later corroborated by another student as a bit of common knowledge.  I have nothing against lust, really (as deadly sins goes, it’s pretty wizard), but when mixed with power, pathology, and predatory practice, it’s just as ugly with academics as it is with anyone else.

That being said, I think it’s reasonable (if not altogether necessary) to make allowances for attraction, like-mindedness, and maybe even love.  Heck, given the mammalian desire to disseminate my genetic materials, who am I to argue against the power of an effective hindquarter display, intermittent doses of dopamine, and the activation of the caudate nucleus?  I reckon I’m just an old-fashioned guy.  I’ll develop this theme momentarily in terms of student-professor interactions and my own sensibilities, but I’d like to flesh out the policy side of the equation first.  A few universities prohibit sexual relationships of any kind, but quite a few more (CMU included) have approached the possibility with the kind of legal language we all enjoy.

Accordingly, let’s get sexy for a moment.  Slip into something more comfortable and let me drop a little policy on you.

CMU offers a statement on consensual relationships (you can read it over here) that I think fairly reflects the central and peripheral phenomena that deserve to be addressed.   The mechanics, however, strike me as somewhat problematic.  Granted standards of integrity and the usual claims to the pursuit of happiness, it seems critical to acknowledge the prospect of such relationships while divorcing them from authority and institutional power; the subsequent language, however, opens up an interpretive space in which just about all behavior could conceivably be considered an improper exercise of authority.  (Let us not consider the throwaway line regarding exclusions that apply to married couples; that’s a can of worms for another day.)  If the language is not altogether dissuasive, it tends to make the complexion of such relationships–of any kind that might involve grades, future employment opportunities, or input into the evaluation of work or performance (per guideline #1), of any kind that might change in terms of authority differential over time (per #5), or of any kind that might be perceived by others as non-consensual (per #6)–a function of institutional appraisal and discretion.  Transparency has been adopted as the necessary protective and/or corrective mechanism at CMU, and were I to dally with suppositional Sally in some consensual context I would be obliged to disclose said dalliance to my chair and my dean.  They would then ostensibly work with me to ensure that the lines of my personal world and professional power never get tangled, although doing so would effectively install them as arbiters of appropriateness, such as it is. 

In theory I would be in the clear so long as I was candid about the affiliation afoot; in practice, I would guess that the prospect of policing might be a bit more involved.  I’ll gloss that suspicion momentarily, but in the interest of full disclosure I’ll confess that I find such policies problematically elastic.  I have been affiliated with six institutions as a student and a teacher, and I have seen those lines crossed (and multiple times, sometimes flagrantly) at all six places.  While I appreciate such policies from a legal point of view-it covers the university’s butt in all the requisite ways-the specter of fitting, permissible discipline haunts the prospect of implementation.  It’s hard to feel good about a rule when any academic will find herself surrounded by exceptions to it.

So much for quasi-objectivity; let’s talk subjective ethics.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s that pre-moistened towelettes are just about useless underwater.  If there’s another, it’s that chicks dig subjective ethics.  In any case I’m pushing 1500 words, and it’s high time I talked about me.

To begin, I don’t think there’s any way around the problems of perception that orbit student-professor relationships, no matter their nature.  The university grapevine works like a bad tabloid:  “scandal” spreads like wildfire and appears beside the bat-boy on the front page; corrections, if they arrive, are relegated to the fine print.  My own experience bears this out to a tragicomic degree.  I was once seen palming a student cash in the morning, and by the afternoon we had been driven halfway to Scandal City.  Attentive observers might have noted that the student in question was nattily dressed and hobbling around on a shoe with a broken heel (about an hour before a job interview), but a short-term loan for a pair of black pumps isn’t much of a story.  The same holds true for the intimate dinner I had with a graduate student once upon a time, never mind that our ersatz intimacy was the result of an e-mail mix-up that sent the three other grad students who were supposed to join us to the wrong restaurant.  I’d like to tell you that I had a ménage à cinq in the offing, but I’m afraid that most of our intimate whispers were devoted to Ph.D. applications. 

I treat the subject casually, but I actually found myself in the Frown of Power soon after this dinnertime debacle.  As Ramblin’ Gal notes, there are sometimes gender disparities in terms of faculty contact with their students, and at least some of them can be attributed to experiences like mine.  In my case, I can only cop to another kind of cowardice:  when it comes to female students, it sometimes seems wise to err on the side of caution in terms of personal contact.  While I know full well that the thought process may be irrational–sexual identity and marital status have never been good guarantors of ethical behavior–as a straight single feller I feel I ought to practice greater tactical reserve, no matter how warm my regard or genuine my affection for the women I’m working with.   Perception is often as good as reality in academic settings, even if the realities themselves sometimes go un- or under- acknowledged. 

And those realities?  Well, I reckon they’re just as complicated as you might expect.  A few hundred paragraphs ago, I mentioned that some allowances are probably necessary; to paraphrase in a grammatically inelegant way, I am not one to admit impediments to the marriage of true minds.  Natheless, I’ll add two codicils straightaway.  I don’t think such a marriage (metaphorically speaking) is likely to emerge after just a few weeks of interaction; mutual consent at that stage is probably just an alignment of lust on one side and infatuation on the other.  Additionally, all questions of policy aside, if there’s a real spark there, a real affinity, I would hope it would be strong enough to sustain our star-crossed would-be lovers for a month or two.  No matter how authentic or powerful the initial attraction, I think it’s prudent to map the dynamics of a budding relationship without grades or other potential conflicts of interest dotting the landscape. 

It’s also not a bad idea to take a serious look at those dynamics in the cold light of day.  Assuming freedom from the inhibiting factors I’ve already glossed, what motivates and sustains the connection?  From a professorial standpoint, I think dating (to frame things in terms of Ramblin’ Gal’s query) ought to look a little something like, well, dating.  I’m admittedly a caretaker personality, but I think there should probably be some real affection, some nurturance, some active attention to the student’s welfare-to the woman’s welfare.  If you want to go ahead and get all adult about it (and the keyword searches suggest that you do), I’d even go so far as to extend those sentiments to a primarily sexual relationship.  I think there can be healthy interactions on that level as well, so long as they’re conducted in a spirit of conscious consideration and mutual respect.  That’s not advocacy, by the way, just an effort to grapple with the likeliest permutation of this set of realities.

The attractions between professors and students tend to be fairly complex to begin with, and I feel like I’m giving the matter short shrift no matter how I address it.  There’s a physical dimension, of course–I just popped over to ratemyprofessors.com to check out the evals of some of my more dashing colleagues; one nets a “meow” for his hair, while another earns props and chili peppers for being “easy on the eyes”–and I wouldn’t underestimate the novelty of intelligence as a variable in the usual equation.  There are plenty of intelligent folks in the world, but profs are given license to be conspicuously so (and I suspect it doesn’t hurt that English profs get to talk about poetry and related technologies of woo-pitchery).  For some, the play of power dynamics will add a little extra spice; even if you strip away all the real machinery of professorial authority, the residue of such authority is not without its charms.  I am reminded of a fellow named Paul I knew in college, a senior who had surrounded himself with a coterie of fetching young freshmen because he was the stud of the Psychology program–he got to hang with the professors, he got the cool lab, he got to proctor the occasional exam.  Paul struck me as a curious looking fellow, empirically speaking, but a combination of variables afforded him a certain je ne sais quoi.  What I think happens more often than not in the dynamics between professors and students is something fairly life-affirming.  The prof might well find himself desired in the aggregate, as a presence, a mind, even a body of work; the student, reflexively speaking, may experience a qualitatively different kind of desire than that she normally elicits from her peers.  That’s more than a bit speculative on my part, but I’ve seen enough surprising pairings between profs and students to think that assessment’s somewhere near the mark.

That will have to do for the time being.  I was going to reveal salacious secrets from my own wiggedy world (if only to explain those curious cries that come from my Dungeon of Despair in the Cabaña of the Damned), but I figure 2500 words is about 2250 words longer than most folks are willing to read.  Should you make it this far, please let me know if anything strikes you as scandalous or libelous; I’ve tried to err on the side of decency, but I’d rather not get fired if I can help it.

Questions?  Comments?  Fire away.  And thanks, as always, for reading.