This semester I’m teaching a course on church history. It’s the first seminary-level course I’ve taught, and despite its attendant challenges, I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve especially enjoyed the presence of “Lydia” in class. Young, pretty, tall and willowy with long light-brown hair, she’s become the object of many a fantasy. On more than one occasion, I’ve desired to bend her over a desk.
“The cultural fascination with professor-student affairs seems to have grown in step with policies restricting them,” Amia Srinivasan wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece. She notes that the vast majority of institutions of higher education now have policies prohibiting even “consensual” sexual relationships between students and faculty. Because of the inherent power dynamics involved (the logic behind these policies goes), it is impossible for these affairs to be truly consensual. Srinivasan wants to move beyond the paradigm of consent, however, and examine the issue from an academic perspective. “Rather, it is whether, when professors sleep or date their students, real teaching is possible.”
Undoubtedly were I to have sex with Lydia, the pedagogical relationship between us would be inexorably altered. For instance, in gratitude for her sexual availability, I might be tempted to grant her a higher grade than she may deserve. (One escort I visited told me of the how she seduced her accounting professor. Needless to say, she got an A.) More fundamentally, our sexual partnership would cloud our status as scholars. The desire for learning can be improperly channeled into sexual desire. Srinivasan concludes, “The teacher who allows his student’s desire to settle on him as an object, or the teacher who actively makes himself the object of her desire, has failed in his role as a teacher.”
Like the therapeutic relationship, the pedagogical relationship can be sexually charged. “[T]eacher and student are not just abstract intelligences, but embodied creatures,” Srinivasan writes. A college instructor in Francine Prose’s novel Blue Angel observes, “There’s something erotic about the act of teaching, all that information streaming back and forth like some bodily fluid. Doesn’t Genesis trace sex to that first bite of the apple, not the fruit from just any tree, but the Tree of Knowledge?” Having taught in the church and now in an academic setting, I can personally attest to this erotic charge. Laura Miller wrote a few years ago in The New Republic, “Students sometimes nurse crushes on their teachers, and teachers sometimes lust after their pupils; these are facts of life so commonplace as to have become the ultimate cliché: a porn motif.” Philosopher Stephen Hicks holds open the possibility of an ethical sexual relationship between a professor and a graduate student as long as there is “a real commitment by both to the integrity of the educational experience.” My experience with sexuality, however, is that it can obliterate all other values. My interest in Dr. Sheffield, especially when she wears her black boots, admittedly transcends my wanting to acquire her knowledge about the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls. (As a student, I confess that I’d rather “know” her intimately than learn more about the Essenes.)
A dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy came from Christina Nehring in Harper’s twenty years ago. In a disquisition on “academic eros,” she described the erotic energy that fuels much academic work: “To say that chemistry between a student and a teacher distracts from learning is like saying that color distracts from seeing. It does not distract; it enlivens, enhances, intensifies….” She went on to say that “sex is a great ‘leveler.'” That is, sex can open up communication between persons of dissimilar backgrounds and broaden perspectives. History is laden with notable scholarly lovers, from Heloise and Abelard to Hannah Arendt and Martin Heiddegger. Or as one student put it in a Cosmopolitan article entitled I Hooked Up With My Professor!, “My school prides itself on cultivating close student-professor relationships. Let’s just say it succeeded. Oh, and I got an A in the class.”
The prohibition of these relationships paradoxically heightens their allure. Knowing that a tryst with Lydia is verboten makes me want to bend her over the desk that much more.
Lutheran Guilt 