Love on Campus
By William Deresiewicz The American Scholar, Summer 2007
Edited by Andy Ross
ALook at recent movies about academics, and a pattern emerges. If the image
of the absent-minded professor stood for benevolent unworldliness, what is
the meaning of the new academic stereotype? Why are so many of these failed
professors also failed writers? Why is professional futility so often
connected with sexual impropriety?
The answers can be found in the
way these movies typically unfold. The alcoholic, embittered, writer-manqué
English professor who neglects his family and seduces his students is a
figure of creative sterility, and he is creatively sterile because he loves
only himself. Hence his vanity, pomposity, and selfishness; his self-pity,
passivity, and resentment. Hence his ambition and failure. And thence his
lechery, for sleeping with his students is a sign not of virility but of
impotence.
Perhaps the most significant fact about the new academic
stereotype and the narrative paradigm in which it is typically situated is
that they are a way of articulating the superiority of female values to male
ones: of love, community, and self-sacrifice to ambition, success, and fame.
So why are academics regarded as the most appropriate instrument for
this lesson? The representative academic is always a professor of
humanities. Of course, there are plenty of science professors in movies and
books, but they are understood as scientists, not professors. Say the word
professor, and the popular mind conjures up the image of a
quotation-spouting bookworm. And it is that figure who has become an object
lesson in the vanity of ambition.
There are larger reasons for the
rise of the new academic stereotype. The existence of academia irritates
Americans' insistence on equality. At the same time, as American society has
become more meritocratic, people want that advantage for themselves or their
children. Universities are playing an ever-more conspicuous role in creating
the larger social hierarchy that everyone wants to climb.
But the one
respect in which the new academic stereotype departs most radically from
current reality has to do with sex. One of the things nearly all professors
in movies and novels have in common is that they sleep with their students.
Why has this idea of universities as dens of vice arisen in the last few
decades? First, coeducation. Coed colleges have existed since the early 19th
century, but the great wave of coeducation at the nation's elite private
schools did not hit until the late 1960s. Another upheaval was under way by
then: the sexual revolution. Suddenly, professors had access to large
numbers of young women, and just as suddenly, young women were asserting
their sexuality with new freedom and boldness. People drew the inevitable
conclusion.
The situation is heightened and made ironic by two other
recent developments. The baby-boom generation has put pressure on
universities to revert to acting in loco parentis. Professors are surrogate
parents, and the raising and casting out of the specter of the sexually
predatory academic may be a way of purging the anxiety that transaction
evokes. But the feminist campaign against sexual harassment has turned
universities into the most anxiously self-patrolled workplace in American
society.
Still, the relationship between professors and students can
indeed be intensely intimate, as our culture nervously suspects, but its
intimacy is an intimacy of the mind, or even an intimacy of the soul.
Love is a flame, and the good teacher raises in students a burning
desire for his or her approval and attention, his or her voice and presence,
that is erotic in its urgency and intensity. Students will sometimes mistake
this earthquake for sexual attraction. But the great majority of professors
understand that the art of teaching consists not only of arousing desire but
of redirecting it toward its proper object, from the teacher to the thing
taught.
All of this was known to Socrates, the greatest of teachers.
The Symposium, in which the brightest wits of Athens spend the night
drinking, discoursing on love, and lying on couches two by two, is charged
with sexual tension. But Socrates wants to teach his companions that the
beauty of souls is greater than the beauty of bodies.
Can there be a
culture less equipped than ours to receive these ideas? Sex is the god we
worship most fervently; to deny that it is the greatest of pleasures is to
commit cultural blasphemy. In any case, how can you have an eros of souls if
you don't have souls? Our inability to understand intimacy that is neither
sexual nor familial is linked to the impoverishment of our spiritual
vocabulary.
But sex and children, sexual intimacy and familial
intimacy, belong to us as creatures of nature, not as creators in culture.
After Rousseau and Darwin and Freud, we've become convinced that our natural
self is our truest one. To be natural, we believe, is to be healthy and
free. Culture is confinement and deformation. But the Greeks thought
otherwise.
For the Greeks, the teacher's relationship with the child
was more valuable and more intimate than the parents'. Your parents bring
you into nature, but your teacher brings you into culture. Natural
transmission is easy; any animal can do it. Cultural transmission is hard;
it takes a teacher. But Socrates also inaugurated a new idea about what
teaching means. His teaching wasn't cultural, it was counter-cultural.
Teaching is a subversive activity.
This is the kind of sex professors
are having with their students behind closed doors: brain sex. What attracts
professors to students is not their bodies but their souls. Young people are
still curious about ideas, still believe in their importance, their
redemptive power. Socrates says in the Symposium that the hardest thing
about being ignorant is that you're content with yourself, but for many kids
when they get to college, this is not yet true. They recognize themselves as
incomplete, and they recognize intuitively that completion comes through
eros. So they seek out professors with whom to have relationships. Teaching
is about mentorship, not instruction.
The Socratic relationship is so
profoundly disturbing to our culture that it must be defused before it can
be approached. The eros of souls has become the love that dare not speak its
name.
AR From my experience at both
ends of teaching at university level, I can confirm that this eros of souls
is really what it's all about. Igniting that love of ideas makes it all
worthwhile. People who confuse this with physical sex are getting it all
wrong.


|