A Myth on Campus
No, Education Is Not Erotic
This article is part of Philomela’s Tapestry, a series designed to address issues of harassment in the fields that study Greco-Roman antiquity.
I was going to start with a lyrical description of the academic life fantasy: springtime on the quad; a professor in a tweed jacket with elbow patches; slightly rumpled Oxford shirts and pleated skirts; big questions and little glances; open books and open minds; conversations that you wish could go on forever (and sometimes they seem to); the air crackling with the electricity of intellectual discovery, which feels a lot like arousal — or is that what it is?
Then I realized I could just embed this clip:
I don’t buy the remarkably persistent idea that education is erotic. I think that it’s a natural result of romanticizing academic life to the point of conflating it with romance; that the people who argue that intellectualism and eroticism are inextricable take the scene I described above — and themselves — just a bit too seriously. Nevertheless, it’s worth examining what I call the Myth of Erotic Education, because it provides fascinating insights into power in the academy.
Some characteristics of people who propagate the Myth of Erotic Education: professors in the humanities, at elite institutions (as Corey Robin points out), will invariably invoke Socrates and Alcibiades.
Did I mention that they’re professors?
Marta Figlerowicz and Ayesha Ramachandran, who co-wrote a piece on “the erotic dimension of mentorship” in the Boston Review this April, are professors of comparative literature at Yale University. The erotics of mentorship, they claim, has recently become “taboo to discuss.” (I feel the same way about that as I do about the ideas of the Intellectual Dark Web: for something allegedly taboo beyond discussion, it sure comes up a lot!) They argue that we need to admit that “erotic ambiguities” exist in the classroom, and allow students to explore them, precisely in order to protect students from exploitation. But their entire case rests on describing their own experiences of the academy as if they’re universal (and invoking Socrates and Alcibiades), a conflation that becomes especially apparent, and especially troubling, in light of how they gloss over other perspectives:
We both think often of these difficulties as we struggle to mentor and support our students at Yale. As young faculty members, we remain uncomfortably aware of having sought out meetings in hallways and over drinks after inspiring lectures in which the excitement of the conversation was clearly tinged with something more — a shiver of heightened awareness, intensity, and passion that was both intellectual and sexual, perhaps sexual because intellectual.
Reading this part, I wondered how clear that tinge was to everybody in the hallway. Did they ask? (“Hey, you felt an intellectual and sexual shiver too, right?”) It’s possible, although the question strikes me, prude that I am, as inappropriate. Or did they just assume? If they’re assuming that their students experience what they experienced, does this insistence on “something more” not become one of those situations where people with more power impose an interpretation on people with less power? In an American Scholar essay on “why we should understand, and even encourage, a certain sort of erotic intensity between student and professor” (in which he invokes Socrates and Alcibiades), former professor William Deresiewicz mentions just one graduate student, whom he creepily asks if she wanted to have sex with an instructor she had a crush on: “‘No,’ she says, ‘I wanted to have brain sex with him.’”
The dearth of student voices in a conversation supposedly about professors and students should be a red flag. In the end, professors are the ones with the power to exploit a crush or not; the extent to which professors also dominate the narrative should make us question whether eroticism in education is even real, or something they project onto their students. In another piece, this time on the Avital Ronell scandal, Robin quotes Judith Shklar to warn against this sleight of hand: “Before you buy the story of shared codes and customs, make sure to hear from the people on the lower rungs, when they are far away from the higher rungs, to see how shared that code truly is.”
The part about “when they are far away from the higher rungs” is important: professors were once graduate students. It is easy for them to believe that all students feel as they did when they were preparing for this career. But the majority of students are not grad students; they’re preparing for other careers, so they won’t necessarily have the same reverence for the professoriate. And even grad students, who do mostly hope to become professors, don’t always believe the Myth of Erotic Education.
It bothers me that in these discussions of the academy’s irrepressible sexual magnetism, students barely figure into the narrative, except as interlocutors for their professors’ erotic exchanges. The more pressing concern of erotic educators is their own allure.
For the myth that drives these arguments is that the university is an elevated realm and professors, its keepers. This is why an unbelievable degree of self-satisfaction permeates them. (In my limited experience, the people who are most prone to having romantic notions about the university are the people who have spent none of their adult years outside of it, because they lack any points of comparison.) Figlerowicz and Ramachandran write — incorrectly — that “there are perhaps no places more vulnerable to the intertwining of work and romance than colleges and universities. Indeed, a defining characteristic of university life is the entanglement of stimulating ideas and charismatic people.” In a 1993 Harper’s round table on new rules against faculty-student romances, William Kerrigan says, “there is a kind of student I’ve come across in my career who was working through something only a professor could help her with. I’m talking about a female student who, for one reason or another, has unnaturally prolonged her virginity.” (You get where he’s going with this.)
It’s okay to take pride, even a lot of pride, in what you do, although I think that it’s generally healthy to maintain a sense of proportion about one’s work. But the refusal to see the university as a normal workplace—a key element of the Myth of Erotic Education—exacerbates academia’s worst tendencies.
Would erotic educators write such things about any other work environment? Would they write about, say, the need to acknowledge eroticism between law firm partners and first-year associates? Perhaps, but I’m skeptical, given how they often try to explain educational eros through the hot-and-heavy nature of teaching. (But then why don’t professors in the sciences or social sciences ever write pieces about erotic education? Don’t they teach too?) No, I suspect that we understand that a law firm partner wields power over an associate’s future and means for survival. But not everybody accepts the same about professors and students; there is always a voice in the back decrying attempts to address the power differential as paternalistic, patronizing, infantilizing.
There’s a difference between sexual attraction being present in the academy and being an indelible feature of learning. And there’s no reason to believe that it’s more present in the academy than anywhere else — you also hear about people transferring feelings to their therapist or divorce lawyer, but I have yet to read a piece on the erotics of psychotherapy or family law. (The idea behind transference is that such feelings can come up, but you should deal with them in a way that’s appropriate for a professional context.) It is unsurprising that erotic educators prefer to rely on texts and pop culture rather than empirical evidence from present-day, real-life universities.
There’s also a difference between eroticism in education being normalized and it being okay. When it comes to the conflation of normalization and moral correctness, I think of Rebecca Solnit’s observation of the Bay Area in the 1970s and the attitude toward adult men dating underage girls (posted on Facebook; excerpted by Jia Tolentino in Jezebel):
The culture was sort of snickeringly approving of the pursuit of underage girls (and the illegal argument doesn’t carry that much weight; smoking pot is also illegal; it’s about the immorality of power imbalance and rape culture). It was completely normalized. Like child marriage in some times and places. Which doesn’t make it okay, but means that, unlike a man engaged in the pursuit of a minor today, there was virtually no discourse about why this might be wrong.
Similarly, it may be true that professors sleep with students in movies like Irrational Man and novels like On Beauty. It may also be true that some happy marriages have come out of professor-student relationships — some of those couples may even be your friends. But that doesn’t make it okay. Dismantling the Myth will have to involve a more sophisticated conversation about what we’ve come to accept as normal and what we want universities to look like.
But sometimes professors and students are attracted to each other. What do we make of that? Not much — sparks can fly between people who work in close quarters. And yes, people can find authority attractive. (Hell, on the college debate circuit, we would joke about Good Debater Syndrome, or GDS — when a particularly talented debater suddenly seemed attractive beyond their actual nerdiness. And we were all very nerdy.) This is not an untold tale of passions too lofty for ordinary minds to grasp. This is the old, boring story of people being attracted to power. That is why it happens everywhere.
Without the Myth, sexy professors have to face an unsexy reality: academia isn’t as special as they want to think it is; they have a job, like any other job. Sex isn’t unique to universities, nor are charismatic people, nor is passion for one’s work. (Nor, incidentally, is abuse.) Deresiewicz writes regarding “brain sex”: “And this is why we put up with the mediocre pay and the cultural contempt, not to mention the myriad indignities of graduate school and the tenure process.” What’s left for him when you take away the brain sex?
A lot, I would say. Professors can (and do) find fulfillment in helping students acquire knowledge — in the way a lawyer can feel satisfaction when closing a deal or a hairdresser can be proud of pulling off a coiffure. In other words, the worker’s pride in a job well done. The impulse to sex this up reveals another facet of the elitism: erotic educators, who usually hold plum positions at top universities, don’t want to believe that their jobs are just like everyone else’s.
If there is any eroticism in education, it’s a bug, not a feature, as computer programmers don’t say. Or: it’s a symptom of a larger problem, people who fetishize power coexisting with people who suffer from it — and sometimes, people suffering from power fetishizing it all the same.
As a classicist, I’m struck by how the word that believers in the Myth reach for is always eros (“The Erotics of Mentorship,” “erotic intensity”) not philia or even the Latin amor — other words that could describe love if that’s what they mean. Unlike philia (or agape or storge), eros has a sexual dimension; what is at stake is not love but sex. In fact Plato, the guy who’s responsible for all of the Symposium references, considered eros to be not reciprocated love but a kind of unfulfilled desire. And the erastes-eromenos dynamic between Socrates and Alcibiades presumes active and passive roles, even from a grammatical standpoint — it’s not for equals. Inequality is baked into the Myth.
I guess the fixation on sex is consistent with the reproductive undertone of the conversation: the professor lavishes attention on the student, and maybe later ravishes the student, in order to create a likeness of themselves that can inherit their space in the academy and preserve their legacy. (Putting the Vater in Doktorvater.) But as long as the vast majority of the gatekeepers are white men at elite institutions, people outside of that one demographic are going to lose under this procreative model. What we call “mentorship” often comes in the form of older white men taking younger white men under their wing — and for a drink at the pub to banter as boys do once the broads head home. You might think that the answer is to stop those older white men. But #MeToo has shown that it’s not so simple: pointing out the problems with brocialization can prompt men to say that they’re scared of mentoring women because they might be accused of sexual harassment.
The dominance of eros betrays another myth: the myth that you can’t have intimate relationships that do not involve being intimate, whether through brain sex or actual sex. This myth feeds into a general tendency to prioritize sex over the many other ways that people meaningfully relate to each other, and to other things. If you love your friends as much as or more than your partner, for instance, you must be doing your relationship wrong; that’s a violation of the hierarchy. When applied to education, eros is, more than anything, shorthand for an intensity greater than usual — if you love your work, that’s philia, but if you really love your work, that can only be eros.
This shorthand, like all shorthand, is convenient yet imprecise. It’s not that education is actually erotic. It’s that we lack the language, and maybe also the imagination, for describing loves — even intense loves — that aren’t sexual, and we resort to sexual language because that’s what we know. I’m reminded of Melissa Gira Grant’s observation that the reactions to #MeToo emphasize sex at the expense of exposing the system at work: “Sex has overshadowed harassment.” Sex is doing some overshadowing here, too.
In their essay, Figlerowicz and Ramachandran point to the implementation of coeducation (they don’t specify where) as an example of how eroticism can be a force for good: “The gradual inclusion of women into the humanist project of universal education triggered a new conjunction of intellectual and erotic energies that now seems utterly normative, but which was transgressive and titillating for centuries. […] Pedagogical Eros catalyzes both intellectual and social transformations.” It’s unclear why the mere fact that men and women had an easier time sleeping together on the same campus means that eros is at all responsible for the fruits of coeducation, and the fixation on sex clouds the simpler, more logical explanation: that intellectual and social transformations happened because women were there, and they contributed.
The lack of imagination also manifests in the difficulties that erotic educators seem to have thinking outside of strict dyads: professor and student, mind and body, sexually charged vitality and completely soulless torpor. But in actuality, there are acres of middle ground. Even if eroticism in education were a thing, why would its removal be such a huge loss, anyway? People experience love of many kinds in many shapes and don’t rank them on the same scale. Professors and students could interact affectionately and in intellectually fulfilling ways that don’t have any erotic dimension — and they do, every day.
And all of this hinges on the assumption that a close relationship with your professor is ideal or at least desirable — which may be a myth too. I was, still am, friendly with some of my professors (though I didn’t perceive any sexiness in the air, and I hope they agree), but I’m hesitant to say that a student who wasn’t received an inferior education. Really, where my peers got screwed over was not a lack of hothouse mentorship but professors failing at the nuts and bolts of their job: not responding to urgent emails, refusing to read drafts, leaving comments on the wrong draft, not submitting references on time. There’s no amount of individualized attention that can compensate for the neglect of basic responsibilities, and a little competency goes a long way. Nor is a dyad necessary for intellectual productivity — people work just as well and sometimes better as a group, such as in a seminar setting.
You could even go a step further and argue that, beyond a certain point, close mentorship does more harm than good; what makes mentorship effective is distance rather than closeness. Distance ensures that boundaries both exist and aren’t crossed. It makes democratization of a professor’s energy not just more likely, but possible. It frees up headspace so that professors and students can better concentrate on what they’re at the university to do: their work.
I hate to use this line, but — I looked up philia in the dictionary, and the first definition reads (emphasis mine) “affectionate regard, friendship, usu. btw. equals.” In a way, eros is the proper word, because the proponents of erotic education are not describing affection on an equal playing field. Ultimately, the greatest myth at work here has to do with the distribution of power. The unfortunate truth is that there are some people within the academy who do not fully understand that professors have power over students, who perhaps do not wish to understand because that would disrupt certain fantasies of a university that is free from the earthly problems of lowlier workplaces. But a myth is just that: a myth. It’s a reflection of concerns, not reality, although it can influence reality all the same. It may be time to put this myth to rest.
And yet, the Myth of Erotic Education is not just a myth. There is real harm in the refusal to accept power differentials that goes beyond sex: senior scholars punching down on junior scholars; professors protecting each other over their students; covert, concerted efforts to keep power in the hands of the few. Not to mention professors assuming that they can speak for their students.
People say that sexual harassment and assault are about not sex, but power. For all the talk about eros, the Myth is not really about sex either; it is much more about ego and the fantasy that feeds it. As long as we are too fragile to acknowledge this, the culture will persist.
What if the culture didn’t have to persist? What if we dispensed of the fantasy and started treating the university as a workplace (like any other workplace)? A place where people approached their work with a sense of proportion, and each other with a healthy mix of warmth and distance?
It’s not sexy. It won’t sell. But unlike the Myth, it’s an idea that I actually buy.
Yung In Chae is the Editor-at-Large of Eidolon. She received an A.B. in Classics from Princeton University and an MPhil in Classics from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.
