The Professor
“A Yes Doesn’t Mean Yes If You Can’t Say No”
This article is part of Philomela’s Tapestry, a series designed to address issues of harassment in the fields that study Greco-Roman antiquity.
The gaps between the bricks of the campus’ sidewalks flayed the leather off the heels of my first pair of grown-up pumps. I couldn’t afford to ruin more shoes, so I mastered a type of geisha walk, tottering forward with small steps, balancing on the balls of my feet, my head bowed.
But on the day the Professor first told me to come to his office, I forgot to look where I was going. My heel plunged into a crack and stuck fast. I was only in the first year of my PhD program. Why did someone so distinguished want to talk to me? I knelt down and tugged my shoe loose, nearly spilling the espresso the Professor had ordered me to bring him. I hadn’t even known that to-go cups came in sizes that small.
Fifteen years later, I got an email from one of the Professor’s current graduate students. She said that he was sexually harassing her and asked if I had any similar experiences. I didn’t know what to reply. That I used to put on my highest heels to meet with him? That I had wanted him to want me?
I was 21 years old when I met the Professor. I had grown up in Arizona, finished college early, and gone straight into an Ivy League graduate program. I was still in the process of shedding an Evangelical Christian upbringing. I no longer believed that sex was shameful, but I was still a virgin. And suddenly I was spending most of my days looking at thousands of penises.
I wanted to write my dissertation about ancient Greek painted vases. That year, I looked at tens of thousands of them illustrated on the flaking pages of the four hundred volumes of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. On the vases, people in all combinations of age, number, and sex enjoyed each other’s bodies in what seemed to me to be quite innovative ways. But the instructor for my Greek art class only once acknowledged the existence of sex, when he explained that the Greeks had often painted their vases with mythological scenes of satyrs who want to “make love” to nymphs. Behind him, a slide projected an orgy twenty feet tall, with satyrs running to penetrate nymphs or donkeys or whatever they could catch.
I was overwhelmed by the sensuality that everyone else seemed to ignore — until, that is, I met the Professor. He taught in another department, in a field parallel to but separate from my own. I took a course he was teaching about social history. He quoted ancient poetry about female desire. He explained how changes in divorce law increased women’s freedom and power in the ancient world. “When I was your age, I thought that when I was my age I would no longer be quite so obsessed with sex,” he said on the first day of class, waving his arms — his hands sometimes smacked into students who sat too close to him at the seminar table. “But this, I have found, is not true.”
I thought he was a little creepy, but I also liked that he explained why he chose what he studied. None of my other professors did that, or talked about their personal lives at all. I started staying after class to ask the Professor more questions. Soon, he told me to come to his office so we could talk more. Soon, we were meeting after every class.
While we talked, he would swing his legs up over the arm of his wooden desk chair. The fabric of his baggy suit pants pulled taut against his gaunt knees. He wore skinny ties that looked like the ones English schoolboys wore in the ‘50’s. In fact, he had been an English schoolboy in the ‘50’s. His accent remained impeccably Oxonian. I wrote in my diary that he explained that he had moved to America long ago because he found the women to be “much more open.”
He was tall and his shoulders folded forward after many decades of hunching over books. When he stood close to me, he seemed about to swallow me up. Especially when he dropped his voice low and asked “How are you?” in a way that made me think that he cared about the answer.
During the summer after my first year of graduate school, I emerged from the library to a voicemail message from the Professor. “I have a big favor to ask of you, and it needs to be transacted in person,” he said. “Sorry to be so ambiguous, but please call me.”
I wondered what kind of a favor it could be to make him so hesitant to describe it in a message, but still, I called him back. He told me that he was going to Europe for the rest of the summer and asked me to run his car once a week so that the battery wouldn’t die. He told me to come to his apartment at nine that night to get the keys.
Although I had worn jeans instead of my usual skirt, and my hair was sopping from an unexpected rainstorm, when I came to his door he raised an eyebrow and told me that I looked like a siren. He handed me the keys and asked if I wanted some whiskey.
I had never had whiskey before. I said yes. He brought it to me in a tiny glass, saying that if he had brought a bigger one “you would have suspected me of evil intentions.” I had been afraid the whiskey would taste like paint thinner. I was relieved it tasted like paint thinner with a hint of orange.
I said yes to the whiskey because I was trying to open myself to new experiences and new tastes. I wanted to grow up, to leave my past behind, to become a new person. The Professor treated me like the person I wanted to be: a woman who was both smart and beautiful.
The Professor finished his whiskey and got up to pour us another round. When he came back with the bottle, he explained that he had just gotten the results from a round of medical tests, during which his doctor had told him not to have sex. The tests showed that nothing was wrong with him, and he complained about the pointlessness of his enforced restraint. I changed the subject and told him that I had been reading Schopenhauer’s “Metaphysics of Love.” He said that instead of philosophizing about sex, I should, like him, simply explore its pleasures.
Nothing happened that night, but, after the Professor came back from his summer away, I went to his office to give him back his car keys. He took them and said, “Come here.” I did.
We slept together perhaps ten times over the next several years. I found it revolting and yet also exciting. Like drinking whiskey, sleeping with him seemed like a grown-up thing to do. I dismissed my discomfort and told myself that I was in the process of acquiring a new taste.
The Professor also kept asking me to do more favors. I ran errands, helped with his research, and went to his apartment while he was traveling to fetch books overdue at the library.
For years, I had said yes to the Professor. Now, could I help someone who had said no?
As I thought about how to respond to the student’s email, I worried about what would happen if I told the story I had been so careful to hide. People might call me a whore. People might call me a fraud — might say that all my scholarly success, including my current professorship, is attributable to sleeping with the Professor. People might call me all the names I’ve called myself over the years.
I also worried that my story might do the student more harm than good. The Professor could use me to argue that he only had relationships with willing partners, implying that she had wanted his attention and only later changed her mind.
I never replied.
Eventually, the graduate student sued the university for tolerating the Professor’s harassment. Her lawyers had found other former female students who all described a pattern: the Professor had moved from talking to them about scholarship on the history of sexuality to describing his own sex life to asking them for sex. The Professor had a checklist of seduction techniques. I had let him keep ticking off the boxes until we got to the end.
The women who participated in the lawsuit had all chosen to turn him down. Several accused him of retaliating against them by denigrating their intellectual merits to other professors. The student who sued said that he had not listened to her refusals, and had done things like touch her breast against her will.
After a few months, the lawsuit settled. The Professor, who had been on paid leave, agreed to retire. Shortly after, I was awarded tenure and got graduate students of my own. They speak enthusiastically in class and want to meet with me afterwards to talk about my work. After 15 years of thinking that my work wasn’t any good at all (graduate school) or not good enough (pre-tenure), I have entered into a paradise of praise. A seeming reward for my pain.
My graduate students not only praise me — they also apologize. Profusely and repeatedly, they apologize for taking up my valuable time with requests to discuss their research or write recommendation letters. In the same conversations, they often ask if I need help with my own research.
I tell my students not to apologize. I tell them I am paid to mentor them and advance their careers. I tell them I don’t have funds to hire research assistants and can’t accept volunteers, because their time is worth compensation. But my students keep apologizing and volunteering. I only understood why they do it when I remembered the Professor. He, too, had been paid to mentor me. But I had felt that I owed him something for taking the time to talk to me.
What did I think I owed him? I had always thought that I could say no when the Professor asked for sex. In fact, I did say no, after a while, when I met someone I wanted to date. But I thought that that sex was the only thing I could deny him. Everything else he asked for, I gave. All the graduate students I knew gave whatever their professors asked. We edited books, watered plants, prepared class materials. We subordinated our lives to theirs. We thought that we had to be some professor’s shining star to become a professor ourselves. We didn’t dare diminish our shine by refusing.
When I was a student, I thought I was saying yes to the Professor fully voluntarily. But now, as a professor, I would never ask a student for sex. I have too much power. I see how easy it is for a professor to write a tepid recommendation, fail to make helpful suggestions on a student’s work, or even just lift a skeptical eyebrow when the student is mentioned in conversation. I know that a student who says no to anything a professor proposes is risking saying no to their entire academic future. I see that a yes doesn’t mean yes if you can’t say no.
When I visit the university where I went to graduate school, I still tip-toe around campus. The gaps between the bricks are still there. The structure hasn’t changed. Nor has the structure of the relationship between professor and student. I hope that few graduate students today think that they owe their professors sex — but I know that many are convinced they owe them everything else. I grew up in this power structure and it is hard to shake off its influence. But I have to try, if I ever want to have students whose yes really does mean yes.
Erin Thompson is a professor of art crime, studying the looting and smuggling of antiquities, at John Jay College (CUNY). Her writing has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Paris Review Daily, and the New York Times. www.artcrimeprof.com @artcrimeprof
