Seduction in the Academy
by Chris Cumo
PBS ESSAYIST ROGER Rosenblatt fears in “Hello Mr. Chips” that the rise of universities.com will end “the tawdry, yet elevated professor-student affair.” He need not worry, for no on-line college can compete with the hormones that saturate campus life.
“Of course professors are sleeping with their students,” Joanne Cavell told Cosmopolitan, with all the nonchalance of a senior at Fordham University who has seen it all.
“Student-teacher affairs are rampant on most campuses, and there’s very little discretion practiced,” said Doretta Mattamira, a student at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania.
But how rampant is rampant? Lisa Capone, who attended Adelphi University during the 80s, estimated that 20 percent of Adelphi’s students were having affairs with their teachers. A student-newspaper survey at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-90s set the figure at 25 percent of its students. Whatever the percentage, anecdotes abound. The most lascivious involve the celebrities of academe.
In 1997 Jane Gallop, distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, published Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, in part to recount her own conquests, which include French kissing one of her female graduate students in a crowded bar at a national conference. Gallop believes that having sex with her students improves their work and her teaching. In her book she reveals her first sexual experience with another woman, her trysts while a graduate student at Cornell University with two male professors on her dissertation committee, and her flings with her own students.
Sometimes, of course, these affairs take a nasty turn. David Cass, an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, openly dated graduate students in his department. When members of the department nonetheless recommended him for an administrative post, Vice Provost Janice Madden quashed the promotion because students complained to her that Cass gave “unfair advantage” to the women he dated, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. When Madden questioned him, Cass replied that his private life was “none of your goddamned business.” Like Icarus, Cass had flown too close to the sun and fallen back to earth. Denied his triumphal entry into administration, he retreated to the classroom.
These stories have come into their own as a genre. In “Love and Lust on Faculty Row,” published in Cosmopolitan, Harry Zehner describes half a dozen liaisons, ending with a confession of his own. Billie Wright Dziech and Linda Weiner, both at the University of Cincinnati, pack The Lecherous Professor with more than 100 anecdotes, ranging from stories of inept flirtation to oral sex and threesomes. John Grisham may be the master of this genre, at least in its fictive form. The Pelican Brief smolders with an affair between law professor Thomas Callahan and his female student Darby Shaw-until his car explodes, incinerating him. Conflagrations aside, what is one to make of all this horizontal recreation? Perhaps the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, and who is once again Prince, should found the University of Seduction and Sex, appoint Camille Paglia, whom critics deride as the do-me feminist, as chancellor, and hire all the wayward professors who strut and fret their hour in The Lecherous Professor.
In one respect, however, this university would be idyllic: it would exploit no adjuncts, for there would be none to hire. Not a single tale in “Love and Lust on Faculty Row,” The Lecherous Professor, or the articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education mentions an adjunct. Does the human libido run at differential rates: on full throttle in academic superstars and not at all in adjuncts? Are we the puritans of the new millennium? Do we all secretly wish to teach a course on celibacy at Bob Jones University? Of course not. Adjuncts have the same urges and have committed the same deeds as the bêtes noires of academe.
The writers of this genre, themselves hoping to climb the ladder of celebrity, have omitted us from their articles and books because we are not the alpha males or females of the academy. By omitting us, these authors have castrated or spayed us, depending on the sex, or have reduced us to prepubescent children, incapable of torrid exploits. We have neither status nor power (what prepubescent child has either?) and thus no reason for inclusion in books or articles that, after all, are not really about sex but about abuse of power. Adjuncts lust after better teaching schedules and office space, not undergraduates.
