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Talking About It

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By Jack Thomas

We don't talk about it. All of us know about it, and most of us have experienced it at least once in our careers. But unless we speak anonymously -- in chat rooms and discussion forums where we can mask our identities -- we rarely talk about sexual attraction between professors and students.

So I've masked my identity, too, and I want to talk about it.

I was teaching in a very small classroom, with narrow tables configured to form an empty square. When I teach, I like to move around, to get myself out in the students' space, and make sure they're awake. In this particular classroom, I would move to all different points of the room, making sure that I addressed part of my lecture directly to all four sides of the square.

One afternoon, as I was lecturing, I walked slowly to a new position around the back of the square, when a flash of red caught my eye. I looked down, and saw a pair of bright red bikini underwear stretching across the lower back of a student who was leaning forward over the table, writing in her notebook.

It was like a five-second clip of a raunchy video had been inserted into the midst of a symphony performance on PBS. Whatever I was saying caught in my throat, and I had to pause and regroup for a few seconds before I could continue my discourse and my stroll around the room.

The student was an attractive young woman; a female colleague of mine had commented once on her appearance, noting how it was possible to get lost staring into her eyes, especially since she spent class time gazing at her teachers, both male and female, with great apparent interest in the subject (judging by her grades and work habits, the interest seemed far more apparent than real).

And now the terrible confession: In the heat of the moment in which I glimpsed that bikini underwear, I felt, well, aroused. It passed quickly, as it should have, and as it probably does for the vast majority of us who occasionally find our sexual selves asserting their presence in our relationship with students.

But I wonder why academics never talk openly, in our own skins, about sexual tension and attraction between faculty members and students. We seem to be the only ones who don't talk about it.

Sexual attraction and relationships between students and professors seem like a staple of just about every movie or television show set on a college campus over the past few decades. Hollywood seems to think that professors spend their days holding forth in the classroom, and their evenings hopping into the sack together with a student, a joint, and a six-pack.

Casual observers of the college scene seem to have a similar impression. Last year I invited a well-known newspaper columnist to talk to both sections of my workshop in argumentative writing. As we strolled across the campus to the classroom, he shook his head in wonder at the legion of young women passing by.

"How can you concentrate in this environment," he asked, "with all of these young and beautiful women around you all of the time?"

A number of my neighbors, college graduates but not academics, ask me that same question on a regular basis when we gather for the occasional barbecue. They seem to envision that I spend my time hanging out on the quad and checking out the pretty girls.

But what really got me thinking about this subject was reading the confession of someone who did actually talk about it, openly and under his own name.

In David Gessner's collection of essays, Sick of Nature, he describes the variety of jobs he took during his long apprenticeship as a writer, one of which was as a substitute high-school teacher. With disturbing honesty, Gessner confesses that "Each day served up a half-dozen potential Lolitas. ... I scanned the room, spending a good part of my time imagining what the girls looked like naked."

He acknowledged his fantasies as "sick" and "despicable" immediately after that passage, which seems reasonable enough. And I should point out that Gessner's fantasies concern an earlier time in his life, one in which he was much closer in age to those students than he was when he wrote the essay.

Indeed, I have noticed in myself that, as the years pass by, taking me further and further from the age range of my students, the moments of bikini-underwear lust in the classroom come less and less frequently. That seems right, and probably biological.

I know, too, though, that another factor has rendered my occasional moments of classroom lust less frequent: my fast-growing daughter. Now that I can envision someone I love -- someone whom I want the world to take seriously for the intellectual contribution I believe she can make -- as the object of some professor's lust, I find it a little harder to see the women in my classes as objects for my lustful fantasies.

And yet those moments still happen, and they don't happen only to me.

We all probably know faculty members who are rumored to sleep with their students. I knew one in my early graduate-school days, and I knew it was not just a rumor; I knew a student he slept with, too. And we all know the occasional faculty member who has married one of his former students, and not all of them began their relationships at the 10-year class reunion.

Every once in a great while, such affairs make their way into the news, as one did several years back, when a professor of English, Jane Gallop, upon being asked whether she preferred males or females for sexual partners, replied that she preferred "graduate students."

I have always believed that to act upon the sexual desires that we might feel for our students is reprehensible, since we have power over them. How could you ever be certain that a student was responding to you on equal terms as a sexual human being, rather than submitting to your will, out of fear that rejection would jeopardize his or her academic career?

I don't think you could ever know that with certainty, and, as a result, I don't think we should ever enter into sexual relationships with students.

And maybe even looking at students as sexual beings is reprehensible, because we are objectifying students in the one place that asks them to put away their focus on their bodies and their appearance, and to dwell on their minds.

Imagine the feelings of a student who was speaking in class, making what she believed was a valuable contribution to a discussion, if she were to learn that the professor was hardly hearing her over the pounding of blood through his veins, as he mentally was casting her in the role of Lolita to his Humbert?

That may be the best reason we don't talk about this subject. We don't want students to know that we judge them for anything other than their work. We don't want them to know that some of them stir our lust, just as some of them stir up our anger, or irritation, or our frustration.

Maybe we don't talk about it because there isn't much to say beyond this: It happens, we should do our best not let it affect our relationships with students, and we should never act on it.

But maybe I'm wrong. Care to talk about it?