Hot Academic Topic

Here’s a lurid one: sex between teachers and students.

In the schools where I have taught (all college-level), this does not happen often. It does happen, but not as often as the stories might lead one to believe. There is relatively little predatory behavior, and relationships that develop between teachers and students can as often be serious and lasting as transitory. They generally do not start until the student is out of the class, but continues to be in touch with the professor. That said, there is nonetheless the attitude represented by the colleague who is supposed to have said, during his first week on the job, “Where do you go to f—k the co-eds?” (He earned his male and female colleagues’ lasting disdain for this query.) By the same token, there are co-eds for whom some professors can be like rock stars to get into bed with. There is also the genuine problem that a relationship between a professor and coed, especially if it becomes serious, but even if it doesn’t, can jeopardize or destroy the marriage of either or both of them.

As I say, the lives of professors mostly aren’t public because who would care? They’re busy teaching and/or doing their research and raising their families, not indulging in seamy sex.

However, there are those occasional scandalous situations, and they yield stories one can’t forget.

I had a colleague whose wife knew danger signs: when he started teaching a Henry Miller novel, there could be trouble afoot. She was used to his escapades, apparently. At one point, he was called into the department chair’s office and warned, in front of witnesses, “Not with students, ----!” This colleague once made the mistake of signing a note to the effect that he would reward a student with an A if she slept with him. She slept with him, and he gave her a C. She went to the university ombudsman with the signed note and her grade. That error of judgment on his part led to the chairman’s reprimand. If he hadn’t allowed his proclivities to be taken public, he might have flown indefinitely under the radar. In the mean time, he was known to have offered his wife once to a friend who was feeling depressed. He wound up not getting tenure, and, indeed, not staying in the academic world. After a stint returning to graduate school to become a creative writer, he became a jobbing professional writer in another city.

The wife of another colleague, who kept a sleeping bag in his office, became suspicious whenever he took up obsessive housecleaning, vacuuming, dusting, etc., as though he were trying to assuage some guilt. They later divorced under circumstances unknown to me.

Another colleague got involved with a student, divorced his wife, with whom he fought incessantly, and married the student, with whom he fought incessantly. They had a wonderful daughter and are married to this day. He also left the academic world and became a professional writer with a much better income than any academic position would have paid, and he was happier.

The most venal situation was not between a professor and a student, but involved a female department chair and a prospective professor in her own department. She never revealed, during the deliberations over hiring him, that they had not only been involved previously, but that they had a son. She hired him for a position that was not exactly in his area of specialization. The information about their real relationship surfaced after he had been employed in the department for several years and resulted in his dismissal, over which he protested loud and long on the grounds that he was being mercilessly harassed, implying that it was an issue of racial discrimination. Another department member dug up the information, for who knows what reason, and circulated it. The chair had lied to the college president about her relationship with the new professor, and she was dismissed as well. She went on to become a dean at another institution.

In another case, perhaps innocent, a married female undergrad was known to be regularly sneaking up to the fourth floor office of a male professor with a large office and a couch, where, behind closed doors, long hours of visitation took place. When asked about this once, she protested that her reputation could be harmed if anyone knew.

And, after nearly forty years of teaching, this is pretty much the extent of my bedtime stories. Whatever other incidents I might have heard about have been few and far between, and not enough known to me to recount.

For the rest of it, I meet my colleagues in the halls and at parties, and they’re quite uniformly devoted to their families and their work and/or hobbies. If you’re looking for salacious tales, read the Decameron or the Canterbury Tales, or a lot of modern fiction. Tales from the academic world are more conducive to sleep.