THE BLUE NOSE OF ACADEMIA I

THE BLUE NOSE OF ACADEMIA I

One of the most insidious aspects of the present political correctness on campus is the puritanical hysteria that now establishes the guidelines for the relations between the sexes. I will argue that such Puritanism is indeed properly described as hysterical, that it threatens academic freedom and civil liberties, and that it hinders the cause for the equality of women.

Speaking about these subjects is very painful. It is painful because it will upset many friends whose goodwill means a great deal to me and for whom I have the highest respect. Nonetheless it seems to me that it is imperative to criticize their views, views which have become quite prevalent among those who feel deeply about the goals of feminism, and among some others who have very lofty ideals about the nature of teaching. It is painful because I had never imagined that the day would come when questioning the intellectual grounds for a point of view might lead to personal censure. And it is painful because as I realize that these things must be said, I also realize that they must be said plainly and in a very personal way. I would rather hide behind the euphemisms under which these topics are often discussed, and thus not risk being thought crude, gross, and offensive, in addition to politically incorrect. But I can’t.

If men and women are to be truly equal in academic life, or in any professional endeavor, they must be able to work side by side, and they must be able to participate and be treated as full human beings. This seems plausible enough, but apparently it isn't. For a full human being is, among other things, a sexual being. This means that some of those men and women together at work or higher education will be attracted to each other, will fall in love, or at least will want to engage in sexual relations. But this unavoidable consequence of bringing together men and women is highly unpalatable to the makers of the present climate of opinion. They feel that sexual allure or tension creates an atmosphere that makes inevitable the oppression of women, and so they move to eradicate what they see as the cause of the problem. Although the ramifications of this attitude affect many areas of campus life, I cannot discuss them all in this article. I will concentrate on the worst possible case: sex between professors and their students.

On my former campus, and to some extent on my present campus also, as on most other universities and liberal arts colleges across the country, most male professors, and many female professors, leave their office doors open when they are talking to students of the opposite gender -- "you have to protect yourself," they say (I always prefer to make a point of closing the door, whatever the gender of the student, as used to be required when I first became a professor: to protect the student’s privacy). In a place that emphasizes close contact between professors and students, the advice on how to protect yourself could fill volumes. Professors are terribly afraid of being accused of sexual harassment. I, for one, worry about it whenever I have a personal or academic problem with a female student. But there is also a generalized fear that even students with whom you have hardly spoken may accuse you, for in the present obsession with sex practically any remark in class or at a social event may be seen as potentially seductive, and thus as requiring chastisement. When I came to this country in the sixties I felt liberated, freed from the prudishness of my native Colombia. But now I feel the same sort of burden that Sister Victoria placed on the boys of my first grade class, when she repeatedly sent us to rip the glossies used for advertisement in the movie theatre across the street from the school - particularly offensive were those photos showing men and women dancing, or worse, kissing (remember all those porno musicals of the fifties, and those perverted flicks with Cary Grant?). That is a sick way to live. But that is the way we are expected to live as academics in this country.

This description of the situation may seem too outrageous, but I will back it up in the postings to follow. Indeed, I will claim that the situation is actually more outrageous than that: the present attitudes encourage some students to make up false and malicious charges against their professors. The result is a climate of fear and intimidation comparable only to that which exists in the universities of countries ruled by religious tyranny.

UNPROFESSIONAL LOVE

UNPROFESSIONAL LOVE

Nothing in academia brings as quick and sanctimonious a condemnation as the revelation that a professor, normally a male, has engaged in a romantic relationship with one of his students, normally a female. If you get caught, your career is over. Plain and simple, as I have heard many administrators state firmly, self-righteous chests rising to announce their determination to protect all those vulnerable co-eds from the nerdy predators who lust after them.

Yet when I was a student, and during the first part of my career as a professor, there was nothing outrageous about professors marrying their students, let alone dating them. When I was an undergraduate, I remember, one of my classmates would brag about leaving her lover’s bed to go to his seminar. And another had the personal goal of trying to seduce all of her philosophy professors. It is strange to think that today’s society finds that those two poor girls had their civil rights violated by the professors they managed to get into bed. Of course, we now live in enlightened times.

In the next few postings I would like to examine this new taboo. But lest people think that I just wish to shock for the hell of it, I would like to begin today with an example -- an extreme example of a love affair between a teacher and one of his students. They first meet when she is 13 years old. By the time she is 15 they are madly in love and they decide to get married. Had this love affair taken place today, the teacher would be sent to prison and branded a sexual predator for the rest of his life. And television pundits would squeeze their bleeding hearts for every drop while expounding on the horrible psychological damage done to the poor victim, the more so the fewer signs of resentment she shows against her former teacher.

Certainly, this example complicates matters quite a bit, for it carries sexual harassment into the criminal dimension. And the fact that it is a true case only shows that in former days women were so brainwashed by society that they accepted their exploitation at the hands of men without much complaint. But thanks to women’s liberation, women no longer must settle for lives without dignity. Surely, had that girl not been so victimized, who knows what she could have accomplished, let alone how happy she might have been.

Let me tell you what happened to her, and you will understand why I like this example so much. As it turns out, she became an intellectual leader of women’s liberation, a thinker respected around the world, a Pulitzer Prize and a Medal of Freedom Award winner. Being the beneficiaries of today’s progressive thinking, we might imagine that she was motivated to save other women from the terrible ordeal that she had to overcome. But surprisingly, she felt extremely fortunate instead.

She was Ariel Durant, the wife of the famous American intellectual Will Durant, a man who devoted his life to intellectual and moral integrity. Yes, the very man who explained that “To be one's 'deliberate self' meant to 'rise above' the impulse to 'become the slaves of our passions' and instead to act with 'courageous devotion' to a moral cause."[1] So, what did Ariel Durant have to say about that sordid episode and the effects it had on her life? In a recording she made with her husband when they were both elderly, she said the following to him:

Every once in a while I had to go off and be myself and do my own adventures and I came back and I met people and we exchanged ideas, and meanwhile I was growing all the time. When you met me, Will, I was a tabula rasa, and you knew that it was because I knew nothing that you could make something of me. And because you knew that I was good for you; that my adventurous spirit, my energies, and my desire to know everything; I would fill myself up and I would bring it to you. You were stationary, you had to sit all the time; you had to read the words of books, the great knowledge in the world, and I had to go out and meet people, gather adventures and bring every kind of personality to you. I introduced you, didn’t I, to all the artists that were in Greenwich Village? I brought them to your table – you never knew with whom you were going to eat, did you? I brought them all to you from Woodstock. We had great adventures, but I brought the world to you so that, though you were learning the world from books, you had not had many adventures because you were almost like a little monk. From the age of four to the age of twenty-seven -- when you were excommunicated -- you knew nothing but Church history, Church philosophy and the word of God, but did you know much about the word of man? Did you know much about what man was around you, or everywhere within us? I was the adventure in your life and I brought you this life, and what did you do for me? You educated me; you quieted my wild blood. You brought unity and meaning to our lives so that now, after 59 years of marriage you have toned me down so that I may be a helpmate to you and I have been so happy to think that, as I believe in the Woman’s Liberation Movement, women should go shoulder-to-shoulder with men. I was so happy the first time that I saw my name with yours in the books that we were working on together for so many years. So many years of research and labor and love before we could see our names united before the whole world as representative of the unity that a man and woman can achieve and must achieve – and will achieve all over the world. I believe the time is right for all that -- with or without a Woman’s Liberation Movement. If you have character, endeavor, personality, courage and the capacity for concentrated labor, you will do what is your destiny – and, perhaps, even do it well. And for so much of the life that we have lived together, learning, contributing to each other’s way of life and character and considering the complexity of the universe, I have so many years of happy memories. And so much of it I believe I have to thank you for, Will. Not only all the attractions of a husband and a lover, but the deep companionship that has developed between us so that we almost have one breath, one life, one interest.[2]

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[1] Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middlebrow Culture, Univ. of North Carolina Press (1992)

[2] www.willdurant.com/ariel.htm