Lecturer or Lecherer?
or Create Your Own Sex Scandal By Reading Only Half The Words.
“Do you want to come back to my place for a coffee and some Lyric Poetry?“. Photo by 500lbGorilla.
Mary Beard is in the news this week after being attacked for her views on nostalgia.
It’s something everyone gets. For instance at school I wasn’t much good at football or rugby, and I was banned from javelin after misthrowing and almost hitting the teacher. He thought this was a bad thing, so he was metaphorically and literally missing the point. PE was something to be endured until we could play cricket and rounders. Except one year I broke my foot in late April, so for the summer term I was in a plaster cast. Playing rounders on crutches is a memorable experience, so if I see a kid on crutches and in plaster I get a sense of nostalgia. What I don’t want is for someone to hit my foot with a sledgehammer, nor do I want to go around breaking other peoples bones. I don’t recommend breaking a foot – it’s not a fun thing. There are better ways to be innovative at the local discotheque.
Bearing this in mind – back to Mary Beard. Mary Beard reviewed a book the Dictionary of British Classicists. In the review she mentioned that Eduard Fraenkel’s entry omitted his well-documented wandering hands. As she notes in her own blog Keeping sex out of scholarship she was then slated for suggesting that Fraenkel’s work as classicst was diminished. In her words:
I did not for a minute suggest that this diminished his status as a classicist. Classical scholars come equipped with all manner of sexual virtues and vices. And, by and large (there are, of course, some limitations), sex can be separated from scholarship. In fact I stuck my neck out to say that most women over their mid-forties (eg me) were likely to feel ambivalent about Fraenkel’s behaviour. One can’t help deploring the abuse of male power. But one also – honestly — can’t help feeling a bit nostalgic for that, now outlawed, erotic dimension to (adult) pedagogy.
What I objected to was the bowdlerization of the biographical tradition. When it is relatively widely known how Fraenkel spent his evenings with his female students, why does that have to be blotted out from the authorized version of his life? Why bother with the pretence that he was devoted solely to his wife? Or why not, at least, be prepared to see that devotion as part of a more complicated set of relationships? Don’t we need to remember our intellectual giants warts and all?
How has this been reported?
Cambridge scholar’s wistful nostalgia of an bygone era of female ‘pawing’
The views are utterly scandalous, if you define nostalgia as a purely positive feeling. This view of nostalgia is utterly commercial. It’s the repackaging of lost youth rather than the past. It’s the yearning for things as they never were and it’s accepted wholeheartedly by June Purvis, professor of gender history at Portsmouth University who is quoted as saying in the THES:
Nostalgia? Where has that woman been living? The wandering-hands fraternity used their status and power to exploit female students, and some were silly enough to feel ‘flattered’ by this attention… Very pathetic.
If you can look at the past and see its faults as well then have you ceased to feel nostalgia?
If you go back to the review that sparked the furore it’s clear that Mary Beard can see the faults:
It will come as little surprise that none of the standard English accounts of Fraenkel’s life mentions his wandering hand or what went on in his tutorials with women. The closest we get is a single sentence in Nicholas Horsfall’s account in W. W. Briggs and W. M. Calder III’s Biographical Encyclopaedia of famous classicists: “He did enjoy, warmly, but most decorously, female beauty”.
Most “decorously”? Either this is staggering naivety on the part of Horsfall, or it is a guarded hint to those already in the know (in other words, most of the Oxford Classics establishment). Or, more likely, it is a pre-emptive defence against anyone who should risk leaking more widely what was already common knowledge in a restricted circle.
The review isn’t in favour of men sticking their hands up girl’s skirts, it’s against the bowdlerisation of historical record that might, among other things, explain why we have a gender imbalance in Classics professors.
Elsewhere in the THES story Kat Stark, women’s officer for the National Union of Students, adds:
I find it incredibly hard to believe that anyone would view sexual harassment with ambivalence – now or 20 years ago.
If ambivalence means apathy then she’s right. But it doesn’t. If for instance Mary Beard wasn’t so happy with the (comparatively) restrictive atmosphere current academics work in, but was keenly aware of the abuses that made the restrictions necessary then she could be ambivalent without endorsing harrassment or even being against it.
Alternatively you can not read the words and come up with your own stories. Try squaring As a female academic laments the passing of ‘groping dons’… from the Telegraph with Mary Beard words – which don’t lament but feel a wistful nostalgia, a “very different reaction – which doesn’t involve trying to put the clock back.” Or “A female professor’s hankering for an age when seminars were enlivened by the sexual frisson between dons and students” (Telegraph again), against “We would not want to return to Plato’s Athens“, Mary Beard in the Guardian.
Mary Beard’s reaction to the fuss can be read in In the news in Pompeii at her blog. The Guardian is discussing it at Hands Off My Learning Curves.
It is an interesting view into the lives of the elder generation. It hadn’t even occurred to me that there was anything sexual in teaching or that it would be appropriate if there was. The power imbalance in any relationship would make it unworkable. Ah, umm… some men are turned on by that aren’t they? What can I say? I’ve led a very sheltered life.
Note on the photo: A typical photo illustrating lechery would be a bit dull – besides I hear there are one or two other websites devoted to the topic. So instead I used the keyword “coffee” and found the picture of this guy. If you read the description and his name then you’ll see why it’s perfect.
technorati tags: education, classics, sexual harrassment, sex
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