Sex, Please, We're Professors Now that we've discussed the sex lives of Harvard students, it only seems fair to consider that of their teachers.

In the American Scholar, William Deresiewicz examines the image of the priapic professor in popular film.

The absentminded professor, that kindly old figure, is long gone....

Deresiewicz, an associate professor of English at Yale, writes that the new stereotype is of a bitter, frustrated, and disappointed professor who compensates for his lack of professional success by sleeping with students.

Why are so many of these failed professors also failed writers? Why is professional futility so often connected with sexual impropriety? (In both Terms of Endearment and We Don’t Live Here Anymore, “going to the library” becomes a euphemism for “going to sleep with a student.”) Why are these professors all men, and why are all the ones who are married such miserable husbands?

So many choices....

The first possibility is that today’s academics are portrayed as pompous, lecherous, alcoholic failures because that’s what they are....

But there's more to it than that, apparently..... Deresiewicz winds up suggesting some quite smart ideas about how a certain erotic tension is in the nature of the student-teacher relationship and, properly channeled, is a socially good thing.

The Socratic relationship...has become a kind of suppressed cultural memory, a haunting imaginative possibility. In our sex-stupefied, anti-intellectual culture, the eros of souls has become the love that dares not speak its name.

Lots to think about in this essay....  ¶ 9:31 AM