When I ran the topic of professor-on-student sexual harassment by a friend of mine, a distinguished second-wave feminist who continues to do good political work in her 80s, she responded, “I remember so well the huge crush one of my best friends had on her chemistry teacher in college. I think she would have been willing to submit to almost anything. Fortunately, the only thing he ever asked her to do was baby sit so he and his wife could go out to dinner. Had he been one to prey on young women, he would have found a willing companion.” Had he been a predator, would the student, as “willing” as she was, have been harassed? For me, the answer is “yes.” In that situation, no matter how enamored she was, it was up to the professor to be an adult and recognize the student’s vulnerability and the relationship’s inappropriateness. [Read more…]
Word for Word
“What are you interested in? Games and all that?”
“Well—video games. Like Age of Conquest? Yakuza Freakout?”
He seemed nonplussed. “What about school, then? Favorite subjects?”
In this conversation between the narrator, Theo, and his older friend, Hobie, from Donna Tartt’s brilliant new novel, The Goldfinch, what does the word nonplussed mean about Hobie? It’s one of those words often used to mean precisely the opposite of its dictionary definition. [Read more…]
Can a Student “Consent” to a Sexual Relationship with a Professor? (Part 1)
The crux of this question is whether one person—a student—with less power than another person—a professor—can consent to a sexual relationship. Today, many people, many of them feminists, would say, “No.” Billie Wright Dziech and Linda Weiner, authors of the still relevant (though 30-year-old) book The Lecherous Professor, are among them. They write about “The Consenting Adult Myth”:
Few students are ever, in the strictest sense, consenting adults. A student can never be
a genuine equal of a professor insofar as his professional position gives him power over
her. Access to a student occurs not because she allows it but because the professor
ignores professional ethics and chooses to extend the student-faculty relationship.
Whether the student consents to the involvement or whether the professor ever intends to
use his power against her is not the point. The issue is that the power and the role
disparity always exist, making it virtually impossible for the student to act as freely as
she would with a male peer. (p. 74) [Read more…]
Exclamation Points and Question Marks, Twin Menaces of Overstatement
Multiple exclamation points, often inexplicably inflected with question marks and preceded by all capital letters, have become a common mode of expressing excitement, urgency, and, probably more often than not, ego. “SAVE THE DATE!!!!!” reads a familiar subject heading on an email. “ORDER NOW!!!!! WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!!!!!” urges a typical advertisement for a product that’s probably languishing in a warehouse somewhere, hardly in jeopardy of running low. “Maybe we can have lunch next week!!!?!! I’ll let you know tomorrow!!!?!” one co-worker responds to a query from another about her availability for a meeting. Is the reader to take the seemingly random question mark in each case as a sign of the writer’s uncertainty over whether she truly will be available next week and / or will know about her availability tomorrow? Or is a rogue question mark a slip of the finger in the flurry of typing fast or, alternatively, a means of separating some exclamation points from others for emphasis? [Read more…]
