On Teachers, Students, and Relationships: Part I

It was a Friday night, and I was in the middle of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when the phone rang. It was Vivien, a student in my center at Cool University. “Hey Slayer, what are you doing?” she asked. I told her I was watching Buffy. She told me that was lame. I said, “Thanks for calling me and telling me that I’m lame. What else can I do for you?” Vivien says, “We’re all sitting here at Casa Guatemala having dinner and wondered if you wanted to go bowling with us. Do you?” “Sure,” I said, “Meet you there?” It would take too long to explain why Vivien had my phone number, but suffice it to say it involves an arrest from a few weeks ago (not mine). As I pull on my jeans and sneakers, I ponder the relationship I have always had with students and how that same dynamic is playing out once again, though this time it is slightly different because the Buffalo Center was founded to blur the distinctions between living and learning. The phone rings again. This time it’s Monique. She is laughing so hard that I can barely understand her, but I eventually make out that they want me to join them at the restaurant because my colleague is there and is having his second entree. It sounds like there are a lot of people there, including my associate director, who is also an alumnus. Again, I contemplate my relationship with students here and elsewhere, but at no time do I seriously consider not going to dinner or bowling with my students. My only concern is the appearance of things outside of our community.

Universities have gotten very nervous about faculty-student interactions in the last two decades, and it’s not for nothing. The old motif of the teacher and student having a romantic and/or sexual affair is as old as Plato, and finds its fullest and most fascinating expression in the twelfth-century text the Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Peter Abelard was a famous and controversial philosopher/theologian (there was really no difference then) who is hired to educate the beautiful and aristocratic Heloise, over twenty years younger than the professor. Abelard moves into the house to better tutor the young woman, and you can guess what happens. There’s also a part you probably wouldn’t guess, and the plot thickens in quite interesting ways after the relationship ends. I’ll leave the rest for you to discover on your own, but it is a marvelous read and a very subtle exploration of the relationships between teachers and students.

While Abelard and Heloise represent a kind of romantic and horrific understanding of the teacher-student relationship, the realities are often quite different. The story almost always involves a male professor who is seduced by the power he has, both institutionally and interpersonally, over the younger people he mentors. It’s a relationship with inherently seductive potential since for students knowledge=power=attraction and for professors, especially men, attraction=attraction. More importantly, the learning experience itself is inherently seductive. Learning not only gives you power, it provides a new perspective on the world, and that means you take on a new identity. When all of this happens in the context of a classroom or a university, it is easy for everyone involved to attach those feelings to the people around them, especially when a professor and a student have a particular connection. It can start with some other kind of attraction, but usually the learning process is involved in some profound way. The problem, of course, is that the professor holds all the power in the relationship, not just in terms of the grade but also in terms of representing the institution. Efforts on the part of universities in the last couple of decades have been directed toward giving the student more power, and it’s true that more often than not the student is a woman, and the professor is a man. Male professors lost a lot of power in the shift, and that is a good thing, though with any institutional situation there are going to be abuses of power by anyone who has it. Overall though, I think the situation is much improved, and men in particular now have to at least think before they begin a relationship with a student because there will be costs associated with it.

The fallout from the changes in power dynamics is that the entire teacher-student relationship now gets scrutinized in ways that can make it look like something it isn’t, and appropriate and healthy teacher-student relationships can get swept into the vortex of the reaction to inappropriate relationships. That’s what gave me pause when I hung up the phone with Vivien and Monique. And while it has always given me pause, I have almost always ignored it because a positive and profound relationship with students is more valuable than the risk of appearing to be inappropriate to the guardians of university culture. For example, I believe I am still known for throwing the best party at Parochial College in the South where I taught for ten years. Vice-presidents and students mingled with faculty and staff and some friends of mine from Europe. Someone threw up and someone got arrested, but the latter only after he returned to Parochial College, and he came to my house already half-way through a bottle of Jack. I actually got a letter in my file about that, but the dean, who was at the party and having a good time, actually apologized to me about it and told me he was acting on behalf of the college attorney. He was also acting on behalf of his own ass since he was there and partaking freely of my single-malt Scotch. But that’s my point. It’s usually outsiders who care about these things, and they often care only in terms of legal or abstract moral issues, not in terms of the actual people involved and the value of community. And I’m not saying their concerns aren’t justified; they sometimes are. It’s just that I am not willing to sacrifice the learning process and the community that it creates for the sake of abstract legal and moral reasoning.

So I met my students at Casa Guatemala, and they were all over twenty-one and had a drink waiting for me. It was some mango daiquiri or something, and when I took a drink, I must have made a face because it was a mixture of cheap mix and cheaper tequila. “Are you opposed to drinking with us?” Vivien said, and the table waited to see what my reaction would be. “Not at all,” I said, “I’m opposed to weak-ass tequila mixed with cheap, fruity stuff that came in a powder.” “Ooooo,” they said, “The Slayer has spoken.” Then we went out and had a great time bowling. We were all terrible, but we were all together, learning and playing. Between turns we talked of how to bowl, the nature of their generation and its dependence upon technology, the meanings of popular culture and the representation of bowling in particular, and great books we were reading. In other words it was just another class but in a different kind of classroom. Or it was just another group of friends hanging out, but they were learning together. And that’s why I won’t ever refuse to have a Platonic relationship with my students: because in the end you can’t separate living from learning. When you do, they both suffer. When you allow them to merge, they both flourish.

Eventually, they make us stop bowling because it is midnight, but the bowling alley bar is still open. Is there anything sadder than a bowling alley bar? Remember in Groundhog Day when Bill Murray is talking to the two guys in the bowling alley bar, and he asks them if they ever feel like they’re living the same day over and over again. “Pretty much sums it up for me,” one of them responds. But the bowling alley bar in Coolville has karaoke, and my students line up for one particular song. It’s the Spice Girls’ “What You Want,” and James and Mark do it with all the choreography. The assembled patrons of the bowling alley bar are cracking up, as is The Slayer and his students, who are also his friends.