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 the failure of teachers to teach has left them vulnerable to being portrayed as failures in everything save lechery.
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