Free All in a Don's Day by Mary Beard Page B

should have been honed by the time A levels come around.
    JACKIE

Sex with students? Is Terence Kealey as misunderstood as Juvenal?
    24 September 2009
    A few weeks ago I had an email from a friend who works on
Times Higher Education
(
THE
) asking if I would contribute 500 words to their forthcoming feature on ‘The Seven Deadly Sins of the Academy’.
    I was tempted, but as my favourite sins (notably sartorial inelegance and procrastination) had already been taken, I gave it a miss. And when the article actually appeared last week, I hardly had time to look at it (except to notice a cheap pot shot at the complacency of nineteenth-century Classics by the multi-talented Simon Blackburn – who should, in this case, have known better).
    I hadn’t realised that there was a storm about Terence Kealey’s piece on ‘Lust’, till I got an email from a man on the
Evening Standard
, asking me if I would like to comment on it – largely because I had past ‘form’ on the issue of sex between students and university teachers. So I took a look at it.
    â€˜Clark Kerr’ it began, ‘the president of the University of California from 1958–1967, used to describe his job as providing sex for the students, car parking for the faculty and football for the alumni. But what happens when the natural order is disrupted by faculty members who, on parking their cars, head for the students’ bedroom … Why do universities pullulate with transgressive intercourse? … The fault lies with the females.’
    â€˜The myth is’, he went on, ‘that an affair between a student and her academic lover represents an abuse of power. What power? Thanks to the accountability imposed by the Quality Assurance Agency the days are gone when a scholar could trade sex for upgrades.’ Anyway he conceded, ‘Normal girls … will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless most male lecturers know that most years there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration … what to do? Enjoy her! She’s a perk. She doesn’t yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea … and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife.’
    It was instantly clear to me that this was SATIRE. So I replied in these terms:
    â€˜I have looked at the Kealey piece … and thought it wicked satire, but certainly satire, which is of course always meant to be offensive, thought-provoking, and often intended to rebound on the very views it satirises … that’s the point … try Juvenal, if you want an ancient precedent.’
    I then looked round the web to find all kinds of huffing and puffing about Kealey, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, who regards sex with students as a ‘perk’ of the academic profession. The
Mail
even managed to drag in an old article of mine which referred to ‘the erotics of pedagogy’.
    Taking several more careful looks at the Kealey piece, I was left in no doubt that he was aiming his darts at the ways crude sexual exploitation of female students gets justified, by satirically mimicking the locker-room style in which it is discussed. Come on everyone, NO VICE-CHANCELLOR (not even of Buckingham) calls women students a ‘perk’ unless satirically (and aiming a dart at precisely those assumptions). Honest.
    It was however a dreadful experience looking not only at the press reports of all this but also the comments of the
THE
website (some of which were presumably written by academics, who showed no ability to read or understand satire
at all
… maybe they were all computer scientists, but I rather doubt it). To be fair, a few did make the plea for humour and satire. But not many.
    â€˜It is appalling that
THE
permitted the deeply offensive comments about female undergraduates … to appear in its pages’, said