Sphinx

Note: this post was written back in early 2020, before the full extent of concerns about Joss Whedon’s behaviour on various sets, including that of Buffy the Vampire Slayer came to light; I tweeted a link to it this morning (8th Feb 2022) in response to the latest discussions of sexual misconduct by senior academics, without thinking about the irony (or problematic aspects) of citing BtVS within a condemnation of exactly the sorts of behaviour its show-runner has become associated with. Trust the art not the artist? Read the art as a surprising self-tell, as if his own subconscious was rebelling? Or, massive hypocrisy. But, having acknowledged the issue, I’m not otherwise going to change the post; it’s a memory of a more innocent time for BtVS fans, but also I firmly believe the programme transcends the misdeeds of its originator, and the ideas discussed below still offer a valid basis for thinking about these issues…

So you like to party with the students. Ain’t that kinda skanky?

Now, I’m not saying that watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer should be a compulsory training element for all new university teachers – but it would certainly have been better than the training I received when I started, namely none at all. This isn’t about the series’ depiction of teaching styles (copious material there, especially with regard to different Watcher philosophies) but the handling of student-teacher relationships and the negotiation of appropriate boundaries. Basic Buffy message: ick. Or worse.

More specifically, the plot lines of relevant episodes include: predatory giant insect exploits and abuses naïveté of teenage boys, secret Student/teacher relationship ends in murder/suicide, paranoid and controlling teacher starts covert surveillance of favourite student and seeks to break up his relationship… The most positive scenario on offer is the profound embarrassment and awkwardness of the Wesley/Cordelia hook-up, which is possibly a bigger deterrent than the prospect of having one’s head literally chewed off.

In the absence of such exemplary fictions… The basic assumption in introducing research students to teaching in my day – this has surely improved – was that you’ve been at the receiving end as a student so you’ll know what to do. That’s problematic in teaching terms (especially when it’s a matter of negotiating the differences between Oxbridge supervisions/tutorials and the sort of teaching that normal universities do), but I wonder now whether it’s also problematic insofar as it assumes continuity and commonality between the undergraduate and postgraduate states, rather than emphasising the student/teacher distinction. There’s certainly no bar to socialising together, and it’s not at all obvious that there’s a bar on relationships – after all, the grad student doesn’t have a lot of power, even when it comes to grading work, and certainly doesn’t think of themselves as powerful.

In a similar manner, stressing to postgrad students that they’re proper researchers now, all part of a big academic community, can blur the extent to which they are also still students, who cannot, structurally, engage with their supervisor or other academics on a completely equal basis. With the result that, in comparison to a school context, academic/postgrad relationships are less clearly marked as student/teacher, and so taking those relationships beyond the purely professional can appear less obviously problematic, especially to those with a motive for downplaying or ignoring their problematic aspects. Socialising together after research seminars and at conferences is presented as an essential part of academic socialisation; as a student, you’re encouraged to develop closer relationships with important figures – perhaps with the assumption that it’s the senior party who gets to decide how far it’s appropriate for things to go.

The stand-out line for me in Erin Thompson’s piece about her relationship with The Professor, published in Eidolon back in November 2018 (which, together with the follow-up discussion, especially from Helen Morales, is what prompted me to start writing this post, and then never got round to finishing it until seeing Charlotte Lydia Riley’s Men, Behaving Badly article this morning) was this: “As a professor I have too much power”. That has at least three significant implications. The first is that this isn’t just about sex, even if that’s the focus of a lot of current discussions; the expectations of running errands, fetching coffee, doing unpaid work etc are also problematic, and it’s interesting that Thompson says she felt she could say no to the sex but had to say yes to everything else.

The second is that this power includes the capacity to confer benefits, not just threaten reprisals, and that it may be attractive in itself; the model of innocent victim being coerced into sex may be appealingly simple, but it doesn’t help us understand the problem if we simply ignore the junior party’s agency (Helen made this point). And that suggests, as has been observed by plenty of people already, that we may need a more complex idea of consent: as something that isn’t always a clear-cut yes/no (even if that’s how it has to be understood in legal contexts), as something that’s a process rather than a single decision, and – most problematically – as something that may be a free choice and nevertheless constrained. In which case, claiming – entirely genuinely, rather than disingenuously – that “it was fully consensual” isn’t actually the knock-down argument it’s generally assumed to be.

I can think of three occasions during my first few years as a lecturer when a student made it clear – to the point, in at least two out of three cases, where it became a joke among colleagues – that they were interested in something more than a purely professional relationship; given my basic social obtuseness, it’s possible that there were more that I didn’t notice. This wasn’t a matter of me exercising my power and status, except by accident; it may not actually have had much to do with my power and status on their part; but power and status were nevertheless embedded in the situation, simply by virtue of my role.

There was never for me any question of responding to these signals; to return to Buffy-speak, Because It’s Wrong. My approach – and I do wonder in retrospect whether this was correct, or actually a different sort of power-play – was to act entirely oblivious to them until they stopped trying. Dragging out the agony but allowing things to return to normal, versus bringing things to a quick and clear conclusion at the expense of a deeply embarrassing conversation and subsequent awkwardness…

Which is to say that, while I may have done it badly in practice, I had no doubt it was my responsibility to try to manage the situation, not just not take advantage of it. Third point: power, responsibility, Spider-Man, yadda yadda. It’s the opposite of the Melian Dialogue mentality (which is of course weighing heavily on my mind this week as I’m in the middle of rehearsals for Do What You Must on Friday): ‘There is justice only between those of equal power’ – because they can’t settle things by force and so have to find an alternative. No, it’s the responsibility of the one with power in a given situation to try to ensure justice, to find a way through the many grey areas of academic life, to protect the weaker (even against their own judgement or desires).

And we might extend this to the responsibility of senior colleagues, university management and other institutions to ensure justice, protecting the interests of students and early career academics against those who have power over them – and also protecting colleagues against the temptation to take advantage of their situation, by setting up clear rules and enforcing them properly. As Charlotte notes, academia is built on power and the attempt to hide that power – not least by pointing to supposedly superior forces like ambiguity, uncertainty and collegiality which tie one’s hands…