When I started University a friend and I joked about a particular ambition of ours. We called it 'Operation: Nail a Lecturer'. Basically, get a lecturer into bed. It was both juvenile and reckless, traits I prided myself on at the time hence my personal life being in a permanent state of chaos. I had spent 25 years knowing everything and being right and suddenly these men (most of my lecturers are male) appeared and unveiled a world I never knew existed, using words I didn't understand about people I had never heard of. I was intimidated and didn't know how to react. In retrospect I think I figured getting them into bed would be my way of taking back some of the power I was worried they were taking from me.
Before University I worked full time in an office and maintained a social life where looking good and getting drunk were your main concerns. It was the numbing effects of that life that led me to University as a means of escape; I knew there had to be more. The men I encountered at University didn't appear to care about what I looked like or whether my coat was ‘cool in an ironic way’. They were interesting and interested and had knowledge and passions beyond anything I could have imagined. This discovery appeared to induce both admiration and resentment inspiring this sudden need to seduce. When researching this topic last year I came across an article on 'The Times Higher Education' site. Simply: Sex and the universityhttp://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=401935. The words from academic Jane Gallop (on sleeping with two of her lecturers as a student) outlined my position perfectly:
"I think I wanted to get them into bed in order to make them more human, more vulnerable. These two had enormous power over me: I don't mean their institutional position but their intellectual force. I was bowled over by their brilliance; they seemed so superior. I wanted to see them naked, to see them as like other men. Not so as to stop taking them seriously as intellectuals (I never did), but so as to feel my own power in relation to them," she says.
It was Gallop’s admission that motivated me to address my own 'ambitions'. It wasn't a case of a bit of fun it was a case of me trying to locate myself within this world via my sexuality, perhaps this was all I thought I had to offer (we’ll save that one for a therapist perhaps). Needless to say I am getting from University what I paid for: new ways to think about myself and the world around me beyond appearances and potential conquests.
It feels important that I make it known that I have never had sex with a lecturer and do not intend to. I have lunch, a few beers and interesting discussions with several of them and class them as 'almost friends'; there are still necessary boundaries to observe in the student/teacher dynamic. Interestingly, it seems one of the hardest things to do is convince them that you're not trying to get them into bed and, given what I have disclosed, I can’t blame them. I think it fair to assume there has been some blurring of lines in the past leaving a bad taste in the mouths of some. I happen to think such caution is a useful component in building a rewarding relationship with an academic; I only developed connections with my lecturers either after tutorials or if they had marked my coursework. I think it was within these contexts they recognised passion, my hunger to learn and my willingness to work my arse off! And, for me, this is worth so much more than being told I look pretty and am ok in bed.
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