| Books The Professor-Student Love Affair, Revisited Two new novels suggest we're still uncomfortable with the subject. By Michelle Dean
Posted Friday, Jul 12, 2013, at 02:00 PM ET  For a long time now, I've been wondering if I should be insulted that not one of my university professors ever hit on me. I try to avoid the usual feminine self-questioning about attractiveness and intelligence; instead, I tell myself that I went to a large public university in an urban setting, and that tiny arts colleges are better soil for that sort of thing. But my school did have its share of professors rumored to dabble in their students. One, I recently discovered, actually wrote a memoir in which he blithely described meeting his second wife in a graduate class there. Clearly it wasn't the setting that released me from cliché. Such relationships are not necessarily seedy, predatory things. But even when the encounters involve intellectual equals, they give off a sour smell. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger had an affair when they were in Germany together, the former as a student of the latter. It looks, at first glance, like a great collision of brilliant minds. Except that Heidegger became a Nazi, and Arendt seemed to excuse this—a bit of forgiveness that has inspired a lot of scholarly infighting about whether she was lovesick or in some way morally compromised herself. That she could have been internally conflicted does not seem to be an available interpretation. The professor-student romance debate similarly breaks down, for the most part, to two opposing views. In one corner you have your Roiphes and your Paglias, who style themselves as ... To continue reading, click here.
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