May to December

Last night, Newsnight featured a discussion between horrible Martin Amis and an American academic based at UEA, on the subject of the Walcott/Padel scrap (that's poetry, not the Arsenal player dumped on his backside by Stoke at every opportunity in the home leg). One of the things they discussed was quite serious: staff-student relationships. Amis pointed out that his famous father Kingsley had at least one affair with a student, and there are plenty of people from previous generations who married their students.

So is it acceptable? I thought there'd be a rule against it, given the obvious inequalities of power and the opportunities for corruption, exploitation, blackmail and nastiness. Even a mature student would exist within a hierarchy of authority which would make a relationship dubious. However, although these relationships are banned in most US colleges and frowned upon in this country, it's not specifically forbidden.

Quite frankly, I like a lot of my students, and would join you for a chat if we met in the pub, but there's no way I'd date one of you. I'm too old and too boring, and you're too young. What would we have to talk about?

Most importantly, there's the matter of professional standards. Dating someone you're meant to help educate seems exploitative, and the teaching situation is highly charged as it is. A teacehr asking a student out seems abusive to me: behind the individual request is the authority of an institution, the power inherent in the teacher's role, and a degree of droit de seigneur - all of which would potentially intimidate a student of any age. Last semester I spent several weeks discussing love, sex and gender in poetry, to an all-female class (some males were meant to attend but rarely did), one session of which was observed by my teaching mentor. If I'd been having a relationship with a student in that class, all pretence of professional objectivity, fairness and equality would have gone. These subjects need talking about, but all parties need to know that they're being treated seriously and fairly: this couldn't have happened if I'd had an exclusive relationship with one person in that room.

What happens when you get a low mark from a lecturer you're dating (or a too-high one)? Relationships need emotional and experiential equality, not an extension of the learning process. Are there positive outcomes from such relationships? I can't think of one.

What do you think? No personal comments, however (I was surprised by some personal comments on Module Evaluation forms this year). Let's keep it conceptual.

Such bloody awful poetry

Those of you who've ever been involved in student politics will know that the smaller the stakes, the bitterer the poison. So you won't be surprised (or perhaps interested) by the race for the Oxford Poetry Professor post - a non-job which involves giving a small number of lectures over a few years. But because Oxford and Cambridge are the jealously guarded property of the élite, the race attracts a good deal of backbiting, all stirred up by a press which loves tales of shenanigans in high places.

This year, the competition was between a Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott and average poet Ruth Padel, who has been all over the papers this year because she wrote a lot of poems about her ancestor, Charles Darwin. I've used her book, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem for teaching purposes.

The race has been convulsed by 'friends' of Padel anonymously mailing out pages of a book which claims (convincingly) that Walcott sexually harrassed students 25 years ago. Walcott withdrew from the race, Padel won, and now it turns out that she mailed journalists saying things like 'I don't want you to pay any attention to the following claims made in this book which you might not have seen…'. Never mind the scansion - that's good shenanigans.

The depressing thing is that this pointless and sordid affair will fill entire chapters of various boring autobiographies, dutifully to be reviewed in the serious newspapers as though poetry and poets were central to our cultural lives. If only poetry were that important. I'm sure it's the hot gossip at this week's Hay Literary Festival, but nobody else will notice. I wish I were there though - my friend Aimee Lloyd goes for a week of intellectual replenishment every year, but instead I'm googling students' sentences and trawling through footnotes… not that there's anything wrong with marking! Oh well - Hay is a beautiful Welsh town with 80 bookshops, and the last thing I need is that kind of temptation.

(Post title is a Morrissey quote, by the way)